61 new of 78 responses total.
Scg's #16 slipped in. Yep, CDA II is a "rider". A pernicious practice, but it's done all the time.
re #14 & #18 Thanks for the support for the blue ribbon idea.
Re #15: Actually, they are "thinking", like politicians that is. Few if any have ever lost an election by coming down in favor of "protecting children." And few have the courage to oppose something on principal if an opponent could later point to the vote as being "against protecting children." Nowadays, I honestly believe a majority of the electorate would vote away the Constitution if the debate was phrased in terms of "protecting children."
And indeed, if our Constitution really were harming children, it would be worth changing. However, saying that something is "to protect children," and actually doing things to protect children, are different things entirely.
In the real world they're different. In the world of the 10-second sound bite who can tell?
steve, your hypothetical is a very subjective standard... the constitution *does* harm children, in the minds of those who want to change it because they believe it harms children. that doesn't mean *I* think that it harms children, or that i want it changed...
Right. I don't think the Constitution is harming children, at least to the extent that changes to it wouldn't in general do more harm, so I support leaving it alone. If there were a provision in the Constitution that I felt were harming children, I would think the Constitution needed to be changed. But, the US is the World's second largest democracy (India being the largest). The US Constitution is ammendable, but intentionally it was made rather difficult to ammend. If I felt the Constitution were harming children, I couldn't just go out and ammend it; I would have to convince a really large number of other people that it was worth ammending. Likewise, those who now feel that free speech harms children would have to convince a lot of other people that it was worth changing the constitution to get rid of freedom of speech, to protect the children. It's one thing to push a rider on the budget bill through Congress, but I don't see the CDA making it as a Constitutional ammendment any time soon. That sort of thing tends to get much closer examination.
well, i care about this issue a lot. i have had something about this on my website for about 6 months now. i suppose it is time to update it, now that this got passed (that, and I could remove the marquee asking for pledges for the June 8th Ecology Center Bik-a-thon, though I suppose that, much like Christmas lights, i could just leave it up for NEXT year ;-). I imagine that a fair number of people care about it far more than they have expressed in this conference. It is probably good to assume that for every 1 person who said something about this, 10 have heard about it. Of course, these numbers are still low, so I urge everyone to go send an e-mail / fax right now. F'real. Take the initiative NOW please. As far as having an electorate that doesn't care about the constitution, they are only representing American interests. Americans, as a general rule, don't care about the constitution either, as they are too lazy to find out what is going on in their government, and presumably think that what they hear on the evening news is "correct" and "complete." If people would take the initiative to find out what is happening in their government, we wouldn't be facing this problem right now. The fact of the matter is, most of the time the only people who are aware of the governments workings are the Christian right and other politically-organized and politically polarized action groups, who don't typically represent the views of the average American. When the average american hears on the news that the government is cracking down on kiddie porn with a new bill, however, they are pretty likely to think it is a really bitchin' thing, without realizing that what is actually being cracked down on is personal freedom and privacy. The long and short is, in order for this current state of affairs to stop, more Americans need to TAKE THE INITIATIVE to find out what their government is REALLY doing. This is the only way to prevent more CDA's and prayer in schools bills from being produced in the future.
The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people want it. Just as with motorcycle helmets, seatbelt laws, TV/movie/music rating systems, and laws about smoking, drinking and drugs, they want someone to make choices for their neighbors. No one, of course, needs regulation himself, but everyone else around does. It isn't driven by just a few people. It's driven by most people. The CDA was a popular law. The president held his nose when he signed it, (and so did a lot of senators and congressmen as they passed it) but he signed it -- he had to. People wanted it. The CDA II will be even more popular, because it more directly targets the 'protection of children'.
