Slashdot Mirror
Has Verizon Forfeited Common Carrier Status?
An anonymous reader writes, "Freedom of speech, the future of the Net, you name it. In October, a U.S. vigilante group asked Verizon to cut off Net access to Epifora, a Canadian ISP that hosts a number of (entirely legal) web sites offering support to minor-attracted adults. Shortly thereafter, Verizon gave 30 days notice to Epifora, ending a 5 year relationship. Telecos have traditionally refrained from censoring legal content, arguing that as 'common carriers' it is outside of their scope to make such decisions. Furthermore, they have refrained because if they did so in some cases, they might be legally liable for other cases where they did not exercise censorship. The questions are: has Verizon forfeited their claim to common-carrier status by selectively censoring legal speech that they do not like? And can the net effectively route around censorship if the trunk carriers are allowed to pick and choose whom they allow to connect?"
Verizon is just protecting the children, you pedophile freak.
Seriously though, Common Carriers should really not be censoring ANY content if they want to be common carriers. Here in the real world, though, Verizon and all of the other big telcos have the FCC in their pockets, so I wouldn't hold my breath on anything happening to them because of this.
Next
So, since they did this, isn't the obvious thing to do to sue Verizon for transmitting something bad that "hurts" you? They are no longer protected now, yes?
The phrase "minor-attracted adults" makes baby Orwell cry.
Actually, it's a typo. The submitter meant "miner-attracted adults." It's a group of people irresistibly drawn to hard hats and black lung disease. Just goes to show you can find a website for anything on the Internet.
Depends on the age, and the law now doesn't it?
If the age of consent is lower than that of the age of majority (ie, a minor) you could be referring to a 17 year old potentially.
Here in Canada, the age of consent is 14 as long as you're not in a position of authority over the minor in question, with people making noises about raising it to the age of 16.
If I look at a 17 year old girl, am I a pedophile? I think not. I could legally have sex with her, but since she's half my age, I probably don't stand much chance/wouldn't have much in common with her anyway, so I'm not gonna go out and try. But, it hardly makes one a pedophile to stare at her b00b13z, she's merely a minor, but one who is legally allowed to have sex -- including with a dirty old man like me if she so chooses.
I don't know anything about the sites in question (and TFA seems to be slashdotted already), but there is not an immediate transition from "minor" (not old enough to vote or sign contracts) and "child" which is implied by pedophile. Depending on where you live, there are a few years of late adolescence which is a gray area.
Of course, now that I've tried to point out the distinction between being attracted to a minor and what it means to be a pedophile, I'm sure I'll be accused of being one, or at the very least supporting them. Which I don't. I'm merely trying to point out that "minor-attracted" might, in fact, NOT mean pedophile.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Or, he may not :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
>Censorship is an ethical cancer. There can be no legitimate justification for it.
Yes, because you still have the unlimited right to yell, "FIRE!" in a crowded theater not on fire. Or incite a riot.
Face it, there is NO such thing as unlimited freedoms, and for good reason.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
First of all, if you read the article, 2 sites were named as being found objectionable by Verizon:
"The company's clients host a number of websites and chatboards-- such as Boychat.org and Freespirits.org-- with a pederastic slant."
The article also seems to indicate that they would be legal in the US:
"With its transgressive content, Epifora had faced scrutiny before. After a July, 2001 report in Canada's National Post, MCI-Canada approached the Ontario Provincial Police for an opinion, and inspector Bob Matthews, of the OPP's "Project P" declared the material on Epifora's servers in compliance with the Criminal Code. That says a lot, as Canadian law sets a higher bar than the US and most other countries, making no distinction between, say, photographs of minors having sex, textual descriptions thereof, or even speech "advocating" such acts."
Furthermore, I believe you are missing the point:
Weather or not you agree with what is being said, free speech is protected by law in Canada and in the US. The issue here is weather or not Telcos should be able to censor content by refusing to provide access to their backbone. Verizon is refusing a Canadian ISP access to the backbone because they host a few websites that Verizon doesn't like.
The websites are legal in Canada for sure. Should Verizon be allowed to do this? I don't think so. This is a slippery slope that nobody wants to end up at the bottom of.
Common carriers do not have the "right to refuse business". If the Gay Nazis for Nuking Whales and Buggering Baby Seals wants telephone service, Verizon is obligated to provide it. They can only terminate service for non-discriminatory reasons like not paying the bill. It's inherent in the definition of a common carrier that the service be offered to the public in a non-discriminatory manner.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That's not censorship.
