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New York ISP Held Liable For Newsgroup Content
jmoloug1 writes: "The New York State Attorney General has secured a guilty plea from an ISP for providing a newsgroup to its customers that peddled in child porn. While kiddie porn is a tough practice to defend, what is the next subject that an ISP will be held liable for due to the actions of its subscribers? Since the Attorney General is calling this a 'groundbreaking case' it's clear they intend to use this as a precedent. Do ISPs now have to monitor the content of newsgroups?" The question keeps coming up: how responsible is an ISP for content available through them?
But as for context, the orginal "raid" on Buffnet and another ISP (in Syracuse) happened just before elections a year or two ago. The Attorney General was up for reelection, and this was nothing but a set up to get him publicity. The way it worked was not that some J. Random User found the kiddie-porn, but someone from the AG's office posing as J. Random User setting them up. I'm not sure to what extent an ISP should be responding to every random caller on the line who is complaining about a Usenet article. If so, any ISP should start doing it to their competitors right now full time - that would tie up there customer service abilities!
Anyway, it didn't work and the AG lost the election. However, the new AG now had the case on his books and had to carry it through.
Let's hope Ashcroft does the same with the cases he inherited at the Federal level. I can think of one in particular ;-)
OK, this is about the 4th time you posted this. I'm sorry, Buffnet is my ISP and I've followed the case since it happened in 1998. Where did you get the idea that there were complaints about a specific newsgroup for months? Or did you make this up? I can't claim I know all the details, and I won't rely simply on Buffnet's take on it, but it apparently was a reelection ploy by Vacco timed just before the election. Secondly, I know all to well that Buffnet expires their news way too quickly, so there's no way someting objectionable would be there for months. If you are saying that someone objected to the entire group, well, there's plenty of other discussion here on why removing individual groups from your NNTP feed is (a) useless, and (b) leading down a slippery slope (remember, open source is UnAmerican according to Microsoft, better remove the comp.os.linux.* heirarchy!)
Beginning in 1998, the Attorney General's Office and the State Police began an investigation of a group that called itself "Pedo University," whose members used the newsgroup to possess and exchange child pornography. After a series of successful prosecutions that helped to dismantle "Pedo U," the investigation turned its focus from the users of the newsgroup to the ISPs that provided access to the newsgroup. One of these was Buffnet. When Buffnet was made aware of the content of the newsgroup, it took no action.
They plead guilty, does that mean they conceded that they broke the law or did they bargain for a lesser charge to avoid the hassle of a trial? There aren't enough details in this press release for me to judge for myself if the ISP was really guilty of 'looking the other way'. I'm left with the impression that BuffNet was asked to cooperate and refused.
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
possibly there would have existed a legal precedant as such, but with a more recent ruling to the opposite effect, there now exists a different precedent
I'm a concientious
the point is not that the isp deserved or didn't deserve this, because they got it, and legally that creates a precedant that is very harmful
I'm a concientious
"alt.binaries.erotica.children" is just a newsgroup name. Should ISPs remove a newsgroup from their servers just based on its name? Any newsgroup may or may not include so called "illegal" material (speech is never illegal in my opinion).
Not a single newsgroup include ONLY "illegal" material. On the other hand, ANY newsgroup may contain SOME "illegal" material. (Kiddie pr0n, by the way, is just the tip of the iceberg.. What about MP3s for example?? Or warez?? Or bomb-making guides??)
Is it ISP's job to decide what is illegal and what's not? No it's not.
The conclusion: newsgroups are going to get banned. ISPs can't afford to take the risk that somebody may post "illegal" material to their newsservers.
- If the AG had asked, BuffNET would have cut off the newsgroup.
Uh... that doesn't work either. Let me 'splain.When an NNTP gets a feed for all of the Newsgroups is subscribes to, it gets all of the messages that exist in any of those groups, including messages crossposted to other groups.
For example, a few years ago, I had a UUCP node and my upstream node would give me all of the "clean" heirarchys such as soc.*, rec.*, comp.* and so forth, but only hand-picked alt.* groups. The sysadmin refused to give me alt.drugs because he disapproved of it. He was doing me a huge favor giving me the UUCP feed, so I didn't make a fuss about it.
Anyway, I ended up subscribing to some groups that I could get, like soc.college that occaisionally had cross-postings from alt.drugs. When a discussion was cross-posted like this, it would end up getting into my feed. Of course, posts in this example should have had to do with recreational drugs and college social life, not just recreational drugs, so a lot of material was filtered out.
A year or so after I switched to a different feed, the newsgroup rec.drugs was finally approved amongst much controversy.
Anyway, if the ISP cuts off alt.porn.kids, then they still may end up with content from that group if (as many alt spammers do), there are cross-posts to similar groups such as alt.porn.very-young (these are not real groups AFAIK).
Followup-To: rec.birds
I miss the old days...
"No ISP should be displaying obviously morally-wrong material."
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
For whose values of "morally wrong"? And what values of "displaying"?
Has nobody realised yet that usenet doesn't work by what the servers do, but by what people post to them?
"(I could be wrong, there could be people who believe it is not wrong). "
I'm prepared to consider that it might not be. I don't know about `believe', that's my opinion and I reserve the right for it to differ. But it needs an occasional return to brass tacks to ask why kiddie-pr0n *is* wrong. And why it's illegal, and whether "wrong" & "illegal" are related in some way.
"ISPs who ban child pornography should be commended for fighting against obvious morally-wrong materials."
I think you'll find the vast majority do explicitly ban just about everything interesting you could ever want to do, in their T&Cs. And that's where this sort of thing should be left, between the user & the ISP.
I don't see how an ISP can be held liable for content. If you don't *like* content, that's your bad look-out. If you have a sociological problem, deal with it sociologically, don't sit there making up silly rules and having potentially devastating precedent-setting cases with all the force of the law behind it.
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Assuming that the details involved articles in the local news server spool, what exactly do you want the ISP to do?
....
Delete the offensive articles? No problem.
Delete the offensive newsgroup? Big problem. Do you delete the entire comp.os.linux.* hierarchy because some idiot spams it with a single explicit picture? A dozen? What about the soc.motss.* hierachy? The alt.pagan.* groups? The soc.catholicism.* groups?
Oh, you said that this is different because it was (at a guess) alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen.hardcore? Have you actually looked at the content of that newsgroup? I have, before complaining to *my* ISP, and determined that there was literally nothing there (at the times I checked) which wasn't cross-posted to every other abpe newsgroup. Damn spammers! But since I didn't see anything other than "hot 14-year-old babes" who were clearly old enough to have 14-year-old daughters I didn't see any reason to contact my ISP.
On the one hand, there's nothing "there" so I shouldn't mind if the newsgroup is deleted. On the other hand, I've seen far too many people who don't understand why gay or (legitimate) pre-teen sexuality or wiccan/pagan or illicit drug information or any of a dozen other topics shouldn't also be banned. After all, "in this state sodomy is illegal (and it's against God's law everywhere)!" and "in this state the age of consent is 18 so no teenagers are fucking other teenagers and that's why the schools give absolutely no sex education lessons" and "drugs are illegal so nobody is taking them and therefore nobody needs to know how to recognize their friends are overdosing" or
Of course the ISP should remove specific articles containing obscene material. (Arguably, it should have forged a "cancel" message for it, so it would have been deleted from other servers as well.) The ISP should have probably had somebody monitor the newsgroup for a while after the complaint.
But it does not follow that it should have immediately deleted that newsgroup, or entire hierarchy, or entire fscking news server, because some of the articles were obscene.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
As others have (thank God) pointed out, a guilty plea does not a precedent make. Furthermore, attorneys general do not make "decisions" of any more far-reaching weight than your decision to sue your neighbor for running over your dog. All they do is decide which cases to attempt to prosecute. The courts still decide who wins (not to mention who even gets to trial).
From reading the cited materials, it looks like the ISP rolled over because they took stock and realized that they failed to reply when notified of the presence of the objectionable materials, as required under the CDA, which - like it or not - is the law of the land.
I think (and hope) the case would have turned out very differently if the police had just shown up one day unannounced - or otherwise without following appropriate and published procedure - and attempted to bust them for materials which unbenownst to the ISP had passed through their network. This is exactly what happened in New York State a couple of years ago, and as you'll recall, it all turned out fine in the end.
For what it's worth, I wrote an angry letter to the tone-deaf demagogue attorney general (Dennis Vacco) behind the 1998 action, and his subsequent re-election bid failed. According to elementary cause-and-effect theory(*) the stirring moral resonance and excellent argumentation of my letter caused him to lose faith in himself and stumble in the polls (granted, the only outward sign was that he had an aide write me back with a bunch of press clippings about what a great guy he is, but I can read the writing on the wall), so you all owe me a debt of gratitude. If this current business turns sour, you can bet I'll dust off my fountain pen again and it'll all get taken care of.
- - -
* Elementary cause-and-effect theory states that if I take a certain action with the intent of causing an outcome, and that outcome is later observed, then I was 100% responsible for that outcome. Unless it turns out to be a bad outcome, in which case it was all a coincidence.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
2^32 generates an overfflow error. Therefore you get spanked.
I guess that's what you get for using an ancient 32 bit system these days.
This ISP decided to take a plea bargain. They were found guilty because they admitted as a part of the plea that they were guilty. This sets no legal precident. A finding of guilt by a jury or a judge would have set some precident, even though a very narrow one. IMHO, had they taken this to trial no reasonable judge or jury would have found them guilty (assuming they had a decent experienced trial attorney).
I don't care about teens staring at teens, but an old geezer looking at a teen makes me nervous!
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Child porn is almost universally hated.
I agree. Microsoft is almost universally hated. We should ban *.microsoft.* newsgroups also.
Instead, the ISP should have asked the attorney general for identifying information other than the newsgroup present on offending messages that they could have used to remove those postings. If that information was forged at their site, they should have referred the attorney general to the upstream site and stopped the problem there. This is no different from spam or other USENET abuse, and there have been mechanisms for dealing with it since the beginning.
Now, there are two possibilities. Either the ISP was incompetent and didn't know what it should really do to stop this. Or the ISP was receiving forged headers from their upstream site and the attorney general interpreted the ISP's referral to the upstream site as inaction. It's hard to tell from the press release. I would, however, blame the ISP for not standing by its convictions: once it decided that it wasn't going to act on the request as made by the attorney general, it should not have settled later without going to court.
Of course, a more general question is whether we should shut down established communications channels because they can be used in this way. For example, should we consider shutting down the US post office because it can be used to mail offending material? Should we shut it down because header information can be forged with just a pen? Should we shut it down because it provides untraceable anonymous distribution of gigabytes of data for a few cents per giant packet? Should we require the post office to open every letter and inspect it for offensive content? I think there are still a few countries that do that sort of thing...
No. The ISP was in trouble for continuing to host kiddie porn on local NNTP servers after being informed that it was doing so. The equivalent would be the phone company letting a terrorist keep an office in its building after being informed that the terrorist was launching attacks from it.
Oh come on.. you know that the ISP's are TOTALLY to blame for this. Without those EVIL ISP's, there wouldn't be any kiddy porn on the internet. As we all know, there was NO SUCH THING as kiddy porn before the internet introduced it to the world. The ISP's are TOTALLY to blame for everything, so THAT'S who we should be punishing.