#26 If that's true, then why have both bills (the original CDA and "CDA II") had to be tacked on to large measures that were passed based on the support for the large measures and in spite of opposition to the CDAs? (the first CDA was tacked onto a huge telecommunications bill that was basically guaranteed to pass and the second one was added to this year's last-minute budget compromise. In a way, the full Congress has never voted on either CDA, only on the proposition "you can have this other thing that you really want only if you'll also accept this CDA.") As far as the popularity of the bills go, that's in large part a function of how they're described. If you ask people if they're in favor of laws to protect children from pornography you're going to get a lot of positive responses. Ask them, though, if they're in favor of censorship and the response is going to change considerably. Unfortunately a lot of the press coverage that these bills get uncritically uses the descriptions provided by the pro-CDA folks without also raising the censorship issue. If you ask me, that's a pretty significant omission for our nation's supposedly vigilant free press to be making.
Well put, Mike - I agree with that whole response.
Actually, congress did vote on the original CDA. It lost. There is a significant and powerful *minority* that supports CDA and its ilk. They are the conservative right, the same people who want to outlaw abortion, legalize school prayer, and all that. I've never seen anything to suggest these people command an absolute majority of popular opinion. (Otherwise, I imagine we'd be voting in Pat Robertson's 3rd presidential term in the next election). Besides the conservative right, CDA and its ilk also enjoy a certain amount of support on the left, from "femninists" who are against "exploitation" of the female body in any form. It should be noted that while there are a *lot* of commercial oriented pornography sites out there, there are also a significant number of sites oriented around "erotic art" (some of which are commercial, and some of which are not), as well a significant number of sites that contain what I guess you could describe as "sexually explicit" amateur material (mostly stories). I don't think many people will shed tears if the commercial oriented pornography sites were to disappear (especially as they seem to generate a significant amount of spam). On the other hand, I suspect CDA II would also apply to most, if not all, of these other sites, and it is likely to have a dampening effect on many other sites as well. It could well effect grex. If we have a "singles" conference here, would we be able to buy a commercial internet ISP connection and allow people on the internet to read that conference? Or would most commercial ISP's enact stricter regulations on customers to avoid any possibility of risk?
ISPs are not responsible for content that they do not originate, according to this law, so ISPs can't be held accountable for content created by their customers, or users of their customers' systems.
Except that over-zealous prosecutors in (I believe) New York state recently seized equipment and shut down temporarily a couple of ISPs (Dreamscape and Buffnet) for carrying the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.pre-teen. Even if the CDA protects them or they are found to be common carriers and not responsible for the material they carry they will still have suffered considerable hassle and the actions of the New York Attorney General's office can be expected to have a chilling effect.
Re #26: You say: "The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people want it." This demonstrates the error in your logic. People want results (protecting children from inappropriate sites). They do not necessarily want the methods that politicians have chosen to achieve those results. Part of the problem is that the technical aspects of this issue escape both the general public and the average politician. Its interesting that there has been almost no discussion of creating new "filterable" appellations such as ".sex", even though this idea periodically gets raised. If Grex truly wants to accomplish something, it would be to educate the public and politicians about the technological alternatives available to achieve results the public may desire, as well as a clear-headed discussion of the technological and social implications of the various alternatives.
Yeah. If people want to stop their kids from being exploited, they should do something towards looking after them. This doesn't mean depending on a piece of legislation, because all the legislation will do is make the people breaking the laws that already exist (and last I checked, there was a certain legal age that you have to be to be involved in the production of pornography) a bit more careful. This is redundant, unneccesary legislation that is being marketed as being pro children. Of course, every state in the country has an age of consent, every state has laws against minors making pornography. So, this law won't really accomplish a whole lot except to annoy ME, an ardent believer in free speech. I am not the kind of person who normally subscribes to mass beliefts, however I used to think that I was a patriot because I felt almost religiously about the constitution. I feel that newCDA is a violation of the constition, and if it gets passed, I won't even be able to believe in our country anymore.
By the way, while were at it, would someone care to define what porn is?
"Porn is sexually explicit material I don't like; Erotica is sexually explicit material I do like."