Censorship would be the gov't throwing you in prison for warning people about the danger of fire. Your example is the gov't throwing you in prison for knowningly and willfully endangering people's lives by shouting something you a) know to be untrue, and b) know will most likely cause a panic-stricken stampede for the exits.
Quite honestly, saying that not being able to yell 'fire' in a croweded theater is like saying that your right to bear arms is infringed by not being able to shoot people at will.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
You can say anything you want. If it can be substantially proven that you inflicted quantifiable harm on another, you can be held accountable for that.
For instance, if I published a full-page ad in your local paper calling you a pedophile, I would have the full legal right to do so. If you could demonstrate that I caused you financial losses from such a thing, and damages, then I could be sued for libel.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Right. Just words. In the USA, they're a crime where the constitution has been violated by the government. As long as we understand that "crime" simply means "behavior forbidden by arbitrary and illegitimate government edict", rather than "behavior that causes harm."
Your words may (or may not) signal intent. Words are like that. I'd take your words in context, and I probably wouldn't worry much about them if the context was normal — conversation, joking, etc. If, on the other hand, you had a gun in your hand and were pointing it at me at the time, I'd do my best to disable you right there, because that's no simply longer an act of speech, now, is it?
There is nothing in the constitution that can even remotely be construed as a "right to not be offended by another's speech", and in fact, the first amendment explicitly goes the other way, because it is obviously much more important that we hear what you have to say than it is we protect our pissant little preconceptions from the fact that you wish to say it.
To put it another way, perhaps more easily understood by the "mommy protect me" contingent, I would far rather you tell me you intend to do my family in so I can keep it in mind, than you be forbidden from mentioning it so I will have no clue that you are thinking such things.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I did some digging and found the "vigilante group" is "Perverted Justice" (www.perverted-justice.com), the makers of the Dateline "to catch a predator" shows. Their status as "vigilante" is debatable during their law-enforcement-supported television shows, but their daily operations definitely slide toward the vigilante area.
I found a site called corrupted-justice.com which is a site critical of Perverted Justice, and discusses a number of cases where they clearly violate the law and most people's ethical standards in a "the ends justify the means" sort of way.
In fact, I also found quotations from Perverted Justice and thier founders saying basically "we have no interest in protecting children, that's not what we're about, we simply hate pervs and want them to suffer miserably". Corrupted Justice seems to imply they use 15-17 year old "minors" in some of their stings as "bait" and tell them to engage older adults in sexual discussions.
I don't know, that sort of "by all means, hell with the law" approach is disheartening.
I also found that the websites hosted by Epifora include sites like www.boychat.org and www.girlchat.org.
Doing some more digging, they seemed to be linked to some sort of organization called "Free Spirits" (www.freespirits.org) which claims it is a "support group" for pedos, but it also says that it is very opposed to illegal content.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing saying that Epifora wasn't hosting child porn on their server, but I have a feeling that the FBI or RCMP or whatever would have beat down the door if there was any evidence of that, rather than Verizon quitely unplugging their upstream. In addition, comments from Canadian law enforcement mentioned elsewhere in this thread seem to lean toward their content having been audited by both law enforcement and MCI's legal team in 2001 and found to be entirely legal.
So a conclusion? Verizon pulled the plug because they didn't want to be listed as a "corporate sex offender" on the perverted-justice.com website. They had a meeting where lawyers said "we choose the better of two evils" and they chose to shut down the Epifora ISP and face the unlikely circumstance their "common carrier" status was put in jeopardy, rather than face the guarantee that "perverted justice" will be posting fliers on their headquarters with pictures of decapitated children or somesuch that say "VERIZON DID THIS".
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Consider a moment if was 18 and I liked a 17-year-old girl, I could be considered a "minor attracted adult" - but pedophile? I think not.
Now, all that aside, I really have no idea what the site was about at all, and I decline to comment about Verizon's action at this time.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
That's fine, but it is free speech. Better to have people discussing this than for it to be a forbidden topic that festers in darkness.
They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades. I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this.
The important question is why? What is it that is different between pedophiles and homosexuals? Why should society accept one and not the other? Is there a fundamental difference of ethics in your mind that you can explain or are you just reacting emotionally?
This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't
The "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy. What we need is reason and rational dialogue. We need an understanding of why pedophilia is wrong, not just an angry, emotional attack upon it.
The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'.
I disagree. The "negativity constant" of a word is how much people react negatively to a given word. It is an emotional response, conditioned by society. Pedophiles are people who are attracted to minors. Rather than reacting to either set of terminology it should be made clear why either people who are attracted to minors or pedophiles should be forbidden from acting on their attraction.
