Speier (D-Silicon Valley) Sows Techno-panic

Posted by Jim Harper

“Techno-Panics” are public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies, particularly driven by the desire to protect children. As the moniker suggests, they’re not rational. Techno-panic is about imagined or trumped-up threats, often with a tenuous, coincidental, or potential relationship to the Internet. Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka of the Progress & Freedom Foundation have written extensively about techno-panics on the TechLiberationFront blog.

Talking about techno-panic does not deny the existence of serious problems. It merely identifies when policymakers and advocates lose their sense of proportion and react in ways that fail to address the genuine issues—such as censoring a web site because it reveals the fact that some few among a community of tens of millions of people will conspire to break the law.

You’d think that a congressional representative from the heart of Silicon Valley would not sow techno-panic, but here’s Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) on the Craigslist censorship issue:

“We can’t forget the victims, we can’t rest easy. Child-sex trafficking continues, and lawmakers need to fight future machinations of Internet-driven sites that peddle children.”

Of all representatives in Congress, Speier should know that Craigslist has been making it easier for law enforcement to locate and enforce the law against any perpetrators of crimes against children. Pushing them to rogue sites does law enforcement no good. Censoring Craiglist only masks the problem, which may be in the interest of politicians, but definitely not children.

A Rarity: Newspaper Argues Against Techno-panic, Cites Constitution

Posted by Jim Harper

Progress & Freedom Foundation president and Cato alumnus Adam Thierer has done yeoman’s work for years pointing out, and arguing against, the phenomenon of techno-panic as it relates to children. That’s not the only area in which techno-panic can tighten its grip on the neck of common sense and the constitution, of course.

But here’s a delight I ran across this morning: the Los Angeles Times arguing against techno-panic despite the use of Web sites to research and case potential burglary victims (by the “bling ring,” soon to be the subject of a major motion picture).

The Times editorializes:

[T]hieves [did not] have to wait for the invention of Google maps to reconnoiter neighborhoods in search of easily accessible homes. That’s worth remembering if, as we fear, some legislator decides that a law should be passed to prevent Internet surfers from looking at houses they easily could scope out from the sidewalk. . . . . A law against photographing a home or what occurs outside it in plain sight — or disseminating the images to others — would be overreaching, not to mention unconstitutional.

What a delight—a major newspaper arguing to keep a hot issue in perspective and citing the constitution as a limit on government power! Thank you, L.A. Times.