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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.]"
Trying to reduce kiddie porn by blocking IPs is like trying to reduce the sale of beer by bulldozing the road that leads to the grocery store. It's not gonna work.
Did you read the article? Legitimate businesses, and other sites are being blocked by these filters. If they want to remove these sites, they need to do it by prosecution, not by technical workarounds.
I also think states must work together to track down the providers of child porn and arrest and jail these scumbags. They should be forced to go to jail.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yeah, it's great. It's sort of like creating a blacklist for addresses and telephone numbers then sending random S.W.A.T. teams out and blanket wire-taps. The guy moves out, you move in. Suddenly, you'r ass-up to a full body-cavity search and your front door is a pile of matchsticks. Hey, why not make the worthless domain registrars actually verify who the hell you are so they can identify the actual people behind the sites? Then the police/fbi/kaos/control could just do an nslookup and drive over. No, that would be too freakin' logical. Harassing innocent people is P.A.T.R.I.O.Tic UGH.
Perhaps because it's difficult to raid a site, and equally difficult to convince local governments to, in Vietnam or Bulgaria or similar countries.
--
est modus in rebus
Great. Guilty until proven innocent. Let's just round up people who we think might be car theifs and hold them indefinitely. What's not acceptable is punishing the innocent along with the guilty. Yes, we need to do something about child pornography, but this is not what we need to do and the judge who suspended this law realized that.
-AX
^I'm with stupid.^
You're confusing the subject a bit. You're right but we aren't talking about harassing people. Where talking about an affective way of keeping child pornography out of the US.
-Tim Louden
I would say even if 10% of the sites which are blokced are not child porn, then that is acceptable.
Brilliant! As the region's Office of DoubleTruth Information, I would like to thank you for your clever idea. We will now being the campaign to populate the 10% misinformation buffer. "Oh, I'm sorry, we heard that that Democratic Party page was child porn.". Or even better "accept it or imply that you support child porn".
I also think states must work together to track down the providers of child porn and arrest and jail these scumbags. They should be forced to go to jail.
I don't think you'll find much disagreement, and when childporn is found of course people do go to jail, and then they should investigate the perps computer and find the trails leading to his child-porn friends, and the network of childporn traders implodes. That's good investigative work, and is the way it should work. The government running some sort of NetNanny service is wholly unacceptable, though, because we know that the span between the theoretical implementation (eliminating childporn) and the realistic implementation often is a massive one. Instead you have the blocking tonnes of sites that have nothing to do with childporn whatsoever. Indeed, it could just be plain old fashioned, entirely legal, porn being blocked under the moral auspices of blocking child porn...and who's going to call up the state because their Woman-on-Woman site isn't working?
is get the address info of all the child porn hosts and do police raids on them nonstop until it's shut down for good
Sorry, but being involved with a hosting company and being in charge of finding it and deleting, I will tell you this: There is so much of it, in so many places, that it will be impossible to stop. A US customs agent once told me that the internet has made things next to impossible for them. He had been in it for thirty years. He used to hunt them down in person and arrest the people who take the pictures. He used to know the kids in the pictures. These days, most of it comes from places like Russia. With digital cameras and proxies and know how it has become an unstoppable fact of life. With all the free hosts out there and the ease of dropping a box on the internet, how are they ever going to stop it. At the host I worked at, this shit popped up daily. I could go weeks at a time deleting shit every single day. And I am talking stuff that lived on our servers for less than 24 hours. Often, by the time we had found it, it had consumed 1 or more Gigabytes of bandwidth (We had 2 100 megabit circuits, most of the time they were running at 80-90%.) This shit is here to stay. Technology has made that a fact.
No you're not. You're talking about illegal pornographers. Who said anything about pedophiles?
A pedophile doesn't necessarily break any law. Pickpockets, by definition, do.
When such arbitrary information is used to identify people for crimes (think of the truncated passenger name lists in CAPPS), people get harassed. It may not be the intention, but it is the effect. It is also inexcusable to use useless information when useful information exists simply because it is easier for a completely ignorant moron (read: a politician) to say "a-ha! I have your IP address" and then proceed to legislate. The problem is that when politicians are allowed to legislate such dreck, they invariably create systems that are easy to be put into, but nearly impossible to get out of.
