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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.'"
A tough issue, of course, but this can be somewhat equated to the situation with p2p. Would we have the networks be responsible for copyright infringment, or the users themselves? Shouldn't we be policing the users instead of the ISPs?
Too bad the lawmakers never will. It's only a matter of time before the bill is rewritten in such a way that forces ISPs to use "expensive technology" to block kiddie porn.
It's also unfortunate that the same logic hasn't been applied elsewhere.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
I think what he (the parent poster) meant was that if you run an ISP and someone breaks the law, they could come after you like the RIAA came after ISP's or DirectTV came after software developers.
... although I doubt there are any of those left.
The link was supposed to inform slashdot guys that run little ISP's
unforutnately, thereare nomore small ISP's left anymore, all the little guys are either dead or they sold out.
Perhaps we should target those responsible. Surely some of these child pornographers are in the States and we have jurisdiction over them.
Ignoring the problem and pretending it's not there is not going to fix it. Banning access to these sites does not remove the porn and help the kids; it simply blocks our access to it and let's the sick bastards keep doing what they do. I'd think most countries would have no problem arresting someone that did this kind of shit.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
No you could not.
The relevant legal point here would be that the legislation was not aimed at restricting exercise of religion.
Legislatures have tried to act against religion in this way in the past, for example by banning animal sacrifice on "cruelty" grounds. This has failed because they haven't applied the same standards to other instances of animal killing e.g. for food. In this case, however, the banning of child pornorgraphy is clearly applied across the board, it is not targeted specifically at any religion nor at religions in general. It would be valid in much the same way that laws against murder are valid, even if the murder is a ritual sacrifice.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
I think you make some excellent points. Indeed, a similar system exists in many countries if you only think about it for a minute - I'll use the UK as an example here.
Child porn is illegal, but nobody has yet (to my knowledge) tried to enforce blocking at an ISP level. However, there is nothing to stop you buying Internet provision from a company which offers a "filtered" service, or installing software to filter it yourself.
How effective this all is is another issue altogether, but at least in the above example the decision is made by the individual rather than the government. Indeed, I can think of a few uses, both personal and organisational:
Now, watch this get merrily modded down because I've said that people may voluntarily choose to have their internet access "censored".
First and foremost, I do not advocate kiddie porn in any way shape or form. But a law requiring ISPs to block such information is not the solution. It is all to typical of society today that we find a quick solution to a problem and ignore the underlying issue.
Blocking kiddie porn, will only result in people doing their best to bypass the blocking software. It becomes an ongoing battle.
Stopping people looking at kiddie porn will not stop their desires to get hold of it. Who knows how far people like this are prepared to go to get what they want.
We need to give these people help and education, not just drive them to other sources for their material.
If the software can identify the porn/sites to block the stuff, then surely people who look at it could be offered help. Tackle the problem at the source. Remove the kiddie porn and the problem doesn't go away, remove the desire for kiddie porn and you have solved the problem.
Yes I know this is advocating monitoring of what we look at but ultimately the ISPs know that already. But I believe it is a step towards a better solution than simply blocking.
OK, is there any good reason for an ISP to log the activities of its customers? There should be no need to correlate IP to website A, or FTP B, or even newsgroup A.B.W.. They should just provide the connection and be done with it.
(aside: BT have tried blocking at an ISP level)
The difficulty here is not that people want to choose whether to watch child porn or not, or that people want to allow others that choice. No mentally healthy person wants to watch child porn and nobody wants to give people the option.
The problem is that by compulsorily filtering against child porn, all current technical solutions also catch a whole bunch of other stuff. It's like the Tuna fishermen - they go out to fish out tuna, but they end up catching dolphins too. Nobody cares about the tuna, but lots of people don't want the dolphins killed.
If the child porn filters actually only filtered child porn, I'm sure they'd find very widespread acceptance. Since they don't, they have a chilling effect on other sorts of free speech, by blocking those sites in the mistaken belief that they're child porn.
(This same argument applies to normal porn filters, with the difference that quite a lot of people want their porn filter set to "on")
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Ah, but here's the rub:
Adults aren't really involved in creating the child porn now.
