One thing that appears to be universal is that any legislation can be passed so long as you can tie to to preventing terrorist or child pornography. I’m not sure if a majority of people have a built-in kill switch and disengages their ability to critically think when they hear either term but that appears to be the fact. This is the reason the copyright lobby loves child pornography:
The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen). He was speaking in front of an audience where the press had not been invited; it was assumed to be copyright industry insiders only. It wasn’t. Christian Engström, who’s now a Pirate Member of the European Parliament, net activist Oscar Swartz, and I were also there.
“My friends,” Schlüter said. “We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet.”
Politicians know that censorship is the death knell of a political career, citizens don’t generally like having their speech shut down after all. As no logical argument exists in favor of censorship the politicians wanting to pass such legislation need to resort to ad hominem, setting up a scenario where they can claim any opponents of said legislation must support child pornographers.
The trick for the copyright lobby is to somehow tie copyright offenses to child pornography, which they’ve done:
“We pointed out to [the governor] that there are overlaps between the child porn problem and piracy,” Mr. Sherman [The RIAA president] said, “because all kinds of files, legal and otherwise, are traded on peer-to-peer networks.” (New York Times)
Once the link is established you can ram through any legislation you want, just make sure there is some mention about fighting child pornography mixed in with the hundreds of pages describing how the bill will be used to fight copyright offenses through censorship. This is why the state always ends up thieving rights from people, the people put in charge of the state are corruptible and will force their own desires and the desires of those who make them wealthy onto the populace.
Yeah a good rule of thumb for legislation is if anyone says it is “for the Children” you should run away something rotten is hidden inside the bill, either cleverly or like most legislation in the open.
It’s rather ironic that legislations is so often passed by claim it’s for the children which is nothing more than exploitation of children.