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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.'"
If you run an ISP, and are worried about some government agency forcing you to sacrifice your subscibers rights, heres a good place to start to learn about the latest battles. http://www.eff.org/minilinks/archives/cat_free_spe ech.php
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?
Wow, this is certainly a step in the positive direction, in view of stuff like Patriot Act, and RIAA's ...
At least someone in that court room still remember that Americans possess this thing called rights. While decisions like this probably won't stand against the corporate giants, at least 1984 has been postponed yet further..
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
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 wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
I'm not sayin', but I'm sayin'.
Secondly, I wonder if the law had passed if ISPs would have done anything about FreeNet.
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.
My personal stance on the issue is manage it on a regional basis, if your country/state/city feels strongly enough about the issue they can ban the internet completely if it is voted on, and people not in the area are unaffected. As long as no legitimate content (eg "speech") is censored or blocked, there should be no problem with it. Hell, put a switch on every new PC saying "child pornography - ON/OFF" and let the consumers decide for themselves, instead of legislating it to high heaven.
Let's face it, these child pornogrophers are always going to be releasing their stuff, it is up to the people weather they want to watch it or something made by more mature people. Simple as that.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
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...
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
Now wat r the big "legit " things that cannot be blocked- without which ppl will undergo tremendous difficulties?
If the practical effect of a piece of legislation is that the first amendment is violated then that piece of legislation is not valid.
The first amendment makes no mention of "tremendous difficulties". The judicial precedents for application of the first amendment do not concern themselves with whether or not people undergo "tremendous difficulties" as a result of their communications being hampered. Your reference to whetehr or not people experience "tremendous difficulties" is in no way relevant.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
1.Child Porn images (not photos) were attempted to be made illegal by congress, but judges ruled that was making an idea illegal, which is unconstitutional; so all ancient(ie pre-photo) Hindu sex images are legal.
2.Whatever is in general practice CONTINUES to be allowed whether slavery when freedom for all is declared or cutting the foreskin off infants (the genital mutilation of OUR culture) when taking pictures of nude babies genitals is considered cause to call the police.
3. People created new religions declaring various drug use to be sacred, but the courts have only accepted old established (including American Indian) religious activities as privaleged (needing extra special reasons to be outlawed, not just legislative whim); thus some Indian tribes legally use otherwise illegal mushrooms, Christian drinking of wine-turned-into-blood is legal regardless of laws to the contrary (such as being under age), and so on.
4."[Herodotus recounts that] Darius once asked some Greeks what would induce them to devour the dead bodies of their parents, and when they answered in horror that nothing could make them do an act so atrocious, he had some men from India brought in whose custom it was to do this very thing. He asked [the men from India] how they could be persuaded to burn their dead instead of eating them. They cried out in abhorrence and begged him not to utter such abominable words. 'As Pindar says,' concludes Herodotus, 'custom is king.' Edith Hamilton, The Great Age of Greek Literature (http://www.cstone.net/~irksome/Z.htm)
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.
For a second there I thought someone was making pr0n "for" children... I can imagine it now Jane likes finger painting tea parties with her dolls. ring 1800 SEXY and Jenny will play with your Megatron OOH crap gave them another idea..Im soo going to hell
Here in the UK, some ISPs are doing this exact thing. BT Yahoo! call it 'cleanfeed' technology, and it seems to be working. Certainly if the false positive problem was big, they'd be getting complaints. No?
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
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.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
Read the comments with Traci Lords in mind and most of the comments become nonsense.
"Child Porn" is NOT legally what most of you think it is. Some think its any nude of a child. It is not. Some think the child's genitals must be nude/visible to be legally porn - NOPE (not in the USA). Some think the child must look like a child - no again, look at a Traci Lords photo at age 17 (illegal in USA, I THINK legal in Germany).
BT don't get complaints because they are lying to their customers. Pages blocked by Cleanfeed are replaced with a "Website not found" message, not a warning that child pornography has been blocked.
A latent existence
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
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.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
"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.
(guy 1)"Not quite on-topic, but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?"
(guy 2)"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."
(Me}(to guy 2)"Yes, and people who'd been bothered for not accepting the local religion IN NEW ENGLAND (WHERE THE PILGRIMS AND DECENDENTS WERE) went to PENSYLVANIA to avoid persecution as stated by (guy 1).
In 1776 Pennsylvania was ALL about religious freedom. It is IRONIC that today it should be in the lead among the 50 states to be all about limiting freedom.
-- sheesh --
Any education-related grant application makes a huge effort to require schools and libraries to be "CIPA" (Children's Internet Protection Act) Compliant. There are certifications, forms, checkboxes, all manner of things to make sure you are using some sort of filtering. The problem is that the filtering requirements are a joke. Most S&L's put on some commercial package that filters by a small list of sites. I can, within 30 seconds, demonstrate how easy it is to get around things like this. Filtering does not work. But since filtering has been deemed "Good", the government shoves it down everybody's throat.
Just wanted to point out the age old difference between crackers and hackers. Crackers are bad, hackers are not. Thank you.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
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
of that episode of South Park featuring NAMBLA.
"But dude, you HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN!"
Free speech is great, but c'mon.
So, you're saying that any pedophile who downloads pornography from the internet will not go out and abduct a child. I don't think that statement is completely correct. Whenever there is an arrest of a person who's abducted/abused a child, there usually is an entire library of DVDs/CDs/photoalbums found.
Just because police find child pornography at many convicted offenders', that doesn't imply causality. Of course, such a causality may exist, but it hasn't been shown yet.
The grandparent post postulated that access to porn may prevent many from molesting children, by creating a "safe" vent. I suppose that for some (maybe even for many), it will. For others, the effect may be opposite, and dangerous. Human beings are not lemmings, they don't react mechanically and deterministically to stimuli. Still, there may exist research to help us form opinions based on something other than moral bias and fear. The intent must always be to act in the best interest of the children.
For the record, child pornography doesn't have to have victims. But because of the moral outrage, even computer-generated child porn and texts are outlawed most places.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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!
There is no such thing as "protecting" children from porn - or anything else. Any such attempt is itself harm to children.
There is no "harm" done to anyone (including people who are already freaks) - including children - from viewing porn or anything else.
Any "harm" is self-inflicted.
It's all ruminant evacuation.
Any parents who buy into this crap are themselves doing harm to their children by not properly training them to deal with human reality.
This "children are supposed to be innocent" bullshit started with moronic Christians and has nothing to do with human evolution or human history or practically any human culture.
NONE of these laws are useful for anything but enabling freak cops and statists to bust people to enhance their psychotic need to push people around to demonstrate to themselves that they're better than other people.
Humans. Morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!