The VAST, VAST majority of child porn is now created by children, for children. Webcams are ubiquitous. Every twelve year old sending her boyfriend nudie pics or videochatting with him is creating child porn.
When you consider that the age lmit for "child" in the case of pornography is 18, that body of work is *staggering.*
Those pictures get out. Kids break up, they send them out as revenge, they forget to delete them when their parents sell the computer... whatever.
The whole question of how to stop child porn production is now *completely irrelevant.* There's no guy at the photo-developing booth catching it before it's made anymore.
Moreover, the "kids" who are taking naked picutres of themselves and sex partners probably keep those pictures. When you're 18 you're going to delete the photos of your first lay? I don't THINK SO.
The law and the mindset we currently have regarding this material is outdated. There's no way to stop the supply when the supply is the children themselves. We need new laws that make it illegal to pay a child to be in pornography, to force a child, whatever... but that recognize there are just too many pictures of 16-year old girls and too much demand to control it.
The most important thing to remember here is that it's not unreasonable for a man to be aroused by pictures of a 17-year old woman. A woman's breasts and hips are fully developed at that age... there's no magic switch that goes off at 18.
As long as 17-year old girls take pictures of themselves, 30-year old men will traffic in those pictures. That's not a reasonable definition of pedophilia.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
What are the arguments against .XXX or equivelents not implemented?
.SAFE domain instead?
Because people who want to censor everything they find objectionable should be censoring themselves, not everyone else. Why not a
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
And how, exactly, would spending "the majority of child protection tax dollars" on running "sting" sites to bust visitors in the US prevent the exploitation of little latvian girls? More importantly, how would that protect little american girls and boys at all? It's nothing but a witch hunt and a complete waste of US tax dollars. You could lock up every pedophile in the US and the site operators would still be in business... their customers are all over the world.
Suppressing kiddie porn violates the first amendment. Banning political ads 60 days before an election protects American liberty.
It's gotta be something in the water.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Not exactly: the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England, but wanted nothing more than to set up an equally intolerant society of their own. Freedom of religion was never one of their proposed solutions, that was the exact opposite of what they were aiming for.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
And the people "consuming" this porn are NOT necessarily the people molesting children. The people actually molesting children are going to be trading their trophy shots in the underground, not visiting "mainstream" websites. My cousin ended up in jail for trying to fuck his daughter and he doesn't even know how to use a pc. Another cousin had her second husband imprisoned after she found out he had been repeatedly molesting her daughter (his stepdaughter). The jails are full of people who have molested children who aren't even pedophiles - they simply had the opportunity to fuck a little kid and got caught at it. Don't confuse child molestors with pedophiles.
The reason there are no small ISPs anymore is that the little guys can't provide broadband. So, you set someone up. Many people will use it for a few months, forget about it, and do a chargeback claiming they cancelled the service, when in fact, they didn't. Others will use it for a few months, and then cancel and move to broadband. Also, most of the cost in providing dial-up is in the initial set-up. So, if your customers are leaving after a few months, you barely have time to recoup your up-front tech-support costs. That, and the larger ISPs are much cheaper than you can afford to be, AND they provide service in a much larger geographic area. "What? You don't have access numbers in Alabama? That's it. I'm switching to AOL."
"And I believe they'd be doing it whether there was an audience or not. "
On the money. Others should read up a bit on the history of this porn. Before the access explosion, ped's had sites with tons of this crap. No advertising, no limits. It was jollies, and those jollies will continue even with complete success at removing said content.
Those who remember CandyMan's spamming should also remember that he created site after site just for the perversion of it, not money. Every time they closed one -- Bam! -- an email with him crowing about how he'd set up another. He only stopped when he was physically busted.
That's how.
AFAIK the best thing a government could do to prevent child abuse would be to get a stack of servers and a fat pipe and archive all the porn they could get their hands on.
As long as sickos are sitting at home wanking over their keyboards, they aren't stalking kids on their way home from school. Of course it's a different matter if they're actually paying for it, but censorship just encourages people to hand over money by increasing the value of the material.
All this moral crap from politicians and the media is ignoring the actual problems of child abuse and making the world a more unpleasant and scary place for children, just because the politcians and journalists are themselves filled with hate and their cowardly minds filled with terror.
