Internet Providers Block Child Pornography

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: CBS

(CBS) Last week, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown jointly called on California Internet service providers to "follow the lead of Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint by "removing child pornography from existing servers and blocking channels that disseminate the illegal material."

The two California leaders were following in the footsteps of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who a few days earlier announced an agreement with those three companies to remove child pornography housed on servers connected to their networks. Some civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, have expressed free-speech concerns about this agreement. I learned of the agreement shortly after landing in Washington, D.C., on my way to a board meeting of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The NCMEC will play a role by providing the ISPs with a list of Web addresses for sites with sexually explicit images of prepubescent children.

As an (unpaid) member of NCMEC's board of directors, I can't claim objectivity on this story - I strongly support its efforts to rid the world of child pornography. But despite the claims of supporters and critics of the agreement, I don't think it will have much positive impact toward eliminating child porn nor negative impact when it comes to free speech.
Child pornography is not protected under any free-speech guarantees. It has been illegal in the United States for more than a quarter of a century.

In some countries, they don't even call it "child porn"; they call it "child sexual abuse images." In addition to being illegal, it's hideous because real kids are victimized, first by being used to produce the material and again each time an image is circulated and viewed - and that often goes on for decades. Also, sexually explicit images of children are sometimes used by those to prey on children and break down their resistance to sexual contact. But just because child porn is illegal and immoral doesn't mean that it's OK to violate the First Amendment while trying to stamp it out. Some have expressed concern that the agreement Cuomo announced could be a form of "prior restraint" by blocking access to material without a judicial review. But no one is blocking anything. Instead, the ISPs involved are simply enforcing their own longstanding terms of service by agreeing not to host sites and newsgroups known to contain child porn.


Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/23/scitech/pcanswer/main4204461.shtml

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AT&T doesn't seem interested in adopting this draconian solution, however, and says that it is already actively blocking child pornography on usenet in conformance with its legal obligations. "AT&T has long-standing and established procedures for the removal of illegal child pornography from our servers, including servers that host newsgroups," an AT&T spokesperson told CNET. "Consistent with these procedures and federal and state statutes, when we receive a report of any illegal content being hosted on our servers and we have a good faith basis for concluding that the content is illegal, we will remove it."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080624-california-wants-more-isps-to-limit-usenet-access.html

Verizon and others are censoring more than child porn.

[truebrit71]

1. Shouldn't this be standard operating procedure anyway?

:shrug:

[WilyWondr]

2. Or they could just remove their news servers

from the internet. Which is what they did.

Now I no longer have access to the Time Warner/Roadrunner news servers.
I hope my bill goes down :sarcasm: for this reduction in service, but I am sure it won't.

I am sorry that anyone uses news servers for the exchange of child porn, but taking their entire news server system down is way overkill. Maybe they should just shut the entire internet off. Solve the spam email issues and the child porn issues and the downloading of copyrighted material issues all in one swoop.

People are not happy about this and I am one of them.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29210

I guess we are moving towards the Chinese internet model.

I wonder how long I will be able to access http://www.democraticunderground.com ?

[Trillo]

3. When you say "news servers"

do you mean USENET?

Okay, I read your article and yes, USENET was what that article referred to.

99.99% (my guess) of USENET groups were not pornography. In later years many of the groups did seem to get infested with spam, similar to email spam. It's not surprising that usage of USENET dropped off as a result.

[WilyWondr]

4. They came for the Usenet servers first,

And I didn’t speak up because I didn't use the Usenet servers;
And then they came for the Internet Relay Chat servers(port 6667), And I didn’t speak up because I didn't use Internet Relay Chat;
And then they came for the Mailservers(port 25 and 110), And I didn’t speak up because I didn’t use the Mailservers;
And then ... they came for Web(port 80) ... And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

[provis99]

5. Slippery slope arguments don't wash here at DU

[Feron]

6. Well AT&T just deleted non-offending groups.

Their only crime was having the wrong prefix. I have no problem with getting rid of kiddie porn groups, but basically ISPs are getting rid of entire chunks of their newsgroup service rather than just getting rid of the bad apples.

There was only like 88 offending groups out of the thousands banned.

If ISPs are willing to bend over to politicians, then don't think for a minute that it can't happen to the web or a service that you like and use. Right now I'm missing newsgroups that I frequented and had NOTHING to do with pornography, much less anything that could be abusive to children.

My only choice now is to purchase a subscription service, but undoubtedly it won't be long before those are targeted as well.

Never underestimate the 'for the children' tagline. It makes otherwise intelligent people stupid.