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Pennsylvania Court Forces ISPs to Block Porn Sites
jkastner writes "Salon is reporting that Pennsylvania is forcing ISPs to block web sites that have child porn. While we can all agree that child porn is bad, this sort of approach starts us down a slipperly slope. If one site slips through, does that make the ISP liable? In addition, the court ordered blocking may prevent access to legitimate sites that are hosted on the same server."
...of sites to be blocked. I worked at an ISP and at one time a rather irate customer wanted all of a certian kind of pr0n blocked. We simply asked for a list of all those sites that they wanted blocked. This simply made them go away...
Is the ISP responsible if their users are surfing thru anonymizers or redirectors?
... and who gets to draw it?
What if they download that child porn via FastTrack or Gnutella?
Where is the line drawn
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"Connolly, the spokesman for the Pennsylvania attorney general, said Wednesday that in such cases involving a Web site with a shared address, authorities contact the Web-hosting companies and order them -- under threat of legal action -- to pinpoint and shut down the illegal pornographic sites."
So Pennsylvania authorities are going to call a Web-hosting company in Denmark and threaten legal action? In addition to being silly, I think that also violates US law. Foreign policy is the domain of the federal government.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
So how do they intend to block such sites?
Scanning emails for spam is pretty easy, all the mail comes into your server. Blocking websites is a lot harder, you will need a transparent proxy with lots of rules or a list of sites to block. User changes their DNS server and uses a third party proxy and voila, no more blocked sites.
The post makes it sound like some judge woke up one morning and decided to order blocking. That's not quite the case. The Pennsylvania legislature passed a law requiring such blocks. Since county courts (in most states; I assume PA is similar in this respect) do not have the power to declare a law unconstitutional, the judge has no choice but to order the blocking.
Ultimately this is a good thing. The order gets appealed to (the PA equivalent of) a state court, which will (as those tend to lack the power to declare a law unconstitutional) uphold the county ruling. Once a state court issues an order, then the (PA equivalent of the) state Supreme Judicial Court would be able to take an appeal and (finally) declare the law unconstitutional (especially if the PA Constitution has a free speech clause).
Thank you for pointing out the exact fallacy in your logic. It makes debate so much easier when you opponent strikes themselves down.
The slipperly slope in this case is that ISPs will be made ever more responsible for the content they carry. But the phone company and the post office aren't responsible for what their infrastructure is used to deliver. Why should the web be a special case?
How about, rather than blocking childporn sites, which requires ISPs to know who the offending sites are, you make legislation that if an ISP finds childporn, they are required to report it?
How are ISPs supposed to enforce this law? If I were a small or medium-sized ISP, and I were starting or contemplating doing business in Pennsylvania, I'd cancel the plans. There's way too much at risk, and if authorities themselves can't track down and properly prosecute paedophiles, they shouldn't force ISPs to do such or possibly face prosecution, when all they're doing is running a legitimate business of connecting people to the largest public network in the world...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
We won't know until the state discloses the info, but this seems very much like an "enabling" law. Basically one that is not meant to be enacted proactively, instead it enables an action to occur. Basically, if I complain to an isp that www.whatever.com has kiddie porn, then they are compelled by the law to block access to it, vs throwing up their hands and saying "well just don't surf there". I would assume that unless the state is going to come out with a "banned sites" list that all isp's use, that this is the way the law will be enforced.
I don't know why people are asking questions about jurisdictions since this law does not seem to address the hosting of these sites, just peoples access to them. And it looks like the counter argument is focused on the fact that the law requires the blocking based on ip vs url, thereby possibly blocking many potentially unrelated sites (like someone complaining about msn communities and having them all blocked).
that they shouldn't be blocking ANYTHING. End organizations (i.e. where you can view the porn, like your house, school, etc.) should be able to control access.
are you suggesting that the STATE decide what content ISP customers can see and what they can't ? what if the Democratic Senator from that state decides that you can't see Republican websites ? or Catholic ones ? or Jewish ones ? yes, child porn is bad. so are a lot of things that are in newspapers, cable TV, and on the radio.
but to give the control of that content to the people RUNNING the network flies in the face of the end-to-end design the Internet was built with.
once you put control within the network, not at its ends, you have a situation where the vested interests (in this case, the state) can decide what is good and what is bad. that, my friend, is worse than ANY child porn you can find.
I believe that these people can't control their fetish (or choose it) so isn't this the most preferable thing? I mean child fetishes are not going to go away once all these sites are closed down or blocked. It is the same reason I believe that prostitutes and brothels should be allowed to operate freely, as it keeps the rape rate down.
Thoughts? It would be interesting to hear what you guys think.
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How can an ISP be prosecuted for not blocking a child porn site if the site hasn't been legally proven to be a child porn site? How would the state get tips? Are they looking for the sites? If so, when they find them, why not report them to the FBI? I would think this is similar to requiring bookstores to stop selling certain magazines - they'd have to first provide due process that the magazines should be blocked.
A problem with this is unless the ISP's announce a list or warn the site they are blocking, it does risk legal sites being blocked and not knowing it. Unlike the print industry, which knows if shipments are refused or returned, neither legitamite sites nor their attempted viewers would know why the connection didn't work.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
No one's saying it's not a noble effort to reduce child porn. The problem is a major logistical one for ISPs. Most of them work with the mindset that they are carriers, nothing more. This means they don't usually have granularity in the controls over where their customers go by region. null routing all traffic to a site is usually cake, but only traffic from Pennsylvania adds a wrinkle. Sure, it can be solved given time, money, and resources, but it's a big problem for ISPs now since they are being required by law to do this, and probably don't have extra resources just lying around.