Sure, there are child pornographers all over the place that are producing this trash and they're the ones that are actually posting it, but its the ISP's that make it possible, so the ISP's are COMPLETELY to blame.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
PS. This message is an example of sarcasm.
Play with my webcams and lights here
This isn't a question of having the ISP monitor its newsgroups continuously to make sure that nothing illegal is happening, this is a question of the ISP not taking any action when NOTIFIED of said illegal actions. In the story, you can read that the ISP was notified by a customer AND law enforcement that these illegal pictures were being posted, and they did nothing.
I think that if an ISP is notified of something like this, they should check it out, and if there really is something illegal going on, they should remove it. That's different than requiring ISPs to constantly scan their own newsgroups for illegal content.
Basically, if the ISP doesn't know about it, they can't be responsible for it, but if they are informed, they must do something about it. Seems pretty fair to me.
----
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Child pornography, no matter who you talk to, is deplorable. We're talking common sense here: if you're an ISP don't let your servers have illegal stuff if you can help it. Period.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
"Ok, children, gather 'round. Old Tom's gonna tell you about some old school technology. Back before the web, we had something called USENET..."
"USENET?! Isn't that nothing but spam?"
"Well, maybe so these days, Junior. But once upon a time, it was the way to get information around. And in fact, one of its main principles is coming back around these days. See, USENET is basically a peer-to-peer network.
"If I wanted to post to, say, alt.sex.goats, why, I write up my post and send it off to my local NNTP server, asking the server `Please post this to alt.sex.goats.' Now, the server has no way of knowing whether my post has anything to do with goat sex or not. That's why USENET fell to the spammers...damn Cantor and Siegal...green cards...
"Sorry. Mind starts to wander when you're actually old enough to remember USENET. Anyway, the NNTP server holds on to the message and makes it available for anyone else who uses that server and reads alt.sex.goats. And - now here's the clever part - other NNTP servers connect to this one every so often, and say `Give me all your new messages.' Then my post gets copied to the inquiring server. Then other servers will ask that one for new messages, and my post will get propaged around the world!
"(Way, way back when, some of that propagation happened over dial-up lines, via the UUCP. But that's really old school tech.)
"There's no central server, no central authority, and no one owns or controls a newsgroup. (Yeah, there's moderation, but that's more of a convention that a real technical feature.) All that NNTP servers know about messages are what the author provides, including the newsgroups name. And there's cancelation messages that other people can send out to say `ignore that message', but they're inherently no more authoritative than the messages themselves.
"All right, you whippersnappers, that's enough. If you want more, use that new-fangled web thing and go search Google or something."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I think ISPs should be held liable when they ignore and do not do anything to stop actions from their users. If their users use the ISPs newsgroups to send child porn around and the ISP does nothing to stop it then the ISP should be held liable. I think the same should go for things like stopping spam. UU.net is an ISP that most spam bounces thru as UU.net refuses to do anything to their mailservers to stop the anonymous bounces of spam.
That's true, but normal porn is copyrighted. Neither software nor porn copyright holders are in the habit of authorizing the posting of their IP to usenet.
ISPs generally decide what newsgroups will be served by their NNTP servers. If they *knew* that they were serving a newsgroup called "alt.porn.child.fourteen", and did nothing, they are responsible. This is different than other ISP things, because they're not just carrying all content, they're deliberately choosing to provide certain newsgroups.
Now, I didn't have time to READ the article, so if this isn't the case, feel free to flame.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Why not just enforce current laws, rather than making up non-sensical new ones specific to the internet. Go after the users who are breaking the law; the ISP's only involvement should be to assist the law enforcement authorities in their investigations (e.g. by supplying whatever records are necessary, once a search warrent has been issued).
I think if cyberspace were thought of as a physical location then most (if not all) existing laws would naturally apply as intended.
I got a phone call which contained pornographic
content (or illegal threat, etc.) so I guess
I can sue the phone company for allowing that
content to be transmitted over their lines, right?
According to the napster decision, Its up to the company to monitor all uses of its product, and
stop the illegal ones.
Since the laws against duels passed during the 19th century made an individual's appeal of last resort words, rather than the non-verbal fair contest of the cultures ancestral to Common Law, it is incumbant on those who confiscated the monopoly on force to recognize that they are transforming words from, primarily, a mode of communication into, primarily, a means of manipulation. That is the nature of appeals of last resort.
I don't think you solve the problem with feudalism by extending its errors to confiscating the power of words as well as weapons from the commons, with or without a parliament (including the Icelandic Althing circa 1000AD). The solution I have proposed is closer to a pre-feudal system of insurance enhanced up by actuarial technologies that clarify the economic relationship between protector and protected. It might even be called "warrior insurance" as distinct from the gangster "insurance" of feudalism and its parliamentary spawn.
Seastead this.
This would be a bit difficult to enact as law actually. In general, new laws have to have at least the minimum burden of factual truth. Crack cocaine would have to be confirmed as a lethal agent. Unfortunately, the most toxic drugs around seems to be cigarettes and alcohol. So, until someone actually proves that these illegal substances kill...
When someone sends illegal material through the U.S. Mail, they don't arrest the people in the Post Office.
Well, no, but I doubt that the US Postal Service would have willingly continued to deliver mail like that had it recieved a request from a customer or a law enforcement agency to discontinue... as a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that it's against USPS regulations to knowingly deliver illegal material.
USENET newsgroups aen't web sites, which exist on a single server cluster and which are responsible if they fail to pull down a site containing illicit stuff (kiddie porn, warez, whatever) once they know it's there. Newsgroups aren't even chatrooms, hosted on a particular chat server. USENET newsgroups are decentralized, kind of like mailing lists in that someone posts a message at one server and it propagates to all other servers that carry that newsgroup. There are roughly 70,000 newsgroups, so if an ISP fails to carry one, material will just be posted to another in its place. It's absolutely impossible to stamp out illicit material on USENET, whether a news provider censors groups based on name or not. For example, guess what the group alt.binaries.aoi carries? Pictures which are mostly by recognized artists and hence probably legal in much of the U.S., but which are probably illegal in some U.S. jurisdictions and elsewhere because, by artists or not, the pictures are of nude underage females. Now, how is your average news admin going to a) know what's posted to this group, and b) know whether the images are legal in his locale or not--as I said, they're of nude minors, so are illegal in some places, yet in others they're sold in Barnes and Noble. Personally my local B&N has books like this,David Hamilton's *Age of Innocence* and Jock Sturges' *Radiant Identities*, and Amazon.com sells them--yet, Jock Sturges had his prints confiscated at one point and there was an attempt to charge him with production of child porn, and Hamilton's work has been characterized as child porn in some Sun Belt states (much as the great German film "The Tin Drum" was declared child pornography in Oklahoma). So, how is a news admin supposed to know whether to censor the group? What if the server is located in a place where such images are legal, but has customers in places where the images are illicit?
The answer of course is that news admins shouldn't have to worry about it and should just censor nothing, being common carriers as they are. They aren't responsible for censoring illicit material, any more than the phone company is responsible for censoring people plotting crimes or seducing young boys/girls. It's just not their job, or their fault. If presented with a court order to trace a user who's posting illicit crap, fine. But to eliminate a newsgroup based on its name or part of its traffic--bullshit. This one case isn't telling. if the news provider had fought, I'm sure the Court would have recognized it as a common carrier not responsible for content.
Even in groups where more questionable, sometimes downright heinous, material is posted, there is still often a wonderful flow of constructive discussion. As an example, the group mentioned in this articleisn't actually called "Pedo University"--if you know anything about USENET, you know this isn't a proper name--is alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , and it's full of text discussions as well as binaries which I wouldn't ever risk downloading. But I have downloaded the text, as there's nothing illegal about that, and I've found the discussions to be amusing, entertaining, and sometimes even educational.
See, when you connect to a newsgroup, assuming your news server carries it, you retrive the header data for each article--subject line, line count, etc. Then you can choose which articles to download, based on that information. Now, I started writing a novel some time ago in which one of the characters frequents the electronic underground, and one of the places I went for research was the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen, because it was well-publicized when the then-Attorney General of NY Dennis Vacco led a bust which included some of the people who posted binaries to that group. Some of those people were members of a fictional, cyberspace-only "club" called "Pedo University," which in reality is a bunch of people who post mostly text to one another in that newsgroup, interacting as the fictional faculty members of an imaginary girls' school. They have nicknames like "Dean Groucho" (who started the imaginary institution, and "hired" the other "faculty" members from among people who consistently post interesting text commentary for a substantial length of time), "Wildman, Professor of Genealogy," "Herod, Professor of Classical Studies," "Frank McCoy, Director, Family Counseling Office," "Dr. Stein, Dan of Anatomical Studies and Pre-Admission Physicals," "Godfather, U.S. Customs Liason," and "Pall Mall, Director of Psychotropic Plant Research." Ony 1 member of this P.U. group has ever been arrested for child pornography, as far as I know; I believe his handle was Pancho. Some members openly use their own names and such, as they aren't into illicit pictures at all--Frank McCoy, for example, writes stories about sex with young girls, which he's free to do under the First Amendment, and possesses/posts nothing ilegal, so uses his own name and says the police are welcome to drop by and look at his PC.
Now, I went to the newsgroup after the original Vacco bust--the guilty plea by this ISP is a result of this bust 2 years ago--to read text posts to try to learn how to write the character I had planned. Well, what I found was a vibrant group of very funny people with a running joke about being faculty members at an imaginary girls' school. From what I read, there's a lot of illegal binary material posted to the group, though I haven't seen any of it--text only, since I have no desire to be arrested and since I'm not sexually attracted to anyone under about 16 or so, like most heterosexual males. Some of the material posted even offends many members of PU--like a series of an 8 year old being raped by her father, who thankfully was arrested recently after censored pics of the girl were shown on *America's Most Wanted*. The members of PU all cheered when that guy was arrested, and rightfully so. It's just a bunch of people with an unfortunate sexual orientation and a damn fine sense of humor, not a bunch of child molesters, who post text on the group, not molest children. Though I came with the intention of reading text for a few weeks for character research, I liked the people and their humour so much that I still read the group and occasionally talk with the group's regulars.
So, how is the group, in and of itself, illegal? It isn't. Only some of the binaries are illegal; the text isn't. If you want to advocate that ISPs and news servers block binaries in these groups once the authorities give them the message IDs, fine. That puts the burden on law enforcement, where it belongs--and it's easy enough for a news admin to cancel/delete a message by mesage ID. But for law enforcement to try to block entire groups based on name and a portion of content puts an undue burden on both the ISP and free speech. For one thing, it's clearly prior restraint. Niow, an ISP has every right to voluntarily choose not to carry certain groups, and many do. Many others carry all groups, advocating free speech. To strong-arm them into erasing certain groups from their group files is unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, period. As I said, LEA should give news providers lists of illicit message IDs, if they want to censor USENET. That would be constitutional. But what they have done now, in this case, isn't, and I wish the ISP had had more backbone. We need to start fighting for our rights, not buckling under because it's the expediant thing to do. While the right to make-believe about an imaginary Pedo University may not be a right you like, it's still free speech, and shouldn't be put under prior restraint. The police are trammeling rights all over the place, unfairly jailing people like the now-cleared suspect in the Gallaudet murder case, publicly pointing the finger at innocent people like Richard Jewell, trying 10 year olds as adults to appease a lynch-mob-like public witchhunt spurred on by the ratings-whoring media, and murdering innocent civilians like at Ruby Ridge. We need to draw a line, and hold them accountable. We need to start saying, I may not like that, but it's a right and should not be abridged. I hope we all start dropping your own type of attitude, and cring about principles over shortsighted rhetoric.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It's time to hold the ISPs accountable!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
calling this a 'groundbreaking case' it's clear they intend to use this as a precedent
This is not a precedent in any way -- the ISP pled guilty under a plea bargain. It would only be a precedent if this was a judgement based on evidence presented to the court -- the only thing the court saw in this case was motions and a guilty plea.
