By Craig GoodrichFrom PC Magazine Online:
"As Internet legislation is enforced, worldwide protest will only increase. After passing a law that makes online pornography illegal, the Japanese government made its first Internet related arrest last Thursday when 28-year-old Hiroshi Kamekura was charged with posting lewd images on his Web page. Meanwhile, officials in China--where the Internet helped spread word of the Tiannamen Square riots--ordered all users to register their connections with the police within 30 days."America is different. The world knows America is different. And the world knows that if America can do it, then the rest of the world can do it, without fear of being branded "repressive" or "totalitarian" or embarrassed at the UN.
So they jumped at the chance. Because, you see, ALL governments fear their people. ALL governments fear freedom. ALL governments get nervous about anything they can't control.
Except in China it's not an academic exercise. In China they'll reeducate you for thirty years.
Except in Japan it's not a joke. In Japan the police can go wherever they wish, take whatever they wish, and hold you as long as they wish. They have a 97% conviction rate, most of which is due to confession.
And my cyberfriends in Paraguay, and Guatemala, and Indonesia, and Pakistan, and Korea, and Taiwan, and Romania -- I wish you the best of luck. I'll pray for you, but I'm a little out of practice....
And my intellectual friends who claim that even if the Second Amendment does mean what it says, we have to sacrifice some of our freedom for the Good of the Community. And my conservative friends who claim that to win the War on Drugs we may have to bend the Fourth Amendment a little, for the Good of the Community. And my green friends who say we must ignore the property clause of the Fifth Amendment, for the Good of the Community. Do you all feel vindicated now? Now that you're sacrificing some of YOUR freedom for the Good of the Community? I would say it serves you right, except it doesn't serve ME right. It doesn't serve the student in Shanghai right, it doesn't serve Hiroshi Kamekura right -- and no Supreme Court decision will help them.
When will we learn?
Craig
Subject: Another question
Date: Friday, February 16, 1996 8:12AMCraig,
I don't believe that 'laws' are the solution either. How would you insure that children are not 'subjected' to internet porn., etc...
Angie
Good question, Angie.The glib answer is "the same way I insure that they're not subjected to Hustler magazine, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, federally-designed education in sex and history, Madonna, rap, and getting mooned at the 7-11."
The tough answer is "if you have so little contact with and influence over your children that you need a federal law to protect them from seeing something somewhere, then you should unplug the modem. In fact, you should unplug it and discard it, because YOU should be spending more time with your kids and less time in cyberspace."
The more sensitive, detailed, and fact-filled answer is:
First, you need to realize that the nature of the Web is such that it's not easy to "stumble over" something completely by accident. In fact, many would claim that finding what you're looking for, even with the help of sophisticated indices, takes practice and determination.
There are upwards of fifteen million Web pages on the Internet, increasing now at perhaps half a million a month. Some are dedicated to the more esoteric points of nuclear physics. Some are dedicated to chinchilla ranching. At least two are dedicated to the movies of Audrey Hepburn (the first great love of my life). Many are dedicated to some aspect of computing. Many more are dedicated to politics, of all conceivable (and some inconceivable) points of view. And, yes, some of them are dedicated to "porn" which, as in the non-virtual world, ranges from the artistic nude through the early Playboy to the current Playboy to stuff best described as gynecology without the stainless-steel-and-white-sheet context -- all the way up (or down), probably, to stuff that could only be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Web, in short (and really it's only the Web that anyone is talking about here; I haven't heard any worries about email or ftp sites -- yet....), is a fairly accurate reflection of the unimaginably diverse interests and personalities of many millions of middle-class, technically-competent people, with substantial portions of its population living in Europe or Asia, and a substantial portion of its population in colleges and universities.
How do I protect my 8-year-old daughter from objectionable stuff? This is actually fairly easy; I take an interest in whatever she's trying to find and show her how to find it. If I leave her alone net-surfing for three hours, I'm not doing my job as a parent, but she's not likely to stumble across anything dreadful anyway. (Note that I personally wouldn't regard it as a problem if she hit "The Naked Maja" on the Web Museum or a history of brewing from Anheuser-Busch; she probably wouldn't find either one particularly interesting, anyway, except perhaps the Clydesdales. Some parents might find these objectionable; that's their problem.)
How do I protect my 12-year-old son from objectionable stuff? This is a little harder. I can get "filter" program frontends for my browser that will reject documents from certain sites or containing certain kinds of language. Mostly, though, I will depend on the values I've inculcated into him for the dozen years of his life, with some confidence that he'll be so interested in sites concerned with dog training, boat handling, astronomy, and so forth that it would never occur to him to go looking for "dirty" stuff.
How do I protect my 16-year-old son from objectionable stuff? This is damn near impossible, anyway; he's smart enough to work around any software filter I put up, unless I want to go to a C2-level secure system in the den, which is ridiculous. But at his age I had already been reading Sir Walter Scott for five years -- enough to give me a healthily unrealistic idea of womanhood -- and had just managed to obtain and hide a couple of dogeared old issues of Playboy, which I studied in secret with that combined feeling of guilt, ecstasy, and wonder that only teenagers can experience. So although I'll keep on doing my best, and talking to the kid as much as possible (16-year-olds are not notable for willingness to communicate with their parents, anyway), by and large I'll be much more worried about what he might do with the car than about what he might find on the Internet.
How do I protect my 17-year-old daughter from objectionable stuff? I don't have to; she's just finished porting the GNU assembler to Warp-on-SPARC and spends all of her computer time trying to improve the performance of the Java interpreter. She never retrieves any pages but the promotional animations at www.disney.com and never even actually looks at them, anyway, she just studies the frame rate profiles.....
So really, Angie, it boils down to the more general question of how you protect your kids from unsuitable influences in the rest of the world. How do you keep them from sneaking beer out of the refrigerator? How do you keep them from reading Oui at their friend Rocky's house? I dunno. It's not a perfect world, it never has been, and apparently every way of raising children is wrong.
But somehow, for the last hundred thousand years, mom and dad have been managing to raise mostly decent kids by following their common sense and basic moral values. I'm a big believer in "if it works, don't fix it", and anyway I have yet to see the Federal Government successfully fix anything.
Love,
Craig