Pandora’s Blog

I like to keep the Friday blogs nice and light around here. I often save stories and use them on Fridays for some light causal reading. So here are two good ones…

The first one is by Mark Nestmann. He comments on the proposed Internet Safety Act, introduced by two Texas legislators. I have already recorded my thoughts on the issue, but Mark’s words describe my sentiments exactly! Please read it and learn why this proposed legislation is so ridiculous.

The second piece is more of an amusing look at how kids are literally overdosing on Facebook. It’s an addiction that needs to be dealt with.

Where PC Pandora fits in: well, obviously, for the parents of teens who are addicted to social networks, PC Pandora will let you know what your kids are doing on the networks and who they are talking to (let’s be honest, they aren’t going to tell and/or show you the whole truth about their online lives). It can offer a sigh of relief or show you what you don’t know. But in relation to the Internet Safety Act, well, we won’t need the act if every parent is taking steps to ensure their child is not victimized by the predators online. Easy peasy.

Have a great Friday everyone.

March 16, 2009
Spy on Yourself … for the Children

Nothing is “too much” when it comes to protecting our children. Especially your privacy.

Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House have introduced companion bills that would force Internet Service providers (ISPs) to retain user data from every subscriber for up to two years. Key congressional Democrats and the Obama administration appear to endorse their proposal. And it’s all intended, supposedly, to protect children from sexual exploitation by adults.

What’s to be recorded? Everything, according to the proposed “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act. For starters, your e-mail messages, your Web browsing records, and most likely, the contents of any telephone calls you make or receive over the Internet.

And it’s not just commercial ISPs that will be affected. Iif you have a wi-fi router at home, you’re supposed to surveil yourself. Hotels, libraries, universities, local coffee shops—indeed anyone offering Internet access anywhere in the United States—will need to keep and maintain these records.

Consider for a moment what these records might contain. Every day, billions of spam messages promoting pornographic websites are sent to millions of email addresses—perhaps yours. Naturally, the Internet Safety Act requires that your ISP save these messages (or you, if you have a wireless Internet connection). In addition, many Internet pages display pop-up messages that contain pornographic images. You must save those images, too, even if you have absolutely zero interest in child pornography, or any kind of pornography.

Under existing law, if any of these images are of people in nude or sexually suggestive poses who appear to be under the age of 18, you can be arrested for possession of child pornography.

In other words, the Internet Safety Act would, by its very purpose, open the door for virtually anyone who uses the Internet to be arrested on child porn charges. However, I suspect that the data won’t be used to fight child pornography as much as it’s used in other types of investigations.

But, incredibly, that’s not the worst part of this bill. The worst part is that the stored data will be an identify thief’s pipe dream. Consider what you’ll have to do once this law comes into effect if you have a home or office network. First, you’ll need to install some very expensive storage devices that can store two years of data for everything you do online. You won’t have access to the stored data—after all, you might delete it, and that would be illegal.

So now you have millions of Americans possessing at home (or perhaps in an online repository) data reflecting everything they’ve done online for the last two years. Your user IDs, passwords, and other confidential data will be there for the taking by any hacker smart enough to get past whatever security measures are put in place. And don’t think those measures will be impenetrable. If hackers can clone supposedly “ultra-secure” RFID passports (which they have done already), how safe do you think your data will be?

But the most laughable aspect of this proposal is how easy it will be to evade it. If you take the simple precaution of subscribing to a “virtual private network” (VPN) your ISP will see only an encrypted data stream flowing through your online connection. So, I anticipate that a companion bill to the Internet Safety Act will force that VPNs turn over their encryption keys over to the Department of Justice for “safekeeping.” That will naturally cause anyone seeking privacy to subscribe to non-U.S. VPNs, although the Obama administration apparently wants to extend these requirements globally.

If they achieve this goal, the only way left to communicate privately may be to do what I did as a child—string two tin cans together with a wire.

“Hello, can you hear me?”

March 19, 2009
Teens overdose on Facebook drug
By Jonathan Zimmerman, from News Services

Imagine a drug that made American teenagers think and talk more about the timeless concerns of adolescence: who’s cool, who’s cute and who’s going out with whom. Then imagine that millions of teens were taking this drug, every day.

Actually, you don’t have to. The drug already exists, and it’s called “MySpace.” There’s a competitor drug, too, known as “Facebook.” Between one-half and three-quarters of American teens already have a profile on an Internet social networking site, where they spend hours per week —- nobody really knows how many —- sharing pictures, gossip and jokes. And we should all be worried about that, although not for the reasons you might suspect.

That’s because the newspapers keep reminding us about “online predators” and other malfeasance on the Net, which makes us miss the digital forest for the trees. In this medium, the real danger doesn’t come from depraved adults. It’s much subtler than that, and it comes from teenagers themselves —- specifically, from their insatiable desire to hang out with each other.

And the key word here is “insatiable.” After all, teens have always wanted to hang out with each other. But the Internet lets them do it 24/7, transforming the social world of adolescence into an omnipresence.

Consider last year’s report by the McArthur Foundation on “digital youth,” which confirmed that most teens communicate online with kids they already know —- and they’re doing it more than ever.

“Young people use new media to build friendships and romantic relationships as well as to hang out with each other as much and as often as possible,” the report found.

As the teenagers would say, duh! Then they would ask, what’s the problem with that?

Nothing, really, except for what it replaces: solitude. Once you’re “always on,” as the kids describe it, you’re never alone.

That means you’re less likely to read a book for pleasure, to draw a picture or simply to stare out the window and imagine worlds other than your own.

And as any parent with a teenager could testify, you’re also less likely to communicate with the real people in your immediate surroundings.

Who wants to talk to family members, when your friends are just a click away?

True, many teens do communicate with strangers on the Net. But adolescents are also adept at sniffing out “creepy” adults, whose threats have been vastly overblown by media. Consider all the ink spilled over Lori Drew, the Missouri woman who used a phony MySpace account to trick a teenager into believing that Drew was a male suitor. When the fake suitor dumped the teen and she committed suicide, you would have thought every kid in America was somehow in danger.

They’re not, at least not from strangers. Although 32 percent of American teens say they have been contacted on the Net by someone they don’t know, according to the Pew Research Center, just 7 percent report feeling “scared or uncomfortable” as a result.

And when teens do feel hurt by something on the Internet, it usually comes from —- surprise! —- other adolescents at their schools.

About one-third of teenagers say they have been the target of “online bullying,” such as threatening messages or embarrassing pictures. But two-thirds of teens say bullying is more likely to happen offline than online. The Internet just makes it easier to do —- and harder to escape.

If social networking sites had existed when I was a kid, I would have used them every bit as much as my teenage daughter does.

With my own Facebook or MySpace page, I would have focused even more on all the natural worries that permeated my adolescence: Am I cool? Am I cute? Will my peers like me?

And it would have taken me a lot longer to become an adult.

So what should today’s adults do, in the face of this new challenge?

We can try to limit our teenagers’ computer time, of course, but that’s probably a lost cause by now.

The better solution, as always, comes from the kids themselves. Teens around the country have started a small online movement against social networking sites, trying to make them seem un-cool.

My best friend’s daughter just took down her Facebook page, for example, insisting that the site was “for losers.”

So pass the word, to every teen you know: Social networking is for losers. Just don’t tell them I said so.

> Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 8:49 AM and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.