John "Keating Five" McCain is an extremely corrupt politician, and he always has been. This is an attempt to limit blogs to the corporate media.

Amanda at Think Progress sees a war on blogs in the odious McCain "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act." Last week I pointed, twice, to the CNet report about it. Digby's commentary from last night - "you have......

From KHOU:
H-I-S-D Superintendent Abe Saavedra issued an urgent bulletin to parents Thursday warning of the dangers posed by internet predators.
The Houston school district—working with the secret service — reports that one in five children who...

I posted on Tuesday about John McCain’s boneheaded legislation that supposedly targets sex offenders and child porn.
I saw it for what it was, a brazen attempt to shut down free speech on the in…

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It's shifting the burden on enforcement to bloggers. With the amount of spam that we get, say just one slips through that you miss...you're in for a heap of trouble.

As someone already mentioned, can you not imagine someone with a grudge against a certain blog trying to slip a link in on you in this way and then reporting you?

It's not our job to keep an eye on sex offenders, it's law enforcements.

What it will do, and this was my argument, too, not just Think Progress', is shut down trackbacks and comments across the blogosphere, effectively killing us off. So we should be very concerned.

Not so much.......

Again, my understanding of the law is that the duty is limited to acting upon reports to the site admin about child pornography. There is already a similar duty on ISPs but the law makes clear that it is not adding on any duty to search out offensive content.

If my reading of this is wrong, I'll obviously come down the other way.

Your site stores some minimal "user profile" information about commenters. How many of your commenters are registered sex offenders. And note, the law talks about sex offenders, not registered sex offenders making it even harder.

Do you really have that much trouble imagining some of the Kossacks making a concerted effort to shut down the right side of the blogosphere in 2H08 using accusations. When you have a duty to report, then failure to report becomes the criteria for violation. The law is either useless because there is a loophole to drive a truck through with the Sgt. Shultz defense ("I see nothing, nothing.") or the blogger can get blindsided by a commenter (or maybe even a commenter on a blog on their blog role depending on how far they take the linking).

I would support making it easier to get search warrants to track down child pornographers using the web ad hefty finds for hindering the search warrants, but turning every web site owner into an informer is not the best way of fighting the problem with minimal potential unintended consequences.