Re resp:32 - "The technological alternatives available to achieve results the public may desire" -- Now that's a thorny area. I don't think there are any such alternatives, and am pessimistic that there ever will be. Designing a filtering protocol that's flexible and actually works -- i.e. gives the user some reasonable degrees of freedom about what to filter, then correctly filters all such things without false positives -- is extremely difficult. I'm not at all surprised at the news stories I read about failures of existing filtering products -- letting through stuff they weren't supposed to, rejecting things they shouldn't have rejected. The PICS project (PICS = Platform for Internet Content Selection)is one very ambitious attempt to provide standards for doing filtering. (See http://www.w3.org/PICS/ for lots of info.) It provides a flexible protocol for content labeling, which can then be used as a basis for intelligent filtering. PICS shows promise of being useful in various areas, for instance as a basis for intelligent search engines. However, it requires cooperation among users, rating agencies, and content providers. If you're using it to screen "content unsuitable for minors", what do you do about providers who don't cooperate with the standard? I'm a firm advocate of free speech and support putting a blue ribbon on Grex's web page (an issue being discussed in another item). But I'm pessimistic about the prospects of coming up with a technical solution for something that -- if it's a problem at all -- is a social problem.
Since parents can control (up to a point) what books and magazines are in their homes (but not in the library), one "fix" would be software that (even imperfectly) scans for (levels of) "objectionable material" (using the "contemporary community standards", for example), and then sends a message to the parents to look at it and decide if they wish to filter it. [I'm not yet sure that I think this is a *good* idea, but it is an idea that meets current parental responsibility and rights.]
CDA type legislations all deals with drawing lines between decency and indecency, lines that become extremely complicated, jagged, and undefinable. The lines shoudn't be drawn in the first place.
Does it matter if lines are drawn so long as acting on the lines is optional? If we can choose to accept or reject any lines, then they just become an opinion (and others can offer them too). It is the enforcement of opinions that is objectionagble.
Rane, I'm referring to lines drawn by the law. The country is not in the position to say "this is decent but this isn't." I've written extensive thoughts on this before. The minute the government becomes a "value judge," it has gone over the line. Legislation like the CDA proposals draws such lines and makes it the government's responsibility to enforce them. That is blatantly wrong.
Ofr course I agree with that, but I've just suggested drawing lines anyway but making them optional. That is midway between having no lines and legally enforcing lines. Everyone should be happy with that, right?
Who draws these optional lines?
Who draws these optional lines? And re the *technical* feasability of doing the scanning for "objectionable material" suggested in resp:37 , I see big problems. For instance, how do you decipher a graphic automatically and determine whether it is a photo of Shirley Temple or a Playboy centerfold? A website with sexually explicit graphics could get past the filters by having completely innocuous text.
re #27, 32: The CDA bills are large in part because they are popular enough to carry other legislation. The press keeps reporting it as protection for children and pro-child and all that, despite considerable self-interest on their own part to ward off any barriers for anyone to publish anything, because that's how most people see these things. re #33: 'Exploitation of children' isn't just pictures of nude children, or even access to sexual content on the WWW. Teenagers can easily be encouraged to call sex chat lines, pay lots of money for access to on-line pornography sites, and for sexually explicit materials to be sent to their homes. also: The CDA II was passed and signed into law. I don't know when it takes effect, but it's probably around the start of the year. I agree that it is a better solution to take charge of your kids yourself, but many people have more important things to do with their time, such as make money and watch TV.
re 31:
Those ISPs had just their news servers seized, not their entire
operations. I'm not at all convinced that that was a reasonable action by
the prosecutors, given that ISPs generally just take a full news feed,
accepting whatever is in it. The argument used by the prosecutors in that
case was that the ISPs had been notified that the child-porn being temporarily
stored on their news servers was illegal, and hadn't taken any actuion to
remove it.
That's a little different from the CDA II. Child porn is illegal whether or
not the CDA II is upheld. The question is whether knowing that your news
server is picking up child porn automatically, and providing it to your
customers, and not doing anything to stop the automatic processes from
happening, is knowingly possessing child porn. I've heard a lot of arguments
on both sides. I'm not a lawyer, and it probably is a somewhat tricky legal
question, so I have no idea whether that argument makes legal sense or not.
One thing that action has done is given lots of news server operators good
excuses to get rid of newsgroups such as
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and the like, groups that had enough
traffic to be quite noticable from the resource utilization standpoint, and
which I imagine very few news server administratrators felt comfortable
spending their resources on.
