Letter to Congress regarding H.R. 1981 – Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers
July 8, 2011
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
Washington, D.C.
Re: H.R. 1981 – Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011
To The Honorable Members of Congress:
I would like to take this opportunity to submit my thoughts and concerns on H.R. 1981, Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. I was contacted by committee staff on this matter so that I could provide the perspective of a small, family-run, cable business as my family runs Full Channel here in Rhode Island. Full Channel was started in 1965 by my grandfather John Donofrio. His vision for an expansive landscape of information delivered to the living rooms and fingertips of ordinary Americans was groundbreaking. In 1982, after nearly 20 years of preparations and government hearings, he was the only individual businessperson to be awarded a cable television franchise in the State of Rhode Island. By the turn of the millennium, Full Channel remained as the only independent cable and broadband provider in the state and continues to serve the local needs of its three communities, employing local residents and supporting schools, charities and local governments.
Today Full Channel remains a valued local provider, serving homes and businesses in Bristol County, Rhode Island, by delivering digital television, broadband Internet and phone services. The company employs more than 20 local residents as sales and service representatives, technicians and engineers. Public access personnel deliver municipal government meetings, community events and other public service programming through Full Channel’s three local television channels allocated to the communities. In 2009 the company was lauded as a “Top Operator” by the industry trade publication CableFAX. This summer, the Town of Bristol’s council chairman thanked Full Channel in a written statement for bringing “greater transparency to government” by delivering local meetings to the TV sets of residents.
To be perfectly clear, I personally, and Full Channel as an organization, are champions of protecting children from all forms of abuse and exploitation, and we support the very reasonable ideals of H.R. 1981. There is no doubt that protecting our children online continues to provide a challenge in every family, and it is timely and appropriate for Congress to consider what role the Federal government can play in that effort. However, I have serious doubts about the proposed language in that it may open a wide door to conducting electronic surveillance on every Internet-subscribing American citizen in a manner that is redundant to other statutory requirements such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), may prove too costly to small businesses implement and may expand the data that companies are compiling in ways that go beyond child pornography and really touches upon broader privacy issues.
H.R. 1981 is a bill aimed at the distribution of child pornography, a sin that is on the short list of the most heinous offenses in our modern society. Intelligent, well-respected individuals may argue the merits and dangers of gun control, net neutrality, same-sex marriage and even abortion and come out unscathed relative to a witness emerging from a testimony even remotely tainted by the topic of the exploitation of children.
In 2007, Full Channel and the rest of the nation’s Internet service providers began to implement CALEA, which codified the implementation of modern day digital wiretapping. CALEA gives Federal and local law enforcement protocols for the speedy access to live data from a suspect’s digital connections with proper court documentation (i.e., a warrant or subpoena). When a provider is subpoenaed by a law enforcement agency to retain electronic records under CALEA they must comply.
The systems to support CALEA were expensive for small companies like Full Channel to implement; however, they have functioned seamlessly when called into action. Since its inception, Full Channel has had very few requests for information relating to crimes against children. Using these existing CALEA protocols, our staff is able to quickly respond to a subpoena and provide data. However, these instances are clearly infrequent. Adding a new statutory obligation for small businesses that will result in new costs doesn’t seem merited with this in mind. I am not sure where the “problem” with existing data collection and wiretapping law exists.
With that in mind, it concerns me that this bill asks that we collect our customers’ historical personally identifiable information for 18 months on the remote chance that they may have engaged in the transfer or distribution of child pornography. This seems to be an impingement on the privacy of everyday citizens.
Furthermore, H.R. 1981 discriminates between service providers, applying to those who deliver communications services via landline, but not to those who do so wirelessly, leaving gaping holes in this new so-called “security” system. In fact, the bill provides a full exemption from the data retention requirements for wireless providers like cellular giants AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, publically-accessible WiFi hotspots (i.e., Starbucks, college campuses and libraries) and new WiMax installations popping up throughout the U.S. If all of the nation’s providers – wireline and wireless alike – are not held to the same standard of data retention, the burden borne by small companies like Full Channel to implement these systems will be in vein because criminal predators will easily connect to nearby cellular data networks or a neighboring resident’s or business’ open WiFi connection, which are all exempt from the proposed requirements.
The few brief lines in H.R. 1981 that address digital communications not only serve to create gaping holes in the bill’s objective, but also serve to create a competitively unfair environment where landline providers, especially small businesses like Full Channel, are at a distinct economic disadvantage by being held to a higher standard than wireless providers. In an era when the federal government is scrambling to repurpose much of the citizens’ wireless spectrum for the deployment of wireless broadband, it only seems prudent to hold traditional landline and wireless broadband providers to the same level of accountability and responsibility. To do otherwise hurts small business and will have a chilling effect on the deployment and expansion of broadband, especially in underserved and rural areas. By forcing only landline providers like Full Channel to shoulder these new regulatory burdens, it is effectively a regressive tax. This tax may be spread across millions of subscribers in larger organizations; however, small businesses like Full Channel will be hit especially hard by these financial constraints, with the profound effect of having to pass along the government implemented costs to consumers.
I urge the committee to reconsider the data retention requirements in H.R. 1981 because they are inequitable and ineffective on a number of fronts. The tools to apprehend predators are already in the hands of law enforcement under CALEA. I would argue that more resources should be devoted directly to the men and women of law enforcement dedicated to protecting children, rather than on the implementation of carte blanche data collection on the entire population of American landline Internet users.
Respectfully submitted,
Levi C. Maaia
Vice President
Full Channel TV, Inc.
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Full Channel is the recipient of the 
