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PA Child Porn-Blocking Law Challenged, Suspended
An anonymous reader submits: "Pennsylvania's controversial child porn controls have been challenged in court, and in a surprising twist, suspended by the state. If you recall, PA required ISPs within the state to block access to sites hosting child porn. The list (which used IP addresses) is compiled solely by the State Attorney General's Office. The use of IPs resulted in the unnecessary snagging of other sites on the same hosting service. The plaintiffs are the ACLU, CDT, and a Doylestown PA ISP. The State AG, in an odd move, suspended the law and the list indefinitely. [Note: Philly.com appeared to suffer a DDoS earlier today. Please be kind to their admins.]"
Fisher suspends tactic in fighting child porn
By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Inquirer Staff Writer
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michael Fisher today agreed to halt his behind-the-scenes effort to get Internet service providers to block child pornography Web sites until a federal judge rules whether Fisher's tactic violates the First Amendment by indiscriminately blocking legitimate sites.
The decision was announced at a federal court hearing on a request by civil rights groups for a temporary restraining order to stop Fisher's year-old program.
U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois approved the compromise and set a hearing for Nov. 21 on the merits of a lawsuit.
The suit against Fisher was filed earlier today by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based Internet policy group; the American Civil Liberties Union in Philadelphia; and PlantageNet Inc., a Doylestown Internet service provider, or ISP, that provides local dial-up numbers for much of the Philadelphia region in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
John O.J. Shellenberger, chief of the Attorney General's Eastern Regional Office, said his office may still move against child pornography Web sites under state law by seeking a formal court order. He also agreed that his office would contact the ACLU before seeking such an order so that ACLU lawyers could protect the interests of legitimate Web sites that might also be closed.
Pennsylvania is the first - and only - state to try to tackle the thorny problem of fighting purveyors of illegal child pornography, which has become as pervasive on the Internet as legal sexually explicit sites.
The problem has confounded Congress and software developers because the technology of the Internet makes it impossible to filter out, or block, offensive Web sites without also blocking some legitimate sites about sexual, medical or social issues.
Fisher spokesman Sean Connolly defended the law, which went into effect in April 2002, and Fisher's informal policy of contacting ISPs by letter, which advises of a child porn site and threatens legal action if the ISP does not block the site.
An ISP that receives the warning has five days to block the Web site from view by Internet users in Pennsylvania. Failure to do so could result in fines of up to $30,000 and jail terms of up to seven years.
"This informal notification process was developed at the request of ISPs," Connolly said. "We are perfectly willing to obtain a court order. We've done it in the past and we're willing to do it again."
In Doylestown, the president of PlantageNet Internet Limited, James Smallacombe, said that the way the law is written makes it "impossible" for him and others to comply.
"If we received an order to block access to a particular IP address, since we started outsourcing dial-up networks, we have no physical way to prevent any user from accessing any site, because we don't control the network that the users dial into," Smallacombe said. "But the way the law is written, we can still be ordered to do this and, if we fail to comply, suffer the consequences."
Stefan Presser, the ACLU's legal director, said Fisher's informal process effectively blocks legitimate Web sites without the owners' knowledge - or the chance for them to challenge the action in court.
"We do not support child pornography. Regardless of [Fisher's] goal, he is not complying with what the legislature suggested be used," Presser said.
Fisher's informal policy does "little or nothing to combat the crime of child pornography or the problem of child pornography on the Internet," Presser said, because it does not go after the purveyors but the communications links they and legitimate Web sites use.
Because of the Internet's technical architecture, in which multiple Web sites share the same numerical Internet address, or IP number, the lawsuit contends that numerous owners of legitimate Web sites have found themselves blocked from custom
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I'd doubt it very much if any of the creeps are stupid enough to locate in the US, those that were are already in prison.
-Tim Louden
how is it impossible to block domain names rather than IP addresses with the currennt technology of the Internet?
It isn't. But it might get expensive on the hardware side. You'd need to filter everything based on the HTTP request instead of the IP. A lot of ISP are probably not prepared for that and would require investing in router/switches capable of this or forcing everyone thru a proxy server.
is this an intentional disruption by bad co-operation? when things are badly implemented, court order got suspended and no more need to handle blocking requests?
