If we are to believe John McCain and Alberto Gonzales, no child is safe from the online predation, and "we must do all we can to protect our children from these cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet."

Leaving aside for a moment images of Nosferatu prowling in the corners of MySpace looking for his next prey, there is certainly a problem with online pedophilia, but proposing broad regulation of the Internet is not the way to solve it.

Yet that's what McCain wants to do with his awfully-named "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act." The act would require that any commercial web site or personal blog turn over illegal images or photos posted by their users, or face fines of up to $300,000. Not only does this betray a complete misunderstanding of the architecture of the web, but while "illegal" apparently means child pornography, it could easily be applied to a whole lot else.

You can download a PDF of the proposed legislation here.

The enemy, of course, is technology. "Technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography, " McCain said last week. Does this mean that the whole of the Internet-using public is somehow on the shadowy, slippery road to pedophilia?

Beyond the censoring of illegal images (the bill calls for regulation of "images of apparent child pornography" -- plenty of wiggle room there) legislators are simply too willing to regulate online information.

As Roll Call recently reported, a bill from Rep. Roger Wicker of Mississippi would prevent the salaries of congressional staffers from being publicly available (you need a paid subscription to Roll Call to view the story). The legislation appears to be a direct response to LegiStorm, a site that we've documented before that makes it easy to discover the salaries of elected representatives and their staffers. While this information has always been publicly available, it's been difficult to find. LegiStorm makes this data instantly searchable for the first time.

Wicker's bill would mandate that individual staffers' salaries are obscured in public records, and instead only the aggregate of a Congressional Member's spending would be published, making it impossible to view what individuals (including Members themselves) are making.

Imagine if the Yankees didn't disclose their players' individual salaries and only gave a grand total... and imagine if the taxpayers were the ones paying the salaries! Wicker's bill makes it clear that he'd prefer these public records back in the basement, hidden from public view and definitely not online.

While Wicker paints the bill as a protection of staffers' privacy, regulation of the Internet often leads to... more regulation.

Jock Friedly, founder of LegiStorm, doesn't like it one bit:

"Congressman Wicker would do better to focus on the needs of Hurricane Katrina victims in his state than to try to prevent the disclosure of how he and his colleagues spend taxpayer dollars. He is trying to prevent the dissemination of important public information by introducing this anti-LegiStorm legislation," Friedly says.

These proposals have repercussions far beyond blocking the bogeymen they seek to protect us from; in both of these cases we see legislators, despite claims of protecting innocent victims, trying their best to prevent information from being publicly available. Now who's being shadowy?

Tags: legistorm, McCain, pedophiles

Stupid Net Tricks (Mistakes)
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