i-sako.com

Entirely too much political capital is expended trying to control online smut.

Since 1996, Congress has passed three different laws with this aim. I’ve been opposed to all of them. Fortunately, so have our courts, which struck down one and blocked another, leaving only the most recent, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, remaining.

Now even CIPA is going before the Supreme Court in a case that pits the government against the American Library Association. With any luck, this law will be tossed out, too.

Frankly, I think the controversy of the issue stems from a holdover sense of Puritanism that America would do well to slough off. As Molly Haskell put it, “Puritanism is the source of our greatest hypocrisies and most crippling illusions.”

The crippling illusion, in this case, is that filtering Internet content at libraries is a worthwhile idea. Libraries are places where people go to get information. Filters have an atrocious record when it comes to being able to accurately distinguish between smut and legitimate information (about health or human sexuality, for example). They have also been shown to let offending material slip through at an unacceptably high rate. In short, filtering doesn’t work well.

In fact, during the same news cycle that brought the news of this ALA case, Slashdot pointed to this example of the complete failure of a filtering approach mandated in Australia. This is far from the only example; it is merely the most recent in the long history of the failures of filtering.

Beyond that simple consideration, however, is a more fundamental problem: Filtering imposed on local libraries by the federal government is the wrong solution to the problem. It is a problem that should be handled by decision-makers at a local level. What Congress should do, however, is instruct those libraries that receive federal funding (most of them do, I imagine) to use some of that money to ensure this issue is addressed. Better yet, set aside a portion of funding to help libraries deal with it—on their own terms.

Librarians are generally sensible, professional people. (Although acts of legislation like the CIPA and the USA PATRIOT Act seem to view them as threats to society.) They are not going to let public libraries devolve into cesspits of filth and decadence. What they need is autonomy and adequate funding, not federally mandated filters.

[2003.03.07 Update - Yet more evidence that the notion that Congress can legislate Internet decency are inconsistent with our Constitution.]

Although I also have concerns about the Bush administration’s full-scale assault on civil liberties, its poor handling of the economy, and a variety of other issues too long to list, this article at The New York Times sums up quite nicely the reason I am in no hurry to return to the United States.

With the economy in such dismal shape, I’m not sure how long it would take to find a job if I went back, but even more alarming is the fact that, faced with these budgetary problems, the states are deciding to cut funding for important programs like education. This means that not only would it be financially difficult for me to return to the States, but it would be bad for my daughter’s future as well. 

Bush’s irresponsible handling of the budget is causing a lot of trouble for the states, which--unlike the federal government--cannot run huge deficits and simply wait for the economy to make up the difference in the long run. And because schoolchildren don’t generally have very good lobbyists, their interests are often neglected in tough economic times. The real moral outrage here is that the economy doesn’t have to be that bad, but Bush is making a colossal gamble on the idea that cutting taxes will stimulate growth. If you remember the economy of the Reagan administration, you might remember that this kind of “trickle-down” economics didn’t work very well. (Kevin Phillips, author of ”Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich,” says Bush’s plan is even worse; he calls it ”mist-down economics.")

And we’ve seen that Bush is only interested in state governors to the extent that they can help him put pressure on Congress for tax cuts, so the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. 

Of course, it is not only education that is being threatened by the Bush plan. What is going to happen to Social Security and related programs as the Baby Boomers retire? Under Bush’s plan, the only alternatives will be to raise taxes to an unacceptably high level or kill off these programs. Perhaps that is the real objective, after all. Why should taxpayers be forced to pay for things like Social Security or education? Why not just give that money back, at a few hundred dollars a year (for your average taxpayer, that is), to the people who earned it? 

Well, for one thing, to do so would cause incredible social problems across the nation. Are people really so cheap that they would rather have a couple hundred bucks than a functional education system? Whatever happened to the Bush who promised to “leave no child behind”? I’m beginning to get the impression that what he meant to say was something more along the lines of “leave all children behind (except those from wealthy families and those fortunate enough to benefit from my faith-based initiatives).”

I see this as one of the biggest issues facing America today. Although my daughter is still too young to understand the implications of Bush’s tax cut fever, I can see that it has bad implications for her future. 

With those things in mind, the Japanese public education system (which I usually disparage) doesn’t seem so bad. 

I worry a great deal these days that the American people are giving up their freedom to a power-grabbing executive branch that has failed to justify the many new powers it demands.

