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Pennsylvania Refuses to Disclose Banned Website List
koehn writes "In an interesting turn of events, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania has ordered all PA ISPs to block sites that have child porn. If that's not bad enough, they won't tell you which sites those are because - so the excuse goes - that could be construed as 'disseminating pornography.' So much for public review, huh?" See the previous story.
For everyone. ISPs are just carriers. They're not supposed to be filtering based on content. That's akin to the Attorney General ordering Fedex to block all packages that have $WHATEVER material, which is illegal.
The CDT report - entitled "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" - analyzes a 2002 Pennsylvania law that forces ISPs to block access to any web site deemed "child pornography" without notice to the site's publisher and without any opportunity to challenge the determination. ISPs are required to block the sites even if they do not host the content and have no relationship whatsoever with the publishers of the content. The Pennsylvania Attorney General has since gone even further, bypassing the law's inadequate court procedures to simply demand by letter that sites be blocked.
CDT.org
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Fisher has so far instructed Internet providers with customers in the state to block subscribers from at least 423 Web sites around the world.
First, I find it hard to believe that there are only 423 web sites that offer kiddie porn, based soley on the amount of spam I get advertizing it. And in what way is this list updated? Porn sites move around constantly, and use any number of tricks to fool browsers (fake.site.com@real.site.com tricks, IP addresses instead of host names, etc.) so I think this list must be changing every few minutes. Do they reall y have someone sitting and watching as the porn sites get a new IP address?
I'm not saying anything for or against the block itself, I'm just saying this must be one hell of a headache to manange.
The problem with this law is that an ISP cannot search web content for a given filename or even URL and block it based on that. ISPs don't look at anything beyond IP Layer 3. All they care about is routing IP packets. What happens if a large over-seas company hosts thousands of customers with a single IP address (or pool of addresses in the case of a webserver farm)? All it would take is one bad apple at that hosting ISP and Penn. would force Penn. ISP's to block all other content from that hosting ISP's webserver.
Should that ISP be hosting child porn? Of course not. Should all the other sites hosted at that ISP be blacklisted? No.
These lawmakers are either uneducated about how the internet works, or simply do not care and feel that blocking child porn is more important than the free speech of the other legit websites that may be hosted on an ISP's shared webserver farm.
Penn should enforce the law where they can: If the webservers are outside the arm of the US law, go after what isn't: those who download and view this content. They can start with their own state employees at work, which would violate no privacy laws. Folks seriously addicted to kiddie porn known no bounds. I've know of a case where a local county employee spent 2-3 hours a day at work surfing this stuff.
All this law is going to do is drive kiddie porn sites futher underground and make those in Penn be more sneaky. As someone else posted, Penn. law enforcement won't even be able to access these sites to verify if it has kiddie porn (say if they had a download history on a PC but no actual photos.)
Electronic Frontiers Australia have been trying to get a list of sites from the authorities over here. While there isn't an all-encompassing list of sites that ISPs must block, there is a list of sites that have been reported to the authorities. If these sites are deemed sufficiently offensive by the same governmental body that issues classifications for movies, and the site falls under Australian jurisdiction, it will be issued a takedown notice.
So far the government has managed to weasel it's way out of complying with EFA's Freedom of Information requests, due to exemptions in the law. Whether the exemptions should protect the government in this case isn't an open and shut case though - in fact, the government is worried enough that they're currently pushing legislation that would explicitly put such information outside of the scope of the FOI Act.
The problem with keeping this information from the public is that there is no ability to properly review the process. Many in Australia are of the opinion that our content regulation regime is a farce.
More information at EFA