WASHINGTON, DC – Senator John McCain (R-AZ) asserts that the new legislation he will soon submit for consideration by the Senate, known as the “Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act,” is not the free-speech-chilling, burdensome, nanny-law that critics are making it out to be.“Contrary to what has been reported by some news outlets, the reporting requirements in the legislation would apply only to child pornography,” McCain stated in a press release issued Wednesday. “In addition, the bill is in no way targeted at the free speech rights of bloggers or anyone else communicating their views on the Internet.”

In the statement released yesterday, McCain said the bill “aims to clarify and strengthen a child pornography reporting requirement that has been a federal law for almost a decade,” and the law is designed to send “one very simple and very important message: If you’re aware of child pornography online, you should be obligated to report it to the appropriate authorities.”

According to the text in a draft of the legislation obtained by CNET, the “duty to report” under the law states, in part; “Whoever, while engaged in providing an online service to the public through a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, obtains actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances… shall, as soon as reasonably possible make a report of such facts or circumstances to the CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by any such center.”

Under the language of the proposed legislation, the “facts and circumstances” would be anything that appears to constitute a violation of sections 18 USC 2251, 2251A, 2252, 2252A, 2252B or 2260, that “involves child pornography,” or section 1466A.

The law requires that the individual or organization making a report provide “to the extent available to an online service provider” a variety of data concerning the “involved individual,” including information “relating to the internet identity of any individual who appears to have violated a Federal law in the manner described… including the screen name, user identification name, e-mail address, website address and uniform resource locator.”

There are repeated references to “apparent child pornography” in the draft text of the legislation, a fact that may be a tacit acknowledgement that assessing what images are or aren’t child pornography is not an exact science, and those reporting suspected images are unlikely to state with certainty that the material in question is, in fact, child pornography.

Under the proposed law, “knowing and willful failure” to report is punishable by a fine of up to $150,000, with the maximum fine increasing to $300,000 for any subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report.

A “negligent failure” to report would bring a fine of up to $50,000 for a first offense, with subsequent offenses the fine for negligent failure increases to a maximum of $100,000.

In a section of the bill entitled “Protection of Privacy,” it states that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to require an online service provider to (1) monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider; (2) the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1), or (3) affirmatively seek facts or circumstances described in subsection (b)(2).”

It is the “Protection of Privacy” provision that McCain says saves his bill from being the legislative loadstone that its critics have proclaimed it to be.

Despite the fact that bloggers and other “forum” site operators would be required to report suspected child pornography under the law, in his Tuesday press release, McCain contends that “the speech rights of bloggers and others online would not be impacted because the legislation does not require the monitoring of users or the content of any communication. Nor does it require online service providers to seek out child pornography on their sites.”

McCain says that the bill merely “requires online service providers to report child pornography when they become aware of it, either through a report from a subscriber or user, or through a discovery of the material by an employee.”

“As a result, the reporting requirement would protect children while not imposing a financial or administrative burden on online service providers,” McCain asserts in his press release.

What worries some of the bill’s early critics, however, is that the bill signifies a move in a direction that has disturbing implications for the future of the Web, and the future of social networking and user-posted content sites, specifically.

“I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here,” Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco, told CNET.com. “Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?”

McCain counters that he does “cherish the rights of individuals to speak freely on the Internet.”

“That right and the ability to exercise it is what makes the internet the critical innovation that it is,” McCain’s statement continues. “This bill doesn’t interfere with that, but is intended only to ensure that online service providers that find child pornography on their networks report those images to the appropriate authorities.”

McCain’s bill also seeks to mandate the registration of “online identifiers” of sex offenders by adding “Any email address, instant message address, or other similar Internet identifier used by the sex offender to communicate over the internet” to the list of information that convicted sex offenders are required to report to sex offender registries.

Bankston commented that he found McCain’s bill a “constitutionally dubious proposal” that was being made “apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts.”

In support of his contention that McCain’s bill is inspired by fear rather than fact, Bankston cited recent studies conducted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) indicating that the sexual solicitation of minors online has decreased over the last five years, in spite of explosive growth in the popularity of social networking sites.