We should not be making parents afraid to let their kids go and play in the park and telling them to stay at home and watch TV. We certainly shouldn't be suppressing freedom of speech because that makes the world a much worse place for ALL children to grow up in.
I don't think that's a very insightful comment - by that logic ISPs wouldn't investigate spam activities, phishing, and the like. For the average Joe, it might be a good idea, but in practice it just wouldn't work.
A (probably slightly flawed) analogy would be tracking devices in cars. The vast majority of the public would be heavily oppossed to any form of continous government or police monitoring of their whereabouts whilst driving. People don't want to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (minor speeding and the like).
The same with the internet - the vast majority of people don't want their usage to be tracked, because they don't wan't to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (copyright theft via P2P, those under 18 viewing pornography, etc.)
However, once your car's been stolent, you'd probably really want a vehicle tracking device so you could get your car back. The same with the internet - once you've been hit with a large spam attack / DDoS etc. you'd probably want to find out who carried it out, via logs. Home users with little technical experience would expect their ISP to help, certainly with spam.
Yes, it could easily happen here. And the only reason it hasn't yet is because of laws such as the Telecommunications Act of 1934 that hold so-called "common carriers" harmless from any illegal acts that may be performed using their equipment. The government, at the time, recognized that private investment in a communication system would be impossible to secure if every call made using the system was a potential lawsuit. Furthermore, it was determined that the risks of people using the system for some illegality were vastly outweighed by the benefits of a reliable national phone system.
... my ISP offers phone service and my phone company offers broadbad) may very well be held liable for use of the equipment and their content. Heck, the phone system is already an extension of the government's surveillance capabilities (see CALEA) and a logical extension of that would be to force ISPs to be an enforcement arm as well. The simplest way to do that (from the perspective of the legal mind) is to hold them accountable for the information that passes through their systems, which is pretty much what that Pennsylvania law did. Fortunately, it sounds like the judge in that case was rather well-informed about Internet and free-speech issues.
Traditionally, to achieve common-carrier status you had to subject yourself to the regulatory whims of the government. This included specific items such as level-of-service standards with stiff penalties for non-compliance. Those of you old enough to remember the old AT&T (Ma Bell) will remember that, while Ma Bell owned everything, they did have standards laid down by the Feds and they had to live by them. However, these things cost money, and is why companies like, say, Comcast would like to be considered common carriers (to avoid any liability issues) and yet not be considered common carriers (so as not to be subject to regulation.)
There's also that business about "store and forward". As long as the communication made is immediate (the other guy answers the phone) they can't be held liable, but as soon as you use a voice mail system (i.e., store and forward) things get a bit sticky regarding liability. And all Web sites and email systems do is store and forward information.
So don't assume that it can't happen here just because it hasn't yet. In our anti-terrorist-happy society, ISPs and phone companies (the distinction is becoming somewhat irrelevant
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No mentally healthy person wants to watch child porn and nobody wants to give people the option.
Bleh, define 'mentally healthy'. Have you never even been tempted to look at some child porn, just to see what it's like? Much in the same way as many people are tempted to have a homosexual experience to check out what the fuss is about, the human brain is naturally curious, and I bet there are some 'mentally healthy' people who checked out child porn.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Adults aren't really involved in creating the child porn now.
So, so true. Also, insightful. Child porn laws are supposed to protect kids by creating penalties for those who abuse them, or would abuse them, or think about abusing them, or something like that. I'm not sure. But things have changed since the seventies. Image and video replication is infinitely easier (digital); production is trivial---fifteen-dollar webcam at Wal-Mart instead of a basement photo lab.
These 'wonderland' creeps that they found last year (was it last year?) that were involved with white slavery and such, that's what these laws are meant to prosecute. Not some guy searching for 'lolita' on eMule.
There needs to be some division, some distinction, between porn created by evil, abusive adults, and porn created by bored teenagers under no compulsion by anyone. Because there really, really is a difference. But how do you put it into law?
