[Worth reading. Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04871.html --Declan] --- Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 13:40:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <otherat_private> To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> cc: politechat_private Subject: Orrin Hatch "technological ineptitude" misses the point In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030619101740.04291bc8at_private> Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.44.0306201320430.59123-100000at_private> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Declan, several of your readers have been wasting their time proving that Orrin Hatch is technologically inept, and his ideas for attacking user PCs won't work. This totally misses the point. Of course the ideas won't work; but Hatch doesn't care. He is merely saying what he thinks his constituents and paymasters want to hear, in an effort to win votes and maintain a flow of campaign contributions. We went through a similar phase of "It will never work, and if anyone tries, we'll GET them" during the fuss over the very first attemps at Net censorship sponsored by (now retired) Senator Exon. His "decency amendment" was embedded in the telecommunications deregulation bill enacted in 1996. Clinton himself expressed doubts that the censorship provisions were constitutional, but signed the bill anyway, in the Library of Congress, where the new law immediately criminalized the library itself, for having titles with the word "Fuck" in them, and making these titles available online. The committee that did the horse trading to reach a final version of that bill allowed the strongest possible censorship provisions to remain, probably on the principle that they wanted to maximize the chance of the Supreme Court ruling the provisions unconstitutional. So, here's the way things work in the real world. Legislators will say just about anything to please their donors and constituents, and may even include flagrantly unconstitutional or unworkable language in new laws, in the happy knowledge that the ACLU and other organizations will file suit to get rid of the offensive provisions. At that point the legislators send out another fund raising letter, saying, in effect, "I tried to do what was right, but these damned liberals own the court. Send me more money so that I can continue fighting the good fight against porn, illegal immigrants, drugs, copyright theft, [fill in the blank]." Hatch has a good scam going, which he feels will benefit him. But no one should take it seriously. --CP ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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