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Pennsylvania Law Requires ISPs to Block Child Porn
feed_me_cereal writes: "Salon
has an article describing a new law in Pennsylvania which requires ISPs to prevent access to child pornography on the internet. Under this law, the government can give ISPs a list of websites to block. Failure to do so can result in fines from $5,000 to $30,000 + jailtime. While stopping child pornography sounds noble, it seems that these powers will do little to meet this goal and much to allow the government to decide what websites are suitable for public viewing." Reader lightspawn provided this link to the law itself as well as another story at freedomforum.org.
aka if a stat says you can't see this... and isps have to follow .. then everyone ealse who has a net connection provided for others must follow as well...
.. oh what a mess this will be..
now the question is what if somone in pensilvenia uses some sort of web proxy to view such pages.. hrmm makes the isp still liable? does that mean that the isp has to block all web proxies out there
First, this is obviously a kneejerk reaction to Candyman.
Secondly, who's to decide what's what? Is the ISP supposed to just carte blanche kill off anything that even resembles child porn? What happens to people trying to look at Anne Geddes images? Who do you appeal to if an improper decision is made, and how does it work?
This seems like too much idealism and not enough rational thought.
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That I almost suspect its not supposed to be a real law, but rather something to make mothers feel better.
As long as there's a decent oversight so they only block access to child porn I don't have a problem with this. If they start blocking other stuff, that would be bad. It would also be bad if they used some kind of automated system, because that can go wrong. A person must verify these sites before they get put on the ban list.
Of course the big problem with this.. There is now a nice and complete list of child porn sites.. and you have people looking at this stuff all day.
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That's not really a good example, though, is it? Your sister's bathtub photo was probably taken by your parents, so either you're saying that Mom and Pop are child pornographers, or else you think that masturbation should be a crime.
Which is a good question, actually: although some child pornography is very harmful to the child, I imagine (not having investigated myself) that some of it is probably at that "kid in a tub" level. So is it really exploitative for Mom to have snapped that photo of me on a bearskin rug? Or does it become exploitative when it's on the Internet? Or am I only exploited when my photo arouses someone? What if nobody saw the photo until I was grown up - am I still exploited? What if Mom only gets out the photo at family gatherings and also to show my prospective girlfriends - is that when the exploitation occurs?
I'm not trying to minimize the harm that child pornography does to children, of course. I'm just pointing out that you could have found a better example to get all uppity about. And, also that the popular conception of "photos of children == evil" may not be so black and white as we would think. There's a lot of black, and there's some amount of grey.
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Oh, but then the article goes on to say that the law was passed last month: And reading even further, we see that this has been in the works for years: Please, read the facts before starting your rant! Now on to the important issue..this does seem to be a dangerous opportunity to for the government to begin censoring/banning web sites at will. I'm all for getting rid of the child porn websites, but I would rather it be done in a way that does not remove the freedom of surfing the web.
Rather than ranting and raving about how bad this is, why don't we try to come up with an alternative solution.
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If they know of a site that has child porn on it, why in the hell are they not going after the site instead of just blocking it?
I understand that its not as easy as it sounds, but there are other remidies that I would think would be much more effective such as having the DNS entries yanked, the ISP of the site hosting killing the site. Maybe even the FBI raiding the place (obviously not feasible if located outside the US).
But to require ALL ISP's to block sites seems like a band-aid approach to the problem.
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> This isn't just ineffective. It will be counter productive: forcing the underground further underground...
Kinda makes you want to jerk a knee with "Prohibition" or "War on Drugs" tatooed on it, donit?
These laws probably aren't supposed to be effective. At best they are a cynical attempt to get votes by giving the politicians something to point to as "evidence" that they're Doing Something About It. At worst, they become another black hole for tax money, a source of corruption in law enforcement agencies, further erosion of our traditional liberties from the legislatures and courts, and a huge revenue boost to criminal organizations.
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Blocking child pornography is essentially impossible. Blocking any sort of "content" or "IP" is an extremely difficult task. It's one thing to block port 25; unfortunately the IETF has yet to standardize on a port number for kiddie porn.
First, there's the problem of deciding what to block: Let's take the obvious example, of blocking a jpg. This means someone has to determine the age of the person in that jpg. I looked at about 1,000 jpgs last nite, and I pity the fool who has to monitor my drunken pr0n surf.
Perhaps it would be possible to use some VERY sophisticated pattern recognition algorithm, but, like spam filtering, you're never gonna block 100% of the bad stuff while letting 100% of the good stuff through. Nevermind the incredible resource hit of scanning each downloaded jpg, or the fact that your CRC-matching database of known jpgs ain't worth shit once I take the 640x480 jpg and save it as 644x483.
But that's not even the real problem. No, the real problem is THE DEFINITION OF PORNOGRAPHY. Basically it depends on things like "community standards" and such which don't really make sense on the Internet. With child pornography, the definition gets even more complicated; things that are otherwise acceptable become pornography when the subject is under 18, such as a picture which shows the outline of the vulva through clothing isn't porn if the girl is 23 but is porn if she's 9.
(In fact the entire laws about kiddie porn in this country are totally fucked. The gov't can offer to sell you kiddie porn, say from an ad in the back of a magazine, and then sell it to you, and then bust you for possession. This would normally be entrapment, but the Supreme Court decided that kiddie porn is such a scourge that normal constitutional protections are outweighed by the need to lock up pedophiles. Hmmm... "First they came for the pedophiles, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a pedophile. Then they came for the Arabs..." But I digress.)
To make matters worse, pornography doesn't even have to be a picture or movie. Text can be pornography. For instance,
I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't stop myself from licking 15-year old Timmy's perineum as he lay unconscious.
That could be construed as kiddie porn, believe it or not. Of course in this context I won't be going to jail (I hope) since my INTENT isn't prurient (but who can really tell my intent?). But if I logged on to some kiddy chat room and made that comment, I would be in big trouble, esp. if the moderator knows what a perineum is.
So not only do you have to filter the content, which is a subjective process in the first place, you have to ascertain the context of that content. In other words you have to Meta-Moderate, and we all know how much fun that is!
No, this will never work, and the "blacklist" that gets passed from the Penn. A.G. to the ISP's will have all the same problems as the anti-spam blacklists: How do you get off it, do you notify someone that they're on it, or would that just tell them it's time to get a new IP address, etc.
Here are some links to interesting legal stuff:
Supreme court def. of pornography (pdf, sorry)
has the famous "I know it when I see it" qoute from Justice Potter Stewart
Google HTML version
Guy in jail for selling videos of girls in their panties
Guy acquitted after gov't got him to order kiddie porn thru mail and then busted him. He was acquitted because the gov't hadn't proved intent, not because it was entrapment
I am not a lawyer, but I play on on Slashdot.