Hillary Clinton and the Cybersitter genre

[Nick Arnett]

At 06:31 PM 2/27/97 -0800, Mark Stover wrote:

>Anyone have a direct link to the White House?

I participated in the White House's "Leveraging Cyberspace" conference
recently.  I came away with the impression that the administration tends to
agree with the philosophy that censorship is acceptable only when you can
choose your censors.  But they also strongly support the idea that parents
have the right to choose their childrens' censors.  (It takes a village to
censor a child?)

At the same time, it's clear that there's a tense alliance between politics
and mass media, and the power is in the hands of latter.  That's why the
networks are getting away with controlling their own ratings.  The
relationship tense because politicians dislike the mass media, but still
depend on it.  The Internet is starting to eat away at the dependence, but
few if any politicians will yet stand up to them.

I don't think this sheds much light on the library issue, but I'll toss in
my own thoughts.  Society has an obligation to protect its children.  This
protection sometimes takes the form of physically shielding; other times the
shield is intellectual, resulting from education.  Personally, I tend to
think that the Internet will force society to shift more toward education as
the shield, but none of us should imagine that education completely replaces
physical shielding.

Now to be very controversial (I hope).  I support strong identification on
the net, so that it would become extremely difficult to pretend to be anyone
other than who you are.  In the case of parental control, this would go a
long way.  For libraries, schools and other public access, it probably rules
out anonymous access.  How can we have an atmosphere of trust when we often
have no idea who's really there?  This is not to rule out anonymity and
pseudonymity; it is to say that these should be clearly identified.  Thus,
when some spammer forges a return address, the net will tell me that there's
really no such person.  A child would have to pretend to be someone else to
get around the parents' choice of censors.  This puts the onus on the social
contract of the net, rather than the librarians or anyone other public provider.

I'm sure that some hard-boiled privacy advocates would oppose strong
identification, but one must choose one's enemies carefully.  We need a new
social contract for the net, in which we relinquish some privacy in order to
enjoy its freedoms.  I don't know if it'll be quite the way that I've argued
here, but I hope the debaters can let go of the misalliance of freedom and
privacy.

Nick

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