Our civil liberties at stake

[struggle4progress]

... In 1998, Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act, which had the noble objective of protecting children from pornography on the Internet and ridding it of child porn. In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law, saying among other things that it was too broad and violated the First Amendment.

But the court left the door open, allowing the government to either produce a narrower version of the law or go to court to prove it doesn't violate the First Amendment and is the only viable means to fight child pornography.

Rather than take the hint and produce a better law, the Justice Department decided to go the latter route, and as part of its case is contending that the law would be more effective than software filters — favored by privacy advocates — in protecting children. To bolster its case, the government subpoenaed the Web's major search engines for massive amounts of information about the content of users' online searches.

Of the major search engines, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have complied with the subpoenas, but the leading search engine, Google, has refused. On Wednesday, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to force Google, which processes more searches than the others combined, to turn over the records ...

http://www.dchieftain.com/opinion/58223-01-21-06.html

[Strong Atheist]

1. .

http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/the_year.html#smut

:evilgrin:

[Catffienated]

2. Nice link

Nice link, strong Atheist

[Untermonkey]

3. Makes perfect sense to the idiots in Washington.

They assume that they can simply legislate human behaviour into complying with their narrowly defined standards of good and bad.

[SongOfTheRayne]

4. "standards of good and bad"....

must....not....rant....must...not....rant about....hundreds of thousands of civillian deaths and senseless casualties... must...refrain...from...ranting...must not state the obvious.... the ten-page, curse-filled obvious...