Tracking porn viewers

[Dan Lester]

The following is a fascinating piece....a Michigan city councilman wants to
make available all the names of those who view porn.  There are obviously
serious legal problems with this, in Michigan as well as in Idaho.  Gee,
maybe filtering isn't so bad after all.   o-)

dan


Date:       Mon, 03 Nov 97 05:36:19 EST
From: steenburger at hotmail.com
Subject: File 8--Warren Coucilman Wants Library Porn Surfers Names Made Public
Computer Privacy Digest Mon, 03 Nov 97              Volume 11 : Issue: 017
<snip>

Council Vice-President Chuck Busse offered an alternative to filtering:
making the names of people who access porn via city libraries public.
According to an article in the Detroit News: "under Busse's proposal,
which was not acted on, pornography viewers' names could be published
in newspapers, on the city Web site or made available to anyone who
files a Freedom of Information request through the city attorney's
office. The names would be gathered from city computer records and made
available to the public. Only people who call up sex sites on library
screens would be identified." I guess then the mob would know where to
gather and whose house to burn down. A couple of (other) problems come
to mind. One is that a login system would have to be set up so that
files accessed could could be matched to the patron viewing them. Woe
to the person who forgets to log off! Especially if the next person to
use the terminal is one of the city's porn addicts or a neo-nazi. I
hear the city has plenty of both. Of course all the sites accessed
would show up in a log file, not just the porn sites (as if it would be
easy to tell which were which), thus creating some of the biggest
privacy violations in the history of the United States.

Well, Warren city attorneys are used to being on the losing side of
costly litigation. Was this a serious suggestion? Did he think a lot
about this before hand or did he just blurt it out in haste so that
Gloria Sankuer would not be the only one to get credit for saving our
culture from decay? It looks as if Busse knows even less about the
internet and libraries than Sankuer. That's probably why he wasn't one
of the two council members appointed to work with the library board in
search of an internet filter. That honor went to St. Pierre, and the
council's internet expert Sankuer.

http://members.aol.com/neofrant/index.html

http://www.detnews.com/1997/macomb/9710/15/10150169.htm

Dan Lester, 3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho 83716-7115 USA
dan at 84.com   http://www.84.com/   http://www.lili.org/  
http://library.idbsu.edu/   http://cyclops.idbsu.edu/
Albertsons Library at Boise State, the University for Idaho
Sent me a postcard of a library yet?  You'll get something nice in return.   
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  Erasmus, 1534