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Australian ISPs Required To Report Child Porn
rolling_or_jaded writes "As of the 1st of March 2005, Australian ISPs and web hosts will face fines of up to $55,000 if they can be used to access child pornography and do not refer the information to the police. Yikes. How on earth are the ISPs (and web hosts -- like my own very small-time and humble company) supposed to enforce this?"
From the article:
Under the new laws, an ISP or ICH will face penalties of $11,000 for the individual and $55,000 for body corporates if they are made aware that their service can be used to access material that they have reasonable grounds to believe is child pornography or child abuse material and they do not refer details of that material to the AFP within a reasonable time.
What that equates to is if child porn is reported to the ISP/webhost, they have to then report it to the Australian police quickly or face penalties. This isn't some ridiculous content-policing scheme - its just imposing a penalty on those who don't forward child pornography reports to the police at a reasonable pace.
The legislation does not require ISPs to monitor customer usage to pick up on illegal use. It is purely there to ensure that when an ISP becomes aware of specific content, that they report it.
To read an official summary of the legislation, check out this site: http://www.ag.gov.au/ISPresponsibilities
I work for an ISP and we recently had a friendly informational meeting with our local police. It was pretty much a get to know you kind of thing.
In talking, the topic of child porn came up as it would be something we cooperate should that type of investigation land on our networks door-step. The Officer said that they could have found 20 images of a 'child' in various stages of undress, and the last one was an image of a fully disclothed child, but without a clear shot of their face. Out of all of that they would have no way (with out obvious birthmarks and the like) to classify any of the images as child pornography because there was no definitive way to link the final image to the identity of the child.
Pretty depressing stuff, but that is the reality the poice face when trying to prosecute this kind of thing.
Imagine the steps ISPs would have to do to come to the same conclusions.
OK, people, reality check here. In all fairness to the luddites up in Canberra (for whom I did not vote), the law only requires ISP's and hosts to report child porn to the police when it is brought to their attention by a 3rd party.
They are NOT required to go looking for it.
They are NOT required to pre-screen content before allowing posting/hosting.
They are NOT required to take preventative measures.
They are NOT required to implement filtering or blocks.
Get the message?
All the law says is that they are NOT allowed to turn a blind eye when someone complains about child porn hosted on or transmitted through their facilities. Then all they have to do is forward the complaint on to the police for action.
This is no worse than doctors being required to report signs of child abuse in their patients.
John.