only dopes vote for DOPA

[be sure to check out the update below]

Via Mark Kogan, news that 410 members of the U.S. House voted to block "social networking sites" from all libraries and public schools. (Guess who defines which sites are in or out? The FCC. FCC, why won't you let me be?)

Not only is it an unenforceable, unmanageable waste of government resources, it's impractical. It simply won't keep kids from accessing crap if they really want to. You see, there are these things called proxy servers that can route you around blocking software. You'd better believe that high school students know how to use them. And tell their friends how to hack the system. And sneak MySpace into their classtime when teachers aren't watching.

What really makes me mad is that we use "social networking" sites like Blogger for classroom purposes, and this bill might impede our hip, fresh, relevant instruction.

Kogan opines,

Instead of limiting our freedoms for absolutely stupid reasons, the governments needs to help educate parents and teachers to keep kids off these sites or at the very least, warn them about certain dangers of networking sites and chat rooms. Most of it is common sense and rather than now turning it into "forbidden fruit" they would be much better off with helping parents and teacher do their jobs and take care of their kids as they deem fit.

It's time for the government to stop telling us how to live our lives and stop making decisions for parents. This is why bad parenting abounds - more and more now, parents wait for someone else to fix their problems or blame their poor parenting on someone else. That's a poor trend to be encouraging.

When we need TV nannies to tell us how to raise our kids, is it any surprise that we need a nanny state to govern us?



More on DOPA here and here and here. Don't just pray that the Senate will refuse to go along with this political grandstanding. Call or email your senator today.



Update: My anger is mollified on one front after research into the proposed changes to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. There's a codified exception for use "for an educational purpose with adult supervision," so my teaching (hopefully) wouldn't be affected. But I stand by my assessment that the measure is largely ineffectual and a form of political grandstanding. From the floor debate, I quote the words of Rep. Jay Inslee of Bainbridge Island, Washington:

Mr. Speaker, I hate to spoil this garden party, but this is not, in truth, suburban legislation, it is substandard legislation. And the reason for that is that it is, in effect, a good press release, but it is not effective legislation addressing a huge problem threatening our children.

The reason I say that is, after sitting through many hearings in the Commerce Committee about this enormous problem, I reached one conclusion.... What we learned is that the problem is not in our schools. These kids are not hanging in the library with these sexual predators. They are hanging around in their dens, in their basements, in their living rooms, and in their upstairs bedrooms. That is where we have to get to the problem.

If you look at the problem here on this chart, only 10 percent of the abused kids are online and hardly any of them from schools. A tiny, tiny, infinitesimal portion. This will not solve the problem.

Now, there are things we can do, but, unfortunately, this legislation doesn't do a single one of them. I used to prosecute cases, so I know a little bit about law enforcement. I raised three kids, so I know a little bit about the terror of worrying about your children. But what this legislation does not do is the three things we need to do.

Number one, we have to give resources to law enforcement to prosecute these horrendous monsters. We had detective after detective come to our hearings and say, give us some money; we can prosecute these people. This doesn't give them a penny.

Number two, we need to protect the data. What the detectives told us is that this data, once it disappears, they can't find the culprits. Now we could require the data to be maintained for a year or two, like we are trying to do. This bill doesn't do that.

Third, what this bill could do is provide some real meaningful tools for our schools to educate our children on how to avoid these monsters on the Internet. This doesn't do that....

Now, why is this such a pathetic wave at trying to do something? Why has Congress failed so miserably here? There is a reason for that. The reason is we want press releases, without having to do the hard work to do legislation. That is why we didn't go through the Commerce Committee to have a markup on this bill so they could rush this thing to the floor and have their suburban agenda.

Well, speaking as a parent who represents 650,000 people, and probably 200,000 parents in suburbia, I think suburban parents, urban parents, rural parents, big-city parents and little-city parents deserve real legislation to stomp out the monstrosity that is going on on the Internet and not these little press releases. We can't go home and just say that we are heroes without having really done something.

When I go home, I am going to tell my constituents that, yes, maybe there are some headlines, but there wasn't real relief. And I look forward to the day when this Congress gets down to the nitty-gritty and really does something about this terrible problem.

Well said, Mr. Inslee. Now, if only you'd had the guts to vote against it.