af_vet_rr revealed in this post that the government has already done that.
Cicero: But I don't think we need totally uncontrolled pornography all over the place, either. It wouldn't break my heart of they prosecute a few pornographers for selling to minors.
That is fine. As long as they do it Constitutionally I'm all for it.
The problem with the actions cited in the article is it won't work. The gummint claims to want search records from Google in order to determine how much porn was accessed by minors. There is no way they can know (from the records they are subpoenaing) whether even one minor has viewed porn on the net.
Isn't there something wrong with that picture?
I confess I don't visit porn sites. The stuff pollutes your mind, and the images are impossible to get out. It reduces other people to things, and corrupts the imagination.
I agree with you that it's good to be suspicious of government spying on citizens. I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It depends what they do with it, if anything. Cops sit by the side of the road and give tickets to speeders. They paint every car that goes by with radar. That's OK, as long as they take the trouble to arrest the real speeders, and not just the most convenient people who slightly exceed the limit.
They will have data on millions of people, and they can only use a little of it. If they use it to fine pornographers for selling to minors, that's fine with me. If they use it against web trickery that redirects surfers to porn sites, that's also fine with me. If they start yanking in citizens for visiting porn sites, that will only get them into hot water, and rightly so.
I guess some degree of spying is inevitable, and the internet is not inherently private. So, let's hope they pick the right people to make examples of. Not like the music moguls, who are going after kids and grandmothers and all sorts of people with huge and unjust penalties for music downloading which they may not even know about.