July 25, 2006 1:48 PM PDT
Congress spanks naughty sex sites
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Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined, the bill says.
Because the U.S. Senate already approved the measure in a voice vote last week, it now goes to President Bush for his signature. Bush, who previously endorsed the bill, has scheduled a signing ceremony for Thursday afternoon on the White House grounds.
"America's children will be better protected from every parent's worst nightmare--sexual predators--thanks to passage" of the legislation, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement on Tuesday.
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, in a statement issued after the House approved the bill by voice vote, said: "We've all seen the disturbing headlines about sex offenders and crimes against children. These crimes cannot persist. Protecting our children from Internet predators and child exploitation enterprises are just as high a priority as securing our border from terrorists."
The 163-page Child Protection and Safety Act represents the most extensive rewriting of federal laws relating to child pornography, sex offender registration and child exploitation in a decade.
If the bill becomes law, it's not clear which Webmasters would become federal felons. Sites like Kontraband.com, which show Barbie and Ken dolls having simulated sex, could be in trouble, depending on how prosecutors and juries interpret the language. (Kontraband offers video clips and photographs, some of which are racy.)
Kontraband.com representative Dylan Close said in an e-mail message to CNET News.com that he was familiar with the congressional legislation and that the site already rates the pages using a system borrowed from the British Board of Film Classification. For instance, a page showing topless images was marked as not safe for work. Close also said that the site's Barbie and Ken clip was intended for adults and older teenagers, not children.
Also, Close said, "we are increasing the level of awareness and differentiation between our levels of safe and not safe content."
A key phrase in the legislation (click for PDF) promises prison time only if a Webmaster has the "intent to deceive" a casual visitor.
In addition, the Child Protection and Safety Act, or Walsh Act (named for Adam Walsh, who was abducted and murdered in 1981 at 6 years old), would:
• Punish the intentional Internet sale or distribution of "date rape drugs" by making the act a new federal crime with up to 20 years in prison. The list of offending drugs would include gamma hydroxybutyric acid (sometimes called liquid ecstasy), ketamine, and flunitrazepam (better-known under the trade name Rohypnol).
• Force sex offenders to provide a DNA sample, a requirement that many states already have adopted.
• Create a national sex offender registry to be run by the FBI, with "relevant information" on each person. It's supposed to permit geographical lookups based on ZIP code.
• Fund a series of pilot programs, lasting up to three years, to tag sex offenders with tracking devices that would let them be monitored in real time. The devices would include a GPS downlink (to provide exact coordinates), a cellular uplink (to transmit the coordinates to police), and two-way voice communications.
Separately, the Senate is expected to vote this year on a related but broader proposal dealing with Web labeling. That legislation says that Web site operators posting sexually explicit information must slap warning labels on their pages or face prison terms of up to five years.
CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
bill,
legislation,
Webmaster,
crime,
children
It is simple. Your children's compute is in the livingroom, familyroom, or other common room where the parents may monitor what they do on the computer. Routers may be (this I approve) be configured to only allow them on the internet certain times. But the best child protection is a parent or parent surrogate parenting in realtime. Some provisions of this bill are unconstitutional and stupid.
maybe furby ears). I even googled "furby sex" and I got some
christian youth site! I tell you, this Furby character needs to work
on improving his page rank...
maybe furby ears). I even googled "furby sex" and I got some
christian youth site! I tell you, this Furby character needs to work
on improving his page rank...
THIS is the FBI [u]?sex offender?[/u] page:
http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/cac/registry.htm
See for [u]yourself[/u] what it [b][u]REALLY[/u][/b] is!!! Also, [u]THINK[/u] about such lists and the [b]continuation[/b] of [b][u]creating[/u][/b] lists such as this. WHICH [i]list[/i] could [b][u]YOUb/u][/b] find [u]YOURSELF[/u] on???
These links help expose the [b][u]TRUE[/b][/u] agendas at work here.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=1855771&page=1
http://saltlakecity.about.com/b/a/257300.htm
Quotes from:
http://portlandme.wpadmin.about.com/?comments_popup=257612
>1. According to data compiled by the U.S. Justice Department (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#sex ), the high recidivism rate of sex offenders is a myth. Sex offenders have an overall recidivism rate of less than 6 percent over three years, and 40 percent of those who do re-offend do so in the first year after their release. More detailed analysis confirms that a sex offender?s likelihood of committing a new crime decreases the longer he or she remains free; in other words, if they?re going to commit another crime, it will probably happen in the first few years after their release.