I see the similarity, but there is also a difference: in the case of the SPEWS blocklist the decision of an admin to use it is voluntary, and not mandated by the government. Therefore it can be argued that blocking a whole ISP that hosts spammers is not a bad thing -- if all the customers of that ISP are affected, they will move away, and it will hit the ISP where it counts -- money. As long as they aren't made to suffer financially, there will always be ISPs willing to host spammers. I'm only saying that this sounds like a reasonable argument, not that it is unequivocally right. Tricky questions, certainly. A recent controversy about this aspect of the SPEWS blocklist produced some interesting arguments for both sides. When the blocking is required by law, of course, we must be far more circumspect, since the possibility of abuse is great.
People can always write to the Attorney General and appeal that they are not a child porn site. I would say even if 10% of the sites which are blokced are not child porn, then that is acceptable. What is not acceptable is doing nothing.
This is, in formal logic, what's known as a false dichotomy. You can do _something_ without blocking legitimate sites. For example, you can attempt to identify and prosecute the creators and distributors of child pornography. "Deputizing" ISPs without their consent is just silly. If they're aware of any kiddie porn, they should act, but forcing them to monitor everything that passes through their network is just silly. Anybody seriously suggest that telecomm companies be liable for stopping drug deals that occur over the phone?I also think states must work together to track down the providers of child porn and arrest and jail these scumbags. They should be forced to go to jail.
I agree. But we, as a society, pay people to round up these scumbags (the kiddie pornographers, not the ISPs). Foisting off the responsibility onto someone who isn't employed to do so is just passing the buck.
Yes, there's shades of grey here. Hotel proprietors are often required to run off any known prostitutes, but you don't see laws requiring them to monitor all rooms at all times to prevent it, nor would such laws be feasable.
Similarly, requiring that ISPs report known child pornographers is reasonable (and is currently the law, AFAIK). Requiring ISPs to monitor and make a judgement on everything that passes through their servier is not reasonable.
Anybody have any statistics on how many children are hurt by the making of child porn? How does it compare to the number of children hurt by child abuse. If the number hurt by child porn is relatively small, mightn't it be more useful to spend that effort preventing child abuse in general?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Now that's all well and good, but the way it stood, such a site could be blocked quitely and instantly without any sort of appeals process nor warning.
If you're a business doing, say, $1000 of sales a day on the web to customers in PA, and they accidentally block you, what do you do when sales all of the sudden drop by that amount. You wouldn't know anything about your server's IP address being blocked by ISP's, nobody would have told you. Then it takes 2-3 days to find out. Goodbye $3000. A few more days to get a court order to unban, $2000. Then all the ISP's have to go back and un-ban your server, another $1000-5000. There's a possibility of $10,000 of lost sales there, not to mention lost customers who took their purchase elsewhere when they couldn't reach you.
No, if you want to institute some sort of banning, fair notice must to be given to the owner of said IP address, who can then alert their customers to the coming events, and try and appeal. But, whoops! Now the pornographer knows all about it and jumps ship just as soon as they have a backup to $media.
Now we're back to the beginning again. The Child pornagrapher is on another site, another IP address to get banned then appealed. I don't see any way a pre-emptive ban like this could work without harming innocent business.
On Apple Input Peripherals: They're okay, I guess, but I was really hoping for a one-key keyboard and a 109-button mouse
>Child Porn is a special case. It's so abhorent to mainstream society that special prohibitions are deemed appropriate.
So, people would rather be murdered than deal with child porn?
Seems to me society has a more serious problem to deal with than people wanting to look at naked children.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
If they know the IPs, why don't they just raid the creeps and cut it off at the source?
1) These sites probably have nothing to do with sources of child porn.
2) Many people that you think you know, including potentially some of your friends and relatives regularly view child porn. Are they creeps?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The fact that you feel like you can even pose such a question and have anyone take it seriously is a sad, sad commentary on what we as a society have become.
If I said to you "my brother-in-law regularly takes truckloads of toxic sludge in the dead of night and dumps it in the local river. Does that mean he's a creep?" I can almost guarantee your reaction.
Yet you apparently think the "consumers" of child porn--the ultimate reason for its existence, and for the exploitation of helpless innocent children--are blameless to the extent we can't even consider them "creeps" if they are friends or relatives?
What kind of monster did your parents rear?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
If I said to you "my sister-in-law regularly goes to the local river and watches and smells the toxic sludge that was dumped there by your relatives. Does that mean she's a creep?" what would be your reaction?
