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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."
It's wacky that courts can order companies to do things, and not suggest ways of doint it.
This wouldn't be news if the court had listed the sites it wants blocked. Let the court make the distinction between allowed and not allowed once, instead of making every single ISP make those choices.
Kind of like a court saying, "Hey, <INSERT POWER COMPANY HERE> you have to start using fusion power next year."
How do they block it without knowing what the sites are?
If they know where the sites are, why haven't they been shut down?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
What I'd like to know is how they expect the ISP's to know what sites do and don't have child pornography on them. I mean we've had software on the market for years to block regular porn, and look how effective that's been. This kind of thing is just not the realm of the judiciary, or even the legislature. PA's always been stupid on stuff like this, I believe there was some previous ruling/bill about blocking access to obscene material which cause standard porno boilerplate to add "if you live in PA" alongside "if you're a minor" in a number of cases. I'm not dissing pennsylvania, I live here, but the old adage about PA being Philly and pittsburgh with alabama in between is really quite true
I understand that people that run businesses online can't afford to be so blase, but hey. I'm just a turd with a website.
Is a picture of a 2 year old in the bathtub on a family website 'child porn'? It IS a picture of a naked child. And some kiddie porn purveyors would salivate over it.
Yes, child porn is bad. So intensely bad that the website owners need to be hung up by their testicles, and then drawn and quartered.
But...let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the webhost can be identified, and the website known....why are we not going after the website owner/designer?
Don't just block it....put the ass in jail.
Pennslyvania needs to provide ISPs a list of websites it says contains child porn. It's not an ISP's job to determine what is and isn't child porn. It's only job should be to block it if the state deems something child porn. You can't just go off enabling filters that filter out key words like child porn, etc without disabling other legitimate websites. In fact, that article itself on ISP's filtering child porn would probably be marked as a child porn site and thus filtered.
Ah, nevermind I'll stop beating the horse.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Empowering an ISP to block certain content is to blatantly go against the end-to-end design which the Internet was built on. It is a slippery slope indeed. Setting a precedent like this is to give the courts the ability (i.e. and high powered self interest lawyers of corporations) to CONTROL the content layer of the Internet. Porn is bad. No doubt. But is a historical image gallery of lynchings in the American South ? Is the image of Jesus in a jar of urine ? How about a website that criticizes Republicans ? Democrats ? Catholics ? Jews ? Controlling the access to certain content should exist as the ENDS of the network, not the network itself.
Is it not possible to argue that child porn is a bad thing, socially unacceptable, with devastating consequences for innocent lives. Therefore if the constitution has some kind of loophole which permits child porn, perhaps there is something wrong with the constitution? Guys, lots of us are software engineers here. If the specification for your project is causing massive problems, consider getting the spec changed!
Don't get me wrong. The constitution was a wonderful thing back in the eighteenth century and a vast improvement not only on its predecessors but its sucessors too in many ways. I'm just baffled how so many folks in the USA act as though the constitution was handed on tablets of stone from Mount Sinai by Founding Fathers who were acting in some infallible capacity.
Not a troll, just curious. And yes, I live in a land with no constitution, cameras on every street corner, and elective dictatorship and bad dentistry blah blah blah. Before you tell me what's so bad about my world, please satisfy my curiosity about yours.
If PA is so intent on blocking child porn, why don't they fine the USPS for delivering porn?
This will get my lynched, no doubt, but... ..." but nobody has explained the logic behind their position, which is strange to see on slashdot.
Is there a good essay that examines just "what is wrong with child porn?"
I keep seeing posts like "Child porn is bad. So bad that
I understand perfectly well the problems inherent to the creation of child porn and the mental problems associated with the people interested in child porn, but wouldn't it be better to fix the problems, not the symptoms?
Or does it depend on context? What about high school yearbooks, where parents often send in "embarassing" naked-little-kid pictures? Isn't that child porn? What about parents who take pictures of their kids in the tub because the kid is doing something cute? That's also child porn...
And how does child porn relate to age of consent? In many states, the age of consent is 16, yet you can't take nude photos of someone under 18 (legally, anyway), even if they are begging you to. I've never quite understood this, either.
I suppose the lawmakers assume the typical person interested in naked 16-year-olds is a 45-year-old male, but what about other male 16-year-olds who always click the "Yes, I am over 18" button anyway?
Bah, OK. I tried to come up with some interesting questions, so I'm expecting some interesting answers (and probably many trolls, too).
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Does Fedex?
How is an ISP any different?
sure you can control what goes out, force people to use your proxy filters. but once a valid request goes out... you've got traffic. so you setup a middleman proxy type server. now all my requests go to www.mysecretdomain.edu/site1, and that will feed you traffic from site 1. next thing to do is to setup the mysecretdomain to switch ip's frequently if needed.
i guess some one's got look like the dunce, might as well be a commonwealth and not a state.
why don't they create a pensylvania mail trafficing sytem to block porn from entering their state via snail mail?
'Course, upon doing some more reading (ie., RTFAing): if they're talking about blocking child porn, I kinda wish 'em luck.
The slippery slope is, when you let government decide to block a website because it is outside the realm of protected speech, you have to make sure it doesn't start blocking websites just because the speech might not be protected, or because it doesn't agree with the party line of whomever's in the government at the time.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
So a webserver is blocked, and you're ok with that.
Who tells the isp that they can remove the block when the "child porn" site is removed? I fear that even years later, certain ip addresses will be blocked even after they aren't owned by those same server sites, much less the particular web sites.
Who defines the site as child porn? Does it have to be actually even porn, or involving children, or can the state simply decide that the site is unacceptable and should be blocked? Is there any judicial review involved, or is there some beaurocrat who makes the decision?
