Censorship

Just to be clear, the McCain Feingold bill, is disguised is a 'Save The Children' effort.

I thought I ought to go look this up before I said much more about it.

This is a tough one to word. The bill targets bloggers. It makes them criminally responsible for the actions of other people. Essentially, if some anonymous person, posts a link to an illegal image or video, in the comments section of a blog or forum, the site owner has committed a crime. Further if a sex offender posts anything on the internet, then the site owner has committed a crime.

What this means is that a blogger must prescreen everyone before they can be allowed to post. It will be the bloggers responsibility to do a background check on users, to make sure that they are not a sex offender, before allowing them to post.

Here's a link to Family Watchdog. Its a sex offender look up site. It found 468 offenders in my area alone.

Now keep in mind that to be registered as a sex offender, you don't have to be a hardened criminal, a rapist or a child molester. You can be a teenager caught making out. You can be a husband who's wife filed a complaint, you could've been busted taking a whiz behind a local bar, while celebrating a bachelor's party.

Now some of the folks listed are sexual predators. Some are downright evil, but in the interest of keeping our children safe, we've made it very easy for people to get added to the list.

Now how are bloggers going to enforce this bill? Heck if I know. We could ask for a copy of photo ID I suppose. But a sex offender could simply borrow someone else's ID. How would we know?

The only safe way to do this is to only allow people to post, if you've met them in person and can be certain of their identity. But then, you need to check up on them on occasion in case their identity is stolen online or they end up on the registry at a later date.

Who will this effect? It will effect all of the newsgroups, newspaper comments sections, political campaign sites, Amazon.com, gaming sites, pages devoted to tutorials and learning, etc... Essentially all sites that allow users to post content, will be at risk.

I suppose the purpose of this bill is to get the public to do the work of the FBI. A side effect may simply be to get the United States of America out of the internet communications business. If successful, then the FBI won't have to work so hard to monitor what US Citizens are doing on the internet.

The effect of this bill, if passed, will likely shut down blogs and newsgroups of US origin, but won't effect bloggers in other countries. We can all flock to Australian blogs to share commentary on US events if we have to. Google and Giganews can simply move their operations out of the US, to avoid unnecessary risk.

This bill will stop US Citizens from hosting blogs and community driven websites, but unless it becomes part of the greater war on terrorism, it won't effect our ability to share opinions on sites in other countries.