Aren’t they redefining both teen/adolescent (last I checked, five year olds were neither)? Wendy, do you know why they didn’t formulate it as just “minors?”

But more to the point aren’t they redefining the law?

Last I heard, the Supremes said the government can outlaw material based on the following standard: “whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

There really is nothing in there about harm to adolescents, which would be a hard case to prove.

All that aside, the conflict library filtering has been going through for years shows that content can’t be reasonably filtered in a way that allows an adult restricted to the same common carrier band rightful access to important information. For example, filtering often flags sites on breast cancer or AIDS prevention. Although these sites may portray primary or secondary sexual characteristics, the fight vs. the CDA showed that you can’t restrict a public resource from carrying this kind of information, as I remember.

However, this could be judge similar to CIPA, which restricts even adult access to similar information via a library computer.

Roger and Nim — if you think that a law that purports to protect children from the Internet has that as its only agenda, you are terrifically naive. Every law that has come down the pike to restrict rights lately is either to protect you from being bombed by terrorists, or to keep your children safe from boogeymen.

Laws are, universally, rhetorically constructed so that in their sound bite form they seem like no one could possibly disagree with them and still be a reasonable human being. But it’s our duties as Jeffersonian citizens to transcend this kind of adrenal rhetoric and try to understand the law in the context of our whole society.

Please think about the context of the law. If you believe that legislation is about what it overtly states, the patriot act is also about being good Americans, No Child Left Behind is about making sure every disadvantaged child in the US has a decent education, and FISA is used to tap the Friends Service Committee because they are a terrorist organization.

We are experiencing an unprecedented erosion of our rights in recent years. My civil liberties are a baby I do not want to throw out in your perceived bathwater.

Eternal vigilance and all that…

But hey, what happens when a “porn” item is discovered on this publicly free arena? Are the lawyers going to line up? Private citizen going to sue?

Right now it is just about impossible to ban porn on a large scale, do they really think they are going to be able to do this?

Some may think the more porn available the better society we are building.
Sorry, but I really don’t feel like fighting for granting our children access to porn. Not in a family oriented service, anyway.