I’m going to launch a campaign to legalize crack by telling state legislators it will protect children from online pornography.
I’m starting in Connecticut because if a recent report out of the nutmeg state on so-called child protection do-not-e-mail registries is any indication, state officials there will believe anything as long as they’re told it will protect kids from online porn.
Despite a mountain of evidence and repeated warnings from the Federal Trade Commission that the ironically named child-protection do-not e-mail registries pose serious threats to kids whose addresses are on them, Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection has issued a report recommending the state implement one.
If Connecticut follows the report’s recommendation, it would be the third state to enact a child-no-e-mail law. Utah and Michigan implemented kids’ do-not-email registries in summer 2005.
Astonishingly, Connecticut’s report claims Utah and Michigan have solved the biggest flaw of child no-e-mail registries: the possibility that a predatorial employee of a marketing firm could legitimately access a registry and match the scrubbed list against the unscrubbed list to extrapolate kids’ e-mail addresses.
“[T]he latest software does not return a list to marketers,” and as a result, “concerns that returning lists to marketers would unintentionally verify registered contact points have been nullified,” said the report. “The marketing lists are not converted back from their hashed format to a readable format when returned to a marketer’s computer.”
Thing is, the claim can’t be true.
The e-mail address is the only thing that contains the information needed to get the various systems communicating with one another for the message to arrive at its proper destination. Without the information in the e-mail address, the message can’t be sent.
And in any case, do officials in Connecticut really think that commercial entities would trust the government to take their customer files and return them in the form of unreadable gobbledygook to be reached only by some special piece of software created by a government contractor?
If a commercial e-mail service provider made claims similar to those in Connecticut’s registry report, the FTC would prosecute.
The report also claims that Michigan and Utah have had some “success in limiting the illicit or illegal electronic messages received by contact points registered with each states program.” Nonsense. Utah and Michigan officials may claim it but they couldn’t know it even if it were really happening.
The report also recommends the state hire a private contractor to run its registry.
Now let’s see… Who might that private contractor be? Let’s think for a minute. Ummm … scratching our heads here. Struggling to come up with a name…
Wait a minute. Could the private contractor be the same company that has been lobbying from here to kingdom goddamn come to have state child no-e-mail registries implemented? Is it possible that contractor may be the same company that runs the only two such registries in existence?
Nah. There’s no way it’s Unspam. If Connecticut enacted a child no-e-mail law, surely, it would be nothing more than a coincidence if Unspam got the contract.
Meanwhile, the report acknowledges but doesn’t address in any meaningful way the fact that these registries are impossible to enforce.
“[T]he state of Utah has verified that enforcement efforts are stalled in many cases because a violator is located beyond the state’s jurisdiction … [h]owever, in October 2006, the state of Utah Division of Consumer Protection was able to issue administrative citations to four businesses in violation of the Child Protection Registry Act,” said the report.
Here’s the real story: Utah so far has cited six companies, none of which are in Utah, and three of which aren’t even in the U.S. The amount of money collected from these companies so far has been zip, according to Jennifer Bolton, public information officer for Utah’s Department of Commerce.
“The citations have been turned over to the Utah Attorney General’s Office for collection proceedings,” she responded in an e-mail exchange.
Good luck, Jen.
Finally, Connecticut’s report also acknowledges that it’s impossible to make sure that addresses added to the registries are legitimate e-mail addresses of minors who reside within the state. The report says Utah officials have admitted that people are fraudulently registering addresses on its registry.
But this is apparently no problem. The only people fraudulent registrants could possibly affect would be those in the law-abiding companies that pay exorbitant amounts to have their files scrubbed.
Message to Connecticut’s legislators: This is your brain. This is your brain if you vote for a child protection do-not-e-mail registry. Any questions?