I can only assume that the NYSAG used some nice arm-twisting threats with a sentencing recommendation in exchange for not burying this poor ISP with 10 years worth of bankruptcy-inducing legal procedures. If the ISP were larger, I'm sure they'd have fewer qualms about defending their common carrier status...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I mean, have you *seen* the band Kittie? They be some HOT bitches in that band. Even their songs are...well...go look up some of the lyrics, because it's hard to understand what they're saying when they yell at the top of their lungs phrases like "YOU CAN EAT A DICK!!!!" But, I digres...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Since emancipation is a legal status wouldn't you have to have the emancipation files for every one of the underage models on file? How many kids are emancipated? I don't think that this is a loophole at all really.....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Newsgroups are not like websites. They can't peddle a damn thing.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Perverts watching kiddie pr0n don't directly produce injury to the child in question, but the theory is, that the audience "feeds" the activity.
Well I think that free speech (or the 1st amandment as you Americans call the same thing) should be unconditional. No exceptions. I don't like kiddie pornography, but trading those pictures is pretty much a victimless crime, and for the sake of free speech, we must accept it, because if we make ANY limitations to free speech, we're ultimately no better than authorities of communistic China, for example.
Do you know for a fact that alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children actually has child porn on it? The only way to know would be to download stuff to find out. If you haven't, then you're advocating banning the group without even knowing whether there's child porn or if it's one big massive flame-fest and spam-trap.
If, on the other hand, you are arguing from personal knowledge, please turn yourself in.
The difference is that NNTP stores the data on the ISP's server. If I give you a TCP/IP connection that allows you to download kiddie porn off a remote server, that's one thing; if I knowingly store kiddie porn on one of my computers for you to download, that's another.
"No ISP should be displaying obviously morally-wrong material."
Perhaps it's not the material that is wrong but the actions (i.e. photographing naked children) that led up to the production of the material.
If you think that viewing material==pictures, text, etc. is wrong, then you're implying that certain types of thoughts are wrong. I don't think I need to go into the matter of how dangerous this idea is...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
None of these articles indicate what newsgroup is being discussed.
If it was content being posted to comp.os.linux.advocacy I think it would be questionable for the ISP to know anything about this.
However if it was alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children or any of the other usenet groups which obviously contain child pornography, the ISP is responsible for not doing something about it.
It had nothing to do with the name of the newsgroup. The article itself states that Buffnet admitedly KNEW about the child pornography and failed to act upon that information. Both customers AND law agencies informed BuffNet of the existance of child porn on certain news groups and they did nothing. that to me IS negligence and deserves legal action.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes in the above post.
A bit better analogy: if you give rent a car to someone and he drives it to an illegal arms dealer and gets a machine gun, that's one thing. If an illegal arms dealer sells machine guns with your knowledge out of a storefront you loan to him, that's another.
Addendum: I am plainly a moron. The two cases I contrast are in fact the same case. One day I will learn how to read.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
British Columbia seems to think that kiddie pr0n should be constitutionally protected.
A thousand mistaken goatse.cx redirects on their heads.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Hold the ISP responsible? bah! then i think we should shut down the f_cking USP United States Postal Service for all you tech llamas. Just because we have perverts transmiting kiddy p0rn across the lines doesn't mean you hold the ISP responsible.. anyone who thinks so is dumb and has no idea of how to do security.. the only thing the ISP could have done is logged the IP's, which obviously did not, to pass the buck. I think that these charges is just a bunch of crap and i'm tired of the stupid people taking away our rights and belittling the internet because of a few people dumber then they. IMMHO, -R33t
In an unprecedented move, Conectiv pled guilty for providing access to electric current used to power Napster servers.
"In a law of physics knowing no geopolitical bundaries, electricity providers are morally and socially obligated to patrol their power grid for inappropriate usage.
The songs were those recorded by Metallica, which clearly goes beyond any policy for acceptable use.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
You should also weigh whether or not the confessor has something to gain from claiming to be guilty. When child porn is more desirable than regular porn, as is the case when posting to those newsgroups, then the poster can get trades easier and/or more hits for whatever site they are advertising for. AFAIK, just calling something child porn is not illegal.
You are saying if I rob a bank and then go to the FBI and say "I robbed that bank", that the FBI should just ignore me because they didn't see it happen.
Its more like saying the FBI should check to make sure the guy confessing isn't just someone who is mentally unstable and looking to be famous. Its not a perfect analogy, but its really hard to imagine a situation where you can profit from confessing to a bank robbery.
If it was on the servers of the ISP's, then maybe they should be liable. If they simply had users that were getting their kicks using the service, then there is a problem.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Sexual fantasies are all about fiction. If some perverted person posts a story in alt.sex.stories entitled "How I Raped My Neighbor's Great-Grandmother", we could conclude that this person had very strange and disturbing tastes, far outside our social norms. We would not, however, take it as a factual account, without some other evidence.
That's what a lot of child porn viewing is about - a fantasy. Yes, a strange and disturbing fantasy, and I would gladly break the neck of anyone who tried to force such a fantasy onto any young kid I know. But so long as it remains in their brain, their fantasies are none of my business.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Look, people, The ISP was TOLD that a PARTICULAR newsgroup was peddling child pornography. They ignored it. Bad ISP, bad. The legal precedent here is that ISP's are responsible for removing content (IE offending newsgroups) from its servers if informed that it is illegal.
Sounds kinda like common sense to me
hmmmm?
Is a crack dealer really responsible if someone overdoses and dies on the stuff they sell a person?
In some places, yes. I read recently that California is trying to pass laws to make the sale of crack prosecutable as attempted murder, and if the D.A. can prove that the stuff a dealer sold someone resulted in death, it is prosecuted as first-degree murder. I don't know if the law actually passed however.
Seg
segfaulteq@home.com
...this indirect blame that really scares me. Other people getting in trouble for other's wrong doings just isn't fair.
-Posting anonymously to avoid trolls. (seriously)
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Check out my blackbox styles
You know of some software than can accurately (say... 99.9%) judge whether a picture is porn of a young-looking 18 year old, or porn of a 17 year old? Last I knew, software couldn't do this... or even accurately distinguish between 10 year old porn and 25 year old porn.
Yes, it'd be nice to put a lid on things, but pretending a problem is easier than it is won't do anything, other than unnecessarily give a lot of ISP's headaches (and worse) that they don't deserve.
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The question keeps coming up: how responsible is an ISP for content available through them?
That is indeed an interesting question. One might say that they have a responsibility to AT LEAST get a peer review service into place. What is meant by that is that they have an email address where, upon users finding illegal material on a newsgroup, that the users write this email addy and someone at the company checks it out. Someone might say that this would be a "Good Thing," and I would to, except for a few problems...
For starters: what is the ISP supposed to do if it finds a news group FULL of illegal contact... they monitor it for a while and it never chances.. illegal contact all the time. The easy answer would be to remove it.
For something a little harder: It finds a news group that has been "Taken Over" by an illegal internet ring. Example: Say there is a Disney(c) newsgroup and it was unmoderated. Say that a group of child pornographers who start posting their content on this newsgroup, bothering the 50% of the people who use the newsgroup for its intention. So, 50% of the messages are from an illegal group, the other 50% are from users (legit users) of the group... what then? How would you deal with that? Close down that group too?
Next example: How about we use our previous example.. say there is a Disney(c) newsgroup that has 10-15 messages that contain illegal content out of 500 messages that are "legit newsgroup messages".. how would you deal with that then? Get rid of the group too?
I do believe that the ISP's should not knowingly carry newsgroups whose intention is to disseminate illegal content, but the questions are "What do they do??" and "How much illegal content is too much?" If X messages that are illegal can be enough to shut down a newsgroup we could have people trying to shutdown specific newsgroups by doing this. Of course I am ignoring the term "Illegal Content" -- what is illegal in one country, is legal in another, etc etc but please forgive that...
I used to work for an ISP as a Network Admin. I was told by our legal representation that ISPs are views legally as content providers(eg. Hustler Magazine publishing) and not as distributors (magazine stand). IANAL but this is what a lawyer with a lot of technical expertise told me. Of course, it makes no sense but that is where the precedent is and, from this article, appears to still be. Anyone have the money to mount a challenge?
What is next? telephone companies being held responsible for terrorists organising attacks over the phone?
The NYS AG's office may wish to use it as a precedent, but I assume they are a bit more legally savvy than the writer of the Slashdot blurb.
Since the defendants * plead guilty * no arguments were heard, no judicial decision was made and * no precedent was set.*
Sheesh.
kfg
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Perhaps because this matter wasn't really settled in a court--it was a plea bargain, which means it was never officially measured against the applicable laws. The ISP, in all likelihood, just decided that it was not worth its while to put up a strong defense, and copped a plea. They weren't tried, weren't found guilty, and no precedent has been set. Really, this is more about overzealous prosecutors than anything--and maybe not even that; if the cops really did contact the ISP previously, as the article indicates, and they didn't drop known porn channels, then taking them to court may have been the only recourse. Even companies exempted from liability for third-party content are responsible for complying with laws once they have been notified.
No relation to Happy Monkey
And that bit about the government using gang rape as a threat? Spurious reasoning: the corrolary to Occam's Razor says "Never suspect maliciousness where incompetence could be at fault."
The reason that guards let gang rape go on in prisons is not malicious neglect, its just that there's too many horny, malicious characters around for them to control. Remember, a prison guard is always heavily outnumbered, and a shiv can kill you as dead as a gun, if you piss off too many people. They just can't stop the rapes without fearing for their own safety. Irresponsiblity on the behalf of the state, yes. (in theory, they could hire enough guards to provide safety to both the guards and prisoners. In practice, its prohibitively expensive) Maliciousness, no.
Never think of the opposition as unneccessarily malicious. One in maybe 20 times, you will be right; they are being rat bastards. But usually they are just being lazy/overstretched/overworked/misunderstood/misgui ded/just aren't good enough for the job. Take your pick of any one of those. I'd rather be right 95% by giving the opponent the benefit of the doubt than right in in dealing with that dangerous 5%. The other approach might be safer, but it's not as kind....
Anyways, thanks for the reply. I think about those ideas of yours, though I might not agree.
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
Criminally liable? Maybe, maybe not. That depends upon whether the landlord was either a conspirator or an accessory.
HOWEVER, the house can then be declared a Public Nuisance. If the landlord knew of the violation, or reasonably could have been expected to know of it, and failed to stop it, he then forfeits the house.
