On Jan 24, 2008 11:00 AM, Bradley Daw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To: Steven > From: Representative Brad Daw (District 60) > Re: HB 139 > > First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest and concern in > my sponsored bill, "Wireless Internet Access Requirements." This bill > originated out of a personal responsibility that I feel to protect our > children and our families from the dangers of the internet. Internet > pornography poses a great threat to our children and this bill is > directed to help to keep them safe when they are outside of the home. > The other aspect of protection that this bill offers our families is > protection against pedophiles. Those members of society do not deserve > free wireless internet service and should not be allowed to easily and > anonymously access it in public hotspots. > > However, I am concerned with many of the critiques of this bill. For > this reason, I would like to set up a time when we can meet together > with a member of the Attorney General's staff and discuss alternatives > that would make this bill more acceptable for the general public while > still fulfilling some of the goals I have discussed previously. Please > let me know if there is a time next week when we can set an appointment > and discuss the matter further. > > I will be circulating a formal email regarding this bill and answering > many questions and objections about it. In the mean time, I look > forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your time and your concern. > >
Your reason for sponsoring this bill is to "protect the children" Ok, I can understand that you have a desire to protect your children from the dangers of the internet. However this is not the way to do it. Content filtering is always a bad idea in general, most kids are smart enough to bypass it and it tends to get in the way of legitimate use, such as a medical student, or someone studying psychology or any number of thousands of legitimate uses of the internet. As far as I can tell, your bill doesn't specifically require that and I commend you for that much, however "proving adult hood", is also not going to prevent anything either. The bill is unenforceable, and what do you do if the child has presented a "fake id", or handed the "nice man at the counter" mommy and daddy's credit card, or even has a credit card of their very own as I stated previously. The best way to protect children from the "dangers of pornography and the internet", is to educate parents and instil values in the children. You cannot legislate that. It starts from within the family. It is the job of the family and to a lesser extent the church to teach and instil values. If your child is browsing pornography on the internet, meeting up with paedophiles and etc, that means that YOU as a parent are being neglectful of your child. You have failed your child, plain and simple. We already have laws to deal with parental neglect. I fail to see how letting your child browse porn on the internet is any different than leaving your Playboys laying around the house If you want to stop this, then sit down with your child and have a frank discussion about it. It's your job as a parent to do this, but it is not your job as a legislator to create a nanny state in the interests of protecting the children, and in the process inconveniencing everyone else, by creating a crime out of allowing simple public access of a shared community resource. One which was originally funded by taxpayer dollars for the purposes of advancing technology and the state of research. Remember, your job is to protect YOUR children from the dangers of the internet. My job is to protect MY children from the dangers of the internet. I may even disagree with you on what is and is not dangerous, for instance someone may let their child climb a tree, another may not, out of fear the child will fall and harm themselves. Therefore it is not YOUR job to protect MY children. As far as pedophiles not deserving to have free wireless internet access, this law does nothing to prevent that at all. And to be frank there really is nothing you can do except punish a person for creating / distributing and possessing such materials, I'm relatively certain we have a law like that in place already. You could extend the penalty for being a pedophile to require no internet access at all. But how do you let them re-integrate into society. If you don't want them re-integrating then why let them out at all? Either the criminal has paid their dues, to society, or they have not. You cannot pass a law that punishes someone for something that they have not yet done, nor attempted to do. If you think the current punishment for being a pedophile is too lax, then work on a bill to strengthen our penalties against it. I would recommend you lengthen sentences and require regular contact with a clinical psychiatrist at their own expense for the remainder of their life, or until the psychiatrist can say with certainty that the offender will not re-offend and is willing to be held criminally liable if his assertion is incorrect. Then again I would recommend that for any felon. Justice must always be "ex post facto", and the justice system works best when laws are passed that recognize this fact. Laws designed to "prevent" crime, are never successful and place an undue burden upon society. As soon as we start to pass laws that infringe upon the greater good of society in the interests of protecting society from a few individuals, we are trading freedom for security and making a whole new set of criminals out of otherwise ordinary citizens. Usually while doing nothing to actually protect us from the "bad guys". The truth plain and simple, is that this law makes a criminal out of any business owner who decides to leave an open WiFi point for the convenience of his/her customers and/or employees and/or society at large. Since you are a resident of Orem, I urge you to go to http://www.plug.org/ the Provo Linux users group (About half of us are actually in Orem), and sign up for the mailing list there. A sizeable portion of your technically literate and concerned constituents are members there and engage in lively debate on political topics all the time. You could receive feedback in advance from hundreds of people, whom the laws you are proposing would effect, before you propose legislation that boils down to nonsense and you end up losing more voters. I can promise that you will be received well, and this simple act would enhance your credibility with your technically literate constituency. Sincerely, Steve /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
