Re: Some More Poor Legislation (fwd)
Topics: FreeSpeech
19 Feb 1995
From: "DG Ervan Darnell"
> [S.314, repealing the First Amendment for electronic media]
>I will leave it to others to
>comment on how impossible it would be to monitor every bit of email for even
>simply encoded dirty talking.
Quite. Even worse, it is illegal to monitor e-mail as a BBS or internet
provider. It does not even matter if you have your users sign an agreement
saying that you will monitor their mail and they agree. You should be able
to contract for whatever amount of privacy you want. But, the point here is
that it is a catch-22. You are liable for the contents of messages that you
cannot legally observe.
>Suffice it to say, like so many other recent
>laws, this will just be another spare club in the back pocket of the feds.
Absolutely, every internet provider would be in violation of a federal
statute if it passes. Agent X buys an account, downloads doglick2.gif from
ftp.fbi.gov, and everybody that owns a piece of wire or disk drive along the
way is busted. Throw in assett forfeiture and "good faith" and you don't
even need to worry about niceties like ever having any reason to search or
need to even convince a jury that those actual wires were used.
As you noted, there is no chance of enforcing this consistently. I want the
law absolutely enforced. I want the feds to fine Rice U $10M for
distributing porno and IBM another $100M and most of all AT&T is worth at
least $1G for their complicitly in owning the microwave stations. I want
all of these people in jail. I want everyone's phone bill to double in
order to pay the fine so we can all know what it costs to banish the scourge
of pornography.
But, of course, that's not the point, only the excuse.
Of course, we should also arrest and shut down the entire post office for
all the porn they distribute, but that might actually be a good thing.
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