Monthly Archives: July 2011

The ISP directory and discussion forum “My ISP Finder” alerted me to a blog entry they just posted called “7 Laws Impacting our Online Privacy“  It is a nice quick article, and I recommend everyone take a look at it.  This has been a banner year for government institutions creating laws which attempt to control the way we use the internet.  State Amazon laws, for example, supported by unions, corporations and retail merchant associations, go against the dormant commerce clause, and will likely be ruled unconstitutional.  Other laws attempt to “crack down” on piracy by using Internet Service Providers to limit their bandwith. Here is a summary of the article:

There are laws that regulate the use of such things as child pornography and online gambling, but it is important to realize that most laws are issued by individual states rather than being comprehensive and federally issued. The following is a list of 7 laws that impact our online privacy.

You’ll have to click the link to see the actual list of laws.  There is another bill coming down the legislative pipeline that the article does not mention because it isn’t a law yet, but it will have a much greater impact than what was mentioned.  The bill is the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act or, “Protect IP Act”, proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT).  I wrote a blog post about “Protect IP a few months ago.  The bill would require domain name servers to block access to websites suspected of infringing on copyright by blacklisting their domain names.  The sites would only be able to be accessed by IP address.  The law would also require search engines to remove the websites from their search results.

How does it impact privacy?  It doesn’t directly, except in the methodology used.  The law presumes guilt in that it requires the effective removal of the site, without due process.  Due process rights are always tied in with privacy rights in the legal realm, so the diminishment of due process rights opens the door for to legitimize the diminishing of privacy rights in the online world.