Use(less)net

By now everyone who reads this blog knows what a huge fan I am of the New York Football Giants. What you may not know is where I go for my daily dose of breaking Giants news. Of course I check BBI on a daily basis, but that site is only updated daily, so for breaking news and discussion, I head for the Giants newsgroup on Usenet (for the truly geeky, it's alt.sports.football.pro.ny-giants). There, I can find out what other Giants fans are reading, watching, and thinking, and occasionally I even participate in the discussion.

But all that just got a lot harder. In an egregious example of overstepping the authority of one's office, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has strongarmed several major internet service providers into dropping most or all access to Usenet newsgroups. The reason? 88 out of over 100,000 of them--that's around .08%--contained some form of child porn. Does this sound like overkill to you? Why not ban digital cameras? Or analog cameras and scanners? That would ensure that no one ever trades child porn again ever. Or extend it into other areas of life. Want to reduce highway fatalities? Ban automobiles--everyone takes the train! But wait, once in a while, people get hit by trains (either accidentally or as a means of suicide). So it looks like we're back to the ol' Foot 'n' Leather Express.

The Founding Fathers thought that the right to free and open speech and expression was so important that they made it the very first piece of the Bill of Rights. But Cuomo doesn't seem to care, extorting ISPs with the threat of bad publicity, since, as the CNet article stresses, using the law to accomplish this has already been ruled unconstitutional. Hopefully, the ACLU (who, in their defense, was involved in overturning Pennsylvania's attempt to legislate Internet censorship) will take a break from defending terrorists and rapists and put the pressure on New York and the ISPs to bring back our newsgroups. My Giants offseason depends on it.