Thread: McCain bill to silence internet political bloggers?

Chris Simcox said this evening on KKNT radio that John McCain may try to bring up some sort of bill in the new Congress that would seek to fine people $300,000 for making statements (slanderous??) against politicians in office. Obviously, this would be a way to silence political speech and the use of the internet for dissemination of information. Did anyone else hear this or has anyone read about such a bill?

that would be censorship, wouldnt you say? what has america come to/

Okay, I found an article on this-

McCain Bill Is Lethal Injection For Internet Freedom
Exploits fear of sexual predators and basic misunderstanding of Internet to attack blogs critical of the warmongering agenda he fronts for

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/de ... inbill.htm

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, December 15, 2006

Republican Senator John McCain has introduced legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards, effectively nixing the open exchange of ideas on the Internet, providing a lethal injection for unrestrained opinion, and acting as the latest attack tool to chill freedom of speech on the world wide web.

McCain's proposal, called the "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act," encourages informants to shop website owners to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who then pass the information on to the relevant police authorities.

Comment boards for specific articles are extremely popular and also notoriously hard to moderate. Popular articles often receive comments that run into the thousands over the course of time. In many cases, individuals hostile to the writer's argument deliberately leave obscene comments and images simply to sully the reputation of the website owners. Therefore under the terms of this bill, right-wing extremists from a website like Free Republic could effectively terminate a liberal leaning website like Raw Story by the act of posting a single photograph of a naked child. This precedent could be the kiss of death for blogs as we know them and its reverberations would negatively impact the entire Internet.

Under the banner of saving the children from sexual predators, McCain is obviously on a mission to stamp out the influence of the burgeoning blogosphere and its increasing hostility to the warmongering agenda that he fronts for.

"This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts," warns Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

McCain has publicly expressed his distaste for blogs in the past and this is why any protestation that he is simply aiming to "protect the children" with this legislation falls on deaf ears.

In a May 2006 speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, McCain attacked the blogosphere as a refuge of those only infatuated with self-expression. He was trying to minimize the importance of the last true outpost of freedom of speech, the Internet, and portray it as nothing more than a swap shop for egos and hyperbole.

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So if the blogosphere is nothing more than a bulletin board for self-important know it alls, what possible threat could that be to young children? Where is the evidence that kids are being victimized by people who post comments on blogs?

There is no evidence but that doesn't really matter when you consider that a sizable portion of Congress critters who will be voting on this legislation if it comes to pass, don't even know what the Internet itself is (it's not a big truck), never mind how it's used. And then a sizable majority of the remaining House members probably hate the blogosphere as much as McCain, because it has replaced the lapdog mainstream media in acting as the 4th estate in muckraker reporting, anti-war protest, and holding public officials to task.

In reality, sexual predators have always confined their grooming to live chat rooms, or in the case of Republican pervert Mark Foley, instant messaging and PDA's. Pedophiles are never going to leave a record of their sordid advances on message boards because in most cases, their IP address and location can be obtained immediately from the server log. And as reported by C Net, "Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services."

McCain's proposed bill is just another step in greasing the skids for Internet 2, a tightly controlled, regulated and privileged world wide web where government approval will be required just to run a blog.

In recent months, a chorus of propaganda intended to demonize the Internet and lead it down this path has spewed forth from numerous establishment organs.

- The White House's own recently de-classified strategy for "winning the war on terror" targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to "diminish" their influence.

- The Pentagon recently announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.

- In a speech last month, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a "terror training camp," through which "disaffected people living in the United States" are developing "radical ideologies and potentially violent skills." Chertoff pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.

- In an interview with Fox News last month, Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an "adversarial and ugly climate."

- A landmark legal case on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other global trade organizations seeks to criminalize all Internet file sharing of any kind as copyright infringement, effectively shutting down the world wide web - and their argument is supported by the U.S. government.

- The European Union, led by former Stalinist and potential future British Prime Minister John Reid, has also vowed to shut down "terrorists" who use the Internet to spread propaganda.

I have no problem with coming down on child pornographers or those who molest our children, but McCain has no where to be talking seeing he is wanting to sell America out to 10 to 30 million illegal criminal invaders giving them amnesty, and how many of them are child molesters and child rapists? As the saying goes; "Not today boot licker!"