Given an easy-to-filter .SEX domain (or something equivalent), how much incentive is there for porn providers to bypass the filter? Given a bypass problem, does it have enough well-financed enemies to create a healthy market for the moral equivalent of anti-virus software? (Most employers don't want their workers doing any smut surfing on company time - what will they pay for effective blocking?)
I can't help but wonder how the "children" whom the CDA-II bill seeks to protect, feel about this. Do they feel endangered by the presense of porn, or a need for such "protection"? And I especially oppose bans on *possession* of just about anything, especially patterns of magnetic force on a disk platter! Excessive do's and don'ts.
re #46: Some sex sites deliberately masquerade as popular sites, choosing names that are like those sites to get people who slip up when entering their URLs.. (for example, there is (or was) a site called "www.whitehouse.com" which was set up to catch people headed for "www.whitehouse.gov". Since many people are conditioned to assume URLs end in ".com" I'm sure they got a lot of accidental hits.) Such a site is not going to want to clearly distinguish itself as a sex site. I'm not very fond of most of the filtering options proposed so far but I think that what we'll eventually wind up with is some sort of self- rating system where material "harmful to children" can be posted freely on the net so long as those providing it marked it as adult material, with substantial penalties for deliberately misrepresenting harmful material.. Sites wanting to avoid the issue completely could just mark everything on their site as "adult", making it unavailable to children but keeping them safe from legal difficulties, at least those of the CDA sort.. I suspect that there will be a problem with a "chilling effect" where some sites with material appropriate to children might nevertheless mark it off limits just to be on the safe side but it seems that such a scheme would at least be better than the ham-handed regulatory solutions we've been offered so far..
If the scenario in the last paragraph of resp:48 comes to pass, I can forsee real problems for open systems like Grex that don't pre-screen content and don't *want* to pre-screen content. Anybody can come along, post something, and it becomes immediately web-accessible. That's a big part of how we build our community. Do we make users self-rate the material they enter? What happens if they don't? That's one of the reasons I support Grex taking a visible stand now on the whole business of content regulation.
Re 48: Yeah, right when there was a lot of interest in the Mars Pathfinder, a lot of people mistakenly hit "http://www.nasa.com". Which, yes, was exploration of *sorts*... I'm still unconvinced about the feasibility of web filtering. There was a school system in England that put up one of the popular smut traps. It looked for various naughty combinations of letters, and if it found any of them, it wouldn't let the page through. Apparently people in Scunthorpe only made the connection after their kids couldn't find a single bit of information about their town.
re #50: *snicker* how amusing... almost as amusing as whitehouse.com... re Jeds response #44 to *my* entry 33: the obvious solution to prevent children from being "exploited" into *buying* pornography or calling a phonesex line (oh, gee, horror of horrors, do you think mommy and daddy might realize that THEY didn't call the 900 number and actually do something about it, instead of passing bullshit legislation that filters MY THOUGHTS?) is to give away pornographic materials for free. So, I am glad that Jed has pointed out to me that the obvious solution to this whole debate is to do nothing at all, so that children can't be exploited in this horrid manner, and can continue to recieve free fuck photos (oh, the alliteration in that last sentence!). Damn those capitalistic bastards for trying to corrupt the kids by making them BUY PORN! Of course, last time I checked, most if not all of the commercial sites on the internet require a credit card to verify age, so the logical conclusion is that the little brats will have to STEAL a CREDIT CARD or commit CREDIT CARD FRAUD, in which case the fact that their whacking off to pictures of Pamela Lee Anderson isn't going to corrupt them a lot further. In any event, censoring me isn't something that the government should be wasting my tax dollars to do. I don't like getting a bad thing for free, let alone paying one fifth of my income for it. Christ. Each time I see this kind of thing, I am reminded that this country was founded by religious nut-jobs, and that they haven't stopped trying to "convert the savages" since they landed here. Since all of the injuns are off on conservations and in casinos, however, they have taken it upon themselves to see me as a savage and convert me and my kind. Well, I am done ranting now, so I am going to go have sex with someone and take photos of it. Have I got any bidders? (btw, I am a minor!)