That's the Colorado law. In some states, the forfeiture law is Strict Liability, which means the house is forfeitable regardless of what the landlord did or didn't know, or how hard he tried to prevent crimes from taking place on the property. The law only cares that the house was a Public Nuisance.
What you imply is that if the speech is not popular, than it isn't protected?
You know it isn't a good idea. After all, who's to decide what's "not popular?" I'll tell you that more than half of the countries in the world would allow a 15 year old to get married. In America, it's a crime.
If child porn groups are prosecuted successfully, than the next will be warez groups, and then the mp3's. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's supposed to be ruled against. I don't see much difference between carrying illegal copies of mp3's and child porn, they are all illegal.
PS: Occam's (or Ockham's) Razor is "plurality should not be posited without necessity." Your supposed quote was a bastardization of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" by Robert Heinlein (Logic of Empire, 1941), the primary use of which has historically been either by or in defense of those engaged in some sort of malfeasance of office. My, less abusable, quote, with which I always rejoin is Bowery's Razor: "Never attribute to sheer stupidity that which can be adequately explained by unenlightened self-interest." Live by it.
Seastead this.
Yeah, the prison system sucks. Fortunately, there are people out there like you and others like the prison ministry programs working to make it better.
Oh, and thanks for the correction on the use of Hanlon's Razor. I knew that I was somewhere off from the correct form of the quote!
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
If I've made the world a better place, it isn't because I, for a time, chose a political route to do so. What my successes in politics have shown me is that it is time for Mr. Smith to go home and work around the system with technical innovation, rather than within it through political action.
Seastead this.
Funny thing but a phone call is not "posted" or recorded or archived in the same fashion that newsgroups are therefore there's a major difference between the two. I can subscribe to a newsgroup and "download" all of the posted messages - you can't do that with the phone system. I also can't print out a phone call or further distribute a phone call in the same easy manner in which you could with a posting to a newsgroup.
Regards, Peter J Strifas
No, but if your hit squad sets up a call center that has business arrangements with AT&T, and regularly uses AT&T to conduct essential operations in your murder-for-hire scheme, then I would expect AT&T to take a close look at how much aid it gives you--to say nothing of the guy who owns the land and building you are using.
The concept of prosecuting those who provide tools of empowerment to people known to use those tools to abuse others is basic to most Western culture. It is one thing to sell guns to Boy Scouts; it is another to sell guns to Mafia hitmen. It is one thing to rent apartments in which someone on one occasion commits a crime; it is another to rent apartments in which people regularly commit crimes. US society does not tolerate a known public menace; that would be considered a disgrace.
ISPs might not be liable for someone occasionally shuttling illegal material through their system, but ISPs certainly should be liable when someone sets up a regular meeting place using their equipment.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
The NY prosecuters and many people here seem to be thinking of a newsgroup as if it was like a physical meeting room or a dead-tree magazine which can be closed or banned.
A "newsgroup" is really just a keyword attached to a post by its originator. When you read a newsgroup it's like doing a search on that keyword. If ISPs can be prosecuted for allowing you to read messages labeled "alt.erotica.whatever" then it it is a small step to prosecute search engines for allowing you to search for pages containing the words "sex" and "teen".
"Sorry, you are not allowed to search for that - try a different search string"
Or is Netscape 6.01 refusing to render it? I would love to hear about what you did try to do...that's more than a lot of people ever do.
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
I'd like to know just what it is that you find so offensive about this.
Honestly, seek counseling, or learn to spell. Or both.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
The cases both appear to hinge on the same thing. Both ISP's were informed that illegal, or at least material of dubious legality was on servers belonging to them, and they did not act with due speed to remove this material.
I'm a sysadmin (but one with little experience of news) and not a law expert, and I know that removing content from a single newserver would be somewhat pointless, but it still should have done so. I think other issues that this brings up are important though, such as :-
Why should having any digital content, including porn with kids, make the holder pay for it? Shouldn't instead be the persons who kidnap, lure and film these kids be the ones to be stopped?
This reminds me a case that happened in AOL a few years back. A portuguese person had his account with AOL suspended because of "raising controversial issues" in the forums. He was posting messages informing about the situation of the (then) occupied by Indonesia territory of East Timor.
This is a case where AOL has total control, or "responsibility", over the "content".
Porn with kids is the excuse for those in power, mainly governments and corporations, to increase control over the internet,
i.e what you can see, exchange, and talk in it...
As I understand it, the way that ISPs generally offer newsgroup access is to store the contents of the newsgroup on the ISP machines. Different ISPs have different amounts of available space; that's the reason they limit how many articles they carry at a time for each newsgroup. This is different from Web access, because the Web sites you access may not be (and probably aren't) stored on your ISP's equipment.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Wrong. This non-precedent, narrowly construed, merely says you may not knowingly store illegal content on your own NNTP server.
In this case, the ISP was informed that a particular newsgroup was carrying kiddie porn, and months later was still storing the group on its NNTP servers. Prohibiting ISPs from knowingly storing illegal pictures on their own servers doesn't seem to be a big deal to me.
I am sure of that too, but how would they know they are delivering illegal content (the USPS that is) -- by going through each letter? I believe I will let Buffnet speak for itself... -- found at http://www.buffnet.net/ag/
Does anybody know which newsgroup this was? Seems like any common sense admin would refuse to carry alt.sex.child.binary.pictures if that is what it is. However if it was alt.child.pictures, it is kinda ambigous.
While I think the idea of banning any information is ultimately futile, the ISP, knowing it could be held responsible, should've discontinued carrying the newsgroup, and the offending content, on its own servers. Let those pedophiles get their downloads from servers outside the US, or over Freenet, where the government would find tracking the source of that content impossible.
If you take a very liberal interpretation of the attorney general decision, it makes operation of an ISP or providing any type of internet access illegal in NYS. Based on this decision, all anyone has to do to get a newsgroup banned in nys is anonymous dump anything resembling kiddie porn into the group. I can see the usenet hackers/crackers having a field day targetting different groups every few days and getting them banned until there are no groups left. I know that people can access kiddie porn the net, based on a strict interpretation of the AG's case, that meand all internet access is illegal as everyone knows the internet can be used to access kiddie porn. There's no reliable way to stop it. Newsgroup names do not necessarily have anything to do with the newsgroup content. Its been about 15 years or so, but the group alt.pedophelia (IIRC) was created by people who wanted a place to talk about how to handle/prevent/stop kiddie porn on the net. The religeous right got ahold of the name and came down real hard on the group. I always wondered why they wanted to prevent people from stopping kiddie porn. I used to run an ISP in upstate NY and followed the original dreamscape/buffnet case closely. The NYS AG basically said that a newsgroup was illegal in nys as it was found to contain kiddie porn. Any newsgroup can contain kiddie porn, all you need is a determined enough poster and unsecure news servers (of which there seem to be many).
The newsgroup in question was alt.binaries.pictures.pre-teen, not an information service specific to the service provided by buffnet or dreamscape. Common carrier for ISPs loses.
I wonder what the response from Supernews and Earthlink (or any other ISP providing access to alt.*) will be.
I think that it basically comes down to oversight - who monitors the LEAs. We can't afford to trust them - they're only normal people after all.
I know it's an old chestnut but what about what the US Secret Service did to Steve Jackson Games?
Is it OK to for a LEA to (nearly) put a company out of besiness and never say sorry? No charges were ever brought. And it's far from isolated or peculiar to the US.
It's the difficult cases that ought to instruct the lawmaking. A lot of the laws where 'take it down because we say so' applies end up both overused and oppresive.
On their website Buffnet indicate that they copped a plea because it was too much time and money to fight, even though their previous relations with the police were good - are they going to be cooperative in future or require warrants whenever applicable? And what about the other ISPs in the jurisdiction with news servers, were ANY of them 'required' to take the same action as Buffnet, and if not why not?
As I said I don't know where, or how, to draw the line but I think we need to look at what could happen.
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
If you *are* a whippersnapper, and want to understand Usenet, the Green Card reference above and the origin of the term "Spam" as applied to the internet, your Google search should probably use the correct spelling: Canter and Siegel.
Stopping spammers is easy.
You kill the fuckers accounts and if their ISP doesn't co-operate you have their upstream and downstream providers pull their access.
I've had loads of spammers accounts cancelled, the groups I frequent only get the occasional spam now. The spammers know that their accounts will be pulled within minutes of the spam hitting the groups and the ISPs know that their newsfeeds will be pulled if they don't kill the accounts.
Gimme Gimme Gimme - Karma!
ISP today, and then what mind controll tommrow. Think about first they force all the ISP to montior there content, but that isn't enough. Next they will limit the content on TV, radio, and media. And BAM before you know it we'll all be wearing collas around our necks that montior what we think. I mean you'll be walking down the street and see a hot chick or guy and ZAP 10,00 volts will be given to you by some robot out in space for having illegal thoughts. And after that, and before you know it we'll all be shareing the same thoughts. And saying, "We Are The Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. Resistance is futile."
When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to reform. --Mark Twain
Providing access to child porn harms the children in the photos. That is the legal basis why pedo stuff is regulated more harshly than just about anything else (except for media content owned by multinationals, sigh). Many organizations argue this position much more clearly than I do.
Too bad there aren't HTML tags for "voice of the comic book store guy on The Simpsons".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
- Remove and prevent content on Yahoo.fr which contravened French law.
- Remove and prevent content on Yahoo.com which contravened French law, or make it impossible for either people in France or French citizens in other countries to view such content.
Yahoo.fr content is probably physically hosted in France, and perhaps mirrored elsewhere, but I have no definite information on the subject. Yahoo.com is probably hosted in the USA.At substantial expense, Yahoo complied with the first part and attempted to comply with the second. Owing to ambiguity in the original court order, the judge ruled that Yahoo had not complied with it, and issued a second judgment. (I've only read the English text, for which Yahoo's interpretation is much more reasonable, but the emphasis may have been different in the original.) This new order repeated the restrictions against yahoo.com, and imposed stiff fines until they were met. Yahoo has complied with the stricter regulations, effectively censoring its US and worldwide operations. The company has countersued in California, citing the jurisdictional arguments you mention.
Nowhere in any of the court proceedings is there any mention of the physical location of various servers. It would be quite possible for yahoo.fr to move its physical hosts to another country (e.g. Belgium). It would also be possible for the company to be registered abroad and the staff to work elsewhere. But none of these considerations are mentioned in either of the rulings against the American defendant. The locations of Yahoo's various operations were not a factor in either of the decisions. These questions will not be addressed unless/until the countersuit is heard. If yahoo.fr left the country, the court's only new problems would be the administrative ones of how to enforce its ruling. And there are very few countries which do not cooperate with France on international crime.
If the Church of Scientology can censor the Internet, a permanent member of the UN securirty council isn't going to have much trouble. By the way, Robespierre isn't representative of any enduring French political tradition. Petain would be a better example. If you feel the need for childish nationalistic taunts, Bonaparte won't have the desired effect. Most French people admire him, just as Americans admire JFK and the English admire Henry V (there's obviously something about crazed warmongering losers that inspires national pride).
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Usenet is not dead (yet).
I read about 30 groups without filtering, all of which are roughly 1% junk. (Compare that with slashdot at -1.)
A big problem are the binaries. Usenet was designed for discussion, not for transport of large files. Perhaps ISPs should filter out the all binary articles (porn or not), and tell them to put up websites if they want to distribute large files.
