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

The good, the bad, and the opportunity

[TLouden]

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.

Re: The good, the bad, and the opportunity

[Black Parrot]

> 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?

If they know the IPs, why don't they just raid the creeps and cut it off at the source?

Re: The good, the bad, and the opportunity

[La Temperanza]

Perhaps because it's difficult to raid a site, and equally difficult to convince local governments to, in Vietnam or Bulgaria or similar countries.

Re: The good, the bad, and the opportunity

[Illbay]

Many people that you think you know, including potentially some of your friends and relatives regularly view child porn. Are they creeps?

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?

Re: The good, the bad, and the opportunity

[danila]

Fact: People who are aroused by images of children engaging in sexual acts are a very small minority.

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. :) Now that was sick. Compared with that any child porn would look mainstream.

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. :) 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.

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. :)

Re: The good, the bad, and the opportunity

[vDave420]

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?

Har har har.
Be careful, your reasoning cuts both ways:

Automobile accidents cause more than 40,000 deaths each year in the US alone (far more than child pornography and terrorism combined!!), and yet you, the consumer, are the ultimate reason for the existance of these horribly deadly "Automobiles!", and ultimately, the death and destruction of millions of dollars of property and loss of countless lives.

Does that mean you are a creep because you use said product? NO!

In fact, the (by far) most likely scenario (that I can see) is that you are a nice, "normal" person who doesn't use his car for bank robbery, vehicular homicide, etc.

However, since those creeps cause deaths and destruction, and you use the same end product, by your logic YOU ARE THE CREEP WHO SHOULD BE LOCKED UP!

What kind of creep did your parents raise? How can you (the consumer, and ultimate reason for the existence of these automobile tools-of-death) live with yourself?

Right?
Of course not.

Please, PLEASE don't fall for (or propegate) the "save the children" rant. They are plenty safe, and people who view said pictures are NOT hurting them or causing them pain, anymore than you are responsible for other people's automobile deaths because you use a car.

Do you see the problem with your reasoning?
I doubt that you will, because it involves children, and (as politicians know) that is the way to influence anyone to agree with anything.

-dave-

Suspend Kiddi porn law and sue them

[deadmongrel]

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

Re:Suspend Kiddi porn law and sue them

[ogre2112]

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.

Porn and spam

[sbszine]

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).

Off topic - PA Child Porn-Blocking

[ralian]

When I saw this post I could only think to myself: "Pennsylvania has employed a child to block pornography?"

I used to work for a porn host

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Re:IP instead of domain name

[secolactico]

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!

Re:Well

[gfody]

Then they should just block the range 255.255.255.255.. that of course blocks all child porn sites (and all spam sites too).

the people who are not kitty porn or spam sites can just call and have their ip's removed from the list. the ACTUAL kitty porn peddlers wouldn't have the audacity to call and lie about it

Re:Well

[Quothz]

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.