And also, in Australia, the age of Porn is sixteen, not eighteen as it is here in the US. Striking, that data which is perfectly legal, no cause for concern, in Australia, will cause one to be sent to the Being Raped to Death Big House here in America. We're both supposedly civilized nations here. Sheesh. If this isn't a moral absolute (like, say, killing someone---that's pretty much a moral absolute), it's kinda scary that we have such harsh penalties. Like drugs. Maybe weed will be legal in ten years. Nice consolation prize for someone who spent five of those years in jail on some stupid possession charge.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think the counter-argument goes like this (no "profit" jokes, please):
.XXX domain is created to allow easy filtering of porn sites.
.XXX domain is filtered, as its charter implies
1.)
2.)
3.) Porn sites on non-XXX domains are either more harshly regulated or forcefully eliminated. People see them as deceptive or uncooperative to a system set up for their benefit.
4.) Non-porn (by their owner's discretion), but objectionable sites start to fall into the category of No. 3. Sites with possibly legitimate non-pornographic, but offensive, content get strongarmed into dooming themselves to the "XXX" label or getting the axe.
The fear with things like this, the RSACi ratings, and the PMRC stickers is that they start with the freer intentions of "self-rating by community standards", it may still devolve into outside censorship from people saying "They're not using the rating system right! Punish them!" (Think "Meta-moderation" on Slashdot applied to censorship.)
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
You're correct in that this is the attitude that most users have - a sort of sophomoric stay out of my business mom and dad!.. but by the way can I borrow a few bucks and the car? Major ISPs like AOL are currently nailing this attitude with ads describing how they will protect your children for you and monitor your email for you.
That's all well and good, but many of us do just want a reliable connection and are willing to sacrafice some of these protective luxuries for the sake of autonomy. I can protect myself from spam, or at least try, and as for a DDoS attack, that hurts my ISP, so it's in their best interest to block it.
sure it's a bit of privacy advocate paranoia, but history has shown that when there is the opportunity for abuse of privileges- eventually this opportunity will be seized.
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No you are incorrect, in my case at least, I don't want to be tracked because its *none's* dammed business what I'm doing.. None, Zero, Zilch.
The ISP does NOT need to know what I'm accessing, the government does NOT need to know where I'm driving.. or where I had lunch yesterday.
It has nothing to do with 'getting away' with "little things", as you put it. It has to do with tracking citizens doing legal activities, and a violation of the rights guaranteed to me by the 4th amendment...
That being said, I I'm really doing something wrong, then a court order is all that is needed to track me for the sake of collecting evidence an active case, which I DO support.. But only then, not 'just because'.. or for a 'crime sweep' sort of concept.
And do address your last statement, no I wouldn't want my next car to be tracked by the state because it was stolen and trashed.. Perhaps, if *I* am the *only* one that can track it, and no one else can, i might consider it.. My car, my business..
Same goes for the ISP, they don't need to know content of the emails.. Monitoring bandwidth usage is acceptable as its part of good network management, but it stops there and does not go into tracking of content.. nope.. no sir.
As a side note what liberties our fore-fathers faught and died for that you willingly trade in for a bit of percieved 'safety', you dont desrve to have in the first place..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So then the government winds up with the average citizen PGP encrypting everything and their little Carnivore system is as useful as a clicking Zip-Drive. The sooner the better if you ask me.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
How many people here have looked at technically underage photos of Natalie Portman in a bikini at some point?
The problem with this system is that any time you label content, it only just stops short a hair away from censorship. By universally categorizing, there's no gray area. You'd end up with beheadings in the same group as hunting videos, by some people's tastes. Sure, you could add more categories, then, but even those would have their gray areas, and so on, and so on.
Then, by using the extreme examples of the category to implicate the whole class, it's easy to convince people to censor these "content ghettoes" (easily marked by a TLD or a tag), and even the marginal-but-useful content gets cut off.
Even if it's author-classified, that just means that the author will just be pressured by accusations of misusing the classification system. If not, then the classification system is pretty much useless.
For example: If I set up... say... an "Olde Tyme Horribly Violent Execution Pics" website, and self-rated it "Kid-Friendly"... either because I think kids should know the full history of violent execution, or just because I'm an asshole, one of two results would happen:
1.) I would be accused of misusing the system, and probably be forced to re-rate or drop from the rating system altogether (if it were a centrally-run system like RSACi).
2.) If I was not rerated, then many would consider the system to be inadequate, and choose a centrally-controlled rating system instead.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.