Thanks for a very interesting and thoughtful article that addressed current events, came up with new approaches, and put it all together neatly in one, entertaining article.

My view on those folks who would employ our law enforcement authorities to charge and convict individual InterNET users, is somewhat different.

I see these forceful, legal and legislative and policy stratagems, collectively, as an intentional assault on the individual and individual rights on the InterNET, in favor of corporate and governmental power.

While your article speaks to one legal case, one hapless guy, an InterNET user in Florida somewhere, who has "caught a case" whereby the Government in the State of Florida seeks to prosecute him to a conviction for using the InterNET, I see more than one case. I see all the cases, past, present, and future, whereby either well meaning or power mongering legislators of "OfficialDom" -- not to be confused with FemDom - (although they seem contiguous, if not commingled, as American conceptions, nowadays) strive in their ever perfecting ways to legislate moralities.

What I have noticed about these "cutting edge" new laws on the books here and there, especially in their application, is how they always seem to find some Minority Male somewhere to target. More broadly, I personally think Criminal Justice generally, is 90 to 95 percent targeting Males generally, and Minority Males in the particulars. We are not the Alpha Males who get the Girls, like that Hugh Hefner bub. Feminism and the laws endorsing same, and Abortion and the laws endorsing same, similarly target Minority Males and their Interests, in my own view. Election laws and their enforcement are no friend to Minority Communities or Minority Males, certainly not in the State of Florida. That last assertion is not just my own view, but a matter of Record, at this point.

Most Americans do not know the extent to which InterNET companies sell out the nominally cherished "Individual Rights" we Americans have taken for granted for generations, in their WorldWide KowTowing to authoritarian regimes, rulers, potentates, dictators, elites, and Chinese Mandarin Rulers, my particular favorite. I remember with bemusement now, in my call placed to the Chinese Embassy staff in Washington, DC, in the course of my Chinese national wife departing my company, how I was lectured on the rights of the individual to make his or her own decisions. Too bad they don't apply that lesson in China, where coercion, political and otherwise, to include "family planning" so-called, is the order of the day. Too bad the Tibetan people do not seem to have either individual or collective rights to self determination, or the least little bit of autonomy, under the hegemony of Han Chinese Mandarin Rulers. The Han are ethnic Chinese majoritarians, rather like our Anglo Americans here. Each majority similarly brooks no dissent, while talking a good game.

I wrote to my own New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg a few years ago, inquiring as to how a guy viewing pictures of naked women on the InterNET, could possibly tell if they were under age 18, as required by law, if they were fully developed physically. Even the FBI cannot tell by just looking, because they require statements at the opening of Adult Entertainment films to assure all concerned, that no minors were involved in the production.

So then, is every guy using the InterNET, supposed to take precautionary steps beyond merely viewing all the action? Maybe as an added value InterNET security service, RSA Security and other InterNET security vendors can employ knowledgeable and experienced Playboy magazine readers and maybe Hugh Hefner himself, with his years of experience, to certify that all the beautiful, youthful, provocatively posed and college attending females you can find with the press of a few buttons nowadays, will not, like Hydra-Headed MEDUSA, destroy you if you merely look their way online. You cannot say that about fashion magazine models nowadays.

In American traditional legal culture, since when is merely witnessing events a crime? This foolishness echoes those laws that get passed mandating that people "report" things to the police, else suffer legal peril. The truth is that if you even raise these subjects, or try to discuss them with authorities, you yourself earn a target or legal or legislative "bull's eye" on yourself. Police and State should reconsider how very dependent they are on citizen observers, both online and off.

The vanguard gambit of the "legal beagles" is always "save the children" at first blush, have you noticed? Who could argue with their good intentions? Well, just to exercise what remains of my individual autonomy and free speech rights, I will now, but merely for the sake of argument. It is all just an Aristotelean or Sophoclean exercise in argumentation, and that is all.

It really seems to gall people, that a 53 year old guy such as myself, might be able to strike up a conversation online, or God forfend, engage in an online chat or friendly relationship with this or that MySpace friend. Why is that? You know, I might as easily become a teacher of children, or sell insurance in their homes, or head over to the local mall and rub elbows with all the young and restless people you find there everyday. I like the social context of real life. In past American generations, people of different age cohorts interacted easily and continously, without issue or concern, certainly without legislation or legal prosecution. Has our Society, so-called, changed so much? I do not think so. I think America's leadership and polities have grown incredibly dull witted and yes, compartmentalized with "fear of the other" which, as we all know, generally tends to target Arabians and Minority Males more generally. Thank God, I have not tried to board an aircraft since 9/11, because I do not think I could tolerate the utter and complete loss of my normal, natural, and legal civil liberties in doing so. Better to follow Michael Dukakis to the AMTRAK train station, and take my time getting there, while saving fuel, peace of mind, and the quaint traditional view that we Americans still have some semblance of individual Liberty, individual Security against governmental predations, and the old fashioned presumption of innocence.

