Every time the ACLU defends neo-Nazis or the ADL supports gay rights a critic like Ed Morrisey scratches his chin in disbelief. Don’t we hate Nazis? Don’t Orthodox jews disapprove of gay people? Why defend them? Critics like Ed never seem to pick up that Ed Morrisey doesn’t get to choose who will be the next group to arbitrarily lose its rights. Times change. Some day rightie bloggers who defended an administration that commits torture and repudiates habeas corpus could find themselves an isolated band of social pariahs thanking jeebus that the ACLU won’t let the state sever their internet connection. I honestly doubt that Morrissey has thought much about what it might feel like to live on the other side of that angry pointing finger. It could be my Jewish heritage, but Abe Foxman and I have thought about it.
Anyhow, when the state really wants to stretch its legal authority it usually packages the new powers with some indefensible subgroup, usually sex offenders*. To be clear I don’t have a problem with keeping closer tabs on these guys than most other criminals. Some ideas sound perfectly fine, for example tracking serial offenders after they’re released, keeping child molesters away from schoolyards and chemical castration for the worst cases, since it’s fairly hard to expand those powers to the rest of us. In other cases the state is obviously just using fear of child molesters as a cynical selling point to grant themselves a new power that in reality extends to practically everybody. The Bush DOJ, including and especially the newly sainted John Ascroft, practically invented that gambit.
I am having a hard time deciding on which side of the fence this new development falls.
MySpace said Monday it has begun to release data to state justice officials on convicted sex criminals it finds using the youth-oriented social networking website.
The move ends a standoff between MySpace and top prosecutors from eight US states that had demanded the identities of sexual predators who have posted their profiles on the News Corporation-owned website.
The state attorneys general gave MySpace a deadline of May 29, 2007, but the company responded that it was barred by law from revealing the data.
[…] MySpace is providing what it knows of sex offenders on its website for criminal investigations and probation or parole proceedings, according to Mike Angus, general counsel of News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media.
On the first hand it makes perfect sense to keep likely predators out of a social site for kids. I don’t have the reference at hand but I seem to recall a recent study reporting that something like one in two (?!) kids who use social network sites has been inappropriately propositioned. Obviously the state needs flexible new ways of dealing with the mind-bending opportunities that the internet offers to pedophiles with poor impulse control, and I’m totally in favor of MySpace scouring its registrations for known offenders. I could even support a law requiring it, although I could be convinced either way. The problem is that once the tap between MySpace and the state has opened a hair, what mechanism exists to make sure that it doesn’t open a bit more? The next time they will come back looking for some guys who might be terrorists, then some guys who might know a terrorist. Eventually they could stop bothering to give a reason. That is more or less what the FBI has already acknowledged it did with our telephone records.
As I understand it the question of online privacy is still somewhat a legal wild west, and I don’t blame state for trying to bias the issue in a direction that makes doing their job easier. But I think that we should all pay attention when it happens, and we should deal with the question separately from impossibly charged distractions like terrorists and child molesters.
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On the third hand I have absolutely no conflict about hamfisted power grabs like this. True to form Alberto Gonzales used a jackalope issue (copyright infringement? yeesh) to package a ridiculously broadly-defined set of powers that would essentially let him scan around where he wants for whatever he wants. I don’t know why the admin wants that power when they already think they have it (Addington, Yoo), but there’s no reason why Democrats should play along.
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(*) After 9/11, tarrists.
Pb
To quote Don’t Be A Sucker (1947):
Shocked
Special Ed said something dumb?
Andrew
And to think, he’s the smartest of the winger crowd.
Jake
I call bullshit. “Sex offenders” could apply to a lot of people and not all of those people have or ever would lay a hand on a kid. Also, why just sex offenders? Why not drug dealers? Drugs are a threat to the kiddies and what better way to meet a bunch of new clients than through the tubes? Hey, what about convicted burgulars? They might befriend a kid, find out where they live and when they’ll be on vacation and…
As I said, bullshit. The big threat/worry isn’t some dirty old man sending little Johnny a Foley-gram. Little Johnny will survive that the same way he survived the obscene phone call. The threat/worry is DOM making little Johnny his next victim. How do you prevent that? The same way my mom did. Tell little Johnny not to talk to strangers and keeping an eye on her kid.
Steps like this just give people a false sense of security. Is anyone’s kid safer from a pedophile because of this? Sure. The perverts are all sitting at home trying desperately to get on MySpace and not, for example, passing off as a kid so he can infiltrate a school. Seriously, I’d like to see some stats on this. Has there been in an increase in these type of crimes since the advent of the tubes? If not, why are we bothering?
The amount of fear an hysteria that can be generated over a given issues.
The deterrent effects of CC are iffy at best. The perp still has his hands, remember?
Ed Morrissey
You misrepresent my objection, which is no big surprise. I objected to the ACLU spending its resources defending a group whose stated policy preferences would strip non-whites and non-WASPs of the same rights they demand. It seems a bit hypocritical to me.