The thing that bothers me the most here isn't that child porn sites are going to be blocked, but IF courts are allowed to tell ISPs that the have to block to web sites of some kind than it is just a matter of time before the forced banning gets out of control.
What if some yahoo gets elected and thinks violence is bad and has all websites containing violence of any kind forcibly banned by court order. What about bad language? What about porn? What about sites about drugs and alcohol?
Hey why not ban every site that this anti-that judge or every site that is anti anything?
You can't just let courts force ISPs to censor things. I hate censorship so much, whatever happened to freedom of speech?
Pennsylvania's attorney general, Republican Mike Fisher, is leading the state's effort, which already has forced Internet providers to block subscribers from at least 423 Web sites around the world.
423 kiddie porn sites?! I hope the Attorney General has his office raided and his computers inspected for that, the man should be in jail. Anyone else would be in jail for that kind of collection.
This is arguably one of the worst pieces of news in a while. Once, we laughed at places like Saudi Arabia for trying to censor the internet. Now we are to have state mandated censorship as well.
Mr. Fisher, your efforts are not appreciated. You conclude that everyone in your state is into kiddie porn and that gives you a right to interfere with the press also known as the internet. It's offensive and unconstitional. Kiddie porn is vile and illegal already, but you are going to have to respect the rights of the rest of us while you catch people who can tell you where the best kiddie porn is. Your monitoring of my web surfing or email is a violation of the fourth amendment. Any restrictions you might place on my web surfing, however well intentioned, are violations of the first amendment. If you have reasonable suspisions backed with evidence you are ready to swear to in a public court of law, then you might be able to look in a particular place at a particular time. You might even be able to watch the web surfing of an individual for a limited time.
In the end, the only way to end the kiddie porn industry is to teach the world to have respect for their fellow man. Children would not be violated if people would not violate each other. Abuse of state power, presumption of guilt, and disrespect for your fellow citizens are all steps in the wrong direction. Aid to countries where this occurs would be a better use of your money.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How do they block it without knowing what the sites are?
Exactly. I'd have to require a list to impose anything per court order. To expect otherwise would be like asking the police to "just go get all the criminals out there - we don't have names, but make sure you get them all."
This issue will certainly be moved up on appeal, and I'd have to believe it will lose as it violates the framework of common carrier. You can trust that no service provider will permit themselves to operate without those protections - Prodigy's embarrassing loss in the 90s (due to its policy of filtering some content and therefore providing a guarantee thta the content was free from offensive material, vs. the Compuserve case where they clearly disclaimered "life has risk" and let people determine where they wanted to go) is enough of a reminder of where we service providers do not want to go.
I think it'd be wonderful to demand the list from the State of Pennsylvania, and then when they miss a site, hold them accountable. Or if they accidentally block a site, nail them for interfering with commerce.
BTW, it'd help if people would quit electing nanny-wannabees...
*scoove*
How would the telephone company implement an order to block, say, terrorist planning conversations?
The telephone company is hereby ordered to block phone numbers of terrorists.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Pervs will get it anyway. They are insidious that way.
Actually, I'm pretty sure if there was a comprehensive list of kiddie porn sites that 2 things would happen:
1: Most ISP's would voluntarily block those sites
2: The kiddie porn sites would simply switch hosting on a regular basis (like they do now) to keep one step ahead of law enforcement and blocking policies.
The problem that I have with this is that it seems to put the responsibility for determining what is and is not legal in the hands of people who are not qualified to make that decision. So, if I have vacation pics of my kids at the beach, they might decide to block the site just to be on the safe side.
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There's a kinky story accessible through this site about two underage kids who fall in love, have sex, and later die. I've read it myself. It's called, "Romeo and Juliet."
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
There's no good legal definition of it either. That's the real problem.
Where do we draw the line in the sand, This is slashdot and many people here are from the US, but we also have a lot of people from other countries. How do they view this. In Holland, at 15 your an adult and can be in porn if you like. Is this a problem? Where did we pick the magical age of 18 and do we have the right to impose it on everyone? I personally enjoy the look of a mature woman, which is why my wife is 4 years older than I am and I find her sexy every day I wake up. But what if I was 17, and I took pictures of my 17 year old girlfriend, do I go to jail? you can't expect a 17 or 16 year old boy or girl to want to look at people much older than themselves. hmmm... and then there is this issue of men of my age looking at young girls. This really pisses me off, but I have a daughter, so maybe my view is biased. See that is the problem in this country. Were always so gung ho about picking a random moral standard and forcing everyone to follow it. We get pissed off over child porn, but then I see, we don't seem to respect our own principles in our own homes. I often drive my daughter and her friends to drop them off at the movies, or the mall, and I see these parents who let their 13 year old daughters leave the house in outfits that would make me blush to have seen my wife wearing in college. mid drift shirts and belly button rings, thong underwear very vissible. This pisses me off, but you don't see me running out to make a law against mid drift shirts, or belly button piercings, although I feel this causes more rapes to happen than any child porn we can imagine. I guess my point is, that life is subjective, and we must be careful what laws we start throwing around willy nilly, a friend of mine in college became a nudist when she got married, she has kids and a husband and has been happily married for 15 years, should I look down on her, because it is not the lifestyle I chose. Let me reitterate, men who take erotic pictures of children should die a horrible death, but I just don't want our laws suddenly starting to infringe on the rights of the innocent, and I fear vague rulings such as these could result in that.
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