They've met only once. And a Congressionally commissioned, sixteen-member Internet decency group has two problems - no funding and no agency to host it. Not an auspicious beginning for the group that has until year's end to suggest ways to keep Net porn from children.
The group includes executives with America Online, Yahoo!, Network Solutions, and other e-heavyweights, along with educators and activists. But Congress has failed so far to provide money or resources. And with a reported 75 percent of parents in a University of Pennsylvania survey saying they're concerned their children might see Net porn, the Associated Press says the funding and resource snafu has some questioning whether Washington "is serious" about keeping kids from seeing Net porn. And the new group's first meeting this week was so dominated by the funding question they wondered just how they were going to do what they were charged - under the Child Protection Online Act - to do. The Commerce Department was to be the original home for the group, but when lawmakers reauthorized the group after its original expiration date - and with no one named to it until two days before that deadline - they forgot to order Commerce to pay for it.
LOS ANGELES - Carla Virga doesn't have to worry about getting its Web site bashing Terminix bashed in return. Terminix has dropped its lawsuit trying to stop the protest site. The California secretary had been a pest to the pest control company over what she called its poor service, and Terminix had hit back with a defamation suit (dismissed quickly) and, then, a suit claiming Virga's using the Terminix name constituted trademark infringement. Virga's attorney, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen, tells Wired the dropped suit means other consumers with protest Web sites "shouldn't roll over and play dead" if their target comes after them. Public Citizen was just one consumer group which sided with Virga. Levy had argued that because Virga's was a non-commercial site, trademark issues didn't apply.
WASHINGTON - You've read here and elsewhere about Echelon, the electronic communications interception network which is said to be able to pick off private e-mail, cell phone calls, and other electronic communications. Now former CIA director James Woolsey has reportedly confirmed the U.S. monitors e-communications in Europe for "economic bribery activity," according to the German Net publication Telopolis. "We have spied on that in the past," the journal quotes Woolsey as saying in Washington last week. "I hope… that the United States government continues to spy on bribery," he continues - justifying the snoopery because European companies, he says, have "a national culture of bribery."
The news isn't being taken as that big a deal, Wired says, because Woolsey had said, during his years running the CIA, that such things were precisely what he said he would do - and that intelligence gathering against allegedly corrupt foreign businesses has been Washington practice for a long time.
--- Compiled by Humphrey Pennyworth
