You may have heard about the Deleting Online Predators Act proposed by Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), which would require schools that receive federal funds to block access to social networking sites like MySpace. Some reporters have written to me about it, so here are the answers to some common questions I’ve been getting.

First, based on the feedback I’ve gotten from high school students using the Circumventor to get around blocking software at school, most of them are already blocked from MySpace anyway, so the law wouldn’t change the situation much. I certainly catch hell from a lot of users whenever we release a change to the Circumventor that causes problems with the MySpace login.

But if I were interviewing Representative Fitzpatrick, I’d ask him: If he really believes that social networking sites are dangerous, why not also charge parents with child endangerment if they let their kids get on them from home? Either he believes social networking sites are dangerous, or he doesn’t. We actually do pass laws that go that far, when something really is dangerous, like crack! Even if it’s something only mildly dangerous like riding a bicycle without a helmet, there’s no parental exemption for that - because, while small, the danger is real, and not a political bogeyman.

This suggests that even Rep. Fitzpatrick knows that social networking sites are not really dangerous to minors, and statistically speaking, of course, he’s right - a minor is still far more likely to be harmed by their own legal guardians than by someone they meet online. I suppose it’s a cliche by now to point out that such-and-such which is making the headlines is far less likely to harm you than such-and-such which we’ve lived with for years (remember anthrax?), but responsible lawmaking still ought to take that into account.

Apart from all this, I’m wondering: Is anyone in Congress - say, Rep. Fitzpatrick - ever going to try and pass a law against what Peacefire is doing?

Because surely they would know that if they did, then even just during the period when the law was being debated, it would draw far more attention to our site than we would have otherwise garnered, and thus lead to far more young people circumventing their Internet restrictions. Rep. Fitzpatrick would know that this would happen, and most voters would know it, but the question is, would they know that he knows it - and thus blame him for deliberately giving us the huge publicity coup? Perhaps - in the doomsday scenario - it would even lead to more people reading our arguments in favor of civil liberties for minors and thinking that they made sense.

It’s a lot of risk for probably very little gain, since most proposed laws do not get passed. And even if it did, we could challenge it on First Amendment grounds, since the bar for outlawing what a private citizen does on their own time is a lot higher than the bar for controlling what students do in school. And finally, if they did outlaw it successfully, we’d just have to hand over the operation to someone in Canada.

We hear from a lot of students who use our software to access blocked sites from school, including MySpace, so let me know if you need to talk to any of them. (Naturally, some of them probably wouldn’t want to be identified by their full names, though.) We also hear from a lot of overseas military who are blocked from accessing MySpace, since Internet access for troops stationed abroad is filtered by WebSense.

[Bennett Haselton from Peacefire.org]

[tags]myspace,peacefire,social network,michael g. fitzpatrick,deleting online predators act,circumventor[/tags]