Science & Tech Quote by Judy Biggert

“Some comfort” is doing a lot of political work here: it’s modest enough to sound responsible, but emotionally loaded enough to make dissent feel callous. Judy Biggert frames the Internet less as an information utility and more as a hunting ground, where “child predators” lurk as a default threat. That phrase is a rhetorical shortcut - vivid, frightening, and hard to argue against in public - and it quietly shifts the debate away from what the legislation actually regulates (filtering, monitoring, access restrictions) toward the kind of worst-case scenario that justifies almost any precaution.

The line also builds a moral transaction around money. By specifying “schools and libraries that receive federal dollars,” Biggert signals a familiar Washington bargain: take the funding, accept the strings. It’s a soft coercion dressed up as stewardship, implying that public institutions have forfeited some autonomy because they’re using subsidized Internet services. The subtext isn’t only “protect kids,” it’s “the federal government has standing to police your network because it’s paying the bill.”

Context matters: this language sits squarely in the late-1990s/early-2000s panic-and-policy cycle around online pornography and youth safety, where “predator” often served as the umbrella term for a wider set of anxieties about sexual content, anonymity, and loss of adult control. The intent is reassurance, but the mechanism is normalization: surveillance and restriction become the responsible default in public spaces, and “comfort” becomes the metric that outranks open access and privacy.