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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.
methinks you meant attorneys general. what is the point of /. having editors if they don't edit?
you must be new here
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Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
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...
Why are people hanging onto this myth? ISPs do not, and have never had, common carrier status.
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.
I've watched a few episodes of cops where, after raiding a crack den or whatever, the cops then pose as the dealers and do a sting on everyone who buys the product. It seems like it should be similar here--raid the servers, and identify the clientÃle.
But the REALLY important thing, and I do mean the REALLY important thing, is to trackdown and rescue the exploited children. I'm okay with punishing people for participating in the distribution process; however, the reason we view it as so despicable is because of the value we place on the children involved, and our primary efforts should certainly be directed toward finding the source of child porn vs. find the recipients.
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.
We had one of our ISPs cave to something similar. So I wrote this letter to the marketing director: (pardon the asterisks)
Dear Steve Jackson
I'm writing to express my concern over ******'s introduction of website filtering. I believe this sets a disturbing precedent for the continuing provision of internet services by *****.
An ISP's role is not to regulate what I can use my internet connection for. An ISP's role is to provide me with an internet connection, which **** has been excellent at doing.
The aim of 'stopping objectionable practices' is a noble one. However, problems soon become apparent when one considers that my interpretation of objectionable behaviour is undoubtedly different from *****'s interpretation. The logical conclusion to this line of reasoning, is that at some point in the future when I want to use my internet connection for something, **** will decide that it knows best, and stop me from so doing.
This quote from David Lane (Director of Society For Promotion Of Community Standards Inc.) is particularly disturbing: "... [The society] wants the filtering extended beyond child porn content to include the blocking of all hard core pornographty sites and those promoting "objectionable" content defined in secion 3(2)(a-f) of the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993 (sexual violence, bestiality, etc).".
It illustrates the problem rather well. I have used the internet for pornography, and I don't expect to be blocked from doing so in the future. If I look at pornography more hardcore than the limits imposed on free-to-air television, this doesn't make my behaviour 'wrong', and I certainly don't expect **** to impose its standards on my behaviour. If I do something illegal, then that's relevant for the Police, not a coporation.
Additionally, the concept that a list maintained by the Internal Affairs Office will be capable of cataloguing all objectionable sites on the internet is flawed if not outright hilarious.
There are various software packages available which attempt to keep the internet 'safe' for younger users. I am sure that, combined with actual parenting, these tools are far better suited to keeping children from accessing inappropriate content.
I should take this moment to clarify that my primary concern is not that I may soon be unable to access pornography with my **** account. Instead, I believe that once this form of filtering has been introduced for one honourable reason, it will only be a matter of time before the practice of filtering is extended to other aspects of the internet.
It is widely publicized (although not necessarily accurate) that 'peer to peer' (p2p) services consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth accross the internet as a whole. I extend from this assumption that some time in the future **** may be in favour of blocking p2p services in order to extract more customers from the same amount of bandwidth. This would have a real and noticeable affect on my internet behaviour.
There are other scenarios in which **** might decide to filter my internet use. For example, I'm sure **** wants to retain their customers, and so logically it would be a sensible idea to block all competing ISP's websites. Or, if there is a damning report about ***** on a news website, it would be very easy to block any user from accessing that website.
I'm not suggesting that **** does or would do any of these measures, but the only way I can be certain of this is for **** not to regulate my internet behaviour in any way.
The knee-jerk reaction to this news would be for me to cancel my **** account. Instead I'm going to post this letter on a few popular **** forums, and raise general public awareness of ****'s actions. I will continue to closely monitor ****'s actions, and may switch ISPs if it continues with this course of action.
Yours Sincerely
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Check out the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica hierarchy sometime -- there are some groups with very suspicious-looking names.
(alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.child? Gee, I wonder what that could contain?)
Erotic pictures of Julia Child perhaps?
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).
Yes, it was an election year.
This space available.
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.child? Gee, I wonder what that could contain?
That's an easy one. Thousands upon thousands of SPAM messages.