Lie By Omission

[elfs]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, following in the grand tradition of attorneys general by being utterly opposed to the Constitution of the United States, yesterday asked Congress to pass laws requiring all web pages on the internet to be rated, much as movies and video games are rated (what's next? ratings for books? At least one Christian "family" group has endorsed the idea).

Gonzalez cited a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that showed (you've seen these billboards) that one in five children between the ages of 10 and 17 was "sexually solicited" (whatever that means).

What Gonzalez did not tell Congress was that, in that one-in-five result, most of the "solicitations" came from other children in the same age group. Come-ons from one teen to another are the on-line equivalent of adolescent sexual fumbling, rather than a vicious preying upon our children by dirty old men.

Impeach the whole lot of them. Now.

Comments

[funos.livejournal.com]

And I bet that the distribution of that data is strongly skewed towards the upper half of that range, turning that number into an even more innocuous truism.

"1 in 5" sounds like a lot, until you take in account the mean, mode, and distribution. This is (very) elementary statistics.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Dust off and nuke'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

I'm still surprised it's that low. I remember being under 18 and on BBSes and having a lot of difficulty with solicitations from men, some of whom were twice my age. One particularly memorable fellow managed to carry on a very one sided cybersex conversation involving himself, me and an 'orgasm gun', much to my bafflement (Cybersex I got, since I was doing it with sheer_panic back then, but orgasm guns? :) Wasn't doing a darn thing for me) but it wasn't just one or two guys, it was a constant issue.

I have to wonder what percentage of those kids are even allowed to chat or give out their email addresses such that they'd be at risk for a solicitation.

However, I fail to see how labeling web pages would address the issue in even the smallest fashion.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

So, thirty seconds with a search engine got me the NCMEC page (http://www.missingkids.com/), and from there I found the document they cite to get that fnording one-in-five statistic. Here are links to the topline report (2 pages) (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/internetsafety_surv.pdf), and the full report (62 pages) (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC62.pdf) - they go into enough detail in the report itself that there are a whole slew of interesting things you can learn from it, once you get past the sensationalist headline.

[threnodym.livejournal.com]

On the contrary: please, please employ them in the rating of every single page on the internet! A few friends of mine put together a wiki for a project they've been working on together. Its front page first appeared on Wednesday evening; today, there are 179 articles and it's showing no signs of slowing down. I'd be delighted if Mister Gonzalez would rate each one of those individually, and then move on to our livejournals. With any luck, he'd have no time left for all this silly law-making business...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Sadly, Gonzalez wants to make it a federal crime if you don't rate the pages yourself and, oh, if you rate them incorrectly, it's still criminal.

[threnodym.livejournal.com]

Give the public enough makework, and they'll be too busy to demand impeachment. He's more cunning than I thought...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

How lomg before he wants to apply US laws to those of us not physically in the USA, or using non-US-specific domains?

Like .com?

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is one of those outfits, like the American Library Association and Amenesty International, who I used to respect and support, but who I am now antipathic towards, due their having become utterly deranged and unhinged.

[fallenpegasus]

Well, cops need a away to get their rocks off as well, after all...

[kengr]

Oh, that's been happening for *years.

Didn't you hear about the Russian programmer who wrote a program in Russia that was legal in Russia and when he visited the US for a conference, he was asrrested because the program violated *US* law?

Other countries pull that sort of stuff too. For example, commit an act that's legal in the country you are visiting, but not back home and you can be prosecuted when you go back home if the goverment finds out.

[kengr]

The stories about the real teens don't get circulated as much. Partly because of legal issues about reporting the teen's name in a news story.

and partly because some of them are just *gone* and it's not known for certain what happened.

But it does happen. I recall a couple of local cases.

[woggie.livejournal.com]

Explain to me again how impeachment happens? Who do I need to nag?

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[shunra.livejournal.com]

You have to give the pres a blow-job, save your dress with the souvenir, and irritate a DC socialite.

At least, that's how I think the Constitution reads... ...lawyers may have additional requirements.

[pendor.deadjournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Screw the Impeachment....

I have a Brick Wall, a Pack of Cigarettes, a handful of Blindfolds, an AK-47 and a whole clip of ammo....

Line 'em up

-Pendor
"Just don't ask me to pull the trigger. I don't want to be in vacinity of the blood splatter."