Consumers of child porn are different. There are apparently many innocent consumers, whose only wrongdoing is that they are sexually aroused by scenes of kids in erotic/sexual situations. These people do not pay for child porn (so no money for the producers) and they do not act on their fantasies (if they even have paedophilic fantasies). What is wrong with having on your PC an image of a child having sex? I have much more disgusting images in my browser cache after a visit to rotten.com. How does me having such image cause any harm to anyone else? I don't see that. And furthermore, how does having such an image suddenly change a person from moral and ethical one, who works for a respectable software company, has a social security number, pays his taxes, and helps the landlady carry out her garbage, into a creep? Do you really think such moral absolutism is possible?
So, in summary
1) I don't see how consumers who do not pay for child porn and are sane enough not to harm any children themselves can cause any noticable harm.
2) Watching child porn may not be the most ethical thing to do, but I fail to see how everyone who does that, immediately turns into a creep (unless he is a LEO, in which case he is immune).
In addition to that I want you to realise that for many children that are filmed for child porn this is not a big deal. In many countries you can get a blowjob from a 13-year old girl for 5 bucks. Do you think posing for some pictures would really do her any additional harm? What about hungry and homeless orphans? Sometimes (not always, of course) they even love (like) the person who exploits them for child porn because at least with him they are fed and have a place they can call their home. I am not even saying anything about those hundreds of millions of kids who live on less than 1$/day (guess how long do they live on average). Do you still think the problem of child porn has any relevance whatsoever?
I am not a monster - I am just a rational person, who is able to see through the media-induced bloodlust and who is happy to live in a country where posession of any and all digital materials on your PC are legal and where a thought can no longer be a crime.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
i have two small children. maybe those withot children don't understand the pernicious nature of the crime.
What does having children have to do with understanding the nature of the crime? In fact, the people that commit the crime of creating child porn are far more likely to actually have children than not.
no, no crime deserves total abrogation of civil liberties, but this is hardly that.
You're right, this is hardly that. This is people that have committed no crime at all having their sites blocked without due process of any sort, without even being informed that their site is or will be blocked. When I worked for an ISP, the number one rule was that you do not take any action that will take a customer offline, because it can cause a great deal in monetary damages to be offline for even a short period of time. Anything that would take a customer offline had to be done because they weren't paying their bill, not because I (or someone that worked for me) did something that took them offline.
The problem with taking harsh knee-jerk reactions against crime is that you have a tendency to hit bystanders. It is one of the founding beliefs in the US that it is better to let criminals go free than to punish one person for a crime they did not commit.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
It realy dosen't matter if people agree or disagree with you beacuse there is such a stigma surounding the child porn that even if you don't truly beleive there is any harm in it, if the subject is brought up and you dont express your disgust along with the group you may be thought a pedophile yourself. There are very few people who would publicly admit that they don't feel there is anything wrong with viewing child porn (even if they dont) and even fewer people who wouldn't shun them for it. But all that aside, I't also strikes me as odd that an organization like NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) is aloud to exist yet anyone even suspected to be viewing child porn has their house raided and could face many years in jail even if they never would dream of harming a child. I don't see how posessing a few pictures in your home is so much worse than publicly anouncing that your a 40 year old man who loves little boys and meeting with other old men to discuss it.
First of all...we're talking about children here. NO child under the age of 18 can consent to committing sexual acts...period.
The so-called "innocents" that you describe are not quite so innocent. They continue to feed an industry which has real victims, which is the problem.
Your twisted rationality is that these children are so much better off...but are they? Do you really think that the children are the true beneficiaries of any of that money?
If you were in the U.S. and dirt poor with a couple of kids, would you send out your 13 year-old daughter to give out BJs for $5? After all, the residual profits from the pictures might get you a supersized meal...and a better cardboard box at the end of the day. The money that actually trickles down is barely enough to live on, but not enough to break free from the cycle.
Then when they kids get older, what are they worth and how much emotional baggage do they get to carry with them for the rest of their lives?
Like most trial lawyers, it's the brokers of the porn that make the money by their resale...not the people photographed.
I would recommend you take a course in child maltreatment, which should be offered at most reputable institutes of higher learning. You'd be surprised what you'll learn.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Fact: People who are aroused by images of children engaging in sexual acts are a very small minority.