December 14, 2006

John McCain’s ‘war on blogs’

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/9342.html

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is clearly lining up institutional support in advance of his presidential campaign, but he doesn’t seem to know quite what to think of the blogosphere. On the one hand, he’s bashed blogs. On the other, he’s reached out and started contributing to a handful of far-right sites directly.

Rhetoric and posturing aside, though, McCain is highlighting just how little he thinks of blogs by championing legislation that would make bloggers responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles.

* Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

* Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.

* Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

The point is to combat online child pornography, which is obviously a laudable goal. The question, of course, is how best to achieve the goal without undue burdens on law-abiding citizens.

McCain’s proposal is a step (or two) too far.

Red State, a leading conservative blog, helps make the case against McCain’s latest attempt to score some cheap points with the GOP base.

Through a vaguely written last-minute piece of legislation, scrawled on a napkin by a staffer who could’ve used an extra Red Bull, McCain would solve the problem of online child pornography by regulating the heck out of the internet in the form of massive fines for sites that allow any obscenity to slip through. The target area includes everything from message boards to MySpace to (if the smart lawyers who don’t work for McCain are right) Redstate and other membership-based blogs.

This is exactly the reason why McCain has such little support from social conservatives. Either this misguided legislation is completely honorable, and McCain’s just that naive, or it’s another sloppy attempt to throw a bone to the socon base. We think it’s a blatantly crass attempt, insultingly so, with the implicit assumption that right wingers are suspicious of internet freedom. As John Cleese would say, it’s irritating but obvious — like setting Julie Andrews on fire.

The more you dig out of this piece of legislation, the more frightening it becomes. Bloggers could be forced to pay fines for not regulating the amount of spam on their blog — any links that make it through the obscenity filters could spark regulation and punishment — and in addition, according to the smart folks at the Center for Democracy & Technology, any membership-based site that allowed a sexual predator to register could be subject to penalties:

“The bill would also require sexual predators to register their email addresses and Instant Messaging ids with law enforcement, and social networking sites, blogs and other chat sites would have an obligation to monitor and prevent predators from becoming members of the site.”

Let’s translate: if you’re a blogger who wants people to register on your site, you don’t just have to keep an up-to-date spam filter or link blacklist, you have to actively block people from registering with your site based on the email addresses they’ve sent in to the online sex predator patrol.

Given the obvious problems of blog spam, why anyone would continue to use a commenting system if McCain’s bill passed and risk a fine that could bankrupt most bloggers is a real question. For your average 400-hit count mommyblogger, monitoring spam and user registration is an irritating task. With a site the size of Redstate, we’d have to hire someone fulltime. With a site the size of MySpace … well, Juan from MySpace IT just stabbed himself in the eye with a fork.

James Joyner, a conservative whose opinion I respect, said McCain’s plan isn’t that bad, but concedes larger blog communities would likely find it difficult to police their sites. “I’m not sure how Markos Moulitsas would know whether some schmoe with a Diary has posted something objectionable, let alone whether a commenter on said Diary did,” Joyner noted. “Indeed, even on comparatively small group blogs like [Outside the Beltway], the site owner is unlikely to keep up with the comments in posts made by other contributors.”

In other words, it’s a problem. Just how far will McCain go to improve his far-right bona fides? Apparently, pretty far.

Personally I do not think it will fly. There is no way for this to be plausible, it would be near impossible to monitor the entire internet, and any politician who likes his/her job, will not even consider backing it.

What color is McCains nose again?

I wonder where we could get the statistics about how many children have been mosested by illegal immigrants, then hit him in the face with it and his bill to give amnesty to these people along with their families?

Hmmmmm.

If they stop us from posting on the Internet, my-oh-my what shall we do with all of the extra time?

Originally Posted by StokeyBob

Hmmmmm.

If they stop us from posting on the Internet, my-oh-my, what shall we do with all of the extra time?

AmericanElizabeth wrote

What color is McCains nose again?

I don't know about his nose, but those horns are really starting to bug me!

In a speech last month, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a "terror training camp," through which .....Chertoff pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.

He says 'domestic terrorists', but observing the way this administration operates, they say one thing and mean another..he could mean people like us! So, does this mean, John, that anyone that speaks out against the government is a domestic terrorist? Ha! Some leader you would make!