John McCain Wants To Shut Me Down

This is essentially cherry-picking from another site, but it involves this blogosphere, and therefore I find it very important and disturbing. John McCain, Mr. Open and Honest Straight Talk himself, has introduced legislation that would hold blogs responsible for all activity that occurs within their comment section or anywhere on their site. Such a measure would severely hamper the ability for most blogs, particularly community sites like the Daily Kos, to function, as there would need to be almost full-time policing and background checking on the site.

Here are some highlights, or lowlights, of this legislation.

• Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”

• Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.

• Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

Regarding photos and videos, I'm assuming this is why photo storage sites are limited to a select view. Still, that's no safeguard against ripping something off the Web and uploading it to Flickr, for example. The idea that blog owners would be personally responsible for that action, at a cost of $300,000, is far more punitive that what would seem a logical standard.

We've already seen, with soon-to-be former Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick's legislation, how dangerous it is to give the federal government sway over "social networking sites," especially when they set the definition of what they are. Anything with a comment, and certainly anything with a profile, can be seen as a networking site. It appears that the burden would be on the site owner to provide criminal background checks on all of its users, many of whom are anonymous for very specific reasons.

This is an absolute intrusion into the blogosphere and makes a mockery of freedom of speech. I don't expect that such an awful measure would pass a Democratic Congress. However, once you start putting things in terms of "protecting children," anything can happen. And if this passes, I don't know how you could have anything but a top-down blog without comments. Otherwise the mass of writing on the site that is not user-generated could never be vetted.

It is incumbent upon those of us who benefit from this experience to make our legislators aware of this attempt to crush dissent. And it's very incumbent to make everyone aware of who the prime mover in this is: John McCain. The straight-talking maverick. I guess when straight talk isn't to his liking, he moves to silence it.