Bill, find . -type f | xargs grep "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64"
Does this mean that to post "illegal" things on a site I don't like is a way of getting it "censored"?
Without knowing more facts here, it sounds like the law is on the side of the ISP; as others have mentioned, they most likely pled guilty to avoid bankruptcy through court proceedings.
-Legion
Actually, all this case says is that if you're hosting illegal content on your own servers, and you have been informed of this, and you take no steps to correct it, you will be held responsible for h
hosting illegal content on your servers.
We in Britain trust our government and any powers that they take are normally reasonable
What, you're able to speak for an entire nation? For what it is worth, I'm British and I certainly don't trust our government. Why the heck should I? Do you trust, for example... Peter Mandelson? Vaz? Do you think that Jack Straw is anything but a powermad little tinpot dictator keen to strip british subjects of any freedoms they may still enjoy? Are you in favour of the British Government limiting the right to a trial of your peers? Of revoking the assumption of innocence in some cases?
Assuming you are not a troll, please be so kind as to open your eyes and see our government for what it really as.... as bad as all the others.
And as for the state of our police force... why do you suppose all those miscarriages of justice keep cropping up?
Here endeth the rant.
"I think there is a world market for about five computers" - Thomas John Watson (President of IBM), 1943
Okay, so "alt.binaries.porn.children" contains child porn?
How about these groups?
Obvious attempts at reverse psychology or correctly named groups?
Perhaps ISPs should lose all large base64/uucode articles and tell people that usenet is for discussion, and that large files should be distributed of web sites.
Bill, loves Usenet, and hates to see it abused.
Please disregard the last comment, sleep is what I need now.
Get real! Should every ISP have a crew go to all the mail is a newsgroup? Doesn't sound realistic to me.
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Privacy is terrorism.
I think the "knowing" part is important, and the "storage" part is not. Akamai stores illegal content temporarily, just as ISP's do with usenet binaries. But ISP's get to choose which data streams to pass along, and it chose one which is well-known to contain a large amount illegal content.
So, from a legal standpoint, how much illegal content can exist, before the chooser can no longer legally pass the group on? Certainly groups that have only one illegal post per year should be let through, it's bound to happen on the internet. But is 10 okay? 40? 200? 500?
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It's not a new law. It's just a new precedent that deals with the enforcement of current laws.
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Aren't you going to tell us about your boyfriend?
Thats silly, the CDA say that ISPs are safe from this kind of crap.
They should take it down if they see it, but if they dont, they shouldnt (and the CDA says so) be held responsible for it.
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
I don't give a flying fuck what some attorney general in New York thinks.
An interesting thing about the Internet that many (American) government officials don't seem to understand is that American laws don't apply to the whole Internet.
If they want to censor, fine. I'll just have to move my server to another state or country.
These feeds are unmoderated, the same as radio and TV signals through the air.
Again, true. But the ISP was, if you will, "capturing" these signals and re-broadcasting them to the local populace (its subscribers). Now, from the press release, I gather that the local "populace" and local authorities requested that they stop "re-broadcasting" the signal. Obviously, they don't have the authority to request that Spring (possibly an out-of-state concern, though I don't know for sure) to stop, but I don't see that they're in the wrong for asking someone within their juristiction to stop.
isn't that like telling a city to control murders or something and then have the victim's family sue the city?
bye,
-jimbo
Is a crack dealer really responsible if someone overdoses and dies on the stuff they sell a person?
Is a restaurant owner really liable if someone gets food poisoning from the food that they serve?
I think I made my point.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
China: "There is nothing to stop someone from hosting pro-democracy material in Outer Mongolia and hence avoiding the law."
The fact that national borders stop laws but not communication is a good thing, not a bad thing.
The best way forward is for people to get over the idea that someone is looking at stuff they don't like.
Yes, child sexual abuse is horrible. Find the people who do it and lock them up. But don't use the spectre of "child pornography" to restrict free speech.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Have you actually looked at these groups for yourself? I mean really looked at it - how many articles are cross-posted spam, how many articles are individually-posted spam to multiple groups?
There's not much "there" there. I'm tempted to say there's nothing there.
All a newsgroup-name based ban would do is establish a precedence for banning newsgroups on the basis of their name, not specific objectionable content.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The ISP was informed the newsgroup carried kiddie porn.
The ISP did not remove the kiddie porn from its NNTP servers.
The ISP was thus knowingly in posession of kiddie porn on its servers, and knowingly making it available for further distribution.
The distinction here is between providing a link to kiddie porn on your website and hosting kiddie porn on your website; between telling someone where they can buy an illegal weapon and selling them out of your trunk.
Thus, I don't really consider this a threat to anything, even if it had been set as an actual precedent.
We in Britain trust our government and any powers that they take are normally reasonable. We elected them. This has been proved through out our long history. In theory the British government has unlimited powers but rarely use them. And the British police are one of the least corrupt in the world.
I think with the amount of kiddy porn, race hate, subversives etc on the net, it's time stop believing that the net can regulate itself and start working with the FBI, Interpol and other law enforcement agencies. I think the powers in RIP act are necessary and unless you have something hide, there's nothing to fear. Are the police going to monitor you surfing Slashdot and the like.
This tactic of Attorneys General whipping companies with lawsuits because the AGs have essentially unlimited funds, is damaging the credibility of our legal system, at least as much as, say, Clinton lying to a Grand Jury and spending no time in jail for it.
C'mon, judges, get off your corn cobs and enforce the laws of the land!
It is no surprise that this happened in New York (their motto, "Regulate Everything!"). There is legal precedent for this type of case, but New York seems to be ignoring it. First, it has been upheld by the courts repeatedly and consistently that "common carriers" are not responsible for the content they carry. "Common carriers" include telephone companies and the like. For example, if someone defrauded you using the telephone, no court in its right mind would allow you to sue the telephone company for it, unless they were actually part of the scam. Again, carriers are not responsible for the content they carry.
Second, the courts have also well established by now that ISPs are effectively "common carriers". Legally, they are no different than telephone companies in the type of service they provide.
The unprecedented merger of a carrier with a content provider (AOL/Time Warner) has no effect on this general or legal concept. As long as the carrier is not actively involved in creating or supplying the content, the carrier is not legally responsible for it.
However, if the carrier either supplies or regulates the content, it is legally responsible for that content, as AOL found out in that famous suit over statements made in its moderated news groups.
We are left with only one conclusion, and it is the one that courts have repeatedly upheld (except, apparently in Weird-Liberal New York): if the ISP neither provided (created) or regulated the content, the ISP is not legally responsible for it. Any other result is a formula for chaos.
Can you imagine what would happen if telephone companies were held responsible for what people said, or U.S. mail and parcel delivery companies held responsible for the contents of theri packages? Can you say "absolute halt to commerce and free speech"? Sure. I knew you could.
It might be reasonable to expect them to try to stop it, and you might wonder about their character if they do not. Even so, it is not legally required.
The courts and the police do not have the right to demand that others do their jobs for them. That is why we employ them ("employ" is the correct word). If they demand that we do their jobs for them, maybe we should expect them to do without pay!
> The bottom line is, society is not going to be run by the low-life of this world.
No, the bottom line is that people like you will either be the downfall of liberty, or (hopefully, but doubtfully) be stamped out by the more reasonable and tolerant.
I need not quote the two similar Jefferson and Franklin quotes usually brought up in situations like these, but needless to say, you don't deserve to be an American. That's not a flame, it's just what our Founding Fathers would have said. People such as yourself kill freedom, for silly mistaken reasons. In another thread on this discussion you said that neighborhoods with a high rate of criminal activity should be bulldozed. Instead, people like you should be bulldozed. You advocate mass censorship of media which have legitimate uses in discourse, calling them a "public menace." Sir, places and media are not a public menace; people with your censorious attitude are.
As for how you say things should be handled in terms of jurisdiction: bollocks. The Federal government has authority to regulate interstate commerce; however, it has not the authority under the Constitution to regulate interstate morality. That is the whole reason we have state governments--so that they can legislate based on the customs and temperaments of the people living therein. The Federal government has no more right to hold an ISP in New York City accountable for being a conduit for something which is illegal in Oklahoma City, than the government of Singapore has to hold the U.S. responsible for something it allows to be put online. Unfortunately, we've been in a Federalist mode in the Court for the past several decades, but the tone is changing and with a Bush appointee or two in the next few years the Court should once again begin respeting Amendment X of the U.S. Constitution.
The same holds true for International accords--the EU notwithstanding, what an ISP in The Hague or Madrid or Berlin or Osaka or San Diego can and cannot be held accountable for, will still remain as different as can be. Fortunately, some countries are blessed with a citizenry which relishes freedom more than that of the U.S. now does.
As for your understanding of USENET, it cannot be as extensive as you seem to believe if you think newsgroups are ever, as you put it, "shut down." It is a well-known fact that there will always be another server which carries any given group if one's ISP stops carrying it. Almost all people serious about USENET use a "premium" news server in addition to their ISP, and despite your wishing it so, this case is not a precedent and the Court will definitely hold that government attempts to stamp out a newsgroup based on some of its content is unlawful prior restraint of speech. You conveniently neglected to address such points as that when I made them in the post above.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
After starting a pornography company and producing a website with lots of questionable content I had to do a lot of legal consulting and studying to avoid ignorant prossecution. I discovered an interesting loophold much more steadfast than the existing nature kid one. In California it is legal for an emancipated minor to pose for child pornography. This is not a loophole by precedence, it is written in the books.
The reason child porn is considered wrong by the US judicial system is because a minor is not capable to make a decision which has such emotionaly impact because he/she is to young to know the consequences. Existing kiddie porn lords have argued that kids on nudist colonies have grown up to view their birthday suits as their (and others') only attire in existance. In addition, a child would bear the same emotional impact as another child (not in a nudist colony) modeling with clothing on. The problem with this loophole is it's focus on the impact the child would face, rather than the child's ability to face impact. The other problem with this loophole is that even though the child's viewpoints and culture are different in a nudist colony, the viewer's of the child's pictures viewpoints are still the same. The California emancipation loophole says that if a child is emancipated he has the same inteligence and maturity as an adult. If this were the case, the child would be able to handle the emotional impact of posing nude the same as an adult would. So the solution to this ISP's problem? Fuck censorship, move the server's down to California and show all the tiny teeters ya want. I (as a determined anti-censorship protestor, not a kiddy porn supporter) and my company, Ubersoft, will donate to this ISP's project if they decide to move this single newsgroup of discusion to servers on Californian soil to put this loophole to the test.
Jack Roehrig
CEO UberSoft Inc.
Please excuse my grammer/spelling, I'm illiterate.
Stop calling me human.
I'll shut the fuck up when they fix it. I can promise you that.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The good news? I think we're really poised for a new Rennaisance. One of the hallmarks of the first European Rennaisance was the rise of Nationalism, and with Nationalism we saw the confiscation and consolidation of military power by a single national government. This had some interesting effects, most good and a few bad. The good news was that the constant warring between small-time nobles ceased, giving the peasants a taste of peace. The bad news is that with the rise of nations and nationalism, men laid the groundwork for the doctrine of total war.
