[sllug-members]: Re: Deseret News Article

Thu Mar 20 14:25:51 MST 2008

Very well put, Eric.  After many years of law practice, a few years ago
I helped found a Utah company that helped police the internet for
parents and employers, named Cerberian (since sold to BlueCoat Systems).
I recognized then, as now, that technology can be a tool to help
employers, employees, law enforcement or criminals, but it can't be used
effectively to enforce the moral views of one group (even a
supermajority) on people who don't share those values.  Pedophiles and
sexual predators (like terrorists) don't share our values, and they will
use whatever tools they can get.   

Mr. Daw's "assurance" notwithstanding, I don't think the link between
pornography and sexual predation is clearly established at all.  The
link between predation as a child victim, and subsequent predation as
predator is much more sound in the evidence I have seen, and HB139 did
nothing about that.  The Utah legislature seems intent on treating
sexual predators as untreatable criminals (which the evidence suggests
may be right, treatment rates don't seem good), and blaming their
predation on anything imaginable except the real likely cause-- that
they themselves were usually abused and are perpetuating the cycle.  

Worse yet, HB139 was not drawn to pornography (a really vague term which
over the years has been difficult or impossible to define, see Justice
Potter Stewart's famous quote), but to "material harmful to minors", an
even more vague term.  Does that include tobacco? Underage drinking?
Street racing? Bungee jumping?  Skateboarding? Where does it end?  Why
not pass similar legislation for cars (most abductions involve a
vehicle), the streets they drive on, and the houses and other buildings
that provide the privacy in which sexual abuse takes place? 

Wifi was being treated as a scapegoat here.  It isn't technologically
feasible to prevent minors public access while allowing it freely to
adults.  The net effect would have been to close public wifi access,
period.  No starbucks, no truck stops, no user group installfests, no
Utopia-- only secured subscriber access, and yet any kid could connect
to any unsecured residential home wifi system (exempted) and get
anything he wants.  As a kid in Silicon Valley, every Playboy magazine I
ever saw was shown me by another kid who had swiped it either from a
store or his parents.  Why would today's kids be different?  Yet I
turned out to be a lawyer (BYU grad), scoutmaster, and entrepreneur, not
a child molester. (Strange, huh?)

This legislation was poorly thought out and primarily motivated by
someone wanting to be "doing something about" a problem rather than
really solving it.  This is why a New York appellate judge observed in
1868 that "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe when the
legislature is in session."  

When I was in college I worked as a construction framer, and we had a
saying: a guy with a hammer in his hand thinks everything is a nail.
Legislators that don't think things through are even more dangerous.
There oughtta be a law-- against people saying (without thinking) that
there oughtta be a law... 

-  
Matt Warnock, President
RidgeCrest Herbals, Inc.

On Thu, 2008-03-20 at 09:17 -0600, Erik Falor wrote:
> On 3/16/08, Bradley Daw <BDaw at utah.gov> wrote:
>         All,
>          
>         In the letters I have received, there has been a lot of
>         questioning whether or not I was overreacting. I hope these
>         and subsequent articles will put those concerns to rest and
>         will get all of you thinking about how we can solve the
>         problem before it gets to the level presented in the article.
>         I can assure you that every single perpetrator of a sex crime
>         got his or her start with an addiction to pornography.
>          
>         http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695261701,00.html
>         http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695261747,00.html
>         http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695261976,00.html
>         http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695261702,00.html
>          
>         Brad Daw
> 
> I see your four articles, and raise you three:
> 
> http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/28029.html
> http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/assessing-the-dangers-of-the-internet-for-children/
> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/fear_of_interne.html
> 
> Nobody disagrees that child predators are a threat.  Nobody disagrees
> that something should be done to protect our children.
> The disagreement is centered around the fact that your HB 139 would
> have done nothing to disarm them.  HB 139 would not
> have any power to stop the threats child predators present.
> 
> Of the four articles you referred to, only the first so much as
> mentioned the Internet.  The following words were not present
> in any of the above articles: wireless, pornography, wifi, computer. 
> 
> The DesNews articles describe a problem.  I believe there is a
> solution that can improve the status quo.  HB
> 139 is not that solution.  Most, if not all, of the anecdotes contained in those stories involve people who were molested before the 
> Internet became prevalent, and for that matter, before
> wireless Internet became widespread.  Could Oprah's abuse have been
> prevented
> by your measures?  The problem child molesters present is not
> technological, and the right solution will likewise
> not be technological.   
> 
> Let me put this another way: any technological solution we can dream
> up to protect people from themselves will either be too intrusive
> to be used, or will be broken down by hackers in under a week.  An
> example of the former is User Account Control (UAC) on Windows 
> Vista; most users disable it out of annoyance despite the security
> benefits it can offer.  An example of the
> latter is the HD-DVD&nbsp;encryption&nbsp;
> controversy, where a key to unlock movies
> was discovered by someone with knowledge and time applied himself/herself to the problem.  
> 
> The problem Windows Vista UAC attempts to solve is user discipline.
>  People expect the computer to do their bidding, no questions asked.  
> Therefore, they use their
> computer with Administrator privileges enabled, allowing them to do
> any operation, even dangerous ones,
> without eliciting error messages.  This invites the user to make mistakes which can destroy data on their computer, and allow viruses and 
> worms to propagate.  Because UAC
> is optional, users will inevitably choose to disable it when
> it gets in their way.  Then the user has gone
> back to square one, operating their
> computer in an unsafe mode.  If only they were taught to exercise discipline. 
> 
> The problem HD-DVD encryption attempted to solve was theft.  But theft
> existed before computers and HD-DVDs existed.  In fact, this
> very same problem of recording counterfeit movies was already hashed
> out in the Supreme Court in the 1980's.  But every time a new 
> technology is developed, we go through this tired debate again.
> 
> Because this encryption scheme was forced upon consumers with no
> choice to opt-out, someone discovered a way around it.  The utility 
> of the encryption scheme was destroyed from that time on, and all of
> the effort put in to devise and implement it were rendered obsolete.
> The problem of theft?
>  It hasn't been fixed through technology yet, and nobody should expect that it will be.  There always has been, and 
> always will be thieves.  Let us find a balance between raising high
> barriers to deter crime and making technology useful to non-criminals
> instead of betting on a technological silver bullet.
> 
> Please consider an approach that addresses the real issue: children
> need to be educated about what sorts of information they
> ought to be giving out to strangers.  It doesn't matter whether they
> meet them online, on the street, at school, in a comic-book store.
> The fact that predators use
> the Internet doesn't change the nature of the threat; it's simply a new venue to use the same old tricks.
> We teach our children to not accept candy from a
> stranger; do we teach them to not accept a fileshare from an unknown user online? 
> 
> When a doctor prescribes
> a medicine that he/she knows will not treat a particular patient's symptoms, it is a wasted effort.  If the
> doctor is aware that the side-effects of said medications are harmful, it is an immoral effort.  
> 
> I submit that you either do not understand the consequences of the
> course you are proposing, or that you are indeed overreacting.  
> HB 139
> would have harmed commerce, information access, and our state's reputation.  Let us not approach this problem as Luddites, but
> rather
> as technology users who understand what technology can and cannot do.
> 
> Respectfully, 
> Erik Falor
> 
> -- 
> Erik Falor
> Registered Linux User #445632 http://counter.li.org 
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