In response to
this article...
Please feel free to adapt and send to other legislatures
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Message subject: The slippery slope you propose
As a regular viewer of CSPAN I have consistently and impressively found you to be one of the one of the most enlightened members of the US Senate on so many issues. However, it appears you have blindly jumped on the latest bandwagon in an effort to snag some conservative steam in next year's Senatorial elections and I would like to appeal to your common sense.
I am referring to your "threat" to crack down on P2P, specifically your comment, "if you don't move to protect our children, it's not going to sit well."
Ms. Boxer, with all due respect, expecting to clean the internet up to be a safe place for children is a very ignorant and dangerous stance.
For all the legislation that could possibly be imposed on US companies, the internet is a WORLD WIDE web. Unless you plan on blocking entire countries from being accessible from the US any legislation is going to fail.
Do you understand how P2P works? It is simply your computer hooking up to my computer and we can transfer not only files but messages. The person that is sending your kid a cartoon could easily be also trying to entice them into a meeting or attempting to brainwash them with whatever agenda. Not only that, but as soon as I add a file to my shared folder it becomes available to others. This means that even if the P2P company has blocked a word/file name I can rename my file to get around that filter while the person browsing my files will still be able to know exactly what it is. If you have ever used spam filtering on your e-mail you will know what I mean when you get e-mails soliciting, for instance, pen1s p1llz or v1@gr@.
It is impossible to filter OUT to make the internet safe for children, you must only allow what is appropriate for a child in the first place and there are many softwares that will do that 100% for lazy parents who think a computer should be their babysitter. This is very similar to the ability for a parent to set their TV/cable box/satellite to only allow channels/program ratings that they pre-approve (which some refuse to use and instead want you and your fellow legislatures to ban certain TV programming for all including adults). In addition there are family ISPs that only allow family friendly sites.
P2P is no different from *ANY* interactivity that a child could have with others online (including any chat/email/instant messengers/messageboards/newsgroups or other forums), it ALL puts them at risk.
If you want to take a tough stance and propose legislation that will *actually protect children* you should advocate making it a serious crime to allow a child unsupervised unfiltered access to the internet as much as it would be to toss them a bottle of vodka and/or keys to a car. You don't ban alcohol and cars because a child might use them, you punish parents who allow it. If a mother was afraid that her kid or their friends might mention to someone keen to report them for the felony of allowing children to surf the net unattended you can best bet that little Johnny won't be surfing porn on his mom's computer.
Unless you plan first to make it illegal for adults to view adult material I fail to see the logic or legality of passing legislation that P2P software developers may not have the manpower, capital or technological ability to enforce, or in in the case of programs from other countries not subject to US law.
As far as piracy, I fully support protecting the rights of copyright owners, please separate that issue from "protect the children".
Thomas