So, what will the analogue of this new Rennaisance be, with the confiscation of military power? Well, I foresee the possibility of the Government confiscating legal power and providing it as a service to all, meting out a more fair system than "he who can afford the best lawyers wins." Think about it. It would certainly level the playing field between the Mega-corps and the consumer/citizen. It will have some inevitable drawbacks, but I think the tradeoff will be well worth the risks.
Jonathan Fisher, hopeful New Rennaisance man.
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
Any guesses as to what this newsgroup contains? If you're baffled, you are supposed to be. soc.motss was the first USENET forum for homosexuals. "motss" stands for "Members Of The Same Sex." The people who created this forum in the 80's felt that soc.gays or soc.homosexual would make the newsgroup too visible to online gaybashers. It wasn't an attempt to hide in the USENET closet -- the forum was publically accessable to all -- just an attempt to avoid bigots looking for someone to harrass.
Anyway, after reading a zillion posts from people who've probably never even used NNTP claiming that "it's obvious what's in alt.picture.erotica.children," I had to comment. Sure, that newsgroup is easy to spot, but anyone can create an alt group if they want to. Would an ISP block alt.asdf.jk.hasd? I mean, would you even have time to find out what the hell was in it?
First, there is some law out there that states that one becomes liable for everything on a server the first minute that any little act of censorship occurs. If they have a policy of never censoring anything they must be immune. People who operate bulletin boards or servers are frequently unable to know about material that goes through their systems and the moment they take that step and censor one little thing they had better review every little thing that passes through the system. So the law is a mess in this regard. Second, N.Y.C. censoring something implies that every little hick town everywhere in the world can apply their laws. With free speech it is an all or nothing sort of thing. France recently managed to control the content of Yahoo. So now I am censired by France even though I live in America. This is not right.
In this situation, it's the duty of the court to throw out the case, the guilty plea notwithstanding. Judges are supposed to see to it that prosecutors don't get to bully innocent parties into guilty pleas.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's what courts are for.
If someone posts something I don't like can I tell the hosting company that it's illegal - or get the police to do it for me?
If the matter of legality is decided by the LEAs we have a police state.
I know that somethings may be easy to judge as illegal or undesirable and kiddie porn is despicable (to put it mildldy) but while I would censor paedophile porn (if it was up to me) I don't know where or how the line can be drawn between free speech and porn.
To me the ISP possibly fouled up by not pulling the posts based on it's AUP - and yes I know it was usenet but their AUP should cover this to, if only to protect themselves from this.
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
:s/child porn/mp3/
This is the easy target, but the Usenet regulation foot is in the door in the U.S. (thanks to that buttlick cockgarler* Laurence Godfrey, the U.K.'s freedom's already gone). First casualty: "premium" NNTP servers based in the US. Think people are signing up for "premium" news service to ensure they get their daily dose of rec.humor.funny and sci.physics? Ha.
*the phrase "buttlick cockgargler" is in no way intended to imply that Mr. Godfrey engages in such practices. It is only a satirical term of derision. See Hustler Magazine v. Falwell for more information.
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
As a member of the Labour Party (joined May 1997), I find your aspersions cast upon Jack Straw and Keith Vaz nauseauting. I have actually met Jack Straw and while he is tough on crime, he also knows there's a balance to be struck between so-called personal freedoms and the abilty of the police to catch kiddy porn perverts. Warrants and other such legal niceties like the right to silence merely warn off these people. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omlette, the eggs being these old fashioned 'rights' and and the omlette being the good of the society. As for the police, there have been a few miscarriages of justice admittedly but on the whole the good old fashioned Briish bobby is the salt of the earth and I would trust them to make the right decisions. Middle England has nothing to fear from monitoring of their E-mails and where they go on the web.
This is what kills free services on the internet. People get sue-happy when they see something that offends them. I know kiddie-porn is very bad, put the ISP can't be help liable for a free service. Im sure they stated that somewhere on the site (or i hope they did). It's also terrible when people abuse the free service. This same sort of thing is happening to IRC as i speak.
"the police can gain the records at any time without a warrant. Only people with something to hide need fear anything" I am stunned that these words could be spoken by a semi-intelligent person. I cannot fathom that you would so oeasily give up one of your fundamental rights becasue "you have nothing to hide". Know what? I have nothing too hide either, and I'd be seriously Pissed Off(tm) if our police were able to willy-nilly get to my "records" without a warrant. Just becasue someone ELSE is a prick and needs to be prosecuted for a crime, doesn't give the authorities the right to look at MY shit. You must be from the UK or something - if you'll remember, it was just this type of BS that made the founding fathers say "To hell with THAT", and create the US. You want intrusive police, fine, stay the hell away.....
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Are you trolling, or are you really that fscking dense?
"Only people with something to hide need fear," indeed. I suppose you would have no objection to the government reading your mail, searching your house, or performing full body cavity searches, without at least a warrant?
"People with something to hide" often includes anyone with opinions contrary to those of the current regime. Go do a little research on the US COINTELPRO operation in the 1960s. Read about about the unjustified raids on groups protesting at the WTO and World Bank meetings.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I don't really think that this unfair. The isp could have easily not carried newsgroups that are for kiddie porn. If someone posts kiddie porn to inappropiat groups, that's not the isp's fault, but carring groups that are intended for kiddie porn is the isp's fault.
http://www.BuffNET.net/release/
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The simple fact is that someone has to be held responsible for certain types of content on the internet. It cannot be the hoster of the content, because that puts the material beyond the reach of the law; there is nothing to stop someone from hosting child pornography Outer Mongolia and hence avoiding the law.
It is not a simple fact; it is an opinion. Many people disagree. The Internet is making geography irrelevant with respect to content. True, someone can host child porn in Outer Mongolia, and until we have a planetary government, they would probably be clear. I don't necessarily see this as a problem, especially in light of continuing moves to expand what is claimed as child pornography. Who's definition of pornography do we use? Denmark's (Somewhere between 12 and 17, IIRC)? The US's? (18 or 21, sorta)? How about Iran's (No legal age. Women are evil and should never be seen.)?
There are plenty of laws to use to attack those who abuse children. Kidnapping, assault, rape, etc. A man taking pictures of cheerleaders at a football game, however, shouldn't.
The poster is where the responsibility lies; not the hosting site. And if you don't like that someone in another country doesn't have the same views you do with respect to some of these things, please consider moving to Pennsylvania and joining an Amish colony.
Therefore the only practical way of bringing things under the remit of the law is to make the ISP's responsible. They can do it. We have the technology to filter everything and so excuses about how the ISP's cannot filter everything on the internet are nonsense.
Obviously you don't read the YRO section; I'd suspect you have it in your "never let me see these articles" section.
I could post an image of a nude women here in the Slashdot comments, and no filter yet made would pick it up, since it would be an ASCII art. Image recognition software is, well, almost completely useless. And keyword-based blocking is hopeless; it blocks legitimate material almost as often as it blocks pornography. How many filters have caught up with the term pr0n, and how soon will they catch up with the next variation down the pipe, say pr0|\| ? Or nrop?
In fact, the ISP, in refusing to shut down customer's access to the group, may have been attempting to maintain their common-carrier status. Many arguments have been made that if they refuse to carry something, they become editors/publishers, rather than simply a connection.
And one of these days, I'll figure out just what the hell the problem is that people have with children seeing nude bodies. If they're old enough to give a damn about it, they *should* be being told about it. And I mean serious education, about the full range of interest, and not just the dry statistics on contraceptive failure rates, and a set of rules without any explanation for reasons behind them.
The best way forward is to make someone pay, Otherwise the Internet will become a lawless, chaotic domain that will undermine our lives.
No, the Internet will develop different laws. The violence associated with anarchy is not due to a lack of government, but due to too many people wanting to become a government.
Some argue that the internet has always been lawless, and worked well, but this does not apply anymore.
Says you. Again, opinion, one which I do not share.
Now the internet affects the real world, and it is not just academics that have access to it, but criminals, pornographers and common people too.
At least you recognize that criminals and pornographers are a disjoint set. However, I would suspect, at the current rate we're putting people in jail for consensual crimes (drug use), and a noticable tendency of late to ignore the rights of those who have completed their sentences for crimes, that "criminals" and "common people" will soon enough be the same group.
We must try and put a lid on things, to stop it from spiralling out of control.
To stop it from spiralling out of your control, or the control of people you like and agree with. It will control itself.
But you won't like it.
In fact, I find your views rather odd, considering your e-mail address. Do you believe the Burning Times can never return? Especially with some of the disturbing things President Bush(2) has done since he took office? (No, I voted for Harry Browne. It was as close as I could get to "None of the Above", since secret write-in votes are not available here.)
And how is the ISP admin to know that a photo titled "16 year old" isn't actually 18? Or a Photoshop composite?
The cops should be out finding people who are actually sexually abusing children, not stomping on free speech in the name of preventing people from looking at pictures -real or faked - of that abuse.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Hmm, that's interesting. So if someone posts a message and says "This is kiddie porn", we shouldn't believe them?
Well in the US we have the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
But usually if someone admits guilt, we trust them. Well now if the admission of guilt was beaten out of them, then we have other problems.
But your not saying the confession was beat out of the guy. The guy came right out and broadcast it to public.
You are saying if I rob a bank and then go to the FBI and say "I robbed that bank", that the FBI should just ignore me because they didn't see it happen.
What an odd reality you must live in.
So if people start posting kiddie porn to rec.pets.cats, are they going to have to not carry that group too? What's next, the RIAA suing ISPs who carry alt.binaries.sounds.mp3? The ISP has no control over who posts what, so I can see where every newsgroup could ultimately be made off-limits.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Not exactly, however. Napster doen't host the MP3s on its computers; the ISP was hosting the kiddie porn on its NNTP servers.
But they weren't prosecuted under the CDA, or even in a federal court. They were charged with Criminal Facilitation in the state of New York.
Usenet has long since been declared dead due to the abundance of spammers and trollers. However up until now, this has been true mostly for the most mainstream international groups. National groups like Norwegian ones are still thriving.
:)
If ISPs are forced to monitor every message that goes into and out of their news servers, that's easily understood as the final death of the once great Usenet. ISPs simply cannot monitor the contents of all the messages, even with more than a lot of resources. Seeing as Usenet newsgroups give no direct income to ISPs (you can't put banner ads in news postings), the only reasonable action would be to discontinue the service.
