The Internet Caucus Advisory Committee this week hosted a three-part panel series on legislating online child safety. The Internet Caucus is a bipartisan group composed of more than 170 members of the House and Senate working to educate their colleagues about the promise and potential of the Internet.
Policymakers put forward several proposals to mandate online safety and security for children and teens. Web experts warned that the investigation of disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley's online conversations with teenagers may prompt legislation that compromises the privacy of Internet users.
"Already we can see the rumblings of legislation in Congress," says Tim Lordan, executive director of the advisory committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. "It's definitely going to color the debate." Lordan, a board member for the Internet Education Foundation, moderated the event. However, parents of Web-browsing children should not view Foley as the classic example of an Internet predator, Lordan says.
"His interactions with these teenagers were begun with notes in the hallway, walks for ice cream down the street. I mean, he attended the pages' graduation," he says. Yet, parental fear fueled by recent events could encourage legislators to push for more stringent Internet laws, Lordan says.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) are among public officials who support legislation that would require data retention, which would force Internet service providers to document and store all users' online activities. Under this policy, ISPs would be forced to keep records of a user's every move indefinitely, from website postings to search engine queries.
"Before too long, you have a serious surveillance system operating on all of us," says Jim Harper, who spoke on the panel. Harper is the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a nonprofit libertarian research foundation. "The data obtained by the data-retention mandate will be used for all kinds of investigation. Law enforcement will switch from pursuing criminals...to pursuing people."
The U.S. Department of Justice, which is investigating Foley and his correspondence with former House pages, feeds off parental concern by using the exaggerated statistics of experts, Harper says.
"They say child pornography is growing exponentially," he says. "It is not growing exponentially; it's growing just like all online activity is growing, and as a percentage of online activity, it's probably not growing at all."
The Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 allows the government to request that ISPs preserve records of a suspect's Net activity for 90 days. Once a warrant or court order has been obtained, the company hands over the information. The law does not, however, require that ISPs keep permanent records of user activity, which normally is deleted after a certain period.
