WASHINGTON – The peril of online porn is why John Ashcroft should be the next attorney general, conservative organizations said on Friday.
At a press conference organized to support Ashcroft's embattled nomination, the groups predicted that, among his other virtues, he would kick off a wave of Net-sex prosecutions.
Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America said that Ashcroft, unlike Attorney General Janet Reno, would enforce "laws against obscenity."
Donna Rice-Hughes, the former Gary Hart gal pal turned antiporn activist, described herself as an "Internet safety advocate in support of John Ashcroft for attorney general."
"The $1.5 billion online porn industry has continued to prosper with an anything-goes green light from the current Justice Department," said Rice-Hughes, who founded Enough is Enough.
"When George W. won, the porn industry lost," said Rice-Hughes, who claimed that online prurience "exploits women, preys on men and invades the innocence of (America's) children."
Free speech groups are aghast that George W. Bush nominated Ashcroft to the Justice post.
Microsoft update: The Microsoft antitrust suit has gone too far, 60 tech executives said on Friday.
In an advertisement published in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they say: "We're deeply troubled by the potential legacy of the outgoing Justice Department, which could undermine our industry's future and threaten our nation's recent economic success."
"Misguided application of antitrust laws, such as the case against Microsoft, ignores the realities of our industry and could create disastrous new rules to govern competitive behavior in the 'new economy,'" the ad says.
Jonathan Zuck of the Association for Competitive Technology, which organized the ad, said in an e-mail to Wired News: "The handful of companies that suppport this case are more interested in market protection than consumer protection. They are big enough to exploit a regulatory environment to their advantage while the small businesses suffer."
On Friday, the Justice Department filed its latest brief, which urged the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the breakup of Microsoft.
More porn: You may remember that last month, a federal porn commission asked for input about protecting kids from online prurience.
The responses are starting to come in. Patricia Nell Warren, a fiction author and ardent proponent of free speech, wrote: "Parents who want to 'protect' their children from certain influences in our society ought to work at having a good relationship with their children, rather than insist that the government bail them out by imposing legalistic and punitive types of 'protection' from without."
In her reply to the National Academy of Science's committee, Warren said: "Too many parents want to shuffle their parental responsibilities and challenges onto the government and the schools and the juvenile-justice system. I respected my own parents, and they respected me in return – they didn't overprotect me, and allowed me a reasonable amount of freedom to read and think."
Congress has instructed the panel to report back with recommendations concerning how well current technology can control the "electronic transmission of pornographic images," what research is needed and what limitations technology might have. Congress also wants the panel to make relevant suggestions concerning the issue.
Raise for work: If you always suspected federal bureaucrats were slothful, well, here's some news to confirm it.
A federal agency has been bullied into giving employees 10 to 15 percent raises in exchange for an agreement to switch from paper files to computers, the Washington Post recently reported.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employees have also agreed to "return calls to outsiders in one business day, direct callers to appropriate officials and review their e-mail at least once a day."
Now that's customer service.
Online snooping: If you use someone else's name to access a website, better watch out.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled recently that Hawaiian Airlines may have violated federal wiretap laws when a supervisor used another name to log into a pro-union website.
According to the judges, federal wiretap rules are a knotty tangle of regulations, but they concluded that "the contents of secure websites are 'electronic communications' in intermediate storage that are protected from unauthorized interception under the Wiretap Act."
The court sent the case back to the district court.
