Thursday, December 06, 2007
Congressional stupidity alert
Those few of you who still harbor the quaint idea that the United States House of Representatives is neither stupid nor cynical ought to consider the transporting idiocy behind this legislation:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.
The romantic in me wants to believe that T-Mobile and other purveyors of commercial Wi-Fi services cooked this law up to shut down the free services increasingly available in public accomodations. If true, that would at least be nothing worse than a naked grab for commercial advantage by greedy telecom companies, which is to be expected. Alas, the more likely explanation is that nobody in Congress is willing to stand up to the anti-porn bluenoses, no matter how intrusive or burdensome their demands.
I note that my own Congressman Rush Holt, who laughably advertises his intelligence by circulating bumper stickers that say "My Congressman is a rocket scientist," voted in favor of this ridiculous legislation, thereby proving that he is as stupid or unprincipled -- take your pick -- as anybody else in Congress.
5 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Thu Dec 06, 07:10:00 PM:
You can never go wrong counting on politicians to be completely ignorant of technical matters.
By 
, at
Thu Dec 06, 07:36:00 PM:
By Andrewdb, at
Fri Dec 07, 12:17:00 AM:
How about we make it apply to land line and wireless phone companies too?
By Miss Ladybug, at
Fri Dec 07, 01:56:00 AM:
And how are they supposed to do this? I guess a start would be that snooper software that tracks all the websites visited by computers on the network, and an employee to check out all those sites regularly or something. This is just stupid...
By , at
Fri Dec 07, 06:36:00 PM:
Passing an extreme bill that they know damn well will never make it into law (either because of a pre-agreement that the Senate will kill it, or knowledge that it is so blatantly un-Constitutional that it will never go into effect by reason of court action or veto) lets the nimrods tell their activist constituencies "Hey, I tried" without doing actual damage.
Because while I fully believe that most members of Congress are cut off from the realities of daily life, including the details of technology, their staffers aren't.