:) Now that was sick. Compared with that any child porn would look mainstream.
:) And as I said elsewhere, rape porn is legal and it doesn't turn people into rapists. Why should child porn be different. Most people are capable of self-control and know the difference between fantasy and reality.
:)
Yep. So what? People who are aroused by images of pregnant chicks or by wearing diapers are a minority as well. Does that mean these practices should also be prohibited?
Fact: The vast majority of people are sickened by such images.
False. Reality is that the majority of people have never seen such images. And just like everyone and his dog in the USSR was against Boris Pasternak when party started the famous defamation campaign without even reading any of his poems. There are some sick child porn images, but then there are many normal ones that would probably make a normal person aroused, not sick. As for the sick porn, the sickest I ever saw was some sadistic anime with some pretty girls cut into slices alive.
Fact: Viewing of such images is very strongly correlated with acting on the fantasies represented there, in other words having sex with children.
First, any data is skewed, because as you are well aware, people do not normally reveal the fact that they enjoy child porn. The only ones that we know about are those that were busted by the police. Not a very representative sample. Second, correlation does not equal causation. Obviously, child abusers would be interested in child porn, but that doesn't mean that child porn viewers are likely to become child abusers.
Do straight guys seek out gay porn?
Do straight guys seek out lesbian porn? Again, there is some correlation between your tastes in porn and your sexual preferences, but trust me, not every hentai fan wants to be raped by a giant squid.
Coercing children to have sex--raping children--causes profound psychological damage which takes at minimum years for them to get over.
1) You can have sex without coercing anyone. You ignore the fact that some kids might be ok with having sex with adults. Consensual sex with kids is illegal in the US, but there is nothing unethical about it.
2) Raping kids is not much different from raping adults. And nobody is advocating raping humans of any age (of course, I mean real rape, statutory rape is ok in many cases). But there is no proof that child porn viewers will turn to raping kids in reality.
3) There are some indications that psychological damage is caused by joint efforts of police, family and psychologists. Many kids are just fine after having sex with adult, but are royally screwed by people who care more about jailing a paedophile than about the well-being of the child.
some never manage to live normal lives.
Fact: Consensual sex with other kids before 18 doesn't not lead to any harm and is perfectly ok in most cases.
Please tell me how it is so much different in case of an adult? Physically sexual contact with adult is possible as early as in 5 years or so. Psychologically some kids are ready as early and many are ready around 12 years or so.
I don't believe you are a monster; I just believe you are an ignorant fool.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
NO child under the age of 18 can consent to committing sexual acts...period. :) I know some people who have been able to consent to sex before 18 just fine. I probably would consent myself if anyone offered. :) And whole countries like Holland somehow manage with this "problem". :))))
:)
That's hilarious.
The so-called "innocents" that you describe are not quite so innocent. They continue to feed an industry
Tell me please, how downloading a child porn image from a free anonymous website feeds any industry? I can only see how it starves the industry by wasting precious traffic.
Your twisted rationality is that these children are so much better off...but are they? Do you really think that the children are the true beneficiaries of any of that money?
Usually not. But you can't ignore things like schoolgirl prostitutes in Japan (although it is controlled by yakudza to some extent) and the fact that sometimes selling yourself is the only way to get something to eat. Great that you don't need to do that. Many people are not so lucky. As I said elsewhere, there are hundreds of children living on under 1$/day. Do you realise that they might have different standards of what is acceptable?
If you were in the U.S. and dirt poor with a couple of kids, would you send out your 13 year-old daughter to give out BJs for $5?
I didn't mean the US. It's a fucked up country but hopefully not as fucked up as that. But in other places some kids (and not their parents, simply because they are orphans) don't have other choice. Of course, there is stealing and begging, but these might be more dangerous and less profitable.
Then when they kids get older, what are they worth and how much emotional baggage do they get to carry with them for the rest of their lives?
Do you realise that these kids often have more emotional baggage already than you can accumulate over your whole life? The problem of child porn is not that evil pedophile scum kidnaps an American white honour student and forces her to pose for child porn (though RIAA might do that if next 12-year old will not have $2000 to pay ransom). The problem is that there are already some kids for whom child porn is an ok way to get money. You can't fix this problem by through child porn viewers in jail. These kids are fucked up because of the socio-economical situation in their countries. These are more difficult so solve.
