Essential Estrogen

Politics, it's been said, makes for strange bedfellows. After the news that came out of the U.S. House of Representatives late yesterday, I'm about to prove that adage correct. I agree whole-heartedly and without question with Congressman Ron Paul on his vote against the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online (SAFE) Act of 2007.

On Wednesday, members of the House voted 409 to 2 to approve a bill that says anyone offering a public, wireless internet connection must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings or face fines up to $300,000. The two Congressmen who opposed were Paul and Rep. Paul Brown, R-Georgia.

The bill, if also approved in the U.S. Senate (something that seems likely), will enact new restrictions on multitudes of individual Americans and small businesses who operate public wireless networks.

Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced Oct. 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.

The Senate has a similar bill, introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and cosponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, and six other legislators.

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

There is also an image retention component built into the law -- not for the government, but for the private entities running the servers. It is something especially troubling for Internet service and email providers, including Gmail and Yahoo!

Once again, at least it seems, the government is willing to sacrifice individual privacy under the guise of saving the children. Once again, it seems, we have legislators who are willing to rush faulty bills through without fully reading them or understanding their intent and impact. What we have now, in essence, is a green light for law enforcement to ticket a robbed convenience store for leaving it's door open during business hours.

If you have a laptop that can access WiFi, I highly encourage you to drive through nearly any neighborhood and see how many open connections there are. If I planned on doing something -- anything -- illegal while on the internet, I would not be sitting at the local coffee shop or library where everyone could see me. I'd pull into a middle-class neighborhood of a town where I didn't live and hop on to any of the numerous, open networks available to me.

Here's the big rub: the United States already has a law that requires Internet Service Providers to report child pornography to proper authorities. This is the exact problem this new SAFE Act also proposes to tackle.

What this new legislation does that the existing law does not is target wireless networks -- hotels, motels, coffee shops, hospitals, schools, restaurants, etc. And that, I believe, is the bullseye Congress took aim and fired upon. American cities have been fighting with existing internet companies in order to set up free public WiFi access throughout downtown (or larger) areas. The new law does not provide protections for government agencies that offer wireless connectivity. While the new law may create a new burden on services like Gmail when massive amounts of content must be retained, is there anyone who doubts Google's capability of doing so? Consider the same burden placed on your local coffee shop.

Two more aspects: "obscene" and "drawings."

I hate to bring up this question, but exactly who gets to define what is and what is not obscene? Quite frankly, I find very little obscene and I'm quite adept at pushing the delete or off button when I do encounter it. I have a very cute/funny photo of my middle daughter who shoved two bouncing balls up her shirt. Would that be considered obscene? How about the photo of my sister reaching across the Thanksgiving table and her shirt falling open to expose her bra? How about the family portrait from the early 1970s where my mom's skirt was too short and you can see up it?

When it comes to child pornography, the pictures are illegal as fruit of the crime. Where is the victim in a drawing? (Provided, of course, that there was no live model posing for the drawing.) How exactly does one punish a thought or a burst of creativity?

Okay, I lied, here's another point: enforcement. The only way the local coffee shop could possibly begin to enforce this is to manually check packets for graphics data. And, while I'm visiting geekdom for a moment, let me clue you in to what that really means: The local coffee shop is going to be checking your packets, all of them, all of the information that travels through their network going either to or from your laptop. They would have to do this because there is absolutely no way to determine what's in a packet of data until it is re-assembled. That is, the store or shop is going to have to look at every piece of data -- and, under this new law, retain it.

Finally, when your computer is connected to a network, there's really only one identifiable trait: your MAC address (a unique string that identifies your network card). How exactly do they plan to track people down based on a network card string? Those who know and who are doing something wrong are simply going to buy another one. Those of us who are just checking our email -- and praying that strange Uncle George hasn't sent any questionable jokes -- will be the ones tracked. We will be the ones watched. And, if we happen to screw up -- click a wrong link or open a wrong email -- our friends the shop owners will be liable for $150,000 if they fail to report us.