Child porn is an awful, horrible, icky, and revolting thing. Let’s just get that out of the way to begin with.
The Internet, of course, has served as a new avenue for child porn distribution among the sick sorts that get off on it. Various governments have taken various steps to try and stop it. Though ostensibly well-intended, some of them are pretty crappy laws.
Pennsylvania, for example, has a state law that allows the attorney general to force ISPs to block certain sites it deems to be child porn. That includes Internet providers such as AOL and Earthlink.
While I appreciate the efforts of the attorney general of Pennsylvania to safeguard his residents from the viewing of child porn (and note that the law itself doesn’t do anything about the trash itself — a lot of these sites are offshore — only the mechanism by which people can access it), since I didn’t help elect him, I’m not particularly sanguine about his making those decisions for me.
Because, after all, if Earthlink blocks site X, it can’t narrow that to just its Pennsylvania subscribers. All of its users are blocked.
Which might still be okay, except that sometimes servers that host child porn sites also host innocent non-porn sites. Which then get blocked by the ISPs.
What innocent sites might be being blocked? Wouldn’t you like to know? Well … you can’t. The Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office won’t tell anyone the 423 sites it has asked ISPs to block.
Why?
Fisher’s office said disclosing the list of blocked Web sites would itself be disseminating such pornography, which is illegal.
“The documents that you seek contain the Web addresses of Internet sites that contain such depictions,” wrote L. Kinch Bowman, director of management services for the attorney general’s office.
But, you may ask, how then can we ever have oversight over the implementation of such a law? How do we know that sites that somebody in the AG’s office simply dislikes — political opponents, minority religions, alternative lifestyles — aren’t being targeted for harrassment.
Well, we can’t.
Well, then, if someone wanted to challenge the law, contend that it was adversely affecting innocent people, beyond the value of what it was designed to do, wouldn’t they need to be able to compile a list of affected sites?
Yup, they sure would. But they can’t.
We’re from the government. Trust us — we’re here to help you.
Hadn’t you heard? New research by the Brookings Institute has proven that the old adage, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is wrong. It should read, “Power corrupts liberals and absolute power corrupts liberals absolutely.” So, you see, there’s nothing to worry about.