Pennsylvania Child Porn Act Overturned 337
Ghoser777 writes "According to MSNBC, a Pennsylvanian law that required ISPs to filter/block websites containing child porn has been overturned by a federal judge. Child porn is still illegal under U.S. federal law, but the judge found that 'there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment.'"
Ehhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ehhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ehhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
The judge got it right (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also unfortunate that the same logic hasn't been applied elsewhere [ala.org].
Re:protect yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
The link was supposed to inform slashdot guys that run little ISP's
unforutnately, thereare nomore small ISP's left anymore, all the little guys are either dead or they sold out.
Wrong Target (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring the problem and pretending it's not there is not going to fix it. Banning access to these sites does not remove the porn and help the kids; it simply blocks our access to it and let's the sick bastards keep doing what they do. I'd think most countries would have no problem arresting someone that did this kind of shit.
Re:Ehhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
With drugs, arresting pot smokers will do little damage to drug dealers. Half of all college students would be in trouble. Instead, they crack down on the dealers. By intercepting one truckload of marijuana, the government can prevent the distribution of marijuana to thousands of people.
Unfortunately, stoping child porn and digital copyright infringement is not as easy. One can smuggle thousands of dollars of bootleg cds or child pornography without putting them in condoms and swallowing them to get them past the border. It can simply be sent with a filesharing program or a website or one of a thousand other ways of sending a file. As with pot, half of all college kids (more like 80%) could be in trouble for copyright infringement, so stopping them is pointless. They need to work from the top down. They can't stop child pornography or media bootlegging in foreign countries, nor can they prevent the illegal material from entering the united states.
The best they can do is filter ISPs or monitor individuals who visit fake sites. Setting up fake sites wouldn't work well because people probably have a source they trust for their child porn. While the actions taken were ineffective, I feel that they were a step in the right direction. Perhaps if/when there is an overhaul of internet protocols, monitoring illegal activities may be easier for the government.
Re:Ehhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Setting up fake sites would be illegal. The only way to stop child porn is to stop its production and I don't know how you go about doing that with censorship. Censorship only increases demand.
The alternative is to copy japan and let them watch whatever fake porn and arrest the people who own or create real childporn. The whole childporn debate should be about protecting children and not censorship.
The way to protect children is to prevent children from being exploited in the first place, censorship of childporn sites won't make a difference because the site already exists. What makes a difference is shutting the site down and finding out where the owner got their pictures and if they refuse to talk then you put them in prison.
Re:Ehhh... (Score:2, Insightful)
___
but this is of course not what is happening.
if you would take the ISP example to the drugs world it would mean that transportation companies would be held responsible for the drugs distribution.
tracking down the dealers would be similar to finding out who put the kiddie porn on the net in the first place. (which propably is neither the ISP or the bus company)
Re:Praise God (Score:5, Insightful)
No you could not.
The relevant legal point here would be that the legislation was not aimed at restricting exercise of religion.
Legislatures have tried to act against religion in this way in the past, for example by banning animal sacrifice on "cruelty" grounds. This has failed because they haven't applied the same standards to other instances of animal killing e.g. for food. In this case, however, the banning of child pornorgraphy is clearly applied across the board, it is not targeted specifically at any religion nor at religions in general. It would be valid in much the same way that laws against murder are valid, even if the murder is a ritual sacrifice.
Re:A Delicate Subject. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you make some excellent points. Indeed, a similar system exists in many countries if you only think about it for a minute - I'll use the UK as an example here.
Child porn is illegal, but nobody has yet (to my knowledge) tried to enforce blocking at an ISP level. However, there is nothing to stop you buying Internet provision from a company which offers a "filtered" service, or installing software to filter it yourself.
How effective this all is is another issue altogether, but at least in the above example the decision is made by the individual rather than the government. Indeed, I can think of a few uses, both personal and organisational:
Now, watch this get merrily modded down because I've said that people may voluntarily choose to have their internet access "censored".
Blocking does not tackle the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
First and foremost, I do not advocate kiddie porn in any way shape or form. But a law requiring ISPs to block such information is not the solution. It is all to typical of society today that we find a quick solution to a problem and ignore the underlying issue.
Blocking kiddie porn, will only result in people doing their best to bypass the blocking software. It becomes an ongoing battle.
Stopping people looking at kiddie porn will not stop their desires to get hold of it. Who knows how far people like this are prepared to go to get what they want.
We need to give these people help and education, not just drive them to other sources for their material.
If the software can identify the porn/sites to block the stuff, then surely people who look at it could be offered help. Tackle the problem at the source. Remove the kiddie porn and the problem doesn't go away, remove the desire for kiddie porn and you have solved the problem.
