Hunting Kids

It's not enough that California screws over every nonrich kid in the state by having one of the worst public school systems in the country. The state has to come up with other ways to destroy our kids' futures. I can think of no other justification for S.B. 1506, a bill recently signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that requires people on peer-to-peer networks to put their real e-mail address on all commercial files they upload. Let's call it the "Help Child Stalkers Act."

You see, Arnie was feeling bad about how hard it is for those legendary online child stalkers to find out where to reach their victims. But thanks to 1506, all they have to do is lurk in chat rooms where kids are trading files, jot down some names and addresses, and go to town. Even better: if kids don't include this stalker-friendly info with their media, their parents get fined. Awesome!

One of the major backers of the Help Child Stalkers Act was the Motion Picture Association of America, which, in its infinite wisdom, pushed the bill because it figured 1506 would separate the pirates from the legitimate copyright owners. Obviously, a legit copyright owner wouldn't mind putting personal contact information on the media he or she was releasing into the wilds. Only a bad person who had stolen the media file would want to post it on P2P networks anonymously or pseudonymously.

I mean, think about it: Anyone who doesn't have a large media company address shouldn't be sharing his or her work around, anyway. And stalkers need love too! Teenage garage musicians who put their work on eMule to drum up sales should obviously be compelled to give out their e-mail addresses so deranged weirdos can send them naked pictures.

But just in case some wily kids are smart enough to sign up for Hotmail accounts with fake information and use those addresses on their shared files, security megacorporation VeriSign has another way to help stalkers find underage victims online. Partnering with the improbably named nonprofit i-SAFE, VeriSign is handing out little dongles in Los Angeles-area schools called i-STIKs. The i-STIK, according to VeriSign's press release, helps keep kids safe "by giving each a unique digital identity as they surf the Internet." When kids plug the i-STIK into the USB port of any device they're using to go online, a chunk of code on the i-STIK broadcasts their exact age and gender. So when they go into a chat room, everybody knows for certain how old they are.

The ass-backward idea is that if every kid online uses the i-STIK, it'll be easy to tell when grown-ups enter teen chat rooms because their lack of a dongle will give them away. Unfortunately, nobody – least of all age-conscious teens – will want to use these things. Kids will hack them to make themselves appear older or will simply discard them entirely. Indeed, anyone under 18 with an i-STIK that accurately reflects his or her age is far more likely to be victimized by pedophiles, as they swarm to the i-STIK age beacon like Black Riders to a fire lit by foolish, hungry hobbits.

The thing I really don't get, though, is why the i-STIK identifies kids by gender as well. What exactly are the terrible things that could happen if kids didn't broadcast their gender to the world? Girls might learn math and hacking in a nonsexist environment? Boys might visit chat rooms devoted to cosmetics and fashion?

When I first ventured online into chat rooms as a teenager, what I found most liberating about my experiences was that nobody knew my gender or age. People didn't judge me based on their preconceptions about what a 15-year-old girl should do or say. If I hadn't had a way to mask my gender online, I doubt I would ever have gotten interested in computers in the first place. At school, where everybody knew my gender just by looking at me, the boys never talked to girls about computers. Geekland was no-girls-land. One reason this has changed so much since my teenhood is precisely because girls like me got online and had a chance to learn from people who had no idea what their gender was and therefore didn't expect them to suck at coding.