FC: Charles Platt on Orrin Hatch's real motives

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Worth reading. Previous Politech message: 
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04871.html --Declan]

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Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 13:40:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <other () platt us>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
cc: politech () politechbot com
Subject: Orrin Hatch "technological ineptitude" misses the point
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030619101740.04291bc8 () mail well com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.44.0306201320430.59123-100000 () rult pair com>
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Declan, several of your readers have been wasting their time proving that
Orrin Hatch is technologically inept, and his ideas for attacking user PCs
won't work. This totally misses the point.

Of course the ideas won't work; but Hatch doesn't care. He is merely
saying what he thinks his constituents and paymasters want to hear, in an
effort to win votes and maintain a flow of campaign contributions.

We went through a similar phase of "It will never work, and if anyone
tries, we'll GET them" during the fuss over the very first attemps at Net
censorship sponsored by (now retired) Senator Exon. His "decency
amendment" was embedded in the telecommunications deregulation bill
enacted in 1996. Clinton himself expressed doubts that the censorship
provisions were constitutional, but signed the bill anyway, in the Library
of Congress, where the new law immediately criminalized the library
itself, for having titles with the word "Fuck" in them, and making these
titles available online.

The committee that did the horse trading to reach a final version of that
bill allowed the strongest possible censorship provisions to remain,
probably on the principle that they wanted to maximize the chance of the
Supreme Court ruling the provisions unconstitutional.

So, here's the way things work in the real world. Legislators will say
just about anything to please their donors and constituents, and may even
include flagrantly unconstitutional or unworkable language in new laws, in
the happy knowledge that the ACLU and other organizations will file suit
to get rid of the offensive provisions. At that point the legislators send
out another fund raising letter, saying, in effect, "I tried to do what
was right, but these damned liberals own the court. Send me more money so
that I can continue fighting the good fight against porn, illegal
immigrants, drugs, copyright theft, [fill in the blank]."

Hatch has a good scam going, which he feels will benefit him. But no one
should take it seriously.

--CP




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