Did we know about McCain's bill to censor the Internet?

[AnnInLa]

This article was written on Dec 8th, with an update 2 days ago. If this was already reported here, then sorry! I found out about it by lurking on RW sites (a daily activity)....and they are furious, thinking it is McCains attempt to curtail blogs that are critical of him. They even mentioned attempts to curtail "free speech." Imagine.

http://news.com.com/SenatorIllegalimagesmustbereported/2100-1028_3-6142332.html?tag=nefd.lede

((WILL THIS AFFECT DU? NOTE THE LAST PARAGRAPH))


Senator: Illegal images must be reported





update: Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

snip



After child pornography or some forms of "obscenity" are found and reported, the Web site must retain any "information relating to the facts or circumstances" of the incident for at least six months. Webmasters would be immune from civil and criminal liability if they followed the specified procedures exactly.

McCain's proposal, called the "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act" (click for PDF), requires that reports be submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn will forward them to the relevant police agency. (The organization received $32.6 million in tax dollars in 2005, according to its financial disclosure documents.)

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain's proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme--and even stiffer penalties--on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

"I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?"

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.

much more, plus entertaining comments at:

http://news.com.com/SenatorIllegalimagesmustbereported/2100-1028_3-6142332.html?tag=nefd.lede

[The Count]

1. Wasn't Hillary his counterpart in sponsoring this? Unless I confuse it with

some other awful law they were concocting together....

[Pawel K]

2. That act is a lot worse than what it says above.

With a congress ran by these geniuses that think the internet is a series of tubes what McCain is trying to do is keep a federal registry of all sex offenders' email addresses. Every sex offender would have to register their email address with the registry. This is practically impossible, it is extremely easy for anyone to get an email address and it would be impossible to monitor. But the fact that this is completely idiotic isn't the problem. By this law all web sites would have to check against this registry before a person could sign up for an account at that site. For example, if you tried to sign up as a new member of DU Skinner would have to update the programming of this message board to some how interact with this new federal registry and comply with the new law. Skinner would probably have the resources to do this, but small webmasters would not. You would see billions of web site disappear off the face of the internet because they do not have the capacity to comply with this new law. Internet censorship at its finest.

[wtmusic]

3. But...think of the children

Anything for the children. Hand over your civil rights...for the children. Martial Law...it's for the children.

[wildbilln864]

4. Kicked and recommended!

Thanks 4 posting!

[AnnInLa]

5. I'm worried about the "message board" in the

last paragraph. How can the mods here on DU keep track of every post? How do bloggers who have hundreds of responses to each post (Kos) keep track and become responsible for all of them?

What if a RWer visits a lefty blog, leaves a porno post, then reports that blog? I see porno-trolls on all the blogs.

[Bjorn Against]

6. Exactly, this gives them the power to shut down practically any site they want to

If someone does what you say and posts something that violates the law and the mods don't catch it immediately, all of a sudden the people who never authorized such a post get in trouble for it.

They pretend this is about stopping child sex predators (this coming from the party that protected Mark Foley) but this has nothing to do with sex predators, it is about a backdoor way to shut down blogs they do not agree with politically.