Wimping out on child protection
The issue of protecting children from internet “nasties” presents significant challenges, not just technically, but legally.
In 1996, the U.S. Congress enacted a law designed to make it harder for children to access online pornography (the Child Online Protection Act).
This Act was the Congress' second attempt to address the problem. The first legislative attempt was the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which was deemed by the US Supreme Court to be too broad to pass the First Amendment principles of protecting the right of “free speech”, and so was effectively sunk. As one would expect, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was the initiator of the legal action which did the sinking (Reno v. ACLU).
Now it looks like there is every chance that the second attempt will also be sunk—again through legal action coordinated by the ACLU. The Supreme Court has basically said this week (by a close 5-4 decision) that there are real question marks over the new Act's constitutionality, and all but sent it back to a lower court to consider and strike down. (See Ashcroft v. ACLU.)
But is it really a legal problem, or is it a moral will problem?
In striking down the 1996 Act, the court laid out some very clear principles in relation to which material (particularly obscene material) will and won't be protected by the First Amendment. The legislators in Congress then took those principles and basically word-for-word built them into the 1998 Act.
In other words, the Court said if you want to pass this type of law, these are the legal hoops you have to jump through. The Congress said OK and duly jumped through those hoops, significantly limiting the scope of their law.
Well, it is looking like it is all to no avail. The Supreme Court has basically said, “No, we're still not going to let you do that, even though you jumped through our hoops—we'll find some other grounds for keeping the status quo”.
There is some extraordinary logic and rationalising in the judgements of some very senior lawyers (well highlighted by Justice Breyer in his dissenting judgement)—logic which makes you question whether the difficulties in protecting children are really all technical and legal, or just simply plain old issues of moral will. The moral will just does not seem to be there to let the Government do anything about a serious problem.
On the other hand, it is good to see software developers stepping in to give some help to worried parents. I recently downloaded a trial version of a web browser for children (for the Mac platform) called BumperCar, which looks to give a lot of helpful controls to parents over what gets viewed on their home computers. See http://www.freeverse.com/bumpercar/