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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.
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.