Internet chat police presence questioned.

The recent proposal outlined by The U.K.'s National Crime Squad (NCS) to monitor Internet chat rooms is not a workable solution, according to Internet chat network owners and administrators. In their statement of 9 June, 2004 the NCS stated that "Uniformed Officers" will enter certain chat rooms, primarily those chat rooms frequented by adults seeking underage children, and have an icon attached to their nickname to identify themselves as law enforcement officers. The F.B.I. is also named as one of the agencies participating in this proposal.

Another IRC Operator brought up the issue of censorship and the sheer volume of chat channels available. "It sounds like a good idea. However, it could be a first step towards censoring chatrooms. There are many networks (EFnet, for example) that pride themselves on absolute freedom for users to do what they want to. With the exception of damaging the network, of course.

That aside, I don't see how it could be feasible to police chatrooms. According to SearchIRC.com, there are nearly 600,000 chatrooms on public IRC networks alone. It would take a lot of "beat cops" to police it." (Ed. Note. Operator is not affiliated with EFnet)

Yep. It's For the Children?. CNN has details on the idea.

While it's certainly true that there are some seriously disturbing chatrooms out there, this proposal is unlikely to have any real effect even if put in practice. Why? Simple: criminals don't commit crimes in front of uniformed cops. They go somewhere the uniformed cop isn't. They can do this because of the uniform; they can see the cop and they can choose to leave.

And if you think that relatively normal people won't make this choice, how many teenagers clam up when someone's parent enters a room in real life? If you think that they won't do even more when a police officer wanders in, you're probably doing some kind of illegal drug and won't stick around the chatroom to find out.

At this point, you may be thinking that this proposal will kill internet chat completely. And you might be right, if there was a police officer in every chatroom. But we're talking about the Internet here; there are potentially infinite chatrooms, and every time the police start hanging out in one, anyone who's ever done drugs or engaged in a bit of risque chat with an online girlfriend or downloaded an mp3 is going to go elsewhere. Fast. And there are an infinite number of "elsewheres" to go.

There are definitely not an infinite number of police officers, and I would hope most police officers have better things to do than hang out in internet chatrooms. We've got people trying to kill us with airplanes, remember?

So I predict that this effort, if actually implemented, will do absolutely... nothing. Except, perhaps, chill speech. But then, that was the real point of the whole thing, wasn't it? Not actually catching criminals -- that requires pesky things like evidence of a crime -- but chilling speech that the government, in the form of John Ashcroft, He Who Clothes Nude Statues, disapproves of.

If you think this sort of thing is only going to be aimed at predators, BTW, you are wrong.