Blog News Watch

According to Sen. John McCain’s 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. What left? I guess nothing

If this new proposal, which called “Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act” (Cnet has a PDF of it) in the U.S. Senate came into law 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. McCain says during his speech on the senate floor on last Wednesday-

…..technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography….

As you can see this guy have no love for technology, he is blaming technology (i.e. Internet) for all the sex offense. Maybe he forgot, last time i checked last infamous child sex abuser was a legislator too. His proposal summary is—

• All commercial site(he never mentioned personal sites, where i mostly notice pornography) as well as personal blogs needs to report otherwise pay fines as high as US$300,000.
• Sites with comment section such as Blog and forum has to report, or they will be responsible and penalize.
• Community website such as social networking site(anything that has a user profile section) has to delete and report sex related user profile as well as contents.
• 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. So you need to keep your sites record for at least 8 months, i wonder what if the site just changed hand 3 months ago?

There are lot of anomaly in this proposed law. In my opinion it isn’t even fair law. Consider a blogger from half way across the world with just few visitors in his/her blog had to go through all the bunch of trouble for reporting. McCain targeting Commercial Sites and Personal blogs, but how about non-commercial sites (not blog) containing sex articles? Next consider about a CSS blog, have to report just because it has a comment section (Crap!). But i won’t be surprised if this become a law, as Senate already approved a bill that made it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like “Barbie” or “Furby” to trick minors into visiting their sites and viewing sexually explicit material. So much for freedom of speech and privacy in the land of freedom.

John McCain, Senate, Child Abuse, Sex Offender Law, Internet Law