Five Bells! The Crazy Is Loose!

It's been a dry, cold season - at least under the Gold Dome. Bills fly through practically unopposed. Major issues like water, guns and Grady are shuffled around with barely a rustle. Heck, even though the Human Right To Life Amendment is still alive, Rep. Bobby Franklin has held his prayer meetings to a murmur.

It's hard out there for a blogger.

Then came SB59.

A BILL to be entitled an Act to amend Chapter 9 of Title 16 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to forgery and fraudulent practices, so as to provide definitions; to provide that it shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website to allow a minor using a protected computer to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor's parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page; to provide for penalties; to provide for related matters; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.

In other words, unless social networking sites, i.e. twitter, facebook, myspace, lastfm, etc., provide certain parental controls their owners could end up in the hoosegow.

SB59 has that certain special brand of crazy which inspires the bloggers of Georgia to pull together on the same end of the rope.

Rusty:

So, the state Senate wants to try to ban minors from joining MySpace. No word yet on whether they plan to ban church picnics, where minors are actually more at risk than they are on MySpace.

Leonard Witt:

Of course, as someone who just started a social networking site for SoCon08 to help Georgia businesses, nonprofits and entrepreneurs, it worries the hell out of me.

Jason Pye (who might be ready to storm the castle):

I have an idea. Let's just ban the damn internet. That would solve the problem. Let's bring Georgia back to the stone age. We don't need technology, right? It's evil.

Even the heavy hitters at Peach Pundit:

Yet more idiot-based legislation is making its way through our Senate chambers. A few dopes think we can’t teach our kids about the Internets on our own, so they’ll just take it away.

Well, while we are all a little excited (and some us grateful for something to finally write about) the fact remains the thing is probably about as useless as hen's teeth.

First of all it's not enforceable. The only way to arrest the nasty pedophile assisting scofflaws is to raid their hosting facilities. Most of these are either located outside of Georgia or are part of a distributed network across several states. Which brings us to....

...a little thing called the Interstate Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitituion. The power to regulate commerce between the states is explicitly limited to the Federal Government meaning any attempt to affect a business in another state is patently unconstitutional. Even if the hosting facility is in Georgia given the required connectivity to servers elsewhere and the elasticity the Supreme Court has acknowledged in the clause, it would still be patently unconstitutional.

I suppose there is a small chance someone operating solely in Georgia could be arrested by an overzealous law enforcement official. They might even be inconvenienced by some time in the pokey. But imagine the outcry, lawsuits or public damage such a case would cause. Would anyone actually risk that media maelstrom? We should qualify by saying anyone outside the Georgia Senate.

Which brings us to the ultimate point. Jason has it right. Anyone who votes for this thing should be thrown out of office on the simple grounds of idiocy. If our guardians of democracy under the dome can't understand concepts taught in an 11th grade civics class should we really trust them with anything else?