Obviously you have no idea of what you speak. You don't neee to spend any money to find sex sites on the net, very gaphic sites as a matter of fact. And while they may sell time on there sites, they do offer a wide variety of pictures to lure you in for free.
yeah, true, but jep said that one form of "exploiting" youth is getting them to *buy* (yes, he did say buy) pornographic materials. So, I was responding to that ;-)
re #51: I think you misread my message, just as you did my loginid. (-:
After reading all this, I keep asking myself, "What are these folks /really/ trying to defend. Free speech, or the right to look at porn/erotic (semantics) material online?" No one has said a word about how this effects other genres of literature, art, etc. Because it doesn't. And AFAIC, that's fine. If your interests are centered on sexually-oriented newsgroups, Web sites, etc., then I'd say you have a pretty narrow fiew of the world. There's more than enough other kinds of resources out theere that you shouldn't even care if this paticular segment is eliminated. 'Sides, if your that hard up (pun intended) for stories, pics, what-have-you, there's still all the books, mags, flicks, and um, other goodies available via various legal channels.
The original CDA certainly did spill over into areas it wasn't "intended" to cover, in that it both used such a vague definition of what it banned that it banned almost anything that could possibly be objectionable, and it also held operators of systems responsible for content posted to those systems by their users. To take a system like Grex, for example, as long as all the discussion stayed "decent", we would have been fine. However, if somebody posted something objectionable, Grex would have been liable for what was posted. The problem with that is that, even if we were to accept that everything the law said was bad was stuff we didn't want on our system, we still couldn't enforce that without getting rid of our open access policies. The choices would have been to shut Grex down, or to have the Grex staff read every response before it gets posted to the conferences, and preread everything said in party, or to ban minors from the system. That didn't just affect Grex, but would affect everywhere on the Net that allows the general public to post content. It was worse, too, at least in some versions. I'm not sure what finally got passed, but early versions of the bill would have held operators of mail servers liable for the content of their users' e-mail, even though it's generally not legal for a service provider to read a customer's e-mail, and some early versions of it would have even held Internet backbone providers responsible for data that flowed through their networks, even if the originator of the data wasn't even a customer of theirs. The current bill is vastly different, and as such probably should not be referred to as CDA II. It holds only originators of content liable for content, and has a much stricter definition of what content it bans. The content that it bans follows what if I understand correctly is pretty much the usual definition of what constitutes obscene material, except that they've said it has to be obscene with respect to minors seeing it, instead of taking the straight definition of obscenity, which is illegal anyway. The legal issue, then, is whether adults on the Net wanting anonymous access to content should be allowed to access content that it's not legal for minors to be given access to, or whether restricting what adults can do anonymously to the same level as what kids are allowed to do is legal. In the case of the original CDA, one of the Court's objections to the bill was that it was restricting minors in ways that it was not legal to restrict adults, and then holding adults to the same regulations, so it seems likely that the courts will have the same objection to this one as well. In the practical matter, of what content does this law ban, yes, it's mostly porn. As such, while I agree that this is a free speech issue and it's probably therefore bad legislation, I find it somewhat hard to get extremely worked up against it. However, given a still somewhat vague definition of what got banned, overzealous prosecutors could proabbly use this against some stuff that isn't porn as well.
re #55: probably one of the reasons people are talking mostly about
sexually explicit material is that it's one of the few classes of
information that the law presumes is automatically "harmful to children"
(which is the criteria of the proposed bill.)
There are certainly other things on the Internet that could be judged
"harmful to children" but it isn't completely clear that they would be.
