Senator McCain proposes surveillance of illegal images

Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce a bill that would require Internet service providers and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or "cartoon" minors. The bill would establish a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police. Failure to do so would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act

Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska has introduced a bill called "Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act" (#S49.IS). This is a new version of the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) of 2006, including all the original DOPA propositions with two additional Titles added: restricting the sale of personal information of children for marketing; and raising fines for child pornography violations.

DOPA sought to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms. It was passed by the House of Representatives, but not by the Senate. The Act's definition of "commercial social networking websites" is broad enough to include Amazon, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, MySpace, and YouTube. Libraries accepting E-Rate funds would have to block all of these from minor users if Senator Steven's bill should pass.