From Ashcroft’s worrisome spy plans and determination to create a new surveillance society in America, it seems clear that the Bush administration seeks to sweep away the very freedoms it claims to be defending in its so-called “war on terror” (frankly, I find that I must agree with Terry Jones of Monty Python fame: you can’t wage war on an abstract noun). “War on freedom” would be more like it. Given his “with us or against us” behavior both at home and abroad, “war on democracy” wouldn’t be much of a stretch, either.

Hasn’t anyone in the Bush administration gotten the hint yet? Apparently, our judiciary hasn’t.

So we have a Congress that willingly abdicates its authority to declare war to a power-grabbing president, and courts that are unwilling to assert their right to challenge his judgment. What exactly happened to the idea of checks and balances in government? Has it been discarded, along with civil liberties, as a threat to our security? Is there any way this bedrock principle of our Founding Fathers can be restored? Or have we unwittingly ensconced America’s first king?

I do hope that all of these sweeping powers help Bush defend us all from the terrorists, but who will protect us from Bush?

In a follow-up of my earlier post about Microsoft’s power to deny access to information, I thought it only fitting to point to this article at Wired about how Microsoft’s latest “trustworthy computing” efforts will probably have the effect of stamping out the practice of corporate whistleblowing.

On one hand, I find it hard to fault Microsoft for introducing this technology, which will be based on an industry standard (XrML) that any other company could use. In this sense, Microsoft’s behavior is simply consistent with its stated goals of making its operating system more secure—a move that is long overdue. It also makes good business sense for Microsoft to be among the early adopters of this important, new technology.

But, on the other hand, I find it very hypocritical of Microsoft (whose own wrongdoing would have never been made public had this technology been in place) to introduce this technology with little regard for the effect it will have on the ability of the public to uncover corporate wrongdoing. The very company that is asserting corporate rights over the computers of end users (in the form of DRM) is also providing a new right to corporations: The right to never get caught red-handed.

It is possible to see how this new technology, dubbed Windows Rights Management Services, can be both good and bad. On the whole, however, I think it will be bad for the public good.

A recent AP story notes that a bookseller in Vermont will purge its sales records at the request of customers as a means of avoiding searches conducted by federal investigators under the auspices of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Although the story itself is interesting, what intrigues me most was this comment from U.S. Attorney Peter Hall, who seemed to be playing down the seriousness of such searches:

“Only in very rare and limited and supervised circumstances would anyone be seeking that sort of business information from a bookseller, a library or a business of any sort,” Hall said. 

I wonder if Mr. Hall has heard of the Total Information Awareness program that the Bush administration has been advocating (and DARPA has been quietly developing under the questionable guidance of John M. Poindexter, remember that name from the Iran-Contra scandal?), the one Congress recently decided was too much of a threat to civil liberties to be permitted. As I understand it, TIA would make liberal use of sweeping legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act to make this kind of activity routine, even automatic—and, uhm, universal. How exactly does that fit under the category of “rare and limited”? 

Sure, you can argue that Congress pulled the plug on TIA, so it isn’t a threat anymore, but the fact remains that the thinking behind it is present in the USA PATRIOT Act as well. It is also engendered in the draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, which was leaked by The Center for Public Integrity earlier this year. (The same logic was also present in the administration’s ideas for the TIPS program, which was also axed by Congress for being an unwarranted invasion of privacy.)

It is clear that the administration has not given up its plans to create a large-scale domestic surveillance program of some sort, so I see no reason to take comfort in Mr. Hall’s assurances that such searches are intended to be “rare and limited”. Sorry, but when it comes to such glaring inconsistencies between the administration’s rhetoric and its actions, I’ll watch the actions carefully and ignore the words, thank you very much.

In the meantime, while librarians and booksellers in the States brace themselves for who knows how many PATRIOT-authorized searches (the Act itself prevents any public notification that records are being sought, serving as a kind of built-in gag order for people in these jobs), I think I will limit my book purchases to Amazon.co.jp, which presumably is not subject to the terms of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Not that I have anything to fear, mind you, but I do so simply in the interest of protecting my privacy, which is an option my fellow Americans no longer have, unfortunately. (Not that you don’t already know what I’m reading—I advertise my reading list pretty openly on this site. But none of that is Uncle Sam’s business, even if I do choose to share it with the public.)