TechDirt posted a good summary of a bad bill and the ridiculous ramifications — here’s a chilling excerpt:
Congress Rushes Through Law To Protect The Children… And Make Open WiFi A Huge Liability
So what’s so awful about the law? Well, like most “protect the children” legislation, it goes way overboard in terms of what people are expected to do, and like most legislation having to do with technology, seems utterly clueless about how technology works. The bill would require anyone providing an “electronic communication service” or a “remote computing service” to record and report information any time they “learn” that their network was used for certain broadly defined illegal activities concerning obscene images. That’s double trouble, as both the illegal activities and the classification of who counts as a service provider are so broadly defined. McCullough notes that anyone providing an open WiFi network, a social network, a domain registry or even a webmail service probably qualify under the law. Glenn Fleishman describes what the law could mean in practice, points out that anyone who runs an open WiFi network for the public is now basically required to snitch on anyone they think may be doing anything deemed “illegal” in this act, including viewing or transmitting certain obscene drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings. As Fleishman notes, it “sounds like viewing an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog could qualify.” Even worse, part of the snitching is that beyond sending a report and the images to the gov’t, you’re supposed to retain the “illegal” image yourself — which would seem to open you up to charges of possession as well if you somehow screw up (if you follow everything exactly to the letter of the law, you are granted immunity).
This can’t possibly pass. But then again, so many things that can’t possibly happen, have ….
4 responses so far ↓
1 Nobilis // Dec 7, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Hm.
Sounds to me, that you could very easily create an immunity for yourself to have whatever images you want on your hard drive.
First, create an open WiFi for your neighborhood. (Don’t actually tell anyone about it… just put it out there)
Do all your questionable browsing with one machine. Rotate its identifying information regularly. Save the images you want on your “server” hard drive.
Bingo. You can’t be prosecuted, and I’ll bet you can’t be traced. I could be wrong, though. There might be ways to get caught with this, but I’m sure something could be worked out.
2 Curtis // Dec 7, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Now how in the world would any court go about proving that you knew about the objectionable material and didn’t report it?
It certainly doesn’t mean mandatory logging of information- it just means that if you ever find yourself with incontrovertible evidence of some nefarious doings, in a position where someone can prove that you have said evidence, you are required to report it.
I mean, I still think the law is 18 different types of stupid, I just don’t think it’s going to kill WiFi and cause a grand public holocaust.
3 FlipperPA // Dec 7, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Have you seen the new copyright bill? Those who understand, do. Those who do not, litigate. This is frightening.
4 Peregrine // Dec 8, 2007 at 6:53 pm
I don’t think this would affect home users. If you put a wireless signal out there, especially if you make every effort to encrypt it, and prevent someone else from leaching your signal, then you aren’t providing it as a service. End users need to get smart, and encrypt their signal to provide themselves at least some limited protection. If you can argue in court that you encrypted your signal to attempt to prevent people using it for nefarious activities, hopefully, they won’t hold you accountable for the actions of unauthorized users.
But then that assumes that the legal system actually works, and isn’t a massive bureaucracy lagging so far behind technology that it’s borderline archaic.