Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Australian ISPs Required To Report Child Porn

Posted by timothy on from the law-and-ornament dept.

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?"

16 of 655 comments (clear)

  1. With vaporware by surefooted1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    How on earth are the ISPs (and web hosts -- like my own very small-time and humble company) supposed to enforce this?
    With vaporware!

    1. Re:With vaporware by jgardner100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Stop the world, I want to get off as there is no sign of intelligent life here.

      As an asside, they are planning to ban parents from taking photos during school swimming carnivals soon here in Australia for fear of pedophiles taking photographs.

      People are trying to look like they are doing something even though their proposed "solutions" make no sense.

    2. Re:With vaporware by Danious · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. it's simple by Fo0eY · · Score: 5, Funny

    just enable the evil bit of course

  3. New jobs? by wannabgeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does it mean they're going to hire people to go through all porn and judge which is legal?! Where can I send my resume?!?!

    --
    I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
    1. Re:New jobs? by Neil+Blender · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Does it mean they're going to hire people to go through all porn and judge which is legal?!

      I used to work for a free adult host. One thing I did was write a system to monitor the bandwidth usage of individual users and display the results, sorted high to low by megabits, everyday. The regular users were obvious, you knew who they were and what their sites consisted of. But pretty much everyday, 1 or 2 sites would jump to the top of the list. These sites were always newly created and they were always child porn. I would then go and delete the accounts and the files. The FBI, US Customs and local PD all told me it was illegal to delete, move or even shut down child porn sites. We had to rotate our logs 3 times a day, so by the time the authorities came by (on their own investigations) the evidence was always long gone. We hated the CP for what it was, but it also consumed huge amounts of bandwidth so we couldn't afford to keep it around.

      This shit popped up every single day of the week. I used to roam the CP bbses which advertised the new sites and post stuff like "THE FBI IS MONITORING (the company I worked for.)" It would freak the shit out them.

      Heh, I still have an old file cabinet from that company that is labeled "The PedoFile."

  4. Simple solution by Jesus+2.0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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?"

    Easy:

    Dear Police,

    My ISP can be used to access child pornography.

    Thanks,

    Every ISP on Earth

  5. Periodic Hysterias by Martin+Taylor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These sorts of hysterias happen every now and then. People get all up in arms about drugs, child abductions, terrorism, alcohol, $BLAH... and all of a sudden the rules need to be changed to protect us all from the menace that threatens to corrupt our children and anally rape them with a crack pipe.

    Civil liberties mean nothing when you can get a good hysteria going.

  6. simple solution for an ISP... by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 5, Funny

    Set up a non-transparent firewall requiring everyone to use a web proxy to access the internet at large. Then, whenever someone accesses a file ending in .gif, .jpg, .bmp or .png using their browser, forward a copy of that file to the police along with a note stating that it may be an example of child pornography and asking them to investigate further. That should put you in complete compliance with the law.

  7. RTFA by ToshiroOC · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:RTFA by shark72 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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."

      Correct. Just as has been the case for several years in the USA.

      When this happened to me -- somebody let me know that a member of my site was using their storage to host child porn, I very quickly called the FBI, who in turn sent me to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

      For me, there was no gray area. I didn't think for one minute of my rights being violated. I didn't think for one minute about losing my Slashdot cred (which, by definition, I must not have in the first place) by doing so. In short, the phrase "your rights online" did not even occur to me; if any phrase came to mind, it was "you shore got a purdy mouth" or some similar one that I envisioned the scumbag hearing sometime soon.

      In short, I think that if an ISP operator is upset by a law that requires them to report child pornography to the authorities once they're made aware of it, then perhaps they shouldn't be running an ISP.

      --
      Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
  8. Hype by ChimpyMonkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  9. Re:How do they decide? by redphive · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Don't demonise them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Look at what defines child porn.

    US: Sexual acts depicted on women under the age of 18
    UK: Sexual acts depicted on women under the age of 16

    So it's sick if you bang a 17 yo in the US but fine and healthy to do it in the UK.

    Also, the US proposed a law saying that child porn would include poses by adult women dressed up as underage girls (no dressing up as a tarty schoolgirl!).

    Legally, kiddie porn is banging a young woman. According to what is used as the reason for all the draconian laws and rights removal, kiddie porn is screwing six year olds.

    In several cases, the molester (not always male!) was assaulted as a child. They've been fucked up in the head and now, to prove they are grown up, they do what grown ups did to them.

    Sad, but not sick.

    Personally, I don't recognise kiddie porn. I recognise rape. I understand that even consentual sex may not be correct if the situation is such that consent is not informed (rape drugs, retarded adults, young children), but that is only loosly correlated with age.

    Think about this: it used to be absolutely fine and dandy to marry at nine (especially if you were royalty). Now we say "you must be 16" or 18, or 21, or 14... The fact that the age of consent changes shows that there is a band where it's not right, but it may not be wrong.

    For these reasons and more, I will not demonise people accused of child abuse.

    1. Re:Don't demonise them by Ligur · · Score: 5, Funny
      Look at what defines child porn.

      US: Sexual acts depicted on women under the age of 18
      UK: Sexual acts depicted on women under the age of 16

      So... If I paint a pornographic picture on my 17yo girlfriends belly, that's childporn?
      *ducks*
      --
      Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
    2. Re:Don't demonise them by gimpboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So yes, I WILL demonize people accused of child abuse.

      I heard that sgant likes to molest children. So now anyone can demonize him/her.

      Really though. When I was 16 I was accused of molesting my sisters. The time when these sick things were to have occured, I wasn't even in the same state. It's fortunate that I was out of town. A friend of mine and I were taken into custody and questioned without our parents or an attorney present. We were asked questions like:

      "Are you sure you and your friend didn't smoke a little weed and decide to have a good time?"

      My mother was out of town that week on business and my father (whom I was visiting when the alleged acts occured) lives in another state.

      It turns out the people in daycare got it in their heads that my sisters had been molested. My sisters were taken by the police and questioned. Medical exams, preformed on my sisters without the consent of or even informing my mother or their father, showed no such abuse.

      During the questioning, they never asked me where I was when these acts were to have occured. This all came up later. In the absence of any physical evidence and going on the coerced word of 4 and 2 year olds, they turned to the only other man in the house. They then started accusing my mothers boyfriend (my sisters father). Now I have a pretty low opinion of the man, but he's not a child molester.

      See none of these facts mattered. I had been accused of molsesting children in a small town. That was enough to demonize me in the eyes of some of the parents of my friends. One of which was a juvenal probation officer who believes to this day that I'm a child molester.

      --
      -- john