Slashdot Mirror
Usenet Blocking Intensifies
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The war against the alt.* hierarchy of Usenet continues as NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has convinced two more ISPs to drop access to part of Usenet. They've also set up the website NY Stop Child Porn, and convinced California to join them in the fight. In some sense, this is rather like bulldozing the slums to fight crime; sure, it might get rid of a lot of undesirables, but it also affects many innocent people, and everyone will now start migrating elsewhere in droves. The article notes, 'Cuomo's new web site signifies that he's clearly not done yet. It includes contact information for 20 ISPs that presumably operate in New York, and text of a letter to send to them to urge that they sign on to the campaign.' And you thought the Eternal September was bad..."
Whenever there is an industry that has a social problem linked to it's products or byproducts, the industry has two choices. 1. clean up the problem yourself, or 2. pretend there isn't a problem, and wait until the government cleans it up for you.
The 'internet industry' has decided the latter course of action. I have seen hundreds of stories on slashdot about the evils of censorship. I think I have seen maybe 1 or 2 stories about stopping pedophilia. It is not that nerds are pedophiles, it's just that they feel no responsibility for the ways their product (the internet) is used in brand new ways by sick people to hurt others.
You have this logo of Einstein, you paste it on all your science stories. But apparently, you have learned nothing from Einstein, for if he had anything to teach us at all, it is that we are responsible for the consequences of our creations, and the effect they have on people's lives. No man is an island and nobody lives in a bubble.
If Internetania, including slashdot, had been working as hard to stop child exploitation as it has worked, say, on stopping spam, or stopping memory leaks in compiled languages, then the government would not have to step in and do the job for you.
But you let it fester. You just assumed that alt.kiddie.sex, alt.child.rape, alt.stories.incest.preteen, or whatever was not your problem, not your concern, and you could look the other way. Well, fortunately, you people do not run society, in a democracy everyone is supposed to have a say, and a lot of those people are social workers, survivors, and family members of abused kids, and they don't really think 'alt.binares.preteen' or whatever is something that they can turn away from and pretend doesn't exist.
This is a clear case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: kiddie pr0n almost certainly is less than 0.1% of USENET alt.bin* traffic. I would think its' value as an investigation lead in finding pervs is actually greater than the damage in distributing it.
This USENET dragnet is like banning all brown-paper envelopes because some contail illegal materials.
Cuomo reveals his colors.