Re: [noise]Re: The grey lady puts on some boots and rides a horseman or two...

[Declan McCullagh <declan@eff.org>]

On Wed, 21 Aug 1996, Mike Duvos wrote:

> Someone wrote:
> 
> > What ******I'm******* afraid of is another Richard Davis coming after
> > my daughters.
> 
> > In case you don't know, he's the fuckhead who killed 12 yr old Polly
> > Klaas after abducting her from her bedroom while her mother slept in
> > the other room.
> 
> Oh, we know about it all right.  We've heard nothing else on the news
> for months on end.  A little war of sound bytes to the exclusion of
> the hundreds of other children who were killed by their own parents
> during the time we were fed this one-in-a-million occurrence as some
> sort of prototypical child danger. 
> 
> Someone in "another newsgroup" recently commented that by the end of 
> the trial, he was ready to vote the death penalty for Polly's father,
> if that was the only way to make the man shut up. :)

I met Polly's father at the "Kids off Lists" press conference in front of
the Capitol in June. He's an irascable fellow, and there's more to the
story than you might think at first. 

Check out part of Brock's Muckraker column I've attached below.

-Declan





// declan@eff.org // I do not represent the EFF // declan@well.com //

http://www.muckraker.com/muckraker/96/24/index3a.html

Muckraker
By Brock Meeks
June 12 1996


Teach Your Children Well, or Else ...

My kids are info subversives. I should know. I taught them everything I
know about the subject.

My kids know not to give out their telephone number or address to any
yahoo who asks for it on the street or phone. If pressed for such
information, they simply make up a number or address or zip code.

Those lessons have transferred to the online world, too. So when
prompted for personal information while netsurfing, my kids either jet
over to another site or simply fill in the blanks with bogus info.

My question is: What the hell are other parents doing? We live in an
information culture; no amount of bitching about how today's kids are
"smarter than we are" and none of the all-too-tired whining about how
"I have to ask my 10-year-old to program the VCR" will make this fact
any less true. Parents need to take more responsibility. The fight over
the Communications Decency Act raised the same point.

How best to protect kids from unrelenting Internet info scavengers is
now a topic of national debate, and the long arm of Congress and
regulatory agencies is reaching into the sandbox.

The issue ignited with an overheated report from the well-respected
Center for Media Education. These folks have done some great work in
the past, such as hammering the television networks for trying to pass
off Saturday morning cartoons as "educational programming." But when
they released their "Web of Deception" study, the group went over the
edge into Timothy Leary land - rest his soul.

That report overhyped a very real concern: Some companies use Web sites
as bait to entice kids to provide a wealth of information about
themselves, which can then be cranked into a database and crunched
every which way.

The report drove Representative Bob Franks (R-New Jersey) and Senator
Dianne Feinstein (D-California) to introduce the "Children's Privacy
Protection and Parental Empowerment Act." The idea is to keep kids'
names off direct marketing lists. It's a good concept, but it's short
on focus and long on fear - the fear that gathering such information
can lead to child abuse or worse.

A group called "Kids Off Lists" (KOL) was on hand during a PR event to
help juice the introduction of the bill. Heading that group is Marc
Klaas, whose claim to fame is that he's the father of Polly Klaas, the
12-year-old California girl who in 1994 was abducted from a slumber
party and murdered. Klaas's personal tragedy lends a twisted emotional
and impassioned draw to the issue.

During that event, a direct mail company called Metromail, a subsidiary
of the publishing giant R.R. Donnelley & Sons, was singled out as evil
incarnate for its practice of selling information on kids via a 900
telephone number. KOL showed off a flyer that offers US$5,000 for
information leading to the conviction of anyone who has used
information from such a company to "locate and harm a child."

But there's a subplot here. The actual driving force and financial
backer of KOL is John Phillips, who runs Aristotle Publishing, a
political software company in Washington, DC. Phillips, as it turns
out, has been in a kind of run-and-shoot legal battle with Donnelley
for the past five years, according to an article in the Washington City
Paper, an alternative weekly published in DC.

Phillips and Donnelley clashed over a soured deal involving Aristotle
and Metromail. Phillips sued for $5.3 million, and Metromail settled in
1995 for $2.7 million, according to the City Paper article. But
Phillips refused to let up and has funded KOL to keep the pressure on
Donnelley and Metromail. On 7 March, Donnelley said it would sell off
its majority holding in Metromail.

All this emotion spilled over and caught the attention of the Federal
Trade Commission. Jodie Bernstein, director of the agency's Bureau of
Consumer Protection, said that the "focus" of its two-day hearing last
week was "children in cyberspace" with questions aimed at finding out
"what's happening" with information collection on kids in cyberspace.
"We are not looking to prosecute but to educate and report," he said.

[...]