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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."
This means that there will be more bandwidth available when we surf for pr0n, since all those kinky amish won't be able to go there too!!!
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.
...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...
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.
take the term "slippery slope" the way it is meant, not a study in logical deduction with certainty. you know what the poster meant. and he's right. allowing ISPs (or even legally binding them) to control the content layer flies in the face of the end-to-end design that the Internet was built with.
You'll see that the state of PA orders companies that use virtual hosting to shut down the child porn sites that're on the same IP as other, legitimate sites.
"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."
I think there's still some question about exactly how they're enforcing this law, and as the article says, attorneys are requesting information from the PA Attorney General.
There's no good excuse for child porn, and while this law (and therefore method) may not be the way to go about it, it's a start.
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
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
"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)
I looked at the link which described a "slipperly" slope, but fail to see how this points out a fallacy in the logic?
Basically all it does is define it, and clarify that: "..are not (as in the case of deductive logic) 100% absolutely certain." Well duh.
It gives some examples of where it didn't work out, or strawman examples of it taken to the extreme. This is not the same as showing the logic has a fallacy.
s/slippery slope/incrementalism/
Does that make you happy?
As documented in your citation, slippery slope is an informal fallacy that rests on uncertainty in the premises in what is otherwise a deductively valid argument. It would make the debate more productive, if not easier, if you would address the premises rather than regurgitating your first semester logic course.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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'
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).
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.
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).
No good can come from this.
Here's a sig for someone...
--
Pennsylvania: Michael Jackson free since 2003!
Aside from the various technical flaws in their approach, which others have already pointed out, the court's action sets a terrible example.
On the bright side, though, perhaps the federal government could finally win the war on drugs simply by requiring state transportation departments to not permit vehicles containing drugs to use any roads maintained by the states. I'm sure that would solve the problem handily.
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.
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
If PA is so intent on blocking child porn, why don't they fine the USPS for delivering porn?
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.
Unfortunately, laws like this are likely to get passed in other states as well.
Not necessarily because the legislature doesn't understand how the technology works (although that is often also the case), but because if such a bill is proposed in your state, which politician is going to open himself up to the inevitable "he voted against a bill designed to reduce child pornography" campaign when he runs for re-election?
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
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?
I can see it now: at the ISP: "Well, I'll just take this list of child-porn sites that we keep in the file cabinet, and enter it into the filter."
What ignorant jackasses this court has proven itself to be governed by...
Anyways, I don't imagine this will be a serious problem. Just make the plaintiffs send you a list of all child-porn websites or show you where to get one, and have them show you where to get updates without breaking the law, such as seeking such sites out. Or plead with the court to make you immune while you do said searches. I don't think they'll do so. The court will then realize that this request is impossible for you to fulfill without you breaking the law to do so, and have them throw it out. It's not the USPS's job to make sure I don't order seventeen magazine in a brown wrapper. That responsibility belongs to a government investigative body that oversees the USPS. The same goes for ISPs.
And as for ISPs being liable, didn't the DMCA make that impossible?
You almost gave me a fucking heart attack.
I read the title, and had this surreal tunnel-vision of a world without internet porn.
Lets just say its not a world I want to live in.
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.
Oh, I think you're on to something here. The goverment start requiring blocking all domains that might have child porn, leaving only iraqi domains unblocked, so all child porn sites end up migrating to the underutilized .iq (is pr0n.raises-your.iq registered yet?)...and in the name of all that is decent and family values, we finally have a reason to invade and bomb iraq! oh wait, nevermind.
-- If you can't laugh at yourself, someone else will do it for you.
on law enforcement, which has already been proven ineffective, and is thus an embaressment to those who enforce the law.
This punts responsibility to the poor ISP who all government officials can now point their scrawny little finger at while cackling "There's the bad guy" to the voters.
This is actually a quite common tactic and if you examine laws closely you'll find any number of examples.
The fact that this ruling makes no sense, is impossible to comply with, and thus defines every ISP as a child pornographer is beside the point.
Shit rolls downhill.
KFG
When will people realize that "slippery slopes" arguments are, by definition, illogical? Grrrr.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
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.
Ironically enough, Salon.com is blocked by my school's proxy filter!
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.
Does Fedex?
How is an ISP any different?
'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.
the court ordered blocking may prevent access to legitimate sites that are hosted on the same server
I'm trying to imagine a context where a 'legitimate' site would be colocated with a child porn site on the same server. If the whoever's running the server knows its content, then they're clearly running a criminal operation and I wouldn't cry if his whole server was pulled. Otoh, if someone posts stuff to geocities, I think it's the responsibility of the host to keep the server clean and the threat of blocking all of their pages makes a strong enforcement tool. It's not that hard for a web operator, even of a large multi user site, to review its contents for illegal material.
All that being said, it *is* a slippery slope. However, the law is pretty clear about what is illegal and what is not.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
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
I can't make full sense of the other response to the parent post, but the 14th amendment is what makes the other amendments relevant to the states. The other response seems to be under the notion that the 14th amendment wouldn't have been necessary for the other amendments to apply to the states.
It's just like those Democrats to take something perfectly good and trash it.
:)
A few select Senators try to get their twisted bible-belted nazi regime ideas to work in the vision of tring to change things in their own visions.
So which is it? The Democrat baby-sitters or the Republican bible-thumping nazis?
Nice rant, and I do actually agree with the fundamental point that you are making... I do however have a problem with some of what you have to say...
You see, yes, some democrats seem to want to be babysitters for the rest of the country. But if you actually had RTFA, you would have taken note to the following quote:
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.
Also, you would have noticed that the Center for Democracy and Technology is trying to stop the Pennsylvania govt from doing this. The CDT promotes "democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age."
Granted, there are democrats that want to censor the internet, but there are far more republicans that want to do this. Even worse, the republicans tend to be more likely to use religion in the argument.
So, I am not sure if you were attacking democrats and democratic policy in your post or if you were just talking in general but I hope for the sake of open-mindedness the later is the case...
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.
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.
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.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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?
it's legal in pakistan to own a fully automatic ak47 (substitute another country if i'm wrong). it is generally illegal in the united states. if someone in pakistan ships one to my home address, what will happen?
is the shipping company liable? are they required to open the package? will the government open it when it first arrives in the us? once i recieve it, did anyone but me break the law?
i'm curious what the answers are, but i'd start by saying follow the analogy.
char *mySig;
I once voted to ban dog shit in oatmeal cookies.
It was voted down because they said that might lead to removing chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, and other good things.
So we still eat our dog shit cookies.