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Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn
Goobergunch and other readers sent in word that Sprint, Time Warner, and Verizon have agreed to block websites and newsgroups containing child pornography. The deal, brokered by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, occurred after Cuomo's office threatened the ISPs with fraud charges. It's of some concern that the blacklist of sites and newsgroups is to be maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an NGO with no legal requirement for transparency. Here are two further cautions, the first from Lauren Weinstein: "Of broader interest perhaps is how much time will pass before 'other entities' demand that ISPs (attempt to) block access to other materials that one group or another feels subscribers should not be permitted to see or hear." And from Techdirt: "[T]he state of Pennsylvania tried to do pretty much the same thing, back in 2002, but focused on actually passing a law ... And, of course, a federal court tossed out the law as unconstitutional. The goal is certainly noble. Getting rid of child porn would be great — but having ISPs block access to an assigned list isn't going to do a damn thing towards that goal."
There is such a list in Sweden, and some of the big ISPs use it. There was quite an uproar when someone tried to put The Pirate Bay on it, claiming they had torrents of child porn, and it never got on the list. Almost everyone agrees that the list is useless, but it's still there. :-/
So it's not a question of whether or not someone will try to use such a list for their own goals, but how soon that will happen.
Yea, that would be great and all, but Chris Hansen is doing it to make money. That seems a bit sick too.
Seriously, what happens if a group of people (generally young men found living electronically on one of those lovely chan boards) decide to stage a cp raid? Is the attacked site blocked forever or only as long as the cp stays on the servers? Who decides if it is intentional or accidental? Who even gets to decide what constitutes cp? Is there a job where someone has to sort through all the porn on the internet to see what is legal? Are they accepting resumes? Not that I'm applying.
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of my brain.
Many Finnish ISPs voluntarily enforce a blacklist maintained by the police. The list is full of legitimate sites that supposedly contain "child porn." While browsing for garden variety porn I got blocked so many times I had to start using OpenDNS (yes, it's really tough to circumvent the blacklist).
This will probably go down exactly like the GP thinks it will. Just in like here.
The idea is that we prevent the trading of child porn images over the Internet in order to protect children from abuse.
But this doesn't make sense. The laws making it illegal to produce child porn are completely disconnected from the laws that make it illegal to distribute child porn over the internet. If someone publishes indecent images of children over the Internet they are incriminating themselves for the former crime, making the latter one superfluous.
The real purpose is clearly not the stated one. It probably isn't just a naked power grab, rather a callous bit of populism ("Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!?")
When such laws fail, as the nature of the Internet makes them bound to, the same motives that caused them to be created causes the laws to be 'toughened'. If you had stuff like the DMCA that would make it illegal to provide any service that might conceivable allow a person to trade child porn over the internet, then you would have a law usable against any proxy server, encryption, and a host of other technologies that can protect your privacy.
I am not saying that this is a deliberate attempt to crush peoples freedom - more like a hamfisted populist attempt to crush peoples freedom.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Well, to play Devil's Advocate, the police and Perverted Justice are entirely capable of catching "pedophiles" without Chris Hansen's involvement. He is someone who takes advantage of underage sex for his own self-aggrandizement--do you see the difference?
To be honest, I'm a little squeamish about theses sting operations... essentially you're arresting people prospectively for a crime they have not committed. In some cases the decoy is over the age of consent, anyway, no matter what she may have said online--if she wasn't a decoy and the act had been carried out, no crime would have been committed. And you never know if the crime "would have" been committed, anyway--if the perp would have chickened out; if he was internally judging this to be a game of age play between people capable of consent, and so forth. To make an analogy, driving angrily to your ex-husband's house with a gun in the car is not a crime.
I suspect what ends up happening is that these people are so scared they accept some kind of plea bargain or diversionary treatment and the real punishment is the disruption in their lives by revealing their scumbag-ness to their friends and relatives. So in that sense maybe the Chris Hansen show really is the point and the law enforcement so much window-dressing. I don't know.
demi
Besides, my point kinda was that the laws ARE messed up to begin with. For thousands of generations marrying off daughters under age 15 was the norm--did the men wait until their new brides were 18 to have sex? Hardly.
So basically men HAVE the urge to look at child pornography. All men must--it's hardwired in to find a 16 year old nubile girl attractive. Are all you guys crying "Child porn is so awful!" really saying that if a hot young, busty and curvaceous 15 year old was standing naked in front of you, you wouldn't be aroused? So what makes it awful is searching for it on the internet? Or are we just talking about prepubescent child pornography? No body seems to want to make this clear, which bolsters my argument that all this is just another witch hunt used to control the masses.
Careful What You Wish For....
Rethink the "that isn't themselves" part of that.
There was a case (in Florida, I think? Heard about it second hand) where a 15 yo girl takes an indecent photo of herself and sends it to her boyfriend. Numb-nuts shows it off to his friends, and the next result is that he gets busted for possessing the image, she gets busted for both possessing it and for production.
Let's also consider that in some areas, any unclothed photo of a child is automatically child pornography, including the sort that many normal parents might have of their children and never consider them in that fashion (kids in bath, that kind of thing).
Actually, according to his bio, Marilyn Manson tried to use such a photo from his parents photo album in the liner notes for his first album, and the label refused because they might get into legal troubles over the possibility of child pornography (which was precisely his point -- this was a fairly common, normal sort of photo with no pornographic intent, so what does it say about a VIEWER who declres it to be CP?)