Raising Digital Kids » COPA

COPA: The Almost-Law That Finally Went Away

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:25:50 +0000

On January 21, 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that they would not hear the case that might allow the Child Online Protection Act—an Act that’s been dancing around various courts for more than a decade—to pass into law. Instead, the justices upheld the earlier decisions that found the Act would be too restrictive.

Like cicadas, COPA comes back cyclically in the form of legislation that attempts to keep children safe from harmful material on the Internet. The Act loosely defines what is considered harmful to minors and then offers jail or fines as the consequences for those who would distribute these materials to minors for commercial purposes.

Noble in its intentions, the Act was a constitutional nightmare. Identifying minors based on the current “age-blind” way people surf the web is tough. So is legislating U.S. law when so much of the Internet is created offshore. As for whether there’s commercial intent—who knows in a Internet world, where just getting you to take a look at a web page is worth something to someone. Then there’s the old Lenny Bruce issue of what is harmful to minors. Who decides whether Lindsay Lohan on the six o’clock news is more or less harmful than Playboy?

These arguments have been debated for over a decade and it’s time to let them rest. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want kids to be protected online, but this Act is a morass of problems.

Let’s use the public library metaphor. Just because I want to keep my children safe doesn’t mean I need to be confined to the children’s library section with them. Similarly, it’s not the government’s job to create and enforce a PG-13 Internet. The government, as we’ve learned the hard way, should not be in the content rating business.

For the past eight years we’ve watched as the government took some extraordinary liberties in interpreting the balance between safety and personal choice. We’re starting to undo that damage now. In the same vein, the government should not be in the business of rating the Internet.

A Solution

The Court, in its ruling, suggested that technologies like parental controls and filtering are suitable alternatives to keeping children safe. I wouldn’t have agreed a few years ago, because the tools were so primitive that a parent needed to be way too tech-savvy. The newest crop of Internet safety tools are considerably more manageable and offer improved protection. In part, it’s because they’ve become more responsive to input and problems supplied by their own users. If you encounter a problem on the Internet and report it, you’ve delivered information that can alert others.

Next month, Symantec’s Norton Family Safety, a next-generation Internet safety control, lets parents and kids take joint custody of the Internet and have a dialogue about what they do and where they go. Today, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor offers up a quick safety check on websites. Safe Eyes, a popular program, is one of the first to be able to block inappropriate videos from sites like YouTube. Recently the company also introduced parental controls for the iPhone. A new company called Dolphin Secure is about to launch a website where access comes only after you’ve used a biometric fingerprint scanner that assigns you a unique and verifiable ID.

In an administration where high tech is back in vogue, technology and good parenting trump legislation.

The Taming of the Internet: Child Porn First

admin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:39:45 +0000

After decades of trying to curtail the amount of pornography available on the Internet, a glimmer of consensus has been reached. But the moment might be fleeting.Historically, it seemed like the one thing the industry, government, and Internet safety advocates could agree on was that child pornography—the depiction of minors engaged in sexual acts or provocative poses—is despicable and should be wiped off the face of the web. It’s hard to find a person who disagrees with the sentiment. But, as always, the disagreement comes in the definition of what child porn is and what chain reaction might be set off as information is censored.
For years, child porn chatrooms and groups were quietly allowed to do their thing on the net. After a bit of pressure was applied by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office, three of the major Internet service providers, Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications, and Time Warner Cable, announced that they will now block access to child pornography sites, newsgroups, chats, and anything else having to do with child porn.
The companies also promised to speed up their efforts to respond to reported incidences of child pornography and have donated money to help law enforcement be more responsive, too.
Social networks MySpace and Facebook have agreed to block Internet access to known predators. MySpace is also promising a tool to help parents keep tabs on their networked kids. The companies’ determination to deter sex offenders and child pornographers is laudable.
But, at the same time, a more subtle discussion is brewing. Each time the government tries to regulate Internet content, there’s a predicable outcry from civil liberties groups. One of the arguments is that there are already sufficient laws on the books to thwart child predators. Another is that private ISPs should not be deciding what to censor; they should be conduits, not arbiters. In a recent article in First Monday, an online journal about the Internet, the author labels those who see legislation as a way to legislate Internet content as “technopanics” fueled into action by sensationalized media. For more on free speech and the Internet debate, see The Washington Post article.

This may sound uncharacteristically conservative of me, but I think child porn is so heinous that if all we did was agree to block the commonly known and well-documented sites that cater to child pornography we’d be doing the entire world a service. Cuomo’s office used a heavy hand to make the ISPs do what is unquestionably correct. Adult pornography is a different issue and free speech should be held paramount.

The Courts Rule on COPA, But Parents Get No Satisfaction

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:07:03 +0000

The U.S. Federal Court just ruled that a 1998 law created to protect children from viewing pornography web sites was too restrictive and violated free speech rights. Much of the court’s decision behind the ruling suggested that other means, especially software filters, could block inappropriate materials just as well without potentially violating the First Amendment. So what other means are there? And how well do filters really work?

The quick answer is that filters are better than nothing, still not good enough, and still require a certain amount of expertise and ongoing commitment on the part of parents. Like condoms, it doesn’t matter how good the technology is; it matters whether or not they get used. There’s still a great deal of trepidation on a parent’s part before they’re ready to install filtering software or even take advantage of filtering built into the tools of their service providers. The increase in home networks doesn’t make this any easier, since many filtering packages were originally delivered for a single PC.

By overturning COPA, which would have imposed a fine or penalty for companies that allowed minors access to materials deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards,” the courts have freed themselves from a lot of messy and expensive litigation. They’ve probably even strengthened the First Amendment. But they sure haven’t made parents’ jobs easier.

They’ve left parents few alternatives. Here are a few suggestions I’ve been carping about for a long time. In light of COPA I’m re-opening the discussion and I hope you will, too.

A Graduated Internet Driver’s License Program: You need to be a certain age to drink or to drive, so why not to use the Internet? School children would be required to complete certain tasks and prove themselves safe Internet citizens. Many states now have graduated driver’s licenses where privileges such as driving at night or with a car full of friends are extended only after you’ve proved yourself responsible. A great model for the Internet, where privilege to surf freely should be cultivated gradually.
Create a .XXX Domain. Consenting adults should be able to access adult material. Parents who want their kids to steer clear of pornography should be able to make that happen easily. The best way to do this is to have the “porn sites” (for the most part, with a few gray areas, they know who they are) self-identify and give themselves a .XXX domain name. Kids could be blocked from a single adult area of the web instead of this labor and time intensive site-by-site approach.
A Safe Internet Squad: A Geek Squad-type of organization (non-profit) that would–for a very small fee–go to people’s homes and safeguard their computer. You shouldn’t have to pay $100 per hour to keep your child safe on the web. A not-for-profit funded by a combination of government and private funds with a small fee per family (it’s been proven that small fees make people use things more!) could work.

Any other ideas?