First Amendment GroupsConcerned About Proposed Online Safety Bills
RSSBy Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 02/10/2008
"Ineffective” and “unconstitutional" are some of the unflattering terms two First Amendment watchdog groups use to describe a new crop of congressional bills that aim to protect children on the Internet. To make sure librarians, educators, parents, and policy wonks know just how "flawed" they are, the two groups recently posted a detailed online report of the proposed legislation.
A total of 11 Senate and 23 House bills have been filed in the 110th Congress addressing the online issues of child predators, obscenity, pornography, and material deemed "harmful to minors." And the sheer number is disturbing, say two Washington, DC-based nonprofit groups, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
"This Congress has seen an explosion of bills aimed at child safety or proposing regulation of Internet content," says John Morris, CDT's senior counsel and study co-author. "Although some of the bills are good, others raise very serious policy and constitutional concerns.
The report says that two blue-ribbon panels created by Congress to explore ways to best protect kids online concluded that the most effective way was to “combine education with the use of filtering and other technology tools to empower parents to decide what content their children should access." Yet the plethora of proposed legislation this session makes it clear that lawmakers are ignoring that advice.
The Kids Act, for example, proposes a sex offender email registry. Though the intention is positive, the bill, sponsored by Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and John McCain (R-AZ) would "likely reduce the ability of blogging and social networking sites to offer their services for free," CDT says. The House considered a similar path and abandoned the email registry proposal because of the privacy issues it raises.
"At the end of the day, this bill will not actually do much to protect kids from anyone intent on harming them, and it will have a negative impact on the free availability of outlets for lawful speech online," the CDT says.
