Google's Mandate on Porn

Recently Google has been charged by the Bush administration...

"[prosecutors] ...are requesting a "random sampling" of 1 million Internet addresses accessible through Google's popular search engine, and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to Google over a one-week period."

This, is the attempt our elected officials are using to help protect our children from pornography on the internet. Or as CNN put it, "The government contends it needs the data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches as part of an effort to revive an Internet child protection law."

Wow, Now while I'm all for protecting our kids, perhaps the administration should try to go after actual porn stats and not a random sampler. It should be fairly obvious to anyone with some kind of education that this has NOTHING to do with pornography and americas kids. The Government cares more about finding words like: "Bomb building" or "Hate Walmart" and directly connecting those words to their IP address, much like how the RIAA finds students that share music. This is just one more piece of evidence that we have no freedom, or rights, nor privacy in this country since Bush took office.

Since I actually care about protecting our youth, I feel its my civic duty to give our government some suggestions, if they really want to get serious on this subject.

Mandate search companies to give out statistics on a global scale, such as certain sensitive keywords, or percentages on what is being searched from where. Statistics are worth a thousand words. Heck, most of this info exists now.

Require porn sites to get off the .com domains, and move to the .xxx domain. The federal government fears by doing that, it would become a "red light district" for porn, while Christian groups feel it would be legitimizing the industry. Yet it would be a hell of a lot easier to filter the content with browsers. This would be no different then putting xxx on movies. Its time is way over due.

Requiring META tagging or labeling on xxx sites, that would again help filters.

Increase undercover sting operations on chat room predators. Let these people know their not safe if they commit these crimes. Perhaps a public tar and feather or castration would do the trick. Seriously folks, we kill convits in this county, what's a little snip snip.

Here's the big one... parents can start paying attention to what their kids are doing!!!
Since this is the World wide web, it really doesn't matter what our government does, outside of blocking other countries or persuading them to do the same. Porn did create the internet after all, so educating parents is the best way to protect our youth.

If your worried that kids can bypass some of the filtering software or passwords on your system, you probably right. In fact you probably already have a library of porn on your system. While your searching, check out what's really on that iPod you got them for Christmas!