Greetings. Regular readers know that I proudly support civil liberties, freedom of speech, and the broadest possible open use of the Internet.

On the other hand, I am not a supporter of rape, particularly the rape of the most vulnerable members of society.

So I hope it doesn't come as too much of a surprise that I'm very strongly opposed to Congressman Barney Frank's new legislation to broadly legalize Internet-based gambling.

I approach this issue from multiple angles -- but they all end up at the same dark, dank, bottomless pit.

We can start with a basic premise provable by most any student who has passed a first year statistics course -- gambling is for suckers. Gambling preys on false premises, ignorance of what odds really mean, and tends to disproportionately attract desperate persons who least can afford to throw their money down such rat holes.

Many years ago I voted for the establishment of the state lottery here in California. It's popular among some folks who never gamble to call the lottery a "stupidity tax" -- or to draw even more derogatory comparisons with gamblers.

But I've come to very much regret that vote of mine, watching the inane hype of the California Lottery ads over the years, plus the individuals and families sucked down into destitution while buying endless rolls of lottery cards instead of basic necessities.

On the ballot here in California in a couple of weeks is a proposal to effectively expand the lottery -- I intend to vote against it (and against most other proposals on the upcoming ballot, by the way. Fed up? Yep!)

But even beyond the essential stupidity of gambling in general, Internet gambling makes it all so very much worse.

Unless you're dealing with bets that have verifiable outcomes (like sports betting), the opportunities for gambling service fraud in Internet gambling are immense. Simulated decks of cards, simulated slot machines, and all the other server-based gambling models are essentially only a few lines of code away from ripping off gamblers without leaving a clue.

Unlike physical gambling machines where firmware can be audited and inspected to some degree of certainty (though frauds have occurred with them as well), Internet server-based gambling applications are by definition impossible to truly authenticate for honest operations, despite the claims of their supporters. It's hard enough to write a really honest random number generator. In an environment of instant server updates the opportunities for crooked behavior are vast.

But perhaps even worse, the ubiquitous availability of legal Internet gambling, potentially available to every home and office with Internet access, would create a horrible trap.

Just as some persons have found themselves drawn to the evils of child porn through the seeming isolation of a innocent-looking computer in the corner of the bedroom, the disease of gambling addiction will similarly be in wait on the nearby screen to suck finances dry. Studies have already shown that Internet gambling is most dangerous to those who can least afford to indulge -- desperate families, the lonely elderly, and so on.

Proponents of legalized Internet gambling make a number of arguments.

First, they claim that they'll be sure that there are protections in their legislation to guard against fraud, compulsive gambling, and so on. Laudable sentiments, but excuse me if I suggest that such "protections" will amount to a hill of beans in the real world of the gambling-industrial complex.

Proponents also note that even without a formal structure for broad legal Internet gambling in the U.S., large numbers of U.S. residents still gamble over the Internet via various offshore venues. They argue that if it's going to happen anyway, why shouldn't U.S.-based government agencies get their pieces of the pie? Internet gambling fans also point to an EU investigation of whether or not the current U.S. stance discriminates against European gambling entities.

I am unconvinced. As far as I'm concerned, the most polite term to describe the gambling industry, particularly those offshore operations that sucker in U.S. gamblers now, is scum.

Gambling firms (and government lottery entities as well) enrich themselves largely on the backs of people who can't rightly afford to burn money by gambling -- and anyone who thinks that we don't all end up paying for the results one way or another, is kidding themselves.

Free speech. Civil liberties. An open Internet. All important issues -- all worth fighting for. But that doesn't mean that we should willingly pour the most vulnerable of our fellow travelers into what would inevitably be a meat grinder of legalized Internet gambling.

This should not be an issue of Democrats vs. the GOP. It's a fundamental ethical issue that should transcend political parties, and strikes to the heart of what it means to care about our fellow men and women.

Please don't legalize Internet gambling.

--Lauren--