Internet Safety Task Force Takes a Bite Out of Bill McCollum's Cyber Politics



Florida's Attorney General Bill McCollum has made cybersafety his number one issue.

Too bad the Internet Safety Technical Task Force--led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University-- just blasted the lid off his Keep Florida Safe campaign.

As reported by eAdvocate, "A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem."

Old Bill is one of the 49 AGs. (Check out his John Hancock over on Page 5).

Ouch. Bit in the political buns by your own commissioned task force. Karmic, to say the least.

And that's just the beginning.

I just wonder if McCollum will admit his use of "moral panic" to deliberately mislead the public regarding the online sex offender issue should he run for U.S. Senate in 2010?

Read on. (And make certain to run your cursor over the bold fonts for links galore).

The Center for Democracy and Technology--a member of the ISTTF--indicates:

"The (Final) Report (Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies) includes a quotation from remarks that an Attorney General made to the Task Force about (50,000) sex offenders on a social network. Although the Report briefly, and appropriately, explains why the quoted figures are not persuasive data, the assertions made warrant further analysis."
(...)

"The “50,000 sex offender” figure, as well as misleading statistics suggesting that many minors have been sexually solicited online, commonly appear in press reports and the rhetoric of lawmakers, but as the Task Force Final Report correctly shows, those much-touted numbers in fact do not translate into significant actual risk to the minors online. There are, without question, risks for minors online, but those risks are not significantly different than offline risks, and most minors are very safe in the major online social networks. As the Report details, the most significant risk online is for minors who already engage in risky sexual behavior offline."


It only gets better.

"Academics have identified a phenomenon that they call a “moral panic,” referring to situations in which the media and policymakers overreact to a perceive risk or threat that in fact is not as great it is popularly portrayed. A 2008 academic article applied the theories of “moral panic” to the furor over social networks and child safety. See Alice Marwick, “To Catch a Predator: The MySpace Moral Panic,” First Monday 13(6): article 3 (2008), available online at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2152/1966. In her article, Marwick analyzes the public anxiety about social networking and concludes that it is indeed a “moral panic” that reflects an overreaction to the actual threat that exists. She concludes:

the furor over MySpace is disproportionate to the amount of harm produced by the site. Indeed, the furor over online predators seems also to be disproportionate. Rather than focusing on nebulous “predators,” it seems that parents, teachers, and social workers should emphasize identifying and preventing abuse in specific, local community settings. This fits Goode and Ben–Yehuda’s model of moral panics.

Adam Thierer discusses “moral panics” and the Marwick article in detail in “Technopanics and the Great Social Networking Scare,” July 10, 2008, available online at http://techliberation.com/2008/07/10/technopanics-and-the-great-social-networking-scare/.

Marwick’s conclusion – that the public concern about social networking is an overreaction to the relatively low risks that such sites in fact present – is precisely born out by the findings of the Task Force’s Research Advisory Board. It is critical that policy makers based actions on risks that actually exist, rather than on the risks that are hyped to generate ratings in the news media."


The CDT states quite succinctly concerns regarding the constitutional, privacy, first amendment that once again, advocates have been screaming about for the past several years.

Constitutional Concerns

A key threshold fact is that virtually all speech on
social networks – even speech among minors or between minors and adults – is
completely lawful and constitutionally protected, and predatory speech constitutes only a
tiny percentage of the mass of vibrant, constructive speech that happens every day on
SNs. Thus, any law or government mandate that would restrict or burden access to SNs
would bear a strong presumption of unconstitutionality.

First Amendment

Under the framework set out in 1997 by the
U.S. Supreme Court in the seminal Reno v. ACLU decision, online speech receives the
highest level of First Amendment protection. Based on that decision, numerous courts
over the years have struck down a broad range of laws that sought to protect minors
online, because there are better and less burdensome ways to protect children.

Privacy

Beyond the constitutional concerns that would be raised by a
mandate to use a given technology, many of the technologies raise very serious privacy
concerns, in particular by forcing the collection of sensitive data about minors and adults.


Web threat to children may be exaggerated, report finds

By BRAD STONE NEW YORK TIMES

Jan. 14, 2009

Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies: Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States


Download the Final Report


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