Hawaii The Latest To Push Bullshit Porn Filter Law Pushed By Sketchy Backers

Too Much Free Time

from the round-and-round-we-go dept

For several years a man by the name of Chris Sevier has been waging a fairly facts-optional war on porn. Sevier first became famous for trying to marry his computer to protest same sex marriage a few years ago. He also tried to sue Apple after blaming the Cupertino giant for his own past porn addiction, and has gotten into trouble for allegedly stalking country star John Rich and a 17-year-old girl. Sevier has since been a cornerstone of an effort to pass truly awful porn filter legislation in nearly two dozen states under the disingenuous guise of combating human trafficking.

Dubbed the “Human Trafficking Prevention Act,” all of the incarnations of the law would force ISPs to filter pornography and other “patently offensive material.” The legislation would then force state residents interested in viewing porn to pony up a one-time $20 “digital access fee” to whitelist the internet’s naughty bits for each internet-connected device in the home. The proposal is patently absurd, technically impossible to implement, and yet somehow these bills continue to get further than they ever should across a huge swath of the boob-phobic country.

Hawaii this week was the latest to take Sevier’s unworkable draft legislation and turn it into unworkable real legislation. According to CNN, several incarnations of the bill have been proposed in the Hawaii legislature, after a similar measure failed to pass last year:

“It doesn’t make sense for children to have to access to X-rated material on their cell phones,” said Hawaiian State Sen. Mike Gabbard, who sponsored the Senate bill. He also introduced a similar bill during last year’s legislative session. “By making it harder for people to access these porn sites, we can make prostitution hubs harder to access which will reduce sex trafficking,” Gabbard said in an email to CNN.”

Except the proposed legislation has nothing to do with human trafficking, something other states (like Rhode Island) discovered after they realized that the folks pushing these bills may not be, well, ethical. CNN doesn’t even mention Sevier’s checkered past, and also floats over the fact that these filters don’t work, something anybody who actually understands technology already knows. Porn filters routinely not only wind up censoring legitimate content, but, when they work at all, they’re usually easily bypassed by any nitwit with even a fraction of technical knowledge. That’s oddly omitted from most of these stories.

Journalists writing about these porn filters often lose the forest for the trees in their coverage. The story isn’t really about porn filters, though pointing out that porn filters don’t work is certainly important. These stories are about how somebody with a terrible track record and zero meaningful expertise in either technology or law has been able to convince countless states to push ridiculous, unworkable, speech-stifling legislation in a country facing an ocean of more pressing problems.

Filed Under: chris sevier, hawaii, mike gabbard, porn filters