Off the top of my head, I'd expect that if the law stands up we'll
eventually see cases in which someone tries to use the law to control
some of the following kinds of information..
o bomb-making instructions
o drug-making instructions or drug-legalization literature
o racist hate literature
o non-graphic information on sex-related topics such as abortion
or birth control.
o 'satanic' or similar literature
Perhaps the people who drafted CDA II thought it was only aimed at "originators", but the language of the bill is worded much broader and isn't nearly so specific. I'm sure someone who merely forwarded material deemed harmful would be considered just as liable under the law. In usenet, the moderators of certain newsgroups could almost certainly also be held liable. If these interpretations of the law survive the courts, then I would expect the prosecutors will next try to go after some adult BBS operator (if there are any left that have any sort of open registration system, or if the prosecutors are able to show that whatever registration system is in use is somehow inadequate.) If *those* court cases pass muster, then I would expect grex to be at serious and direct risk. When CDA passed, about half of the grex board expressed *very* cold feet about assuming such a risk on behalf of grex. It would be a very good thing to ask the current board candidates how they would feel about grex if this should come to pass. I would also expect prosecutors will also be interested in somehow "controlling" the unmoderated newsgroups that contain material that was found "harmful" in other court cases. I don't know who the prosecutors will go after there, but I suspect ISPs that offer unrestricted news access will find it harder to keep these newsgroups.
All Greg tells me in #55 is that he doesn't like porn. He is, of course, entitled to that opinion. However he is not the only person in the world, and those that like the genre have as much right to access to it as they (and Greg) have to any other form of speech. All I read in #55 is the voice of a censor of free speech.
Gotta agree with Rane on this one. I don't much care for porn myself - B-O-R-i-n-g! But I oppose such stuff as CDA I and II on general principles of minimum do's and don'ts. What is so damn special about sex and "porn", anyways? And just how does looking at a picture of a naked woman, or even people screwing, manage to cause harm to a "minor" or anyone else? I note that at least one "minor" - responded above - does not seem to feel the need for such "protection". And that a lot of legislation passed in the name of "protecting children" pushes children around more than anyone else.
I keep asking that too, but get no answers. I see no harm to minors from porn *if they are brought up with a full understanding of human biology and behavior*. Well, we know that seldom happens, so all this fuss about porn is because of the failures of adults. Pretty lousy reason for censorship.
We're banning hate literature? that's terrific. That means the Nation of Islam, The Religious Right, NOW, and the "I Hate Barney" groups are all now illegal on the internet. Finally.
Not to be redundant or anything, but I'd like to explore some of the fringes of "harmful to children"...I mean, from what I read, you could say pracitcally anything would be harmful to children. What about those women who had that site about breast cancer that was shut down by AOL because they used the word "breast"? WOuldn't sex ed be outlawed on line for this? (there are those who say that it still is, and would like it removed from public schools) Why, this very item would probably be harmful to children by the oppinions of some! Say goodbye to cites for queers and polygamists (even some mormon sites!), and other non-christian non-vanilla sites, like say the black panthers, the DSA, (might inspire little kiddies to riot, and we wouldn't want them to get that dangerous tear gas in their little eyes, now would we? We wouldn't want children to learn too much or think for them selves. Just look at the way public education is designed, for passive little *obedient* citizens. scg, I don't know if you remember public school or not, but thinking is a very big no-no. You get a pinkslip for it. ;-) Now, knowing all that....I'm sure everyone can guess how I feel on the issues. If you can ride topless in the NY subway, why not view breasts on the internet? (Can see it now: no photos of the NY subway on the internet! too dangerous!) Before you know it, they are targeting sites on breast feeding and info sites on STDs. Most info sites about biology (which has *lots* of sex in it, btw) will be banned. Let's talk creationism, eh? (oh yeah, we can't talk about that either....Adam and Eve were once naked) HOw about naturists, or the other word for them, NUDISTS? Can't teach junior how to avoid contracting AIDS on the internet cuz they may learn about sex instead. Even sites talking about what common household items are poisonous would be bad news cuz junior may get ideas about drinking bleach. This may *sound* like paranoia (and to some degree it is: free-associating to make a point) but I can see it happen, considering the wonderous talent the current administration has for streaching and bending the law like silly puddy forfill their party line. This response shows you just how far *I* trust the government. <rant=OFF>
