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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.