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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.
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.
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.
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.
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