Like most trial lawyers, it's the brokers of the porn that make the money by their resale...not the people photographed.
Sure. But
1) Kids usually get something and that "something" is often valuable enough (like food, shelter, alcohol and drugs - they are often already addicts, sorry) for them not to worry about potential psychological problems.
2) Once the damage is done, those who distribute it for free do not cause any additional harm to the kids (neither to those filmed, nor to any other kids) and even somewhat harm the child porn industry by providing free substitute. If more people can get free child porn, less people will be willing to pay someone to make new one (although that would mean those kids will starve...).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Thanks for an interesting post, I tend to agree with many things.
:) :) First, after he had an orgasm, he is not exactly in the mood to order a DVD. Second, you can't easily order a child porn DVD. And third, the quality is probably not the most important factor - paedophiles are quite different from auidophiles. ;) So, honestly, I don't think that downloading the file feed the industry somehow, especially because nobody downloads the files directly from sellers of child porn, no, it's downloaded from the guy, how downloaded it from the guy, who ...... who found it on some obscure BBS and nobody knows how it got there.
But not with all.
Replace "a child porn image" with "an mp3" and you'll have 100,000 people here jumping on your throat to explain you.
These are very different industries. You can't really imagine a person downloading a crappy MPEG child porn video, enjoying it and then ordering a DVD, can you?
My point about grey areas was simply to illustrate that the whole problem is not as black and white as many people in this discussion assume. You see, I agree that making child porn generally (on average) is a bad thing, but I disagree that one photo equals one completely maimed, twisted, fucked up innocent kid with incurable psychological problems for the next 1000 years. There are much worse things that are done to kids, like simply raping them without photos, like killing them, like bombing them from the sky, like suicide-bombing them when they have a disco or a wedding, like destroying the school system and fucking up their mentality more than any paedophile ever could. And then you have bullying in school, you have all kinds of crap that kids have to endure every day in every corner of this beautiful blue speck flying through space... And to single out one particular problem and proclaim it the root of all evil is simply untrue and it smells like a witchhunt.
If you remove the negative impact of parents+police+psychiatrist from the child abuse case, I am not sure if the long-term damage is greater than from a very bad teacher at school. Exploring their sexuality is natural for kids, often they do it with other kids of the same age, sometimes with older children, sometimes with teenagers and sometimes with adults. There are many well-known cases when there is no psychological damage to kids whatsoever. Sex doesn't kill.
Yes, if the abuser kidnaps the child, rapes him/her, enslaves and forces to pose for child porn, this is bad. No doubt about it. But the fact that the child is exploited for child porn is irrelevant. It's not the picture that harms him/her, it's the abuse from the adult authority figure who somehow controls the kid. Poor treatment of the child is not a requirement of child porn. It's simply a consequence of the socio-economic situation. If you can buy a same kid for 100$ in that country, you won't treat him/her well. When child porn was legit a few decades ago, it was definitely a much smaller problem (in Europe and the US). Yes, it never was mainstream, because the sexual revolution didn't not penetrate the whole society to a necessary extent, but it was a much lighter topic. If child porn was to be legalised today, models would be treated the same or better as child actors in movies, TV films and fashion industry are treated. There are definitely many kids (defined as younger than 18) who can have sex without going crazy after it. Some of them would probably be happy to earn good money by starring in child porn. Of course, we can't expect legalisation any time soon, although I hoped that virtual child porn would emerge as a substitute for real child porn. Apparently, people/companies are so scared by the government and the media, that they are afraid to touch this in any way.
I hope you see that there is nothing inherently bad about child porn photos/videos. Now the question of is it moral/ethical to download child porn now, when most of it isn't made in noble ways. We
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
First of all...we're talking about children here. NO child under the age of 18 can consent to committing sexual acts...period.
What the hell are you smoking? When I was 16(which is under 18 for those of you who can't count), I "consented" left and right to sex with my girlfriend.
Let's look at something from a *different* point of view for a second. First and foremost, I don't look at child porn, but I think that viewing it as a right-or-wrong is a bit looney from either side.
When I was 16, my girlfriend and I were having sex. Lots of sex. I got ahold of a video camera, we filmed some of said sex... now, if I were to watch that tape that I made just four years ago of *myself* having sex with a consenting partner, it's child porn?
Think about that. Not all child porn is some fat hairy old guy humping an eight year old.