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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.
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.
The gov't has already decided that child porn is not suitable for public viewing. This is just one way of enforcing that decision.
While I'm as big a conspiracy theorist as anyone, I do think this could actually stop some child porn.
This may be slightly offtopic, but one of the links under this story at cnn was "Child sex trade: a form of terrorism". Yet another crime becomes terrorism. How long before the word loses its meaning?
I am a little unclear on the standards of child pornography. It seems to me that if you put such a broad block, you can lose a great deal of meaningful content. Example. You're doing research on rain jungle aboriginies and there are pictures of children unclothed as they frequently are. (Ever watch a National Geographic?)
I admit this is a weak argument, but this is part of a larger issue. No Internet content ought to be blocked. The only filter should be your own brain. If you find this image offensive, don't look at it! It's just that simple. I agree, child pornography is absolutely sick, and the government should take steps to eliminate it and prosecute those who produce it. They should not on the other hand, enforce tactics for trying to regulate the flow of information to clients. This is impossible.
Consider the choices: regulate content flow to a billion+ clinets, OR, eliminate a few thousand content sources. *sigh*
Why bother.
The law specifically says that a site has to be kiddie porn, as defined by their statutes. So:
Today it is kiddie porn, tomorrow...kiddie porn, then...kiddie porn!
Not only that, but a judge has to sign off on EACH AND EVERY SITE to EACH AND EVERY ISP. That's a pretty safe system.
Just the same as people link to DeCSS samples because the gov't says they're illegal, we ought to link to child pr0n for the same reasons.
"Today it is kiddie porn, tomorrow adult content sites, then sites that provide birth control information, then..."
"once the toe is in the door, it is hard to stop the leg, then the shoulder..."
That is the classic slippery slope fallacy.
In this case, the slope isn't all that slippery, anyway. Child porn is unique in that it is fairly straightforward both to define (as depiction of minors engaged in sexual activity) and to establish the harm that it causes (since engaging kids in sexual activity tends to harm them, whether or not the activity is recorded or not). For most other kinds of porn, the definition and establishment of harm are a lot more ambiguous.
See:
SmartFilter's Greatest Evils:e stevils.php
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/great
BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity):
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php
The Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php
All of them, and a few others on http://sethf.com/anticensorware/ , deal with this issue of the technical requirements for the control system.
The short version is that "disable access" arguably entails banning anonymizers/privacy sites, language translation sites, and more, since these all can act as a means of escape from the blinder-box.
Maybe access through these sites doesn't count as "accessible through its service". But I sure wouldn't want to be the ISP facing child-pornography charges over that argument ("You mean you allowed access to this anonymity service, which is used by CHILD MOLESTORS?!")
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
The way I see it, telling an ISP to block access to child porn sites is like telling Interstate 80 to prevent motorists from going to Texas.
I feel sorry for the ISPs who are going to be jerked around by a government who has no idea how to implement an unworkable law. This is just another case where uniformed legislation is going to raise price for the public and make life difficult for private business.
It may seem obvious but newsgroups seem to offer the relative anonymity that encourages distribution of this type of material.
Websites have to be hosted someplace. Content can be identified and prosecuted.
I'm still not sure why some newsgroups are carried by ISP's. What possible legal use could there be for alt.binaries.sex.children or similarly named groups?
This is not a flame or a troll but I think there's general concensus that certain material should be prosecuted and every effort made to eliminate its presence from the net. I'm not referring to all porn but pornography involving the exploitation of children.
Banning these websites may be a particularly ineffective way to achieve that goal but at a minimum something should be done about the newsgroups.
> What exactly is the problem here??
Several things actually:
1. This puts the burden of doing this on the ISPs, who will remain uncompensated. While AOL can amortize the cost of processing the blocking list across millions of subscribers, the little ISPs don't have that kind of user base. Penn. should pay the ISPs for their costs to do this.
2. How will an ISP block access to kiddie porn websites when people try to access them through, say, www.anonymizer.com? The ISPs would have to mount a man-in-the-middle attack and decrypt all such traffic.
3. The Attorney General is being given the power to simply declare something as being kiddie porn without a judge, jury, or trial. I can easily see them shutting down a web site that consisted of erotic photos of young looking, but legal age, adults. Worse still, I can see a born-again-Christian-zealot Attorney General defining kiddie porn to further their own agenda. It could include everything from Japanes anime sites to sites devoted to helping prevent the spread of STDs among teens.
ISPs should not become uncompensated censors for the government.
I live in PA, and I don't want to come off like I support child porn, BUT:
1) Is this law enforceable? What if someone posts child porn (or something the religious zealots would call child porn - like a 17 year old tryin to look sexy). to a site such as hotornot.com. Does that mean the entire site is cut of, or just that page. The law says just that page (just pornography), which means that the ISP has to filter the URL, determine if it's a match, and block that page. Blocking www.hotornot.com would not be the requirements of the law, and would violate 1st Amendment rights for the other pages.
2) What about due process?? What I see as child porn may be different from what you see as child porn, etc, etc.. You report me, and my site is filtered, what about notice to the owner of the site? What about a court hearing? What about guilty until innocent? (Silly Steve, is that an urban legand?)
There's also a few other problems that people have mentioned about this.
In case you don't know, Pennsylvania is pretty much Philadelphia and Pittsburg, with the Bible Belt in between. So I do see it as something that would spread to Adult content, political agenda sites, how about blocking of sites that portray non-christian values?
John D. Ashcroft, Attorney General, et al., v. The Free Speech Coalition, et al. will decide whether virtual child pornography can be treated as the real thing. It was argued in the Supreme Court last October, and they still have not issued an opinion.
