The One-Handed Economist

Please explain to me, Senator, why on earth I should vote for you. After the abomination that is BiCRA and the continued push to regulate on-line political speech, I thought you’d gone as far as possible. Turns out I was wrong.

The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or “cartoon” minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

{Snip}

The Securing Adolescents from Exploitation-Online Act (PDF) states ISPs that obtain “actual knowledge” of illegal images must make an exhaustive report including the date, time, offending content, any personal information about the user, and his Internet Protocol address. That report is sent to local or federal police by way of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center received $32.6 million in tax dollars in 2005, according to its financial disclosure documents.

Afterward, the center is authorized to compile that information into a form that can be sent back to ISPs and used to assemble a database of “unique identification numbers generated from the data contained in the image file.” That could be a unique ID created by a hash function, which yields something akin to a digital fingerprint of a file.

This is akin to the requirement banks have to report illegal monetary activity by their customers, except even more difficult as there are far more websites than there are bank customers. Worse, though, is that the IP address isn’t a unique or fixed thing. Yes, it’s true that IPs are unique…but most ISPs rotate the IP address around. Do you have broadband? Have you ever had to reset your cable or DSL modem? There, you’ve changed IP addresses. Dial-up users usually get a new IP every time they log on. And that doesn’t even cover things like public library terminals, or IP spoofing. So how, exactly, is this new law going to accomplish anything? Other than using spurious evidence to convict scores of innocent people, that is. I am not joking, once this database is established the data collated there will undoubtedly be used as evidence for prosecution: keeping in mind that juries are comprised of those who were too stupid to get out of jury duty and that judges largely don’t understand technology, it seems pretty obvious that “Well how do you explain your IP address being in this database?” will be enough to convict pretty much anyone. Hell, if we wait long enough* eventually every IP will be in the database.

Even stranger is this little tidbit:

Another section of the draft bill says that anyone convicted of certain child exploitation-related offenses who also used the “Internet to commit the violation” will get an extra 10 years in prison.

So let me get this straight, if you get some lurid polaroids of kids from your dirty uncle you’ll spend 10 fewer years in prison than if you download completely fictional lurid drawings of children from the internet. Because you…downloaded them. Aside from making absolutely no logical sense, that proposal opens the door for even worse abuse by federal prosecutors looking to up their conviction rate. Who isn’t going to take a plea deal when faced with those kinds of charges?

My advice? Start using megaproxy.

*Well, okay, if we wait like a few times the age of the universe or something, there are a lot of potential combinations for IP addresses.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Tilting At Windmills, VITRIOL, Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.