Senate President Pro Tempore Stanley Rosenberg, designated by Senate President Therese Murray as her top adviser on gambling, recently spent three days in Quebec on a fact-finding trip, meeting with representatives from the government-sanctioned gambling industry there, visiting two casinos, and talking with social services officials. Asked if the trip had prompted him to lean for or against Patrick’s plan, Rosenberg smiled, “I am in an information-gathering stage of my work.”

In Quebec, Rosenberg said, he plumbed the government’s efforts toward “security, integrity, transparency, the vendors, the hiring of employees,” and controlling addiction and mental health. He spoke with social services officials who oppose gambling, and business people. He called the trip “fascinating.”

Rosenberg said he had visited casinos in Montreal and Gatineau, and the central gambling regulation offices.

A Harvard Law School professor who studies Internet gambling said that, in talks with administration and industry officials, he’s been unable to determine the anti-online gambling clause had found its way into the bill.

“I’ve been talking to just about everybody I can talk to, and it is really interesting to get to the bottom of how this provision actually got into the bill,” said Charles Nesson, William Weld professor of law at Harvard Law. “You start out thinking that it’s the casino interests, because they’re really the guys that wrote the bill, and then it turns out that the principal guys that were at the hearing didn’t even know it was there.”

Patrick’s press secretary, Kyle Sullivan, called Nesson’s charge that lobbyists wrote the bill “outrageous and ill-informed.”

The criminalization effort also directly contradicts US Rep. Barney Frank’s effort to sanction online gambling. Frank, a Patrick political ally, has criticized the clause.

Parts of this entry are sourced from: PATRICK ONLINE GAMBLING BAN ILL-FATED, SENATOR TOURS CANADA’S INDUSTRY by Jim O’Sullivan.

“It is ironic for a bill to legalize gambling in Massachusetts to outlaw and severely punish gambling online. It simply makes no sense,” said Joe Brennan, Jr., Chairman of iMEGA. “How can an activity that is legal in 48 of the 50 states be a criminal act simply because it utilizes the Internet? If an American has the right to choose in the “real world,” shouldn’t they enjoy that very same right when they are online?”

The protection of digital civil rights and the ability of all Americans to exercise their freedoms with an expectation of privacy, in a safe and protected manner, is as important as it has been to protect the right of every American to engage in the freedom of speech. It is imperative that haphazard government regulation of Internet not create a slippery slope, whereby lawmaking encroaches on all aspects of Internet use, severely hampering innovation, commerce and information, as well as individual rights of personal privacy.

“Like many of the government’s forays into cyberspace, these efforts are well intended but yield the considerable practical problems of unintended consequences,” Brennan said. “In this case, Americans’ right to privacy and freedom of expression are imperiled by overzealous lawmaking.”

Today, readily-available commercial technology already exists to effectively address the social problems that opponents of Internet gambling seek to remedy, without abridging Americans’ rights. Electronic content filtering and financial vectoring are just some of the tools utilized by industry and individuals every day to ameliorate the social ills ostensibly serving to motivate the proponents of this provision. It is ironic, then, that the very groups that this provision is intended to protect — such as children and individuals with addictive disorders — would be made more vulnerable by its implementation.

Currently, iMEGA is engaged with the Department of Justice in litigation in Federal court over the constitutionality of the Unlawful Internet Gaming and Enforcement Act (UIGEA), a bill that banned most Internet gaming nationally. iMEGA believes the challenge to UIGEA will fundamentally shape the future of the Internet and determine whether Americans’ right to privacy will be protected online or dismissed.

Consequently, as this case makes its way through the legal system, we believe that it would be best for the Massachusetts Legislature to remove this provision from the legislation and at the very least wait until the courts have acted on the legality of online gambling.