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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.]"
Good to see an effort to stop child porn
Bad implementation is a little dissapointing
So, who's gunna make the next filter for the ISPs to block the sites without hurting others sharing the IP?
I think something like this is just waiting for the proper implementation to really get it going and then other states (countries?) might follow suit.
Keep up the good work.
-Tim Louden
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. Olestra chips are yummy in the tummy
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
I don't understand how the law works. You suspend Kiddi porn law and you go after them for sharing music. way to go. again I repeat. America - Land of the Free* ________________________________________ * Free but conditions apply
It's interesting to see that the same collateral damage problems occuring with this government porn blocklist that were affecting spam blocklists like SPEWS. Like spammers, porn site operators presumably changed accounts enough that the list operators had to block whole ISPs to guarantee filtering them.
Of course, unlike receiving spam, surfing a porn site is a personal choice (excepting porn viruses etc).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
... 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. Then we can tell the RIAA that there are illegal mp3s on those machines! Man watch the child porn disappear!!!!
But the tricky thing is separating the baby from the bathwater, if you catch my meaning. Some sites are hosted on IP blocks that share with kiddie-pron sites. I for one, would like to be aware if my ISP was allowing this kind of hosting going on and I would want to stop it.
I'm all for the blue ribbon campaign, but I'm certain it doesn't protect kiddie porn dealers (scum).
When we found child porn (or cp as we called it), we just deleted it. We didn't tell anyone. When we tried to cooperate, local police would tell us one thing, US Customs another, and the FBI would tell us something else. And they all acted like they were minutes away from arresting you. The laws vary so much and the agents were such dick heads, that we just quitely deleted it. By the way, it was easy to find. Just watched the logs, any new user that immediately sky rocketed in bandwidth usage was almost 100% cp. Hehe, I still have a plastic file box that we would keep the records in (when we were cooperating.) It had a label on it that read 'The PedoFile'.
One of the few things that most nations around the world agree on is that kidddie porn is a vile abomination of deviant human sexuality. No one blames the state of Pennsylvania for doing everything they can to craft a law deflecting it. What they need are technical advisors from the computer world and the legal community to write it in such a way that it becomes realistically feasible. Legitimate sites will be blocked in the process and that represents a serious contention with the first amendment. I applaud their intentions and hope they turn to the Linux or Unix communities to try and create the most efficient filter possible (maybe with a cash prize as incentive?). Mandating the presence of such a barrier is troubling because of the precedence that this sets. Remeber that Rick Santorum, a Senator whose religious views are readily expressed on key occasions, is from this state. The possibility exists that establishing a law based on "public morality" or whatever excuse could be used a s precedent to enforce a more narrow interpretation of morality later on down the road. In the future I hope that Pennsylvania will allow ISPs to try this out on a voluntary basis first to make sure it works more effectively and to give parents a notice of which ISPs are doing the most in that area. But as long as the average user remains glaringly ignorant about how the internet works, child porn will remain disturbingly accessible regardless of the barrier in place. This is especially true about legal pron sites which usually disguise themselves as something more legitimate.
As a side note, the RIAA should also not be allowed to infiltrate the Pennsylvania legislature as the vast majority of P2P distributors are not facilitators of kiddie porn distribution despite the current propaganda.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
After sending a notice to the ISP that their servers are hosting kiddie porn, the ISP should disable the site and report them to the police along with the files stored on the server as proof.
If the ISP doesn't comply, block ALL their IP's if they reside in another country. Lock them up as an accessory to the crime if they are located in a semi-moral country.
If I was a legit business owner who lost access to my site because of this, I doubt I would have a problem with relocating my site. It isn't like there aren't plenty of other hosting services that have a bit of decency.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
There are 8 organizations in my city for preventing "stranger abduction", yet only four such abductions have occurred in the last 2 years.
There are a dozen groups out there working to prevent sexual abuse, but Social Services itself is badly badly underfunded and can't handle the cases of *simple* abuse.
Simple as it is called, it's no walk in the garden and I think resources from other areas should be re-directed in that direction. So in essence, I'm just saying...
"I agree"
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I find it really interesting to do a general "poll" of the number of people in this thread who seem OK with the far-reaching pre-emptive blanket banning of IP addresses in this topic.
In another topic, the entirety of the board would be up in arms, but on this subject it is stirring up hot debate with the pro-block and anti-block camps looking to be about equal in numbers (at least in numbers of posts).
What does this say? That a good number of us really don't care *as much* about those freedoms that we profess to when discussing other topics? Perhaps it's just because a small group of people get so incredibly hot under the collar about this topic (and I understand, really!!).
The thing to me is that parents are always the ones to jump in and say "well, I can only imagine if it was my kid". The thing is that if you're a half-decent parent, it won't be your kid. If you let your kid be alone with someone who could be capable of posting something like that ON THE INTERNET, you are making a mistake in your parenting somewhere.
Personally, I think kids should be informed about this kid of thing at a young age so that if they are ever actually put in the situation of having to deal with it, they're capable of saying "no" and if forced, capable and willing to tell someone about it later.
But throwing down blanket bans on IP addresses <b>IS</b> a violation of our basic rights and inhibits the freedom of information, which is one of the most basic of human rights and dignities in my opinion.
It will take the cooperation of ALL the world's governments to take down these sites, which I can't see happening soon. Then the content will migrate to a service like FREENET, where the information is decentralized and fully anonymous and guess what... you won't be able to take it down anymore.
Information will flow, even if we don't want it to. Spying on the population isn't the solution. Protecting the kids is a solution. No more kids spending time with pornographers, no more porn involving kids...
That said, I also think it's scary how I, as a young white male (not old enough to be a father, but too old to be a kid myself), can't even hug my 13yo brother in public without attracting a smattering of both disgusted and prying looks from people around that just scream "WHY ARE YOU MOLESTING THAT BOY?"
WTF is up with that?
*sighs*
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
>illegal child pornography, which has become as pervasive on the Internet as legal sexually explicit sites
:)
I have to wonder whether the person who wrote this is wildly exaggerating the amount of child pornography on the internet (or in the UNIVERSE, for that matter) or wildly understating the amount of regular porn.
> impossible to filter out, or block, offensive Web sites without also blocking some legitimate sites
:-)
Remember how easy it was to block alt.sex.pedophilia? "Don't like it? Then don't go there." But the existence of this group was deemed "wrong", so a.s.p no longer exists, and as predicted this hasn't actually stopped the CPs who are now inhabiting alt.grannies.knitting instead, thus leading to the dual problem of people wanting knitting patterns getting a nasty shock and CP blocking now being impossible without also blocking knit-wits.
CP is a social problem, not a technological one. Reinstate a.s.p and anon.penet.fi, then it can be blocked on an induhvidual basis very easily, simply by induhviduals choosing not to go there.
Just for the terminally stupid - I'm not supporting kiddie pr0n here. All I'm saying is that there isn't a technical solution to it, just as there isn't a web site that can be blocked to put an end to drunk driving. Just like drunk driving, the solution is a social one, not a technological one. Even if we revert technology back to the stone age, child abuse will still happen in the back of caves.
This won't happen though. A lot (with a space) of my ideas seem to be crazy, such as removing a substantial proportion of drug crime my legalising drugs and selling them at Boots for a penny a pound rather than creating this enormous black market which needs similarly vast amounts of crime to keep it lubricated. Perhaps this is why my middle name is Vetinari