IP: Brock Meeks on CDA costs -- An expensive lesson in

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

http://www.hotwired.com/muckraker/


Muckraker
By Brock N. Meeks (brock () well com)


The Price of Freedom


                When the three-judge panel in Philadelphia declared the
                Communications Decency Act unconstitutional, it sent a
                swift and brutal civics lesson to Congress: You can't
                treat the Constitution like a rough draft. It was also an
                expensive lesson. The price tag for that little romp
                through constitutional law is likely to amount to more
                than US$2 million.


                Although $2 million is a small price to pay for securing
                First Amendment rights in cyberspace, if Congress had its
                collective head screwed on right, the money would not
                have been spent in the first place. Indeed, a better
                civics lesson could have been "taught" by using that
                money to create 1,176 minimum-wage summer jobs for kids,
                teaching them a work ethic and the value of a paycheck.


                Better yet, the money the government blew on this case
                could have stayed in the Justice Department and gone
                toward the prosecution of real criminals: the producers
                of child pornography, for example. But I suppose that's
                just not as much fun as trying to blue-pencil 200-plus
                years of constitutional law.


                It needs to be said that this $2 million is a "soft"
                number, meaning it wasn't cut and pasted from the bottom
                line of a few spreadsheets. Rather, it was dragged,
                cajoled, and extrapolated over the course of a three-week
                investigation that included more than two dozen
                interviews with government and private sources, along
                with the study of dozens of government documents. And
                yet, all that can be said for sure is that this number is
                a "best guess."


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