Slashdot Mirror
BT Blocks 10,000 Child-Porn Site Visits A Day
jb.hl.com writes "The BBC is reporting that British Telecom, the predominant telecommunications company in the UK, is blocking 10,000 attempts to access child pornography a day. In the first three weeks of the system being operational, BT allegedly blocked 250,000 attempts to view such pages. They apparently have no idea how many of these hits were accidental, or caused by malware. The block affects 2.5m of BT's customers. Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, said with regards to privacy concerns that "we don't know their motives or who does it and honestly we don't want to know"." onion2k reminds us that we first mentioned the block in June.
Reading stories like these always makes me wonder how British Telecom (and others) knows what is child porn and not?
Do they have staff consisting of "smut surfers", that surfs the web and makes note of URL with unwanted content?
Although I'm of the opinion that free spech doesn't nescessarily secure the rights of spreading child porn, I always get a little suspicious when I read about these things. I always think "what can or will they block next".
usenet, p2p, ftp, irc...
Why do the newspapers and others think of the internet as only www?
All the fools who think that 'disturbing' pictures are blocked now, amazing!
It's always possible to monitor and find out what people are doing, and certainly also to prevent them from doing something unsavory or illegal...but look at what it does for civil liberties and privacy. Sure, everyone can agree that child pornography is bad and is rightly illegal, but it a step toward deeming other more innocuous activities illegal.
It seems like it'd be no big deal to actually find out if these people are doing it intentionally, but looking beyond it, the implications of usage monitoring is just looming ahead.
250,000 attempts is one attempt for every ten subscribers. Does that sound realistic? Hell, if you're a BT broadband paedo are you going to continually hammer on the sites, or consider that a firewall is in place and either give up or go elsewhere?
Who thinks that the BT marketing arm is inflating those figures? After all, what sites are they counting? How are they counting? Are they looking for malware? I somehow doubt even 10% of those numbers are really from the sex offender types.
This type of reporting is dangerous. People think that these type of people are more prevalant than they are, they react by denying kids a normal childhood in the name of safety. Meanwhile 'child porn' becomes a convenient black brush to daub all over anything, or anyone, someone wants to attack.
If child porn really is this prevalant, why is no one asking why?
Any such trend analysis would be based upon guessing... and besides, BT doesn't want to do it anyway. If their technology could determine who was intentionally visiting such a site, they'd most likely be expected to tell the cops.
It's better to say "You can't prosecute the people who we're blocking because we don't know if they really wanted the page or just got tricked into loading it not knowing what it was." because then there's no need for them to bother with a log that they'd have to turn over.
The article is a lot of FUD, and doesn't even directly address the notion of malware, popups, etc. What it does say it seems to gloss over in an unpersuasive manner while giving quotes from seeming authorities on how bad this problem has suddenly be revealed to be. It seems to be aimed at convincing its audience that pedophiles are far more common than they really are and that the adoption of this new product is very badly needed.
No doubt this will lead to actions taken by people who don't even understand what the internet is or what's going on here.
From an earlier slashdot article, a comedian got a member of parliment to say, in all seriousness, "Using an area of the Internet the size of Ireland, pedophiles can make your keyboard release toxic vapors that can make you more suggestible."
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Don't talk rubbish. It's kneejerk reactions like that from idiots that prompts this pointless filtering in the first place.
"They've been seen by the Internet Watch Foundation and classified."
Their definition of child pornography is...? And I trust this organization because...?
Unless 1/5 internet users on BT are attracted to children, I think Internet Watch Foundation is using overly broad definition of child pornography.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
It's an issue of control - control of somebody's sexuality is one of the basic ways to have power over them.
Parents have an extremely hard time coming to terms with the fact that their little boy/girl/hermaphrodite is growing up and becoming a sexual creature, and so there's all sorts of FUD about the subject.
16 is an arbitrary limit set by the Victorians when there was an outcry about the number of child prostitutes working in London at the time.
People mature at different rates - some people aren't ready for sexual experiences till they're 18-20. Some a lot longer before. Until society has a way of looking at the situation on a case-by-case basis we have to work with an arbitrary number which means that 90-95% of those over it are "ready".