The implementation was not appropiate and was disruptive. Two wrongs don't make a right.
or are those ISPs have the same mind as Code-Red writer, who tried to DDOS whitehouse.gov's IP instead of the domain name itself.
Oh, I get it now... You are joking and I fell for it. Dang!
No sig
There is an interesting side note concering the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The original two commonwealths were Massachusetts and Virginia.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
"As much as I hate Child Pornography, and the people who distribute it, if you block a million child porn sites, and only 1 non porn site is blocked, they shouldn't be blocked."
That logic works when you're talking about death sentences, but in this case it just plain doesn't work. If 1 in a million sites are getting blocked, then it seems like it'd be easier just to work with that site to get its block removed. Move to a new ISP? Use different terminology? Use a whitelist?
If you had said 1 in 10, then I wouldn't have taken issue with what you said. The core of what you meant is solid, but you used a number that was self-defeating.
So what you're saying is "write a program to determine if a picture is kiddy porn." Have you any idea what you are asking for? I don't think that is at all possible. Image recognition currently only works when you have very controlled and well-known parameters, such as camera angles, lighting, subject matter, etc. To write a program that would take any picture and be able to determine "this is kiddie porn" would be close to impossible. And remember, to be useful it's got to have a very low false-positive rate, otherwise it's just going to waste a lot of someone's time and end up achieving nothing. See the facial-recognition quagmire for how this works (or rather, doesn't work at all.) And facial recognition is light years easier than what you're advocating, since all that needs to be done is compare a target face to a list of known faces and see if features match.
There is a lot of porn out there, and to have a computer deal with the sheer number of variations is just unrealistic. Heck, you couldn't do this with a HUMAN, let alone a program. I bet you could show a person a borderline porn image and they wouldn't be able to tell you whether the actors are underage or not. The porn industry tries very hard to blur that line, to make legal actors look illegal. If a human cannot make this distinction with any accuracy, a computer never will be able to, since such a decision relies on very subtle human abilities to recognise facial features and other cues. Hell, I bet you'd have great difficulty writing a program to tell whether a picture contains a male or a female (or both), let alone trying to determine their ages.
Please try a dose of reality.
I believe that any ISP which hosts this sort of site almost DESERVES to be blocked.
Hello, thiis is your friendly ISP. We notice that you are hosting a website on our network. Be advised that you must provide us with advance copies of any and all material that you intend to post on your website (including material submitted by your users, if any) and give us at least 2 months to review it (due to the fact that there is a lot of material to review ahead of your stuff) before posting it on your site. Any changes to your site, no matter how insignificant they may seem (to you) must be reported to us and the same two month lead time will apply. Any materials that offend us in any way will be prohibited and you can not post it on your website.
Still think this is a good idea?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Of course I can't guarantee you that a random paedophile would not try to seduce your kids. But neither can I prove that your random neighbour will not simply kill them or steal your car, or poison your cat, or anything like that. There is no need to single out all paedophiles as some sort of maniacs without self-control.
/. we usually laugh at the notion that video-games can turn a normal person into a murderous freak. How then could photos of naked kids having sex change a person into a creep? If you compare these two things, the games are more likely to be dangerous, because there is interactivity, people "train" to become killers. With child porn there is none. Rape porn is legal and it apparently doesn't turn viewers into rapists. Then why do people assume that watching child porn will turn everyone into a paedophile and child abuser?
But what I can guarantee you is that there definitely are some people who look at child porn, but who are normal people, just like you and me. I know some and I would even trust them to look after my kids, just like I would trust another friend of mine who enjoys BDSM roleplay.
I mean, this is just porn. Here at
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This table, from a Canadian govt. document, might help:
12 in Mexico
13 in Japan
14 in Iceland, Austria, Canada and Italy
15 in Denmar, France, Sweden
16 in Australia, Finland, Germany (14 with parental consent), Holland (12 with parental consent), Israel, New Zealand, Norway