Yes I know this is advocating monitoring of what we look at but ultimately the ISPs know that already. But I believe it is a step towards a better solution than simply blocking.
Re:protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Delicate Subject. (Score:5, Insightful)
The difficulty here is not that people want to choose whether to watch child porn or not, or that people want to allow others that choice. No mentally healthy person wants to watch child porn and nobody wants to give people the option.
The problem is that by compulsorily filtering against child porn, all current technical solutions also catch a whole bunch of other stuff. It's like the Tuna fishermen - they go out to fish out tuna, but they end up catching dolphins too. Nobody cares about the tuna, but lots of people don't want the dolphins killed.
If the child porn filters actually only filtered child porn, I'm sure they'd find very widespread acceptance. Since they don't, they have a chilling effect on other sorts of free speech, by blocking those sites in the mistaken belief that they're child porn.
(This same argument applies to normal porn filters, with the difference that quite a lot of people want their porn filter set to "on")
Re:Ehhh... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no entrapment, because the feds aren't encouraging a crime that would not otherwise have taken place. The cops are making a situation available, but they aren't coercing anyone into the deal. It's perfectly legal for a cop to stand on a street corner "looking like" a drug dealer, and he can bust anyone who attempts to buy drugs from him. Likewise, it's perfectly legal for the law to set up a site that "looks like" a child porn site, and bust anyone who attempts to sign up.
It's called a sting operation, and it's totally legal. IMO, this is where the majority of child protection tax dollars should be going. Not to legislation that gives states the right to set up secret "website blacklists" that ISPs are required to obey.
The sad source (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but here's the rub:
Adults aren't really involved in creating the child porn now.
The VAST, VAST majority of child porn is now created by children, for children. Webcams are ubiquitous. Every twelve year old sending her boyfriend nudie pics or videochatting with him is creating child porn.
When you consider that the age lmit for "child" in the case of pornography is 18, that body of work is *staggering.*
Those pictures get out. Kids break up, they send them out as revenge, they forget to delete them when their parents sell the computer... whatever.
The whole question of how to stop child porn production is now *completely irrelevant.* There's no guy at the photo-developing booth catching it before it's made anymore.
Moreover, the "kids" who are taking naked picutres of themselves and sex partners probably keep those pictures. When you're 18 you're going to delete the photos of your first lay? I don't THINK SO.
The law and the mindset we currently have regarding this material is outdated. There's no way to stop the supply when the supply is the children themselves. We need new laws that make it illegal to pay a child to be in pornography, to force a child, whatever... but that recognize there are just too many pictures of 16-year old girls and too much demand to control it.
The most important thing to remember here is that it's not unreasonable for a man to be aroused by pictures of a 17-year old woman. A woman's breasts and hips are fully developed at that age... there's no magic switch that goes off at 18.
As long as 17-year old girls take pictures of themselves, 30-year old men will traffic in those pictures. That's not a reasonable definition of pedophilia.
Re:Blocking does not tackle the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The viewers aren't the root of the problem, you have to target the producers. Child abuse happens, this is a fact and always will be. Sometimes it's filmed, or photographed, or whatever. This is going to happen even if there are no "end users." Somewhere in America, right now, a father is abusing his daughter and he's recording it with his camcorder. He's not doing it because he wants to make money off the movie, he may not even have any idea how to sell the movie, he's doing it because it gets him off. If he can figure out how to share the video with others, that's just a "bonus."
People were sexually abusing children long before the advent of digicams, and even before the advent of cameras themselves. I don't buy the idea that child pornography is a "consumer driven" industry, no matter how hard the government tries to push that paradigm. The perpetrators of these crimes are going to do the child abuse whether they make profit or not, their goal isn't profit, it's the sexual gratification.
Even if we magically managed to stop all child porn tomorrow, hundreds of daddies are going to be diddling their daughters tomorrow, if for no other reason than to ejaculate. And this is why going after the "consumers" of kid porn is never going to solve the problems. We've got to target the producers, the people who are actually doing the child abuse.
Re:Freedom is not Cover (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:protect yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people who want to censor everything they find objectionable should be censoring themselves, not everyone else. Why not a
Re:Ehhh... (Score:3, Insightful)
I once heard someone say something about the fact that 'the youth' as a group decide "how things should be" as they're the most powerful group of people in society. Their minds are the most active and capable (bodies as well), they hold the key to whatever future lies ahead, and they pretty much decide how things are going to be, whether all the near-retirement CEOs like it or not...