It is Not to be redundant or anything, but I'd like to explore some of the >fringes of "harmful to children"...I mean, from what I read, you could say >pracitcally anything would be harmful to children. What about those women >who had that site about breast cancer that was shut down by AOL because they >used the word "breast"? WOuldn't sex ed be outlawed on line for this? >(there are those who say that it still is, and would like it removed from >public schools) Why, this very item would probably be harmful to children >by the oppinions of some! Say goodbye to cites for queers and polygamists >(even some mormon sites!), and other non-christian non-vanilla sites, like >say the black panthers, the DSA, (might inspire little kiddies to riot, and >we wouldn't want them to get that dangerous tear gas in their little eyes, >now would we? We wouldn't want children to learn too much or think for them selves. Just look at the way public education is designed, for passive little >*obedient* citizens. scg, I don't know if you remember public school or not, >but thinking is a very big no-no. You get a pinkslip for it. ;-) >Now, knowing all that....I'm sure everyone can guess how I feel on the issues. >If you can ride topless in the NY subway, why not view breasts on the >internet? (Can see it now: no photos of the NY subway on the internet! too >dangerous!) Before you know it, they are targeting sites on breast feeding >and info sites on STDs. Most info sites about biology (which has *lots* of >sex in it, btw) will be banned. Let's talk creationism, eh? (oh yeah, we >can't talk about that either....Adam and Eve were once naked) >HOw about naturists, or the other word for them, NUDISTS? Can't >teach junior how to avoid contracting AIDS on the internet cuz they may learn >about sex instead. Even sites talking about what common household items are >poisonous would be bad news cuz junior may get ideas about drinking bleach. >This may *sound* like paranoia (and to some degree it is: free-associating >to make a point) but I can see it happen, considering the wonderous talent >the current administration has for streaching and bending the law like silly >puddy forfill their party line. This response shows you just how far *I* >trust the government. <rant=OFF>
ow wait til *you* have kids bucko
I'd love to see hard-core right wing religious sites nailed under twhis legislation. As far as I'm concerned, these zealots are *very* harmful to children.
Not all of us change our minds about censorship when we have kids.
One of the best reasons for fighting censorship *is my child*. I don't want to see his rights or choices degraded.
time will tell but I still have the darndest time figuring out how letting my kids see all *that* is going to help them.
At some point in their lives your children are going to have to learn to make choices; you can't be there for them forever. If you choose everything they get to see, hear, or think until they're eighteen there's a mighty good chance they won't be prepared to make the right choices after society says you no longer get to do it for them. I doubt you really want to totally control your children's world but the principle still holds. The more you rely on "because I told you so" the less prepared they'll be to live their lives when you're no longer there telling them.. If you give them the right reasons to choose responsibly and let them make their choices when they are mature enough to do so, you'll be doing them a favor that will last the rest of their lives.
Oh, mcnally, puh-leeze! Give people more credit...
and I've had this conversation enough times t orealize I'm not preaching to the choir here. It eats up too much time. Have fun kidz.
re #71: "Oh albaugh, puh-leeze! Give kids more credit!" I certainly agree that parents should be able to (and should take the time to) influence what their younger kids are exposed to until those kids are old enough to understand the issues but if that's the goal of this legislation it's going about it in a way that is going to trample over all sorts of people who aren't interested in the slightest in what shf does or doesn't allow his kids to see. If he wants to make decisions about what's appropriate for them to view, that's an issue between him and his kids, not between him and everyone else on the Internet.
Personally, I would be more in favor of requireing all the sex sites to have the word .sex at the end of their address. (make that porn sirtes.) Then we would know where these people and tah their porn were. At this point, so many of them disguise what they really are under false names and by linking them to noneporn sites..
I agree that many of the porn sites are sleazy and attempt to attract viewers by deliberately deceptive measures. However, this legislation affects more than just straightforward for-profit porn sites.
There would not be agreement on which sites are .sex and which are not. I presume any site concerning sex medically, pop-medically, or pseudo-medically, or..??.. would not be .sex?
probably not. medical facilities and educational institutions usually fall under .org or .edu anyway
So under this bill, would it be legal for a site run by a non-profit to publicly post sexually explicit material and make it freely available to all regardless of age?
You have several choices: