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

[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.