And instead of villifying those labelled as paedophiles, we should be trying to work out what has gone so badly wrong in their sexuality that they are attracted to a person who hasn't developed sexual characteristics yet, and see if they could be cured.
"Kids messing about"...I know somebody who was told that was all that happened to her. She still wakes up crying sometimes, 10 years later. No simple rule will suffice to adjudicate all cases.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I understand that its illegal and not moral to watch, but still it seems like sertain people have an urge for it.
Those sites are blocked because it's contents is illegal, duh.
In order to produce this crap children (who are by definition not able to consent) are abused and based on societal consensus this is not acceptable, period.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
... whatever yore means, there was one service provider based in Texas whose management were quite offended by dirty pictures on USENET. So they hired a consultant to see just how much money that would save on... disk space, yes disk space.
The contractor came back and said that they could save 60% of their disk space, but since he also analyzed their NNTP logs he told them that porn was also their major source of revenue.
They're still around. Guess which path they chose.
It's been done, there was a book about it and there was, as always, a moral panic. "OMG, SHE ENDORSES PEDOPHILIA!!!!!!111". That was, quite literally, what the reaction was to any suggestion that child sexuality (note: not kids being fucked by adults, there is a difference) is a perfectly normal part of growing up, and that any restriction of it would lead to puritanical, morally warped adults.
Oh wait, that's what people want most of the time. Silly me.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I don't understand this. If I was aware of a child pornography site, I think it's my responsibility to turn this information over to the police so they can investigate and get the people responsible?
Just filtering it is no good.
Despite the russian proverb, the only concern I have about these kinds of initiatives is the line is only made in the sand (ie, it can be changed):
2004/ child pornogaphy is blocked
2005/ pornography is blocked
2006/ anti-bush websites are blocked
2007/ all weblogs are taken offline
1984/ freedom is slavery
this may be a little bit extreme, sure, but it's axiomatic that freedoms are lost in tiny increments.
. . .everyone can agree that child pornography is bad and is rightly illegal. . .
Although almost no one can agree precisely on just what child pornography is, since even the concept of "child" is highly amorphous. ("Honey, I'd really like to just take your picture, but that might be a crime, so why don't we just fuck. That's black letter legal.")
A friend of mine has come up with the only working definition that seems to apply. Child pornography is whatever gives a particular judge in a particular case a hardon.
In practice that means that one is only convicted of child pornography by someone who could be legally classified as a paedophile.
KFG
Perhaps some of the sites blocked aren't child porn?
However, I find it equally disturbing that a corporation has taken it upon themselves to act as a censor for this material because, as far as I am concerned, these mechanisms are only ever put in place by private companies with shareholders if there is money to be made from it. In this instance, it has been done by BT to portray themselves as a "family-friendly" ISP in order to get more subscribers - therefore, by logical deduction, BT are making money from child pr0n.
Like 99.999% of Internet users, I am a responsible adult and I have known what is "right" and "wrong" since about the age of 7. I do not need some money-making corporation censoring me, thanks very much, I'm capable of doing that myself.
Also, why do we never hear about litigation against credit card companies? I understand that the majority of these sites require credit card access and that the providers of that material have registered with those credit cards in the first place. So what are Amex, Visa, Mastercard, etc doing about allowing their services to be used to purchase this material? What self-regulation do the credit card companies apply to themselves?
I would finally add that the whole child pr0n issue is overblown anyway (to "Keep us living in fear" as Michael Moore would say). The stigma attached to being labelled as a user of this material is so great (in the UK we have a "Sex Offenders List" now) that anybody who is seriously into this material (therefore requiring psychological help) surely knows how to distribute it in far more secure ways than a public web site!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Very clever of them indeed... just blocking the site will do absolutely nothing for the children that are being harmed by the respective site owners, and this is not an issue of how easy it is to circumvent the block by using proxies. We are talking about people who distribute content illegal in hopefully almost every country in the world, and they should be punished, not just blocked by ISPs who do it only because they fear for their reputation. Heck, if you can block them you know their IPs, and therefore the owners. Is there no way to shut these sites down? Are governments just being lazy, or ist this an issue of desiderative cooperation between the countries where the servers are hosted and the countries where the site owners live?
How many of those contacts log as starting out with "C:/windows/cmd.exe" by some script kiddy? They don't seem to have done any breakdown of what sort of hit the IP got. Therefore, their figures of actual pr0n cruisers is probably exaggerated 10/1.
