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US ISPs Announce Anti-Child-Porn Agreement
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that ISPs have gathered together with 45 attorney generals and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to form an agreement to crush child pornography. What does that mean? Probably the same as it meant for RoadRunner, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon customers — the end of the newsgroups." Here's the back-patting press-release from the various parties who signed on (the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the National Association of Attorneys General), though the actual text of the agreement does not seem to have been made public.
Why do I have the feeling that all this will do is block many websites and services that have nothing to do with child pornography, inconveniencing thousands of innocent web users, while the paedophiles find new ways to trade child porn and are barely inconvenienced? I'm all for fighting child porn, but blocking individual websites or newsgroups is clearly not working, and blocking vast chunks of websites and newsgroups is going to result in blocking mostly legitimate content. Would it be too much to ask for these organisations to actually focus their resources on catching the paedophiles for once? I'm not even sure which is worse in society - a paedophile with child porn, or a paedophile who can't get hold of child porn but wants to see naked children...
The ISPs can monitor all your traffic as deeply as they want to, and gather up whatever the local law enforcement needs for a warrant.
And you have no recourse, ever, thanks to the new FISA ammendments, brought to you with help from your pal and mine, Senator Barack Obama.
Hey, Mr Hope himself even supports the death penalty for child sex offenders. That'll be fun.
The good senator will spearhead this witchhunt with truth and hope and change and (bullshit), and all the expanded priveleges of the White House.
When you announce censorship to stop piracy, everybody gets up in arms about net neutrality.
When you instead use child pornography as your scapegoat, the majority will turn a blind eye to your censorship efforts.
Note that the first thing to go was alt.* on usenet, a large source of piracy. If they had choked off alt.* because of piracy, there would have been much talk about net neutrality. Since they did it because of child pornography, nobody mentions net neutrality.
The FCC admonishes Comcast for their P2P traffic management techniques.
Never fear. Now major ISPs can start blocking P2P altogether in the name of a cooperative effort with government (45 attorney generals), to crush child porn.
The FCC can't oppose a measure "to crush child porn".
It's a very crafty political technique.
There are a lot of people who want to see child pornography crushed. It's a popular political position to take.
ISP entirely blocking access to an IP, just because some of web pages served from it may include 'undesirable' content (for ISP's definition of the day for 'undesirable'), is definitely non-neutral.
There aren't that many of the general public who understand what "network neutrality" means, or the harm it will cause when ISPs start blocking sites for arbitrary reasons.
I'm sad to say, that Network Neutrality will probably be the first casualty of this cooperative.
It will start with "child porn" illegal stuff, but it won't stop there.
Yes, all of Usenet, or all of alt.* may die, even with all its perfectly legitimate and legal content and discussion areas.
Will the general (uneducated) public hear about it, or lose any sleep over it? Probably not.
First Usenet, then P2P, then IRC, then Youtube, then most of the web (other than major content providers' and business' sites).
Speaking personally, I am so fed up with the censorship, fear and repression taking place in our society in the name of fighting child pornography; that I would personally prefer to see an internet half full of child pornography before I see any more rollbacks of freedom along the lines this "Agreement".
The child porn excuse has long since lost its ability to outrage me into accepting even quite minor restrictions on liberties. Unfortunately, the general public seems so eager to become apoplectic that media outlets have essentially created an industry around giving people their daily outrage "fix". It's like Soma, except instead of making them happy all the time, they just get angry/outraged.
The effect is the same however, as people allow their emotions to overcome their reason, and we lose all ability to object or hold any kind of reasoned debate. It's like a Mass Panic, but in slow motion. Best to run with the herd, lest you get trampled.
May the Maths Be with you!
It's funny: if you replace the words 'child pornography' with 'Scientology documents', you can roll this line of reasoning right back to when Helena Kobrin tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology. (I really recommend look up the newsgroup on Wikipedia, it's fascinating Internet history.)
Like filtering Bittorrent, a real reason for dropping the alt.* hierarchy is doubtless bandwidth. When I last looked some years ago, there were over 70,000 alt.* newsgroups, most of which had no traffic except spam, and some of which were meerely names to create ASCII art in the list of newsgroups. And the binary groups with the most traffic tended to be porn. So since people can download porn on their own fairly easily now, why should the ISP's take responsibility for such an expensive resource to maintain? Blocking child pornography hasn't been an excuse for over a decade, since 'NNTP-Posting-Host' became a de facto required field from all NNTP service providers.
Most of the ISP's I've seen mentioned are only dumping alt.*, not all of Usenet, which still has a lot of useful discussion groups. The Google archives of such groups are wonderful for obscure technical help, and some of the groups remain quite useful for technical discussions or social networking. Dumping those freely created and awkward to flush newsgroups, as a matter of policy, seems to make good business sense and needn't be burdened with the excuse of child pornography.
Looks like GP was right.
;).
Perhaps one of the many reasons the homicide figure is lower is because they can't kill their hated person twice
Based on the statistics it makes more sense to have a burglary/robbery offender list rather than a sex offender list.
Anyway, putting people on such lists is wrong - once they've done their sentence, you have to let them out.
If a country doesn't have confidence in criminals turning over a new leaf, they should do what China does and execute people for all sorts of crimes - e.g. theft, "hooliganism".