I've also always been a firm believer that you should listen to what a kid has to say long before you accept an adult's opinion over that... children haven't yet been affected by as many of the "accepted ideas" that are held by the society they live in, and thus tend to have far more natural responses to situations, and often far more sensible.
BTW speaking of how to prevent child porn, you're right, the thing is to prevent exploitation of children in the first place. Frankly the majority of child porn comes from foreign countries which have slack laws regarding child exploitation, especially Russia... so it's kind of hard for us to do much about that. But nonetheless, sheer censorship won't do a lot to solve the problem. Then again if North Americans can't get to the sites, the sites will receive no business...
Re:Ehhh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrongo, Mary Lou... (Score:3, Insightful)
And how, exactly, would spending "the majority of child protection tax dollars" on running "sting" sites to bust visitors in the US prevent the exploitation of little latvian girls? More importantly, how would that protect little american girls and boys at all? It's nothing but a witch hunt and a complete waste of US tax dollars. You could lock up every pedophile in the US and the site operators would still be in business... their customers are all over the world.
So, let me get this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
It's gotta be something in the water.
Re:Isn't Pa. the place orig'ly for Freedom of Reli (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly: the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England, but wanted nothing more than to set up an equally intolerant society of their own. Freedom of religion was never one of their proposed solutions, that was the exact opposite of what they were aiming for.
here's some refutation (Score:5, Insightful)
And the people "consuming" this porn are NOT necessarily the people molesting children. The people actually molesting children are going to be trading their trophy shots in the underground, not visiting "mainstream" websites. My cousin ended up in jail for trying to fuck his daughter and he doesn't even know how to use a pc. Another cousin had her second husband imprisoned after she found out he had been repeatedly molesting her daughter (his stepdaughter). The jails are full of people who have molested children who aren't even pedophiles - they simply had the opportunity to fuck a little kid and got caught at it. Don't confuse child molestors with pedophiles.
Re:Ehhh... (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally I'm amazed that such tactics are not viewed as entrapment, but it seems worrying about silly little details like that went out of fashion in the 80's
Re:protect yourself (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: Right (Score:3, Insightful)
On the money. Others should read up a bit on the history of this porn. Before the access explosion, ped's had sites with tons of this crap. No advertising, no limits. It was jollies, and those jollies will continue even with complete success at removing said content.
Those who remember CandyMan's spamming should also remember that he created site after site just for the perversion of it, not money. Every time they closed one -- Bam! -- an email with him crowing about how he'd set up another. He only stopped when he was physically busted.
That's how.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep sickos at home. (Score:1, Insightful)
As long as sickos are sitting at home wanking over their keyboards, they aren't stalking kids on their way home from school. Of course it's a different matter if they're actually paying for it, but censorship just encourages people to hand over money by increasing the value of the material.
All this moral crap from politicians and the media is ignoring the actual problems of child abuse and making the world a more unpleasant and scary place for children, just because the politcians and journalists are themselves filled with hate and their cowardly minds filled with terror.
We should not be making parents afraid to let their kids go and play in the park and telling them to stay at home and watch TV. We certainly shouldn't be suppressing freedom of speech because that makes the world a much worse place for ALL children to grow up in.
Re:protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
A (probably slightly flawed) analogy would be tracking devices in cars. The vast majority of the public would be heavily oppossed to any form of continous government or police monitoring of their whereabouts whilst driving. People don't want to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (minor speeding and the like).
The same with the internet - the vast majority of people don't want their usage to be tracked, because they don't wan't to be penalised for what they see as "small" violations of the law (copyright theft via P2P, those under 18 viewing pornography, etc.)
However, once your car's been stolent, you'd probably really want a vehicle tracking device so you could get your car back. The same with the internet - once you've been hit with a large spam attack / DDoS etc. you'd probably want to find out who carried it out, via logs. Home users with little technical experience would expect their ISP to help, certainly with spam.
Re:protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditionally, to achieve common-carrier status you had to subject yourself to the regulatory whims of the government. This included specific items such as level-of-service standards with stiff penalties for non-compliance. Those of you old enough to remember the old AT&T (Ma Bell) will remember that, while Ma Bell owned everything, they did have standards laid down by the Feds and they had to live by them. However, these things cost money, and is why companies like, say, Comcast would like to be considered common carriers (to avoid any liability issues) and yet not be considered common carriers (so as not to be subject to regulation.)
There's also that business about "store and forward". As long as the communication made is immediate (the other guy answers the phone) they can't be held liable, but as soon as you use a voice mail system (i.e., store and forward) things get a bit sticky regarding liability. And all Web sites and email systems do is store and forward information.
