Of all things virtually guaranteed to make me cringe, few are as reliable as a government official saying something like this:
“Social networking sites are very useful social tools but we must make recommendations for how to better protect people from the risks these sites create.”
Oh, my, here comes the government hell-bent on helping again, with the likes of MySpace being today’s fortunate beneficiaries.
In this case, my cringe was more momentary than usual only because an ocean separates me from the speaker, Andreas Pirotti, executive director of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). Of course, I understand that it could just as easily have been — and just as often has been — a duly-elected member of the United States Congress. And it’s not like there’s a European Internet and an American Internet.
On this side of the pond, lawmakers and prosecutors have been hard at work for some time now trying to fix the Internet, in general, and MySpace, in particular. Ten days ago we witnessed the spectacle of a government attorneys bamboozling a Los Angeles grand jury into using an old, utterly unrelated computer crimes statute to indict the alleged monster in the Missouri MySpace suicide case.
Justice? Nothing of the sort. But that’s what you get once this kind of help starts rolling.
Back in Europe, ENISA’s Pirotti told an IDG News Service reporter that EU legislation may need to be expanded “to cover the taking of photos of people and posting them on the Internet,” something that is apparently allowed today in what you call your freer countries.
That’s another fix that ought to work out well.
