Battleangel

Boing Boing reports that “commercial” sites in the U.S. may soon be forced to “place official government warning labels on their pages or risk being imprisoned for up to five years.” Whatever commercial means? In the near future, any of the following may land you in prison:

sexual intercourse of all types; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.

Some crazy stuff. And adding insult to injury, as CNET notes, “lascivious exhibition” has often been extended to mean just about anything. Or how about showing the world the “masochistic abuse” that goes on in America’s gulags? I see ample possibilities here to trump up more grounds to squash dissent and make what is left of the free and unchecked Net so much more reined in. For one it fully opens up a Pandora’s box (first step was 2257) of the government telling people how they should design their websites, adding sure to be butt-ugly banners designed by some pencil pusher. I wouldn’t move a single line break for any government and neither should anyone else. And to think some of the same policy makers have the tenacity to criticise countries like China and how they infringe on netizens’ rights.
Attorney General Alberto “rendition torture” Gonzales also indicated that the U.S. will move towards ISP data retention and that legislation may again be required if ISPs wouldn’t offer their silent compliance. Both proposals seem to be sudden reversals of what was believed to be official policy. You’d think this should be shocking news for pundits who claim to live and die by the constitution, and the First Amendment, but apparently some rights are more equal than others, some of the time at least. Maybe. How this contingency will effect non-U.S. citizens is of course uncertain at this time. But it would be foolish to think that this will stop with the U.S., given that the technological measures that would be required to pull this off, and that we are all in one way or another using, are subject to U.S. legislation. Search engines. Root servers. Major web browsers. Even if one could escape, how fun would it be to exist as a digital rebel but with no or a diminished number of actual visitors?

CNET also notes the eerie precedence to this sort of nonsense. Namely the Clinton / Gore proposal from the mid-1990s, propped up by so called liberals, that came a hairsbreadth from requiring tagging and making it a federal crime to mislabel a site. They even had the budding search engines on-board to make un-tagged sites virtually disappear. Something to think about now that basically the same proposal is up in the air again. It’s lucky that policy makers never got the Internet boom as it happened, or this very journal entry and millions like it would never have existed. Realistically, it seems unlikely that they’ll ever be able to regain control, even if they are fighting tooth and claw, making up laws willy-nilly and erecting technological speed bumps (”Doomsday For The Internet” etc) to nibble at the vast and largely unchecked, underground, uniquely dialogical, democratic complex that is the Internet.

See also: Slashdot: US Intensifies Fight Against “Child Pornography”