Have you ever noticed, how those policing types, officious as they are, even with their shrunken peckers (I refer to their billy clubs) and uniformed authority, always seem to presume your guilt? Here in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Police are the Prosecutors. There is no distinction. I have read a couple of police reports, and encountered not a few police in action here, on occasions that would make your hair stand on end with the peril of individual rights and liberties of this particular Minority Male. When you specifically point out to these Blue Shirted Goons that "I have rights" under the laws, that's when they bring out the billy clubs, so to speak. Why, they could just whisper in your ear once, sotto voce, "Leave now" and immediately thereafter, if you do not move fast enough, grab you by the wrist and arrest you. It really is unfair. I object, but not so much face to face with the goons, nowadays. More on Slate.com where their utter and inane stupidity cannot reach me.

CORRECTION: Could not reach me, until now. It seems the Judd Greggs of the World of New Hampshire - not to be confused with Santa's Village, or StoryLand, or Six Flags Over North America - have just passed a new InterNET related law which felonizes online conduct at the drop of a feather, for their officious henchman of legal prosecution. They always do this stuff on the sly, sneakily, rather than by Roman Proclamation, as you might think they did things during the Ancient Roman Rule, of which, I see myself as an American Holdover, quite frankly. These Anglo-Puritans with their prurient legislative initiatives, fully seek to ensnare me in their legal stratagems. These well-meaning laws they pass, never are intended to apply to Them, so much as to Me. It is true! You think I kid? I kid you not.

Remember that letter I told you earlier I sent to Judd Gregg, seeking to argue, right alongside the FBI, that you cannot tell by looking, the legitimate age of the naked woman pictured on the InterNET? Well, I think Senator Gregg has been working on this new InterNET legislation ever since, and with me in mind.

Why doesn't Judd Gregg think of protecting me for a change, rather than women and children? I guess that would defeat the entire import of our Laws of the Land, as mentioned earlier, and in my other posts.

All this women and children stuff is just a smokescreen, anyway. What this legislative pattern amounts to, quite plainly speaking, is a governmental and corporate takeover of the InterNET.

Just as your Television video broadcasts were mandated to turn "digital" by the end of next year, just as you as an InterNET individual were enabled by the new technologies of digital software and hardware, to broadcast your own video to others, the Governments and the Corporations are now dividing up the World at Large into Five or Six InterNET "Sectors" which preclude digital files or especially videos from working across these artificial and pernicious boundaries. What a clever and surreptitious means of limiting your free speech and freedoms of InterNET associations. Why, maybe next time out of the legislative gate, Judd Gregg and his corporate fellow travellers can segregate us InterNET users into five or six AGE COHORTS, so that for example, people under age 18 cannot communicate with people over age 50, such as myself. Makes sense to me; let's do it! Of course, the usual fear mongering of much that passes for American politics nowadays, is just more of the same. All that law and order fantasy television, all the scary movies, all the news reporting of crimes here and there, it is all featured coverage designed to drive you into yourself, and away from meaningful contact and interaction, what used to be called "association" with your neighbors. Even kids nowadays, are programmed and scheduled and after school supervised and proseltyzed with activities galore, and loaded down with homework outside of school hours, that unless you knew better, you could swear were all designed to keep people well within the well managed boxes of their own, carefully INDIVIDUATED, boxed in personal existences. Shades of Totalitarianism, Shades of 1984, Shades of our Televised Future.

In my own view, there is something quite apparently wrong, about a Society such as our own, where kids cannot interact with one another, or with adults. Whatever happened to "presumption of innocence"? That phrasing and presumption keeps the governmental goons in their own "box" and keeps them from anticipating crimes before they happen, or are even conceived, unlike a few recent futuristic movies, such as Gattica, or those movies starring Sylvester Stallone as an unfrozen policeman in a future Society versus that Wesley Snipes (Minority Male!) character, or that movie starring Tom Cruise as a "Blade Runner" type futuristic and crime anticipating cop with digital screen enhancements. Remember that one? If only our American Federales were even half that smart. They do not even dress half as well as those Armani wearing CSI type actors such as David Caruso. Interesting sidelight: David Caruso actually imitated a Manchester police officer towards me once, with his Costar from that old ABC cop show in his presence. Sometimes, on rare occasions like this one, Life does Imitate Art. Even so, I did not let him arrest me.