Welcome to my blog! I'm Victoria, and I love liberty, individual rights, and writing about politics, trials, and current events. Read more about me here.
…without telling you. According to a recent federal court decision, law enforcement can read your emails as long as they give a warrant to your Internet service provider (like Comcast or AOL). They don’t have to serve you with a warrant.
This seems a little creepy to me. People have much more interest in the privacy of their emails than ISPs do. The government ought to let you know if they are going to read your emails.
In the wake of the Philip Markoff case and other alleged crimes involving Craigslist, several attorneys general from around the country are trying to get the classified-ad site to shut down its erotic services section and even threatening it with prosecution.
I think it’s wrong to hold a website responsible for content that third parties post, and the law seems to agree with me. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields website owners and operators from being legally responsible for comments and posts made by their users. Section 230 has been used successfully as a defense in cases involving sex crimes, child pornography, defamation, breach of contract, intentional nuisance, and emotional distress, according to the EFF. According to Section 230, individuals are responsible for what they post online, not the websites that host or facilitate their content. This is true even if website owners know about the content or are not doing everything that they possibly could do to stop it or take it down. By requiring credit card and phone numbers to post erotic ads and by enabling users to flag potentially illegal content, Craigslist is already doing more than it is legally required to do.
If someone chooses to place erotic ads or respond to them, then that’s their decision, and they should be held responsible for any illegal acts that they commit. Just as news sites aren’t sued for libellous comments posted by readers, Craigslist shouldn’t be punished for the decisions of its users.
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I think it’s terrible that the newspaper industry is losing ad revenue and subscriptions because of the Internet. The other day I just thought of a solution to this problem. It’s radical, and most libertarians wouldn’t like it, but I think it’s worth a try: I think that Internet advertising should be banned.
This would ensure a thriving newspaper industry, because if there were no ads on the Internet, papers wouldn’t lose ad revenue to the Internet.
It would have other benefits as well. Many Internet advertising companies violate people’s privacy rights by tracking their IP addresses and online activities in order to target ads to them. Ads in newspapers don’t do that!
Plus, online ads make pages load really slowly and make them ugly. Although newspaper ads can be ugly and annoying, especially if there are too many of them, they don’t make the newspaper load any slower!
Yes, banning online advertising would have huge consequences, many of them negative. Many websites exist for the purpose of making money through ads, so they would go out of business. But maybe sites whose sole purpose is to make money aren’t as good as sites that are created for enjoyment. Without ads, we’d lose numerous popular websites, but sites created by regular people as a hobby would become a more important resource.
Overall, I’d rather lose some major websites than lose newspapers. Current trends in newspaper readership are discouraging, and the death of newspapers would be simply unacceptable. We need to do something about this, and banning online ads might just work.