If you can treat the virtual like the real, then it becomes much easier for the AG of Pennsylvania to do something. He doesn't have to care about the difference. Otherwise, sorting out whether it is virtual or real could pose difficulties.
Interesting that CANDYMAN happened while the Supreme Court was noodling over the issue. I wonder if they know.
This is slowly becoming the end of the information highway. It is turning into the censorship highway. Of course someone will moderate this down as being overrated, and maybe it is a little bit, but I have been on the internet since 94 and it is not as free as it used to be. We now have more ads then ever before. There are now more spammers then there were and more people online. There are more sites and people using 'family safe software' that blocks 'bad content'. But who is defineing this bad content?
Well believe it or not much of this is being driven by religious conservatism and right or wrong how long will it be before a site that you visit that is NOT pornographic or bad is blacklisted because it is considered 'subversive' or a terrorist threat? in France they are demanding the blockage of the sale of all Nazi memorabilia (sp), asia they block some western ideas. Soon it will be up to those in power to determine what content they want you to read.
Fantasy, well most people are young here and will live to see if this is going to be more real than fantasy.
Only 'flamers' flame!
(1) ISP's, nor the government, should not be in the business of banning certain websites, or blocking access to them. There's no difference between that and banning, or burning, books. Fucking nazis.
(2) In regards to "simulated child pornography", if its simulated, who does it harm? In such a case -- i.e., an 18+ woman who looks younger, or a computer-generated image -- no one's privacy is voilated, nor was anyone's rights violated in producing the image. Banning that is just christian bullshit where they want to control your mind. It's a victimless crime in that case.
(3) In regards to real pornography, which was actually derived from children, there are three classes: (a) Forced; (b) Exploitative; (c) Self-done. Here's my take on each of them:
a. Forced. If a child is forced (raped) into sexual poses/positions/whatever, and the image of that taken is distributed on the web, there's no reason the government shouldn't be able to take down that image from the website, in protection of the child. Every minute the image is up there is a VIOLATION of the child's rights to privacy, self-dignity, and her body.
b. Exploitative. When the child is not "forced" per se, but nevertheless is taken advantage of by an adult. The act itself should be illegal in most cases; I don't think we should be ardent about "exact" age limits. The legal age for consentual sex with older people is 18 most places; if a guy has sex with a girl a month away from being 18, so what? Of course, we need to have precise laws, so people know exactly what they can and cannot do. I suggest keeping the legal age at 18, but varying the punishment for statutory rape depending on the age-difference of the "victim" and of the adult. There's a big difference when a 60-year old man sleeps with a 16-year old girl, as opposed to a 19-year old man doing the same.
c. Self-done. When an underage person engages in sexual poses/sex, and photographs themselves; then they either post it online immediately, or wait until they're older (18) and publish it then. There's nothing wrong with this, though current laws prohibit it. If someone took pictures of themselves having sex at 16 and wants to post it on the web later on, that's their right: it is their body.
Even in case (a), where I feel the government does have the obligation to -- in protection of minor's rights -- stop the distribution of child-pornography, that doesn't justify any means. The government is free to do so via any means that are non-draconian. They are not permitted to, for example, take down an entire P2P network to stop some porn, nor to spy on what all of us put on the web.
I really think that child-molestation laws are unneeded. They are redundant with rape laws. The standard in rape law is, "could/did the person give informed consent". Obviously, a 6-year old child can't give informed consent, as that person doesn't even know what sex is. Obviously, a woman who says "no" can't give informed consent. Obviously, a woman passed out drunk can't give any kind of consent.
But there are some sticky situations where its a little vague. What about when the person is 16-18? When can they give informed consent? Obviously, some people make better sexual decisions at 16 than others do at 30. Well, maybe you can have a "sex license" sort of like a drivers license, which verifies that you know about basic sexual issues. Sounds kinda stupid, huh, a "license to have sex"? But its alot better than setting unmeaningful absolute standards which don't apply uniformly.
What about a case where a woman is drunk and is the sexual aggressor? Should the man be charged with rape if he has sex with her? I don't think so. Another consideration is, "who was the initiator"? Was it the man, the woman, or both? I think that if there is an "initiator" and the other person accepts the advances, it should never be considered rape (unless the other person was purposefully stoned to make them "easy"), except in cases where the person doesn't have their "sex license".
But even that has problems. For example, do we really want to say that a person mentally retarded can't have sex, except with other mentally retarded people?
It is clear to me that this society has not thought enough about sex; all of our answers the a complicated issue are black/white, clearly goaded on by Christian humbug.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
It seems to me that we should block not just
child porn sites but also things that can be
construed as enabling child porn. Let's
start with the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights.
There are technical means that ISPs could use to implement Pennsylvania's orders - they could install proxy servers on all of their connections leaving Pennsylvania, either forcing users to explicitly proxy their browsers, or using transparent proxy servers. Some ISPs do this, to take advantage of caching and reduce their overall bandwidth needs, but except for local ISPs that happen to be entirely within Pennsylvania, most of them didn't build their network to easily keep track of state lines so they can enforce the "Banned in Boston" rules in Boston, "Banned in Philadelphia" rules in Philly, and "Banned in Pittsburgh" rules in Pittsburgh.
Does anybody know if any national ISPs were consulted on the implementation issues? I suspect most of them are perfectly willing to comply with orders to take down web pages, but would have lots more trouble with the blocking requirements - it's much cleaner to implement on the edges of the network, in the user's browser where there's enough information to decide.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Because many ISPs block them already, or the groups are getting spammed/bombed to death, but the people just move to some less explicitly named groups, wreaking havoc on those actually looking for normal or artistic or nudist pictures by mixing it with hardcore stuff. It's been done, and it doesn"t work...
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