Which would be typical of pop media sociological reporting. One of my old soc profs wrote a book called Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists. His favorite quote was "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled". Which, of course, meant that if a kid did, in fact, get gunned down in 1950, we must have hit a billion child gun deaths by 1980.
What you said: Is that why: "one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before the age of sixteen"
The reference you quote, lists the definition of abuse, as:
...and continues: (My highlights) "Of course, this list goes on. Sexual abuse involves forcing, tricking, threatening, or pressuring a child into sexual awareness or activity. Sexual abuse occurs when an older or more knowledgeable child or an adult uses a child for sexual pleasure.
The problems with statistics like this is definition of the sexual abuse. There is a huge difference in the listed items (rape vs. "peeping into bedrooms") - especially to the child. I personally don't consider peeping into the bedroom of my child a sexual offence, but rather that I care about my child.
In the "offender"-part, there is also a big difference if it is an adult, or an equally aged child that does it. Childen below 15 ARE interested in sexual affairs, and often explore these things with their friends - primarily verbally or through imagery. Stating that this is sexual abuse is IMO problematic.
So getting an overview over the amount of offences isn't easy, as it is very hard to get good information about it. I think the information provided in the article, as well as your reference is bad statistics, because the definitions are way too broad to be of any use.
Because an adult having sex with a child will hurt that child - both physically and developmentally. There is a great deal of correlation between those who are abused during or before their formative years and those who develop sexual problems later in life.
On a purely physical level the sheer size difference causes trauma that leads to scarring and in females fertility problems in later life.
Our instinct towards the next generation should be to protect and nurture, not use them for gratification of desires. We are not apes. We go on and on about how we're better than animals, yet people use animal behaviour to justify the worst excess of human behaviour.
Ducks have been known to have sex with the corpses of dead ducks. Many animals kill each other. By your argument that means you don't mind if I beat your brains in and repeatedly rape your corpse.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
as the article says, they don't keep a log of *who* they are blocking. take off your tinfoil hat. it's pretty straightforward that child abuse is a bad thing. and this is the issue at hand. why extrapolate it to a possible future with 1984 scenarios?
:P).
it's not that i agree with censoring any webpage, but let's not make BT look more "big brother like" than they really are.
now, my personal view is that *nothing* should be blocked, but people should be educated instead. type in "child porn" or "kiddie porn" in google, and you will find a plethora of sites saying it is a bad thing and how you can fight it (no i didn't use 'safe search'
information is freedom. but people need to know what to do with freedom... and there lies the challenge IMHO
I total agree
Yes everyone agrees that child porn is a bad thing so actions like generically blocking access to child porn is seen as a good thing and easy to get users to approve off, but keeping a database of every users surfing habits just because they happen to hit a child porn site once is a bit much to ask the users to accept.
For example I used to work at a university where we implement a porn monitoring system which would try to block access to sites "deemed" to be pornographic. That went over ok with the facility and stuff but once we mention that we keep a history of all the block sites (ONLY the block sites) they tried to visit all hell broke lose and the monitoring was switched off.
It is all really just a matter of where you draw the line I suppose.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Or that a lot of people in the UK have been affected by malware that tries to access this site without their express consent? Or even that some people in the UK have clicked on links that they thought would take them to ABC only to be taken to XYZ instead via a redirect?
Britain isn't a paedophile-free society (Where is?) but assuming that all the access attempts are genuine, conscious attempts to access child pornography is very dangerous assumption to make.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
In an ideal world this would be the case.
But ... People know child porn is wrong, and they look anyways. Educating them won't change their habits. Imposing very long term jail sentences won't change them. Pedophiles do not get rehabilitated, and surfing for child porn is something they can do in the safety of their own home (or so they think).
Many believe censorship in general is a slippery slope, and to quote comedian Dave Attell, what two women, a donkey, and midget do in front of a video camera is their own business, leave it alone!
So noone in Canada had better read Romeo and Juliet.
Are you serious in thinking that child porn does not "hurt" anyone !
An example: Ted Bundy publicly stated that he started his warped thinking with reading soft-porn detective novels. He then got into the girlie magazines, and eventually started reading S&M and got into violent sex videos. Once he got that taste, it didn't stop. He assulted many women and eventually started brutally killing them.