We'll see if this really sets precedence. There was an equivalent case in Sweden some years ago. They went over the content once and was forgiven. (I doubt American jurisdiction will be that kind though.) When the silly student's newspaper at our university screamed about how students could get pornography from the internet, our IT staff threatened to put the news server to sleep. They warned that if people were that hysteric about it, they'd simply have to deprive students of all internet access. The news server is still up and running and I can still access the internet, so I guess these hysterical waves are just that.. waves that'll pass
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
For those of you who didn't read the article, here are a few points: Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has secured a guilty plea in a groundbreaking case against an internet service provider (ISP) that knowingly provided its subscribers with access to illegal child pornography. So the NY State AG's office did secure a guilty plea. No need for a trial since the ISP was aware of the illegal activity that they aware and took no steps to prevent further activity and have now admitted guilt. "Clearly the failure of the Internet Service Provider to identify and terminate the access to child pornographic sites is gravely unfortunate. Because the Internet knows no geographic boundaries, it is incumbent upon the ISPs, legally and morally, to be ever vigilant in protecting the public from this criminal activity," said State Police Superintendent James W. McMahon. This part scares me...now my ISP is responsible for my moral protection? That is pretty scary! Buffnet, a large regional ISP based in West Seneca, New York outside of Buffalo, pleaded guilty to the crime of Criminal Facilitation in the Fourth Degree, a Class A misdemeanor. The company admitted that it failed to take action when it was notified by a customer as well as by law enforcement that one of the newsgroups it carried was being used to distribute graphic child pornography. Enough said. Until now, prosecutions in this area focused primarily on individuals who subscribed to an ISP like BuffNET, and who logged on to a newsgroup and downloaded and traded in child pornography. The Attorney General's investigation widened its focus to include the ISP that knowingly provided the means and the opportunity for this criminal conduct to occur. Kind of the same as if I were driving a friend around so that he could rob banks, they are being charged because of failure to do something after a customer AND police complaints. I don't know about you folks, but if I were running an ISP and someone told me that, I would at least have someone look into it. Once the cops got involved, I would consult my legal department to check for potential liability. But thats just me.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Thanks for summarizing the prevailing view of tyrrany^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe law in the US.
I don't agree with everything in the Lawful Arrest FAQ, but it makes some interesting arguments. Like, if crime is not defined in terms of victims and injury, but instead is defined as a "violation of the law", it is paradoxial and self-referential!
Huh? This is the "Begging the question" fallacy. It's an infinite loop. Put these in your computer programs and they will generate heat, but do little else
IANAL, but this seems to be construing web-log, discussion and news-group management as similar to publishing, thus giving the webmaster or site admin the same liabilities as a book or magazine publisher has.
Of course, this is quite unfair because the webmaster does not have the same rights as a book publisher has. One of the rationalizations for making the publisher liable for what he or she puts out is that in most cases the publisher intends to make money from this endeavor. Thus, any highly marketable libel or slander that a tabloid would publish would be highly prohibited regulated by the government.
I don't see how weblog or newsgroup admins, who profit only indirectly from this work if at all, are in the same boat as publishes. These admins provide what is essentially a non-profit, free speech service in an overall package for their customers. The authors should be liable, not the admins. If they have any responsibilities at all, it should be to loudly notify their customers of applicable laws, thus further absolving themselves of responsibility.
Goat sex free since 2001
Guys, the law is NOT code. You don't write an algorithm. There is judgement and grey.
For example, if you are providing a channel, or hosting a site entitled Kittie Porn, you should be responsible. If you just pull everything down, you shouldn't. It's a judgement thing.
For example, Napster enables MP3 sharing. In and of itself, this is innocent. However, Napster will scan your hard drive for you and offer to share out all your MP3s. The problem with this is that while it is legal for me to rip a CD that I own (or I'll argue, a friend owns) for my own purposes, I can't legally share it out. Napster encourages you to do so. Intent matters.
For example, if google happens to index a kiddie porn site, they didn't intentionally do it and shouldn't be responsible.
If I provide a site that is a directory of kiddie porn sites, I SHOULD be responsible, even if I'm just linking. If I provide a link to a site that is legal porn, and they add kiddie porn, I shouldn't be.
Basically, if you are intentionally doing something shady, you are responsible. If something happens beyond your control, safe harbor should protect you.
I wish I knew how to get legislators (US and EU) to accord common carrier status to ISPs as well as telcos. The telcos aren't required to monitor all telephone conversations so why should ISPs be required to monitor NGs, email etc which is where I fear this is heading.
Why aren't the backbone providers also held liable as their infrastructure has been used to transmit thes postings?
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
that maybe the ISP intended to set a precedent?
/other/ people's systems, without looking like you did it on purpose? Get yourself arrested and plea guilty!
Consider this scenario: The owners of the ISP are strongly against kiddie orn, or hacking, or whatever else their objectionable content is. However, they don't want to look like they're consoring things, because the ISP market is very tight, and margins are small. Censorship would give them a bad image that could kill them.
How do you end [kiddie] porn/hacking/etc on your system, and even possibly on
Now, all of a sudden, there is a precedent set that says ISP's must regulate "objectionable" content. The ISP in question takes down their [kiddie]porn/hacking/etc stuff without getting a bad wrap because "The Law Made Me Do It." No customers lost.
Now, however, owners of this nefarious(?) ISP can run around suing other ISP's to take down what they don't like, and there's already a precedent set.
Kinda scary, Eh?
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
Lock them up!
but they are providing a place where illegal activity can take place
Travis
Go after the users who are breaking the law
Consider this: Somebody in a country where kiddie porn is legal post some picts to the usenet.
Even though the US tries to force all countries on the world to follow their laws (DeCSS), they currently have no right to arrest him. But how should they stop these picts? If they can't stop it at the source, they have to take the ISPs.
Same goes for the whole Internet, there is no global law.
Guh... why aren't the courts looking at the laws? I don't really understand that.
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RumorsDaily
Goes like this:
"I've found child porn on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*".
"Very well, what are the message numbers/subject lines?"
"Gee, we want you to delete the whole newsgroup!"
"Sorry, that group also contains some lawful material protected by the first amendment. But again, just specify the actual problem material and we'll remove it."
"But what if someone posts some more there?"
"Sorry, if we become aware of any more we'll take care of that too. Thanks for spending the time scanning for these for us - it isn't something we can afford to spend time doing."
On a slightly more serious note. What's more frightening? A pedophile tapping away at a computer, or cruising the neighborhood cause there's nothing good on the net.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
What is the difference between an NNTP server which caches newsgroup content for local download and a web proxy in this regard?
From Buffnet's response:
The Attorney General's office never told BuffNET it suspected illegal activity, and never asked BuffNET to block the newsgroup that was targeted. If the AG had asked, BuffNET would have cut off the newsgroup.
What did happen was an undercover agent from the A.G.'s office, who did not identify himself as being from the A.G.'s office, made an INQUIRY (not a complaint) about the legality of one image he allegedly found on one specific newsgroup. He asked if it was legal, and could he get in trouble by downloading it. BuffNET turned the inquiry over to our attorney, Steven S. Fox who reviewed the newsgroup and found no illegal images. He answered the inquiry saying child pornography is illegal and that whenever BuffNET finds anything illegal on its system it removes it and whoever put it there.
If some people renting a house commit a crime in it (such as exchanging child porn), you don't hold the landlord liable.
If ISPs are now to be held responsible for policing activities that take place in the cyberspace they are renting, then that IS a new law.
Napster and ISP are not the ones committing the illegal activity but their users are. The way things are going the service provider if Napster or a Usenet provider have to police their content. A bar can be shut down for allowing illegal activity to take place.
Travis
Not a whole lot more info but check it out... http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20010217/1012 156.asp
The question at hand is this: How do we mold the early videotex environment so that noise is suppressed without limiting the free flow of information between customers?
The first obstacle is, of course, legal. As the knights of U.S. feudalism, corporate lawyers have a penchant for finding ways of stomping out innovation and diversity in any way possible. In the case of videotex, the attempt is to keep feudal control of information by making videotex system ownership imply liability for information transmitted over it. For example, if a libelous communication takes place, corporate lawyers for the plaintiff will bring suit against the carrier rather than the individual responsible for the communication. The rationalizations for this clearly unreasonable and contrived position are quite numerous. Without a common carrier status, the carrier will be treading on virgin ground legally and thus be unprotected by precedent. Indeed, the stakes are high enough that the competitor could easily afford to fabricate an event ideal for the purposes of such a suit. This means the first legal precedent could be in favor of holding the carrier responsible for the communications transmitted over its network, thus forcing (or giving an excuse for) the carrier to inspect, edit and censor all communications except, perhaps, simple person-to-person or "electronic mail". This, in turn, would put editorial control right back in the hands of the feudalists. Potential carriers' own lawyers are already hard at work worrying everyone about such a suit. They would like to win the battle against diversity before it begins. This is unlikely because videotex is still driven by technology and therefore by pioneers.
The question then becomes: How do we best protect against such "legal" tactics? The answer seems to be an early emphasis on secure identification of the source of communications so that there can be no question as to the individual responsible. This would preempt an attempt to hold the carrier liable. Anonymous communications, like Delphi conferencing, could even be supported as long as some individual would be willing to attach his/her name to the communication before distributing it. This would be similar, legally, to a "letters to the editor" column where a writer remains anonymous. Another measure could be to require that only individuals of legal age be allowed to author publishable communications. Yet another measure could be to require anyone who wishes to write and publish information on the network to put in writing, in an agreement separate from the standard customer agreement, that they are liable for any and all communications originating under their name on the network. This would preempt the "stolen password" excuse for holding the carrier liable.
Beyond the secure identification of communication sources, there is the necessity of editorial services. Not everyone is going to want to filter through everything published by everyone on the network. An infrastructure of editorial staffs is that filter. In exchange for their service the editorial staff gets to promote their view of the world and, if they are in enough demand, charge money for access to their list of approved articles. On a videotex network, there is little capital involved in establishing an editorial staff. All that is required is a terminal and a file on the network which may have an intrinsic cost as low as $5/month if it represents a publication with "only" around 100 articles. The rest is up to the customers. If they like a publication, they will read it. If they don't they won't. A customer could ask to see all articles approved by staffs A or B inclusive, or only those articles approved by both A and B, etc. This sort of customer selection could involve as many editorial staffs as desired in any logical combination. An editorial staff could review other editorial staffs as well as individual articles, forming hierarchies to handle the mass of articles that would be submitted every day. This sort of editorial mechanism would not only provide a very efficient way of filtering out poor and questionable communications without inhibiting diversity, it would add a layer of liability for publications that would further insulate carriers from liability and therefore from a monopoly over communications.
In general, anything that acts to filter out bad information and that is not under control of the carrier, acts to prevent the carrier from monopolizing the evolution of ideas on the network.
Seastead this.
oops - screwed the URL up in last post - try here
I will agree with you that the internet does affect the real world, and that the laws of the real world are binding on real people. There comes a problem with the internet, however, a problem that has been argued about profusely and I'll only briefly mention: the internet strips the borders of a country away. This, in turn, causes a problem with trying to enforce legal issues on the internet. This does not mean that the medium is the entire culprit of the problem, the laws themselves don't lend themselves easily to being used in the same manner on the internet. If someone could construct a model of how laws from a variety of countries could be applied to a global network that, save for the connective media, is under no control other than the users of that network which continues to promote the values of the internet community as a whole, then I might go for it. This happening, however, is not very likely and if it does it would be terribly expensive as far as cashflow and computer time.
This leads me into my second point, that the ISPs shouldn't be responsible for filtering the data of the internet that travels down their pipe. Even on the small scale, to filter every piece of data eats up computer time and bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive as it is, and computer time, although not as expensive as it could be, is still expensive enough to prohibit buying the iron that it would take to continue to provide the same quality of service to their customers. Not to mention that this filtering process cannot be truly objective, and the debate over censorware has a lot to do with this type of system.
