With all due respect to Myra Adams, the idea that we are going to prevent people from downloading child pornography by filtering the wi-fi at McDonald’s and Starbucks is absurd in a world of prepaid smart phones and a thousand other ways to access the Internet anonymously. Bad people do bad things, but that’s not how they do it.

I would think that the case for filtering in restaurants and the like isn’t that people will use public places to access illegal porn but that viewing porn of any sort in public places is unseemly. (Yeah, guy sitting next to me on the airplane a while back — I’m talking to you.) But if that’s the criterion, we should really start with the public libraries which, thanks to the ideological rigidity of the librarians’ guild, have been transformed into something like one of those old Times Square theaters or the U.S. Treasury, i.e. public masturbatoriums.

As the self-appointed pornography correspondent here, I sympathize with the concerns of Enough Is Enough and Donna Rice Hughes. But if I may say so without being uncharitable, this has the feeling of an invented controversy. The free wi-fi at Starbucks is not a main avenue of communication for pedophiles and predators, but a media campaign against two household-name corporations might generate a fair amount of publicity for an organization that, judging by its IRS filings, doesn’t seem to do a heck of a lot other than issue press releases and maintain a hilariously outdated lexicon of Internet abbreviations that it mislabels “acronyms.” In fact, the organization’s own web site contains an “accomplishments” heading that terminates in the year 2012, which is blank.

Internet crusaders should know more about how the Internet works.