ANY pornography changes the way one thinks, whether you start looking at women in a different view, or you start to look to different ways to "satisfy" your sexual urges, it still has a profound impact on your reasoning.
I think the Pope said it best:
"(there is a) growing reluctance to acknowledge that all men and women receive their essential and common dignity from God and with it the capacity to move toward truth and goodness."
"Detached from this vision of fundamental unity and purpose of the whole human family, rights are at times reduced to self-centered demands: the growth of prostitution and pornography in the name of adult choice, the acceptance of abortion in the name of women's rights, the approval of same-sex unions in the name of homosexual rights"
Up to that point, i'm sure ISP's had been keeping tabs on how much bandwidth file sharing programs were taking up, but since they had the ability to track down specific people, they started turning over names. Yes they were stopped, but child porn isn't musc & there are some very strict laws floating around about child abuse/porn.
Unless it's established that they are not allowed to track/log specific information & tie it to users, it is essentially at their discretion. We'd need a British lawyer to straighten things out because I'm not sure how strong British privacy/protection laws are when a crime like paedophelia is involved.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You make some very good points. However, society has deemed that girls of this "grey" age are off limits. Mature men should restrict their viewing habits to girls who are over 18. I personally would not be repulsed by a 16 year old girl, (possibly because I am only 19), but I would not go seeking images of one, because it is against the law.
Man is by nature a polygamist, but U.S. law makes that illegal, so we don't do it. The purpose of laws is to bring structure to society, and we cannot ignore them because it may be against our nature. These laws are not meant to keep mature men (and women) from viewing whatever they want. They are to keep members of society who we do not deem responsible to make mature decisions (people under 18) from making mistakes that may scar them for the rest of their lives and to keep people from taking advantage of that social immaturity.
I am wholly against the idea of indiscriminately blocking a whole group of websites for a whole group of people. It is the proverbial first step on that slippery slope. However, we should be angry about the censorship itself, not about what it is censoring.
The later group i believe to some degree encompasses most adult males. From evidence of taste in other pornography, more general media and through cultural experiance, it is plain that girls of this 'jail bait' age are found attractive. Approaching the issue from an evolutionary standpoint it would also seem quite natural for a sexually mature male of any age to be interested in sexually mature females, no matter what age the pertaining law says is legal.
Not only that, but from an evolutionary standpoint we've only been preventing sex with teenagers for maybe 50-100 years. Man has been around for at least 1,000,00 years. Do you think Caveman Joe was waiting around until she was 18 back when humans had 30 year lifespans? Hell it was probably acceptable in the 1800-1900 to marry a 15 or 16 year old. It still is in many parts of the world. It's just religious dogma and groupthink that perpetuates this trend of men being some kind of monsters while the media shoves images of over sexualized young women down our throats.
It's really stupid too, because it takes away from the real meaning of pedophillia. It's like when people call George W Bush Hitler. He maybe a right wing fanatic, but it takes away from the horror of the holocaust when you run around calling everyone Hitler. But hey, anything is alright as long as you are going along with the groupthink right?
The major difference seems to be that in the case of child porn, the pictures are a large factor in the abuse happening in the first case. This is almost never a motivation in murder (snuff films being largely a myth).
So it is an attempt to stem demand. You won't stop it, but you may reduce it, and so reduce the abuse.
Then there is the victim's privacy. I really doubt they want people legally owning pitcures or film of them being abused, although you could certainly extend that argument to other crime victims (or their relatives).
While a murder scene photo may be legal, I'm not so sure about sex crimes. Is it ever legal to knowingly posses pictures (or film) of someone having sex who either hasn't or can't give constent (to both the act and recording it)?
I'm a work, so I'm not Googling for the answer to that one. Ultimately I guess its illegal because our society view sexual crimes and crimes against children as being particularly disturbing, and posessing pictures of them for the purpose of getting your jollies is considered unacceptable.
Is BT the only ISP in the UK? if not then you still have the choice to go with one that is not blocking.
BT isn't the only ISP here, but it controls the network used by nearly all ADSL providers, and they are talking about applying the filter to other ADSL sellers "on a non-commercial basis." There are a few ISPs around that don't use BT, including cable companies NTL and Telewest, and companies that take over the phone lines from BT such as Bulldog.
