Update!: Print your very own Universal Response Form for Internet Content Filtering Suggestions (jricher.jricher.com)!
Or rather, Utah lawmakers want to ban free wifi and penalize those with open networks to “protect children form porn”. They’re also proposing to punish and out Utah ISP’s who don’t voluntarily police (read: don’t publish, take down) “obscene material”. They’re just doing it for the kids, of course. Which, as with every other free speech attack cloaked in “saving” kids from porn, whenever someone says they’re doing something to protect the children, you should immediately consider their reasoning suspect and examine their other motivations. In this piece, they are pretty blatantly mixing child porn with adult porn (that might be seen by minors), as usual. And it’s frighteningly clear that the people making the decisions don’t even vaguely understand the technology. Grit your teeth and read this pro-restriction piece, snip (thanks Jonathan):
Utah lawmakers have tried various methods of controlling questionable Internet content, especially the availability of pornography to children.
Little has been successful.
But a legislative committee studying the issue this spring and summer heard Wednesday about some real-world alternatives that Utah lawmakers can adopt.
Local Internet providers, like locally based XMission, have raised concerns about state legislators trying to control a medium that answers to Congress and is protected by constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and interstate commerce.
But those advocating controls told lawmakers there are ways to restrict access to child pornography – already illegal in the United States – and keep minors from accessing adult-only-legal sexually explicit Web sites.
Among the proposals were penalizing those who leave their wireless networks open and rewarding Internet providers that self-police access to pornography.
The discussion in the Public Utilities and Technology Interim Study Committee was often technical, with committee members having to be brought up to speed on various terms and applications.
“My brain is on the edge of frying, trying to understand” the technology involved, said committee co-chairman Sen. Scott Jenkins, R-Plain City.
Link.
Update: Reader Mike Place from XMission emails me with chilling details and more background on this story. It looks like the scope of these people’s agenda is not limited to Utah — it’s basically another flavor of COPA (and there are sane people there trying to raise awareness about it). Mike emails,
Hi Violet,
I enjoy your blog and I just caught your post on the wi-fi story
brewing here in Salt Lake City. As one who’s been chasing this story
down for a while now (I was the one who posted it to Slashdot last
week), here are a few items worth pointing out to your readers:* The issue was just discussed on the local NPR affiliate earlier
today here in Salt Lake City.* Here’s a link to the Slashdot story that I submitted a few days
ago. The story itself contains a link to the audio from the actual
Senate meeting where the idea was proposed.* Here is the organization responsible for all this idiocy.
* The owner of XMission (and my boss) who is fighting to preserve
open wifi here in Utah is Pete Ashdown. He ran for Senate against
Orrin Hatch last year.The important thing to realize here is that this isn’t just limited
to wireless. These guys at CP80 are pushing for anti-porn regulation
across the board — state, federal, you name it. They want to sue
pornographers in order to keep them off of their proposed “clean”
Internet and they actively propose suing/jailing people who provide
“circumvention” measures that run counter to their proposal — think
anon proxies, Tor, etc. These guys aren’t just local to Utah. They’re
actively working behind the scenes to craft federal legislation. You
can bet that lawmakers are looking for another attempt at COPA and
this might just be it.They even produced a film about their quest (I’m really not making
this up).At any rate, I thought I’d pass along all that info to you. There are
plenty of us working hard over here to keep Utah’s reputation out of
the gutter. :]Thanks Violet. Keep up the good work.
Update (4.25.07): Jacques Richer writes me with the most brilliant response to all of this — a Universal Response Form for Internet Content Filtering:
Fortunately or unfortunately I’ve been on the Internet long enough to
have seen just about every stupid harebrained content restriction scheme
discussed at one point or another. It’s gotten to the point where my
responses to them have become mostly automatic. In honor of this :-)
I’ve decided to put together a version of the “spam-solutions” response
form for content filtering solutions (attached).In a way, using these types of forms makes it clear – in a way few other
ways can match, that the vast majority of these approaches are just
rehashes of already discussed/rejected old ideas. Hopefully, this will
help to discredit the approach.Keep up the good work.
— Universal Response form for —
— Internet Content Filtering Suggestions —
Your
( ) post
( ) group
( ) legislative proposal
advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to restricting access to objectionable content. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Website operators can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Sex education and other legitimate web uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It slows down/eliminates/damages deployment of infrastructure widely desired/supported by users
( ) It will slow down access to some content slightly for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from content providers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many website operators cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers/clients
( ) Your plan penalizes compliant websites without any countervailing reward
( ) It’s effectively impossible to differentiate between allowed and disallowed content
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career, business or website
( ) The existance of legitimate differences of taste and opinion with respect to the broad range of content you would restrict
( ) Failure to account for religious differences among internet users
( ) Fundamental differences of opinion as to what subjects are harmful to minors
( ) Lack of consensus as to the harmfulness of content in general and/or this content in particular
( ) Lack of research/scientific rigor with respect to: ______________________________________
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Wide availability of VPS services
( ) The existence of wide reaching anonymity services like TOR
( ) The ability of anyone with $20 in their pocket to put up a website with proxy capability
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) The international nature of the Internet
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in HTTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
( ) Ability of content providers to move to protocols other than HTTP
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of the content you would restrict
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with content providers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of content providers themselves
( ) The objections raised in RFC 3675 (“.sex Considered Harmful”)
( ) People with strong philisophical/religious/ethical/moral objections to filtering information, who would be more than willing to create/maintain circumvention tools
( ) The effect of this approach on people in other jurisdictions
( ) Other: ______________________________________________
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) People under the age of 18 may have a legitimate need for information their parents do not approve of
( ) The internet should not be reduced to a child’s level merely to protect children
( ) Port use should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about any subject without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) In order to be even minimally effective, it would require licensing web servers
( ) This approach is incompatible with first amendment and constitutional tests/limits
( ) Other: ______________________________________________
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This approach raises the bar for technical and sociopolitical naivite
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) I have added you and/or your organization to my personal bogon filter
( ) Other: ______________________________________________
