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.]"

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[setzman]

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