John McCain Wants ISP MonitoringWe have a confession to make. Most of us here at Gambling911.com like Senator John McCain - except for maybe diehard liberal Payton O'Brien...but to each their own.
McCain doesn't back down and he comes across as honest and sincere - unlike that other Arizona Senator whose last name rhymes with "Vile".
He hates betting on college sports - not because the little kiddies will steal their parents credit cards, but rather he's concerned over the integrity of the game. Senator McCain himself loves to gamble in Vegas at the casinos so he's not about going on an anti-gambling crusade.
He's also stood his ground on sending additional troops to Iraq despite being a very unpopular stance at this juncture in time.
Our own Kira Wissman and Tyrone Black have a picture of McCain hanging on their walls.
But yikes....John McCain may be carrying things just a little too far with his desire to have ISP monitoring for "illegal images" over the internet.
McCain, who is listed with impressive 3-1 odds of becoming the next US President in 2008 is proposing to require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or "cartoon" minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.
That's okay by us.....even Ms. Wissman, forever known as "The Ant Woman" would agree.
But Civil libertarians worry that the proposed legislation goes too far and could impose unreasonable burdens on anyone subject to the new regulations. And Internet companies worry about the compliance costs and argue that an existing law that requires reporting of illicit images is sufficient.
CNET News Writes:
"The Securing Adolescents from Exploitation-Online Act (PDF) states ISPs that obtain "actual knowledge" of illegal images must make an exhaustive report including the date, time, offending content, any personal information about the user, and his Internet Protocol address. That report is sent to local or federal police by way of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center received $32.6 million in tax dollars in 2005, according to its financial disclosure documents.
"Afterward, the center is authorized to compile that information into a form that can be sent back to ISPs and used to assemble a database of "unique identification numbers generated from the data contained in the image file." That could be a unique ID created by a hash function, which yields something akin to a digital fingerprint of a file."
McCain has good intentions but it is his counterparts who could use any new measure for their own self-agendas - a la "block images of gambling online from minors". Unless of course they happen to stumble upon some horse racing images.
Children can steal their parents credit cards to gamble online just as long as they are betting the horsies. The Safe Port Act allows betting on horses, but outlaws playing poker online. That's right - the Safe Port Act.
This is why politicians and the internet are not always a good match.
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Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com
Originally published February 8, 2007 9:09 pm ET
