The mysterious case of Ms. Carrie Prejean

[--Pete]

Hi,

Well, I was not really thinking of restricting speech, just creating a legal precedence for the right of privacy based upon the premise of "unreasonable search and seizure". It may take an amendment to the Constitution to do it, but our electronic data needs better Constitutional protection, as well as intrusion into our private affairs by electronic means.

Even as you post this to a site having many contributors from around the world, you still overlook the fact that the Internet is international and the USA (still) has no jurisdiction beyond its borders. The only way any restriction would work would require both censoring the material on the net and blocking the exchange of material from outside the USA. Restricting our access to only government approved internal material is not, in my opinion, a good step for us to take. Perhaps it is the next logical step in the march to negate the Bill of Rights which the far right seems to be hell bent on achieving so that we can all be good puppets of the state, the church, and the military-industrial complex, but I hope that some spark of independence and liberty still exists in the American psyche and that that march will be halted.

This means all those modern gadgets which pierce our veil of privacy, such as shotgun microphones, and other listening devices, telephoto lenses or other image enhancement technology that uses IR, or ultrasonic waves to capture images though walls or clothing.

Right. How do you plan to do that? Uninvent them? Besides, who are you protecting? Us, the common people? No one gives much of a damn what we do, no one is interested enough to spy on us. Sure, if we do something spectacularly stupid in public chances are that it will end up on YouTube. So what? A hundred years ago it would have ended up in the rumor mill. No big change. Then, as now, it was smart not to be stupid. Or, at least, not to be stupid in public.

The first, is to think of it as a big town with zoning, where everything that is currently happening is still allowed, but zoned to the correct areas. That way, if you are looking for a business, you go to the business district. If you are looking for a school, or university, you go to the education section. Etc.

The reason zoning works is that the zones are separated by space, by distance. Separating them by a mouse click seems pretty inane. Besides, the original intention was to do something exactly like that, thus the .net, .org, .com, .gov, etc., part of domain names. The failure was that nobody was there to enforce it. As always, anarchy only works when everyone follows the rules. Trouble is, you have to be intelligent enough to know the rules. After the September that never ended, and with the opening of the net to AoL, the average intelligence dropped to where the anarchy became lawlessness. Unfortunately, the net is like the world, there is no central authority and what little authority there is is toothless.

Second, I think all hosts of content should be treated like any other publisher. So, if you host a blog for the LA times and slander someone, it should be as easy to hold you legally accountable as if it were published in the LA times. If you post content that is ripped from elsewhere, then also it should be very easy to legally prosecute you for violations of fair use.

Do this, and about the middle of next week there will be no Lurker Lounge, no Wiki, no free anything. All that will be left will be pay sites, for only pay sites will be able to cover the legal expenses. So, even if this were doable (and in an international medium as fluid as the net, I doubt it is) it is a poor idea.

I am also hopeful that new document technology will enable the permanent embedding of authorship (i.e. electronic signature on steroids) to all electronic documents which would allow anyone to easily determine the original source and intent of electronic content. And, I do believe in anonymity for forums, and discussions, but ultimately the sites host must be responsible for removing any content which violates the law.

First, think about what a document is at the most basic level. A string of ones and zeros. From that string, it will always be possible to remove any authorship information and leave only the content. If the document is printable, then print it, OCR the printed version and you've scrubbed any embedded information. If it is not printable, then do screen captures and proceed as before.

Second, who are these 'site hosts' you speak of? Oh, sure, small sites are easy. But what about newsgroups? What about Wiki? Who's got the time to spare to supervise those? And those are just two examples. What you propose isn't just throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it's running the baby through a meat grinder.

For myself, I can live quite well by ignoring what I don't care for on the Internet, on TV, in the media. I have no problem letting others live as they wish as long as it is not forced on me. And I have no problem living in a glass house -- I'm not perfect, but I'm not ashamed of my imperfections, either. Privacy is a nicety we all like, but it is only a necessity for those having something to hide.

--Pete