The Nazis have every right to demonstrate, as I wrote. They can also hire their own lawyers.
Dave in ME
“I honestly doubt that Morrissey has thought much about”
anything?
Tim F.
Ed, if you see hypocrisy in the ACLU defending a group who politically opposes their aims then I don’t think I misrepresented you nearly as much as you think I did.
Ed Morrissey
They’re defending people who want to eliminate civil liberties for everyone but themselves. You don’t see hypocrisy in that?
Also, I have never criticized the ADL for defending gay rights. I’m not even sure where that reference comes from.
Bombadil
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
— Inigo Montoya
cleek
civil liberties are not reserved for those who think only in specified ways.
Tim F.
It seems to me that you misunderstand the ACLU’s central purpose. In their view, and mine, promoting civil liberties by stifling groups who oppose them (or by failing to defend them, which amounts to the same thing) is a fool’s bargain because the value of stifling the offending ideas will be far outweighed by the precedent of stifling a group that one finds offensive. The only way to ensure that your ideas and mine can be freely expressed is to ensure that everybody’s ideas can be expressed without penalty. Defending the right of neo-nazis to crap on the ACLU is just as consistent with their core principles as the lawsuit the ACLU would file when President Hillary tries to sever these guys’ web connection and seize their servers.
Tim F.
To be clear, in my first line I said, “a critic like Ed Morrissey.” That was a critic like Ed. Reasonable guy and fairly intelligent but not so clear on the core principles of the ACLU (or in this case, the ADL).
Ultima Ratio
Why does that shock you? Aren’t 50% of all teenagers girls?
Shabbazz
I’ve been spelling it as “tearists”
Rome Again
Absolutely. TZ said it best a few weeks ago, when he stated that we need to defend the rights of those groups of people on the fringes of society, so as to protect the rights of all.
How the hell did you get three hands? I only got two! Hmmmmph! I’m jealous now, imagine what I could do with that third hand.
Dreggas
Complete utter BS. Basically all they’d have to do is get and track an IP of a person using any file sharing program or even mIRC for that matter and then wham, they bust into that persons house and tap their phones. Talk about Hubris.
Perry Como
i.e., the Ed Morrisseys of the Right.
sglover
You DO realize, don’t you, that you just clinched the parent post’s assertion that, “I honestly doubt that Morrissey has thought much about what it might feel like to live on the other side of that angry pointing finger.”
Are you really truly this obtuse?
Jake
Whereas saying you defend the Constitutional rights of all citizens and then creating a lot of caveats is … well, that sounds almost Presidential.
dlnevins
On the first hand it makes perfect sense to keep likely predators out of a social site for kids…. Obviously the state needs flexible new ways of dealing with the mind-bending opportunities that the internet offers to pedophiles with poor impulse control, and I’m totally in favor of MySpace scouring its registrations for known offenders. I could even support a law requiring it, although I could be convinced either way.
TimF, since when is MySpace a “social site for kids”? It’s used by lots of people, many of whom are over 18, for all sorts of purposes. You said you think it might be OK for MySpace to scour its registrations for registered sexual offenders, presumably in order to purge said offenders from the site, regardless of what those persons are using the site for. I’m curious – would you support a similar law in meatspace, say allowing a shopping mall to check patron IDs at the entrances and deny admission to the mall to anyone whose name shows up on the state’s list of sexual offenders? If not, why not? I see plenty of kids at my local mall whenever I visit it, many apparently unsupervised – does that automatically make my local shopping mall a “site for kids”?
I’ve no problems with people creating designated “kids-only” social sites and policing them accordingly (which would presumably mean limiting user registration to people under the age of 18). I have big problems, however, with treating general online social networking spaces such as MySpace, Facebook, and Live Journal as “kid sites”. Just because kids may be posting on a site doesn’t mean the site exists primarily to serve their needs, and there are limits to how much we ought to restrict adult freedoms to protect poorly-supervised children. Any child who would respond to or be horribly traumitized by an online sexual proposition is simply too young to be surfing the net unsupervised, period. The Internet is not a kiddy park!
Zifnab
dlnevins
Good point, Zifnab. Sadly, all too many people these days probably WOULD think it reasonable to require a mandatory background check on everyone entering a public space “just to be safe”. Can’t ever be too safe, you know. Maybe the next step ought to be planting RFID chips in everyone at birth, so the government can monitor everyone 24/7 and arrest anyone who’s behaving suspiciously. That would REALLY keep us safe!
When are we going to learn that we can’t be the land of the free unless we remain the home of the brave? There is no real safety in life, and the more ardently we chase that uncatchable mirage, the more harm we do to ourselves and to our larger society. Why are we allowing the hysterical to set so much of our policy agenda these days?
Barry
I went and read some of the comments there. They just don’t get the first amendment – or rather, they do, and oppose it.