In my mind the ethical principal is quite simply, responsibility. Children are not granted all the rights of an adult, nor are they held entirely responsible for their decisions because they have not yet developed the capacity to make rational, informed choices about their lives. As a result, they are taught to obey their elders as a matter of principal and to cede their will to authority figures, who "know better." They place great trust in their elders and society and that trust in turn engenders a greater responsibility for society to protect them. Sex with children is wrong similar to the way rape is wrong. A child is not socially in a position to make a correct choice and does not have the critical thinking capacity to properly make major life choices.
Sex is a major life choice, both from an emotional and social perspective and from a health risk perspective. Until a child reaches an appropriate level of maturity, every member of society is responsible for making sure to go out of their way to avoid letting children make such choices, whether they think they are ready for it or not.
Now no one with any reason believes that a child magically becomes responsible at the age of 18. Some people develop faster than others. I don't think some 25 year olds are ready to make life choices yet, while some 15 year olds are. Society has chosen an arbitrary age of 18, but ethically, we need to be aware that it is wrong to take advantage of immature 18 year olds. Let the ethical principal, not the law guide one's decision making in this regard.
I pity people who find themselves sexually attracted to children, but I do not forgive them any unethical actions they take. By understanding the issue, however, I think we can more intelligently make decisions and promote understanding within society, both of why one group should be legal and another not, and how we should all act with regard to the issue. Reason, not emotion should guide us.
"What the hell is a "minor attracted adult", if not a pedophile?"
Attraction to those under the age of the majority. That includes more than prepubescent children.
"it bothers me to see the mainstreaming of pedophilia with terms like this."
Has it occurred to you that it may be a tactic to bash those who can't be shown, or even suspected, of pedophilia at all?
"They talked about 'coming out', and about accepting themselves, and reclaiming terms like 'boy lover'. They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades."
What is the problem with this? So far you've described no criminal behavior at all. Are you advocating keeping people with this condition be as emotionally deprived as possible? How is that a help to society?
"I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this."
It isn't perverted. Being closeted for them is no different. Plenty have said the same things about gays.
"This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't."
My moral choice is to accept what everyone's condition is. There is a big difference between accepting a person's condition and accepting their actions. It is child molestation that is the issue and nothing you've described has anything to do with that. You just seemed consumed by hatred and fear of those you don't know.
"The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'."
I don't agree with any of that. First, homosexuality hasn't been mainstreamed outside progressive areas. Second, pedophilia is a condition that people develop outside their choice, and it's child molestation that has to be prevented. Finally, you have no idea why the term "minor attracted adult" was chosen and you have no basis for declaring that it means "pedophile" (or more accurately "child molester in your usage).
Nope, that's a crime. The crime is called assault. However, it's grey (as it should be) and subject to interpretation. You did not commit assault, for example, because from context, it's clear that you were making an example. If you sent that comment as email to a particular recipient, without any context that indicated that you were being hypothetical, THEN it would be assault.
The simple version is: if a reasonable person would assume that the comment constituted a credible threat of violence, then it's assault.
IANAL, as you may have guessed, but I've had to look into what does and does not constitute assault and/or battery in the past.
Mod me to hell and gone, I don't care, but this is yet another prime example of people simply refusing to take responsibility for their own actions. How about you yell fire 10, 50 or a hundred times, till people get the "joke" and then on the 101st time, there really is a fire, and a crowded cinema full of people die, because they stopped believing you.
Communication is an important thing, and it depends on meanings of words and short phrases. In certain circumstances, you actually want to be able to convey huge volumes of data with only one or two words. If someone deliberately and willfully tries to erode the data content of that word or phrase (by censorship, by the childish bullshit outlined by the parent, or even by propaganda/google bombing/whatever), then they all deserve to be slow roasted. Its hard enough to move ideas between people as it is, without additional static clouding things.
Creepy, but doesn't sound illegal to me...
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Actually, "Assault" can be the act of threatening to hit someone. "Battery" is when you actually hit them. IANAL and INW (I'm Not Wikipedia), but I did take a criminal law class in college, and the difference between Assault and Battery were covered, as were the terms Mens Rea (Criminal Intent) and Actus Reus (Criminal Act).
The basis for determining what is and is not a crime falls largely on the existence and extent of the Mens Rea. It's why there are different degrees of Murder and Manslaughter. It's also why the threat to rap and kill a family can, in one case, be totally legal, and in another case, be Assault.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic