In <3342CF22.6181@mexred.net.mx>, on 04/02/97 at 03:26 PM, nadeshda@mexred.net.mx (nadeshda vargas stepanenko) said:
To whom it may concern:
Thank you for answering my mail, it was very useful for me, but at the end you asked me why do I think legislation would be needed?
I have several opinions:
In one part I think that it is not necessary to legislate, because as you said you have to protect your privacy from the gobernent, I m agree of that, but I have other situations:
I m going to give you some examples:
Well these are some of the straw-men that get pulled out whenever the Government wishes to clamp down on the rights & freedoms of it's citizens. Whenever you here the buzz-phrases: "save the children" this means "take away more of your rights" & "terrorist" means "anyone opposed to the policies of the current administration". -- Translations form the "George Orwell NewSpeak Dictionary published 1984."
1) I heard about several cases about individuals who use the Internet to attract children who are then raped and murdered, kidnapped and sold on the black market, many of these pediophiles work out in open in complete anonimaty, due to the structure of the Internet and many service providers.
The overwhelming cases of child abuse including pediophilia are not done by strangers but by members of the childs family or those close to the family; freinds, daycare workers, neighbors, cleargy, ...ect. Those with close contact to the child on a regular basis. Any regulation on the Internet would do nothing to prevent this. It would be just as easy to lure a child by using the Postal system but you don't see anyone demanding that all letters be written on postcards to they can be read.
2) And what about the terroists who use the Internet to comunicate with each other, gather information and funding establish methods, investigate methods of terrorism (how to make a bomb in your house using abono and household chemicals. This is an area that should be strongly controlled, but the question is how do you do it without restricting the rights of the average citizen?
I can see no way of regulating such information. The basic information required to make all kinds of nasty bombs & chemicals are taught in High School chemistry classes. I guess we could ban all science and go back to living in caves but that doen't see very practical now does it? " Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither." -- Benjamin Franklin. " When a government spends most of it's time and energy protecting itself from it's own people it is doomed to fail" -- William H. Geiger III -- ----------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. Finger whgiii@amaranth.com for PGP Key and other info -----------------------------------------------------------