Of course, this sort of data doesn?t make for good sound bytes for politicians seeking to foster a ?get tough? image to bolster their chances for election or re-election; but it?s the truth, as much as they may deny it.
Nonetheless, the supposedly high sex offender recidivism rates that politicians seem to pull out of thin air (when was the last time you heard one cite an actual study to validate the numbers they quote?) have created an environment where the mere presence of an individual who committed a sex crime five, ten, or twenty years ago is enough to cast a community into a state of panic. Given the misinformation and lies of the politicians (and the media?s dutiful reporting of same), it?s no wonder that some, at least, feel that vigilante justice is an appropriate response.
In the end, it all comes down to a simple question: Should our government be in the business of facilitating vigilantism? Certainly the legislators who wrote these laws will argue that that was not their intention, but the effect is the same.
These laws remind me of the ?attractive nuisance? concept in liability law. People who work with potentially dangerous equipment (circular saws, pesticides, chemicals, and so forth) are required to safeguard those items to prevent curious children (and others) from hurting themselves. If a carpenter leaves his circular saw unattended and a child picks it up and cuts himself, the carpenter is liable for costs and damages related to the child?s injuries. The argument that it wasn?t the carpenter?s intent that a child pick up and play with his circular saw is irrelevant. By leaving it unattended, he created an attractive nuisance; and he is therefore liable.
Creating a public hysteria about sex offenders, and then publishing their names and addresses on the Web, where anyone can access that information without so much as providing identification, is akin to leaving a power saw unattended. Anyone ? stable or unstable, honorable or malicious ? can access that information and use it in any way they like. This opens the door not only to vigilantism, but also to innocent people being killed because of mistaken identity.
If this information is to be made public at all (personally, I think it should only be available to law enforcement professionals), then the only safe balance between the public?s ?right to know? and the concept of the rule of law is to release the information only to adults who physically walk into a police station, present identification, and make an inquiry about a particular individual. This creates accountability and helps safeguard against random vigilantism.
In other words, if the neighbor down the street seems to be a bit too friendly towards your children and you want to check him out, that seems to me a legitimate use of sex offender registration information. But to simply publish all of this data on the Web, with no safeguards to prevent it from being used irresponsibly or criminally, is unconscionable in a society whose conduct supposedly is based upon the rule of law.
Comment by Bugsy ? May 4, 2006 @ 10:01 am
-------------------------------------------------
2. Anyone who values their liberties and who has studied history should be afraid - very afraid ? of these laws.
Long before Hitler killed the first Jew in Nazi Germany, he paved the way for the wholesale disenfranchisement of human beings by ? you guessed it ? attacking the rights of sex offenders. From 1933 through 1936, a series of amendments were passed to Paragraphs 173 through 188 of the German Penal Law specifically targeting homosexuals and others determined to be ?sexual deviants.?
The sex offender laws created under the Nazi Third Reich may as well have been the model for ?Megan?s Law.? They established the first sex offender registry, required sex offenders to register their whereabouts and to wear pink triangles, and established draconian punishments for sex crimes that included long prison terms, loss of voting rights, confinement in concentration camps, and (sometimes) the death penalty. All of these laws were justified by the Nazi?s in the same way that our present-day politicians justify Megan?s Law: to protect the children from sexual predators.
Of course, Hitler had other things in mind, as history shows us; and targeting sex offenders was just a way to establish the precedent of wholesale deprivation of human rights in preparation for his later attacks against the people he truly hated.
It?s doubtful that the German people would have acquiesced to Hitler?s rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and so forth, and sending them off to death camps in 1933 when he first ascended to power. Hitler had to first establish a precedent that some people were subhuman and unworthy of human rights ? and he started with the most universally despised group he could find.
Anyone who thinks that this couldn?t happen again is delusional. The simple fact is that history shows that you can?t single out one group for deprivation of civil rights without weakening those rights for everyone else.
Comment by Liberty Lover ? May 7, 2006 @ 8:54 am
To learn more on the TRUE nature of what is going on visit this site:
http://www.geocities.com/eadvocate/issues/?20064
and go through it with a fine toothed comb.
When done, use that computer of yours to [b]REASEARCH[/b] even deeper!!!
Education/Infromation is power!!!! By allowing the US 'gov' to create a China-like net here, we are only handing over OUR power...the power of [b]WE THE PEOPLE[/B]!!!!!
foxy (its about innocent foxes)
***** (its about dogs)
doggy (style - but also about dog world)
blow (about wind)...
please ban and make special forces to search these words and put webmasters to jail!
As for web labeling and banning misleading words for porn sites, it's completely ineffective unless all internet connected countries agree to enforce such things.