FC: Charles Platt on Orrin Hatch's real motives

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 08:04:43 PDT

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    [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
    
    
    
    
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