Battleangel

When the US government wants to police what citizens are saying online, it pulls out the most potent weapon in its arsenal: bureaucratic regulations. The Department of Justice is currently pushing two new regs that will generate long-lasting records of what people are posting and reading. What’s particularly dirty about all this is that it puts the onus of tracking people on private businesses, rather than in the hands of law enforcement.

How will this tracking regime begin? With a group of unpopular and often marginal people, of course. You know - pornographers. The DOJ recently issued a regulation, which goes into effect next week, updating the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act for the Internet age. This law, also simply known as 2257, after its number in the criminal code, requires adult businesses to keep detailed records proving that all the models they use are over the age of 18. Incidentally, these records will also contain the real names of performers, and often their addresses too.

To keep “proper records” under the new version of 2257 (and avoid steep fines or jail time), you must maintain files that contain every single erotic image or film you’ve published, cross-indexed with age-verification papers for every single performer in them. These records must be kept for seven years. That’s a hell of a lot of hard drive space if you run a porn site that posts streaming videos. It’s also a logistical nightmare for any site that does reviews of adult movies or erotic material. Republishing an erotic image - even if you’re doing it simply for the purposes of criticism - requires you to keep the same age-verification records as the people who created that image. The law also applies to any Web site that posts “lascivious” images of naked people or people engaging in “sexual activity.”

Any site affected by 2257 must also publish a physical address that serves as its “place of business.” Someone must be available at that address 20 hours a week just in case a law enforcement officer wants to gain access to those 2257 records.

2257 is a great testing ground for a much broader scheme by the DOJ. This scheme, sometimes called “mandatory data retention,” would force all Internet service providers to keep files on everything that people using their services are doing online.

That’s how it goes. First they come for the pornographers, and then they come for you.

Source: Annalee Newitz, AlterNet

See also:

• Boing Boing “Rotten.com: our gapingmaw.com and other sites shut in anticipation of 2257″
• Rotten.com Gapingmaw “CENSORED BY US GOVERNMENT 18 USC 2257″
• Politechbot