Pennsylvania Child Porn Act Overturned

Ghoser777 writes "According to MSNBC, a Pennsylvanian law that required ISPs to filter/block websites containing child porn has been overturned by a federal judge. Child porn is still illegal under U.S. federal law, but the judge found that 'there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment.'"

Comments

Re:Freedom is not Cover

[lachlan76]

Because when you put in a filter, there are a lot of false positives, and you block legit sites. Blocking peoples' speech because it looks like child porn to a computer is the problem here.

Re:Freedom is not Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, for poot's sake. Calm down, read again, get the point.

In case you don't, the judge's objection was that THINGS OTHER THAN PORN WERE BEING SUPPRESSED DUE TO IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEMS.

And freedom can be unlimited freedom as long as it is matched by unlimited responsibility and accountability. But that's another story...

Re:technical kiddieporn

[Motherfucking Shit]

What does freedom of speech have to do with child porn apart from technical implementation of filtering?

As I recall, the Pennsylvania law required ISPs operating in PA to block access to a "master list" of sites which were deemed to be providing child pornography, but the list of sites was kept secret (ostensibly to prevent the public from getting a list of kiddie porn websites). It's a good idea in theory: the gummint finds kiddy porn, tells ISPs to block it, and doesn't give the goods away to the public by revealing the list of sites.

The problem is that you have a government-created list of websites which all ISPs in the state must, by law, block access to... But the list itself is a secret. In other words, state regulators could add just about any website to the list, force all ISPs operating in Pennsylvania to block access to that site, without any sort of publicly accountable procedure to determine whether or not that website was actually distributing anything illegal. Because the list of banned sites was secret, who knows what they're banning?

Just to burn some karma, I'll toss in the fact that Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security, was formerly the governor of Pennsylvania.

Re:Great

[Motherfucking Shit]

And really, who's freedom of speech is the judge trying to uphold here? The people hosting such content or the people trying to access?

Neither. RTFA:

Over two years, the groups said, ISPs trying to obey blocking orders were forced to cut access to at least 1.5 million legal Web sites that had nothing to do with child pornography or even legal pornography, but shared Internet addresses with the offending sites.

So, apparently, during the course of "blocking kiddie porn," ISPs operating in Pennsylvania were also forced to block more than 1.5 million websites that were totally legal. Sounds to me like the PA authorities were issuing bans by IP address. In this day and age of virtual hosting accounts, tens or even hundreds of websites can be hosted on a single IP address, so long as the browsers are using HTTP/1.1.

Imagine if your website was hosted on a server that happened to be also serving a customer who, according to Pennsylvania lawmakers, was hosting a child porn site. All of a sudden, you're dead in the water, and potential customers in Pennsylvania can't reach you. Meanwhile, neither you nor your web hosting provider have any idea that this is happening, because the law made the "dirty list" a secret.

This was a bad law. Striking it down was the right thing to do.

Re:Great

[Motherfucking Shit]

I never claimed to be a "child porn expert." I have had a number of encounters with child porn, and if you're so curious about the history, I will explain.

I was AOL remote staff for a number of years, beginning when I was only 14 myself. I started in the Mac Help forum, and was there throughout my AOL tenure. Eventually I wound up working in the Youth Tech forum, and later, I instructed other remote staff as a member of KARES (Kids Area Resource for Education and Safety), part of the CLC (Community Leaders College). As a KARES instructor I taught Terms of Service enforcement to other remote staff who worked in areas like Nickelodeon.

My duties in Youth Tech were fairly mundane, I did content publishing through RAINMAN and also had file library and message board tools. On at least one occasion, child porn was uploaded into the Youth Tech file library. As a file library tool holder, I was one of the people whose responsibility it was to download files that people uploaded into our file library, in order to determine whether or not the files were suitable for the public. Someone uploads something, well, one of the staff have to download it to see whether or not it's worth keeping in the library. And yes, I encountered files which I would classify as child porn. There was no procedure at that point, and (being a kid myself) I just deleted the weird shit out of the file library.

Chat hosting was another story. By the time I was instructing in CLC/KARES, I was 17 or 18, and had also taken over some chat hosting slots in Youth Tech. While the forum was called "Youth Tech," the chat rooms were what you might expect, more like "youth flirt." A bunch of "A/S/L" and "13/f/nj" type stuff. As a chat host I was empowered to gag and/or remove offensive participants. What I was not prepared to deal with was the pervs who would come in and mass-email everyone in the chat room with child porn.

Again, as it was my duty, when we would get a mass-email to the room, if there was a file attachment I would check it out and see what it was, to determine whether or not action needed to be taken, whether or not to warn the room about a virus, etc. On multiple occasions, some pervert would enter the chat room, and send an email to everyone in the room containing an attachment of child porn. At this point it was up to "TOS Kids" to deal with it, and I have no idea what they did, and I do not speak on behalf of AOL as to what took place. All I know is the procedure I followed in terms of alerting the TOSA/AOBaseball/ActionFast/DeadVolvo/etc as to what was going on.

I am not a "child porn expert," nor do I want to be. I'm just someone who has spent many years online, a lot of them dealing with kids (much of that time I was a "kid" myself) and encountering child porn in those situations.

Re:Ehhh...

[Bob Uhl]

Oh, certainly. Having recently started driving at exactly the speed limit (rather than 20-30 over on highways and 5-15 over elsewhere), I have found that the limits are set absurdly low. It takes more than a third again as long to travel somewhere at 55 mph as it does at 75 mph, and on an interstate there is no safety difference (in fact, in this town everyone travels at 75 in the 55 sections anyway).

The speed limits are set lower than the majority of drivers for two reasons: to generate revenue and to give the police reason to make drug & alcohol stops. It's illegal for a cop to point a gun at you and take your money, but it's perfectly legal for him to ticket you for an infraction of a lunatic traffic rule; it's illegal for him to stop your car to search it without a warrant, but perfectly legal for him to search it with a loosely-defined probably cause after having stopped you for an infraction of the above-mentioned lunatic traffic rule.

Fortunately, I neither use nor carry drugs, so the latter doesn't affect me--but it's annoying nonetheless the way traffic rules are manipulated to over-ride little things like freedom from search and seizure.