I don't like the fact that blocked pages are replaced with a "Website not found" message rather than a message explaining why the page was blocked.
A latent existence
Any censorship is not acceptable, period.
If they really can't be rehabilitated, I suppose I'd rather have them surfing the web for child porn than actually wandering the streets looking for children.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Your general rules are bad. Thanks to hormones in the milk and other diet issues, girls are hitting puberty at a much earlier age now. My daughter got her period at age 9. Technically, she's sexually mature, but if I catch you trying to have sex with her, you're going home with a stump if you don't bleed to death first.
Most 11 and 12-year old females are sexually mature. Do you honestly think you'd try to have sex with a 12-year old? Your post indicates you would. If that's the case, you're very twisted. I don't care how "mature" and how much "consent" a child that age gives, they're not a fair target for sex.
In addition, regardless of sexual maturity, our culture artificially keeps minors more mentally and emotionally immature than their physical age and intelligence could otherwise account for. Anyone aiming for minors is only out to satisfy their own sexual desires, not looking for an emotional or intellectual connection. I'm not saying there aren't mature minors, but any grown man aiming for them, as far as I'm concerned, is nothing but a self-serving danger to society, because there's nothing coming out of that kind of a relationship other than sex. If you're just in it for the sex, then you are the one that's wrong, not the rest of us, and you can't be in that kind of relationship for anything else.
1)Child pornography by Federal American law is depicting "children" under 18 in sexual acts or situations.
.that doesn't mean we cannot recognize those who are definitely children.
.
In my state the age of consent is 17. In the closest neighboring state it is 16. In a country just a 4 hour drive away from me it is 14. In the next closest country, one I have driven to, it is 12.
By black letter law.
You need to read up on the age of consent yourself.
. .
The age of universal agreement would seem to be under 12. Is that the age you had in mind for child pornography, or is there perhaps still some area of disagreement here? In any case the age of 18 is black letter law.
3)A pedophile is, legally, one who engages in acts with children which are prohibited.
You also need to read up on the current methods being used to test for paedophilia. They use a "dick polygraph" now, only unlike the regular kind it's even less accurate (assuming that's even possible) and have legally compelled people to be subjected to it, "for the children."
You're a troll, and you would appear revel in posting flame bait. Positively none of what you've said has any factual basis. .
4) And this is simply false, a troll and flamebait.
KFG
Actually, while you get my point correctly, you get the facts slightly wrong.
What I was saying is that if you were 60 and had a 15 year old girlfriend in Canada and a 16 year old girlfriend in Vermont it would be perfectly legal to hit it, but not to take its picture.
The case where both partners are under the age of consent is uninteresting. It is the case where one partner is over the age of majority at 18 and the other under the age of majority (and thus not legal for pics) but over the age of consent (and thus legal for sex) where the philosophical interest lies.
KFG
Well, you learn something new every day. Most of the world, under American pressure, does not handle the issue with quite that degree of rationality.
I expect the/you Brits will be hearing from Ashcroft soon, if you haven't already (see the current brouhaha over copyright terms).
This doesn't mean that the issue is irrelevant to Americans, however, as the Justice Department under Ashcroft has now started prosecuting Americans for their legal behavior out of the country, thus it is concievable that Americans could be prosecuted for viewing images in Britain that are legal in Britain, but not in America.
KFG
That situation does not exist in a vacuum.
The fact that the child porn exists indicates there are still children being abused to produce the porn. In addition, all that surfing is going to increase the demand for the material, and thus lead to an increase in the abuse itself.
IMO the surfing is not a safe activity. It is the activity partaken in lack of opportunity. Would you rather surf porn or have sex? The porn is a placeholder until the opportunity for the real thing presents. Why would that be any different for a pedophile? I don't know the "hunting" behavior of pedophiles, whether they actively seek or whether they're just opportunists -- but I can't beleive that feeding their desire with the porn is going to somehow make them docile.
Besides, as I already pointed out, producing the porn itself requires the very behavior we're trying to avoid. Even the faked child porn is unacceptable because according to what I've read, pedophiles often use these images to trick their targets into beleiving the behavior is acceptable or normal.