WASHINGTON -- Is this the new conservatism sweeping Washington?
An FCC commissioner says the agency was wrong to dismiss a complaint filed by an undoubtedly irate Buffalo, N.Y., man upset over the word "piss" being used on a morning talk show.
It seems the AM station, WGR, bought a bunch of urinal splash guards with National Hockey League logos on them. The hosts of the morning show distributed them to local bars and restaurants, then proceeded to joke on the air about "pissing" on select NHL honchos.
FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani insisted this week that such an alarming offense must be severely punished.
"The U.S. Supreme Court has noted urination is excretory and is not a subject for routine public viewing. The repeated broadcast of the word 'piss' has been unquestioningly accepted as meeting the contour of a 'vulgar' and 'shocking' broadcast by the court," Tristani said in a statement.
The FCC's enforcement bureau dismissed the complaint against the station, saying the language used on the air was not "indecent" -- a decision that Tristani condemned as premature.
She said: "It seems the bureau ignored the allegation that this was a shameless month-long campaign to discredit individuals and teams of individuals by covering them with human waste. Callers were also apparently encouraged to use vulgarities like the word 'prick.' I am at a loss to explain the failure to even seek further review. This decision adds weight to the public's conclusion that the FCC's indecency enforcement program is ineffective. Our children deserve better."
Porn appeal: The U.S. Justice Department last month asked the Supreme Court to hear its appeal in the Child Online Protection Act case.
A federal appeals court ruled last June that COPA's restrictions on distributing materials online that are "harmful to minors" are overbroad and unconstitutional.
"The court's decision prevents the government from enforcing COPA against anyone under any circumstances, and the court was also of the view that there may be no constitutional means to protect children from the harmful effects of the voluminous amount of pornographic material on the World Wide Web," a representative of the Justice Department said. "The court of appeals thus has gravely -- indeed, in its own view, perhaps fatally -- constricted Congress's power to address that serious problem."
Medical privacy update: A proponent of federal regulations aimed at health care providers said the Bush administration should not change rules drafted by the Clinton White House.
Janlori Goldman, director of the Health Privacy Project at Georgetown University, told a health care conference on Friday: "We believe that the regulation is strong and workable."
The Bush administration's delay of the regulations frightens her, she said, because "it indicates in itself a willingness to make changes to the rule.... It's hard to write a perfect rule, and we don't think that this is the right way to do it."
Goldman was speaking at the HIPAA summit in Washington, which ended Friday.
This week, the Bush administration said that it will temporarily delay the HIPAA regulations proposed by President Clinton. The rules, among Clinton's final acts, were set to take effect this week, but Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson agreed to push the date back to April 14 to give Congress and advocacy groups more time to review the rules.
Microsoft appeal: Microsoft has at least one friend in Washington: House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
In a statement this week, Armey said: "This case just keeps going and going and going. But the longer it goes on, the less relevant the original grounds for the case become. Just like the antitrust case against IBM slowly faded into irrelevance."
Privacy and porn: Tom Bell, a visiting law prof at the University of San Diego, sent us a copy of his new article titled "Pornography, Privacy, and Digital Self-Help.
The suggestive title aside, Bell argues that civil liberties successfully argue that laws such as the Communications Decency Act should be shot down because less-restrictive alternatives such as filtering software exist.
Bell says the same logic should apply to the debate over privacy. "The arguments that the ACLU, EPIC and CDT once employed in defense of indecent or harmful-to-minors speech on the Internet also apply to the restrictions that they would now impose on another type of speech: speech within or by commercial entities and about Internet users," the paper says.
Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center replies that far from disliking privacy-enhancing technologies, his group was far ahead of industry in embracing encryption, for instance.
Next week: The leading politics-and-technology conference, Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, takes place in Cambridge, Mass. It's the oldest, and still the best, conference on those topics.... In the same vein, the New York New Media Association is holding a privacy panel in New York City on Tuesday. Participants include The New York Times' William Safire and CNN's Roger Cossack.... On Thursday, the House Telecommunications Subcommittee will convene a hearing titled "The EU Data Protection Directive: Implications for the U.S. Privacy Debate."
Ryan Sager contributed to this report