The internet was created in a chaotic time to make a chaotic array of computers be able to share data in an orderly way. All the networking code is designed to take the chaos of the internet and still be able to serve you the content you asked for. With the internet, opened a pandora's box that should, IMHO, never be closed. Although there is a multitude of "undermining" information on the internet, it is also full of good, solid information that is meant to be used all the time. As people started to link up to the net, their values and desires also creeped into the medium, everything you see on the net is there because someone wanted it there and someone else wanted to pull it down. That is the greatest thing about this medium, if you don't want it, don't pull it. The internet has provided a system of freer speech than is usually possible in the real world, because we are the publishers and the content designers.
Finally, in the end we are responsible for what we put on the internet. If someone wants to put questionable content outside of a given national border to avoid the legality of it, then he/she will do it. We must provide content and be the stewards of the medium as well. But that's just my opinion.
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I think I'll call this one Bob.
Live with Love for Love is Life. --mine.
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The newsadmin may be unable to police newsgroup content due to sheer volume, but he is responsible for deciding what newsgroups his site will carry. And you can't claim not to know what gets posted in a group like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children.
Time to ditch my 4 year archive for all of alt.binaries.
If this becomes a real precedent, then:
- Any point on the Internet must block a site, once they're notified that a particular site is illegal (eg. a national blacklist, implemented in border routers).
- Entire websites or newsgroups can be blocked, if a sufficient percentage of its content is illegal.
I can't imagine how such a precedent could remain for very long.--
Ok, I'm a big proponent for law enforcement on the internet.
However I'm not in the UK, and I believe in privacy.
I think that illegal behavior should be prevented, but monitoring the activities of citizens in the privacy of their own home is wrong.
Why stop at kiddie porn, why not arrest people for visiting the website of the Republican party?
That's the danger of things like RIP, Carnivore, etc.
Ok, think of it this way. In London they have cameras on street corners watching what people do in public. I actually find this acceptable, just think of it as a guaranteed eye-witness.
But would you think it was ok to mount cameras in your home so that the government could monitor what you do in your living room?
As usual, it's far easier to blame a scapegoat than actually going after the really guilty people. All the best if that scapegoat is the Internet: Average Joe doesn't understand anything about it, he doesn't realize that it's equivalent to blaming the phone lines, or the mail...
When an ISP becomes aware of illegal child pornography available in its system, the ISP cannot put its head in the sand.
The article seems clear that the ISP was aware of these actions and knowingly were giving access to these materials, but didn't bother to do anything about it. These pictures were in their system, and they were illegal, and they were aware of it.
Maybe a bad analogy, but if I'm a gun dealer, and a customer comes in and says he wants to buy a gun, then during the purchase makes a comment about going out to kill someone, then I'm accountable for what happens. If he said nothing, and the background checks went through, then I'm in the clear.
Sounds like they deserve to be punished to me - why does this type of think always have to turn into a YRO-type discussion? If this article is correct in what it stated, then I support the prosecution on this one.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Just have a look at your ISP's newsgroups list. grep it for young, lolita, pre-teen, child, etc. and you'll see 30+ groups.
I know I'm going to get the responses "the pornographers will find new newsgroups" or "there's no guarantee that stuff won't be posted to adult porn groups"... those are valid points, but the ISP should at least appear to be doing something to discourage the spread of child porn on their servers.
PS: Something's very wrong here... I for a fact know my ISP killed alt.binaries.mp3 (too much bandwidth?) but you can still see the child porn newsgroups in the list.
Hands in my pocket
Ok -
Last check, my USENET server had 46,432 newsgroups that it carries...
Of these, there are several which are clearly illegal BESIDES the KP groups...
Let's see, there is:
alt.sex.necrophilia (Clearly some sickos there...)
alt.sex.beastiality (Many readers here are familiar with this, with the obsession of goats...)
But the list goes on with some REALLY disturbing ones:
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hamsters.duct-tape
alt.sex.bondage.particle-physics.quarks (That one REALLY frightens me)
Let's shut them all down! (along with alt.2600, alt.warez.* etc..., ad nauseum)
The Point(TM) I am trying to make here is that censorship is bad - In any way shape or form. Once you start shutting down one, the next Evil Thing(TM) will be on the agenda.
Oh, and by the way... It doesn't really work - Just ask the scientologists. alt.relegion.scientology is alive and well after all these years.
October 27th, 1998: New York City Police seized computer equipment BuffNET used to provide it's subscribers with access to Internet newsgroups.
There was only one other ISP that was cracked down on.. dreamscape...
Both of these ISP's are in upper state new york.
BuffNet itself has a VERY nice explanation of all that happened at http://www.buffnet.net/ag/.
For those afraid of the infamous Goat, a VERY VERY brief part of it had this to say:
"When someone sends illegal material through the U.S. Mail, they don't arrest the people in the Post Office." said BuffNET V.P. Mike Hassett. "It seems like the Attorney General arrested the people who posted. They didn't have BuffNET accounts." Hassett stated. "Federal law protects ISPs. Isn't it intriguing that he [Vacco] chose only 2 ISP's, both in upstate New York? Is it coincidence that Vacco won his last election relying on upstate New York votes? Why weren't the other 1000 plus ISP's in New York State a target of his investigation? Why weren't BuffNET's peers that provided the newsgroups under investigation?" inquired Hassett. "
That's an excellent point...and how far does one take it? Is the Postal Service responsible for the mail bombs that sometimes make it through their system? Is the government responsible for all deaths and injuries that happen on the road systems because they've provided them? Are parents responsible for their children when they go out and maim or murder because they provided them with life? Are you responsible for whatever reason there is?
The problem is that by holding the isp responsible you empower whatever local DA or police chief with censorship rights. Sure in this case it was child porn which is illegal everywhere, but what about when some DA in bumfuck nowhere decides alt.binaries.pictures.erotica has obscene content and orders the isp to shut off that newsfeed. Again, an isp is a provider, like a phone service. Does the phone company get sued when I commit telephone fraud? hell no.
If I own a business and put up a bulletin board (physical, not electronic) for my employees to use for free and somebody posts a piece of kiddie pron on it, am I liable? Should I have to put that bulletin board behind glass, lock it down, and have an approval process for new postings? What if they tape it to the glass? How the hell are we supposed to regulate the actions of someone else? Shit the police can't even regulate the speeds of someone else! What if someone posts not a picture of kiddie pron but a short story about underage sex? Am I liable? What am I liable for? The 1st Amendment covers that. Now it may offend some woman and she sues someone for sexual harrasment. Whos' she going to sue? Me? Do I have to have hire someone to stand next to that board and check the content of everything that's posted as it's posted? Does anyone else think this is royally fscked up?
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
I'm only focusing on the usenet aspect of the story, but even at that, the government is heading down the wrong path here. Consider the following timeline:
2/16/01 Some ISP enters a guilty plea for carrying, say, alt.binaries.illegal-stuff. They face some sort of penalty.
2/20/01 ISPs across the country have quit carrying alt.binaries.illegal-stuff for fear of legal repercussions.
2/21/01 The regulars in alt.binaries.illegal-stuff figure out that they can't access their group anymore, even on premium news servers. After a quick round-robin email, they decide to take over a different group - alt.binaries.misc - with their illegal wares.
4/1/01 Some other ISP somewhere gets slammed with penalties for carrying alt.binaries.misc, which is now being used to traffic in the material once posted in alt.binaries.illegal-stuff.
4/5/01 ISPs across the country have dropped alt.binaries.misc, for fear of legal repercussions.
... And it goes around and around and around.
If we as the "technocrat" community have learned anything at all from the Napster debacle, it's that the government/corporations CANNOT stop a certain activity just by going after the source. If you go after Napster, people don't stop trading MP3s, they just create better p2p networks. If you go after alt.binaries.illegal-stuff, people won't stop posting illegal material; they'll just move to a different group.
It's time that the US government up and figured out that
a) the Internet is not a US-only entity, some things which are illegal here are not illegal elsewhere, and we cannot regulate the entire internet based on our own standards;
b) going after carriers is NOT effective and will only lead to fear-mongering, degradation of QoS, and perhaps worse, increased bandwidth usage as people start encrypting everything;
c) the only way to make a dent in the activity is to go after the perpetrators.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Please see the Lawful Arrest FAQ for the defintion of "crime", "cause of action", and "probable cause". For your reference:
A crime (corpus delecti) must have:
- An Injury
- A criminal cause (not an accident or act-of-god)
Cause of Action requires:- A right
- An Injury
- A petition for restitution
Probable Cause is : Reason to believe that the accused caused the injury to the victimProbable Cause requires
Look, no one is denying that forcing a child to pose for nude photos (or worse) is a crime. And let's say some sicko scans them and posts them to Usenet. And let's say that Fred O. Phile likes to look at such pictures for erotic pleasure and downloads them from his ISP.
Ok, Fred is a pervert. But did he produce an injury to the child? No. The ISP is in the business of passing bits around. Did anyone at the ISP cause an injury to a child? No.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that not every photo of a nude child actually produces an injury! BUT: if there was an injury produced, perhaps it was the guy that took the photo, and NOT the ISP, and not the guy that pulled it from a.b.p.k-p
Law is code:
while (law.topic=FLAMING HOT TOPIC) {
while (!law.topic.solved) {
law.topic.interested-parties.action=IGNORE ALL SIDES;
law.topic.interested-parties.action=CREATE BLACK MARKET;
law.topic.conscious.parties.action=DEBATE;
law.topic=FLAMING HOT TOPIC;
law.topic.solved=FALSE:
}
}
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This CNET story has lots of details. It was posted October 30, 1998, when charges were filed (a few days before the attorney general in question was up for re-election).
The newsgroups in question were alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.early-teen; pretty non-subtle. There's a claim by the prosecution that the CDA had exceptions for child pornography, so the CDA's Good Samaritan provision (which was not struck down by the courts) does not apply.
The words "chilling effect" come to mind.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
In breaking news today, the United States Government has been held responsible for the slaughter and oppression of thousands, at home and abroad.
"It's a fair cop," stated Representative Dick Gephardt. "What can I say? I like taking freedom and money from people."
"We've been playing our jackleg politico games for decades now. We've got a 2 trillion dollar budget and all of the guns, so what are you going to do about it?" asked House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Including the massacre at Waco, the Body Count of the United States Government is now calculated as "more than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick" by most normal-thinking people in the country. "But, what can you do? They've got all the money and all the guns," exclaimed housewife Denise Smith.
In other news, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has been given a twirling wedgie by Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Hundreds stood idly by and watched, applauding in the end.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I am a volenteer for a group known as capf... we are fighting child pornography. We have connections at the government level all the way down to the isps, so we actually get things done. We do need your help, if you are interested in joining capf or reporting child porn please visit our website at http://capf.virtualave.net and post on the msg board. We are currently looking for lawyers to advise us, and isp admins which would allow us to interview them on this issue of child pornography.
Warez and regular porn is one thing. Child porn is almost universally hated.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
We have the technology to filter everything
Show me the technology to which you are referring. Unless you mean "everything" as being "restricting everything" that filter is known as "pulling-the-plug".
Seriously, filtering software is horrible, absolutely horrible. If anyone has been forced to surf the web through a filter proxy like Bess or another, they find out that bad stuff gets through at times and good stuff gets blocked.
In addition, to force an ISP to monitor all the content it hosts is IMPOSSIBLE. Imagine a webhosting site that offers $20/month hosting service. They may have a thousand sites or more, depending on the size of the company. To be responsible for the content of each of these sites is unrealistic.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan