After a weekend of disturbing revelations and recriminations, there appears to be an emerging consensus in Washington as to who is responsible for the scandal involving former Congressman Mark Foley and underage Congressional pages. In the last 72 hours, there have been a number of suspects: the Congressman of course; the House Republican leadership charged with ignoring mounting evidence, the page program itself, and of course the Democrats who have been accuses of leaking the story. But by yesterday morning the true culprit had been unmasked: the Internet.

In true Washington style, the Foley scandal produced a stampede among lawmakers to the podium — not to announce reform of the House Page Program or the long broken ethics process, but rather to propose new laws aimed at the Internet. Yesterday’s edition of National Journal’s Tech Daily quotes one Internet safety advocate who said she was “deluged” with phone calls from Congressional staffers seeking information to bolster the need for new laws.

Lawmakers and advocates rushed to characterize the Foley incident as an instance of Internet predation (sweeping aside the obvious fact that the relationships began in the physical world, under the less than watchful eye of Congress) and many have called for a new law to stop online sexual “grooming” of young people, ambiguously described as the act of befriending a minor online with the intention of eventually introducing sexual activity, a proposal fraught with constitutional dangers.

Others have zeroed in on the fact that instant messages are not retained by Internet Service Providers in the ordinary course, threatening to broaden the already troubling push in Congress to impose mandatory data retention to the content of communications.

With an election coming up, we can expect members of Congress to churn out new proposals that threaten free expression and privacy on the Internet until the last vote is counted. And we can only hope that the lame duck session that follows will take a more cautious approach.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Free Expression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.