At least if the web site itself is shut down, there had to be some judicial review of some kind. With blocking, the web site might not even know to take it to court.
Is there any
Why does everyone seem to think that the right to free speech covers everything a body might want to say about anything? Is no one here aware of the history of newspapers in the 1800's getting their type strewn into the street for publishing poorly researched and/or slanderous material? This only became a bad thing when people decided that porn (nudie mags, take your pick) was covered by free speech! I say that it is not!
The Constitution was written to cover political, not private, speech. Speaking out against or for the government and its policies (local to federal) is what is covered by the Constitution. Not John Doe wanting to publish his version of Debbie does Dallas!
Current interpretation of the laws puts us where we are, not the laws themselves. This is why there are bitter partisan fights in congress about who gets assigned to what seat on the Supreme Court (and the lower courts).
The Salon article brought up Worldcom, but I'm still curious about this.
I live in New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. My ISP is Comcast (@home, cable modem). Comcast is based in Philadelphia. Does this mean that now those particular sites would be blocked to me, despite me being a resident of NJ?
Now don't get me wrong, I have no desire to see child pornography, but say one of those sites is on the same server as another site I go to. Am I blocked from that site? If I cross the Delaware river and go to PA, I legally have to be blocked, right?
This measure seems overly broad and without real solutions or merit.
The problem with this is that pornography laws are very different all over the world. For example, in the Netherlands the legal age for participation in porn is 16. So lets say there is a Dutch webserver with pictures of 16 year olds. This is perfectly legal, and the Dutch ISP has no reason not to allow it. A site like this would be labeled as kiddie porn in the US, and any non-porn content on the server could be blocked as well.
In this case, the software is probably on the actual workstations. Once the IP packet leaves the computer, there's no way for routers, firewalls, or other blocking systems to determine whether you asked for slashdot.org, 66.35.250.150, 0x42.0x23.0xFA.0x96, or 1109654166. They're all equivalent in the IP header.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I agree with the question everyone else is asking. Just how are they going to block the sites? I can just imagine an ISP blocking sites based on words found on the pages. If that happened, even Slashdot would be blocked. Look what words have already been said in this thread. Child porn, naked, kiddie, and the list goes on. I don't see any possible way to block those kinds of sites at this time. Sure, the ISP can have a list. But the sites on that list will change. And while who ever is in charge of making the list is putting together a new one, users WANTING those sites will have already found new ones. It's a vicious cycle, and I don't think forcing ISPs to 'block' sites is going to help AT ALL.
In a way, this seems similar to the Verizon case because it puts a middle entity between two clearly guilty parties, and burdens them with the responsibility for some "Bad Thing".
In this case, the people who produce and consume kiddie porn are in clear violation of the law. I say "go after them", and don't waste resources in a futile attempt to make sure nobody can see the kiddie porn.
State AG's could go after the smaller pool of large backbone carriers and get them to filter offending material at the IP level, but that would be more expensive for the states to pursue (I beleive). Instead, pick on the zillions of smaller ISPs
Anyway, expect p2p traffic to get this treatment first, because kiddie porn doesen't put a dent in AOLTW's or Sony's bottom line.
The phone company may eventually become liable, if text-to-speech data mining becomes reality. Check out this article by Lincoln Stein:
/ na 0303g/index.html (beware the slashdot space)
http://www.newarchitectmag.com/documents/s=2445
Particularly this paragraph:
******
To me, the IAO [Information Awareness Office, www.darpa.mil/iao/] is scary enough on its own. The Web page (http://www.darpa.mil/iao/programs.htm) lists, without comment, a series of mysterious projects. In addition to the Total Information Awareness System, there is the Human ID at a Distance project, which is presumably a system for clandestine face and voice recognition. The Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS) system will be useful for converting intercepted telephone conversations into text that can be databased and mined for suspicious activity, and the Translingual Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization (TIDES) system will likely be used for translating foreign language emails. But what do we make of the "Bio-Surveillance" project, "FutureMap," and "Babylon"?
*******
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Here's another interesting piece by the same author.
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
Excellent post, BTW. ;)
I agree with you here - pr0n is in the eye of the beholder, not always the taker. Some sicko is probably going to spank off at the picture of the cute kids in the tub, even though that wasn't the intention of the parents. Likewise, I rather enjoy looking at the Victoria's Secret catalog... Does that make it pornography, and if so, is my mailman a pusher?
Unfortunately, you can't define and classify something as obscene without knowing what the person viewing it will think.
And how does child porn relate to age of consent? In many states, the age of consent is 16, yet you can't take nude photos of someone under 18 (legally, anyway), even if they are begging you to. I've never quite understood this, either.
Again, good point - more so, what about other countries where the age of consent AND the picture-taking age is 16 (i.e. Denmark, I believe). Is that kiddie porn or adult porn?
-T
The age of adulthood varies depending on the context and the region. For example, in much of the U.S. it is 21 for drinking alcohol, but 16 for driving a car, but these can both vary by state.
It's the same with the age of consent. The U.S. age (usually 18) is high by international standards. You can argue that this is because the U.S. is a more advanced country than other areas and so has decided to protect its teenagers from predatory adults for a longer portion of their lives, or that it's because America has very immature teens (I mean psychologically and emotionally, not phsically) and more puritcanical adults. Or, avoid antagonism and say cultural differences.
Perosnally, I think that regardless of the age of consent, it should be graduated: lower than usual where there isn't much age difference between the two parties (eg. Romeo and Juliet), but higher where the older party is in a position of power (eg. teacher and student).