Agh! Child Pornography!

The Attorney General anounced yesterday that child pornographers are overrunning the internet. Indeed this menace is growing! So he's asking Congress to pass legislation which will require ISPs (the companies which provide internet access) to store records of their users online behavior possibly 2 years maybe more (the quote is "for a period of time").

He makes it sound so reasonable. And yet...

Would a government regulation that all cars record the detailed behavior (where they go, how fast they drive, how many passengers) of the driver be acceptable? After all, child molesters use cars to get access to children who are further away than they can reasonably walk! It would be so much easier for the government to prosecute these cases if they had a record of where every car in the country has been in the last two years.

The executive branch is trying to set up a huge database of personal information about every person in the country. Since the answer can't be Terrorism, I guess it has to be Child Pornography (An even more fictional threat).

Gonzalez sees a desperate need for new weaponry to fight the thousands of people online (out of an estimated 1.08 billion) right now browsing "child pornography". This is terrible because as we're told, those who consume this stuff are just bound to act on it. There's no actual evidence of that, but it's just, you know, that's what they said on Law & Order that one time.

Child abuse is terrible. A civilized society cannot accept such behavior and must do everything in its power to stop it. We're all in agreement on that point.

Which is why making a big show of "cracking down" on people who access this stuff online makes such a good smoke screen. These people are being tempted by the things they see on the screen and if we don't act now they'll soon be gangs of molesters wandering our streets.

The implication is that the majority of cases of child abuse are committed by strangers; unknown pervs who stalk our children! See here take a look at the statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services! They made a chart, so you can really understand the numbers they're talking about. And if that's not specific enough, they made a table where the numbers are even further broken down.

Well look at that. 90% of child abuse cases are perpetrated by parents/legal guardians. Dang. Well, that doesn't really support the argument. Better to not mention any numbers at all. Better to just say the threat is growing.

Child pornography is the straw man here. What Gonzalez is after is an online record of everyone's behavior. It's hard to really imagine what the federal government could reasonably want with this information.

The paranoid response is that they want it so they can weed out the political dissidents and intimidate the people who might try to stop them (You spent how many hours on what website? Well Congressman, you wouldn't want that to become public now would you?). I'm not going to say that the current administration is really that evil and corrupt, but the paranoids are not too far from the truth.

Gonzalez slyly lets the cat out of the bag: "We need information. Information helps us makes cases."

Information is power. I don't think they know specifically what they want to do with it. But if they had it, then they would use it. And they would use it however they liked.