So don't assume that it can't happen here just because it hasn't yet. In our anti-terrorist-happy society, ISPs and phone companies (the distinction is becoming somewhat irrelevant
Re:A Delicate Subject. (Score:1, Insightful)
Bleh, define 'mentally healthy'. Have you never even been tempted to look at some child porn, just to see what it's like? Much in the same way as many people are tempted to have a homosexual experience to check out what the fuss is about, the human brain is naturally curious, and I bet there are some 'mentally healthy' people who checked out child porn.
Re:protect yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ehhh... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say what they could do at this point is monitor anyone that did sign up and bust them later.
Maybe youve been watching too much Law and Order...
True. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, so true. Also, insightful. Child porn laws are supposed to protect kids by creating penalties for those who abuse them, or would abuse them, or think about abusing them, or something like that. I'm not sure. But things have changed since the seventies. Image and video replication is infinitely easier (digital); production is trivial---fifteen-dollar webcam at Wal-Mart instead of a basement photo lab.
These 'wonderland' creeps that they found last year (was it last year?) that were involved with white slavery and such, that's what these laws are meant to prosecute. Not some guy searching for 'lolita' on eMule.
There needs to be some division, some distinction, between porn created by evil, abusive adults, and porn created by bored teenagers under no compulsion by anyone. Because there really, really is a difference. But how do you put it into law?
And also, in Australia, the age of Porn is sixteen, not eighteen as it is here in the US. Striking, that data which is perfectly legal, no cause for concern, in Australia, will cause one to be sent to the Being Raped to Death Big House here in America. We're both supposedly civilized nations here. Sheesh. If this isn't a moral absolute (like, say, killing someone---that's pretty much a moral absolute), it's kinda scary that we have such harsh penalties. Like drugs. Maybe weed will be legal in ten years. Nice consolation prize for someone who spent five of those years in jail on some stupid possession charge.
--grendel drago
Re:protect yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
1.)
2.)
3.) Porn sites on non-XXX domains are either more harshly regulated or forcefully eliminated. People see them as deceptive or uncooperative to a system set up for their benefit.
4.) Non-porn (by their owner's discretion), but objectionable sites start to fall into the category of No. 3. Sites with possibly legitimate non-pornographic, but offensive, content get strongarmed into dooming themselves to the "XXX" label or getting the axe.
The fear with things like this, the RSACi ratings, and the PMRC stickers is that they start with the freer intentions of "self-rating by community standards", it may still devolve into outside censorship from people saying "They're not using the rating system right! Punish them!" (Think "Meta-moderation" on Slashdot applied to censorship.)
Re:Keep sickos at home. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because police find child pornography at many convicted offenders', that doesn't imply causality. Of course, such a causality may exist, but it hasn't been shown yet.
The grandparent post postulated that access to porn may prevent many from molesting children, by creating a "safe" vent. I suppose that for some (maybe even for many), it will. For others, the effect may be opposite, and dangerous. Human beings are not lemmings, they don't react mechanically and deterministically to stimuli. Still, there may exist research to help us form opinions based on something other than moral bias and fear. The intent must always be to act in the best interest of the children.
For the record, child pornography doesn't have to have victims. But because of the moral outrage, even computer-generated child porn and texts are outlawed most places.
Re:protect yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
You're correct in that this is the attitude that most users have - a sort of sophomoric stay out of my business mom and dad!.. but by the way can I borrow a few bucks and the car? Major ISPs like AOL are currently nailing this attitude with ads describing how they will protect your children for you and monitor your email for you.
That's all well and good, but many of us do just want a reliable connection and are willing to sacrafice some of these protective luxuries for the sake of autonomy. I can protect myself from spam, or at least try, and as for a DDoS attack, that hurts my ISP, so it's in their best interest to block it.
sure it's a bit of privacy advocate paranoia, but history has shown that when there is the opportunity for abuse of privileges- eventually this opportunity will be seized.
"small violations" - no (Score:4, Insightful)
The ISP does NOT need to know what I'm accessing, the government does NOT need to know where I'm driving.. or where I had lunch yesterday.
It has nothing to do with 'getting away' with "little things", as you put it. It has to do with tracking citizens doing legal activities, and a violation of the rights guaranteed to me by the 4th amendment...
That being said, I I'm really doing something wrong, then a court order is all that is needed to track me for the sake of collecting evidence an active case, which I DO support.. But only then, not 'just because'.. or for a 'crime sweep' sort of concept.
And do address your last statement, no I wouldn't want my next car to be tracked by the state because it was stolen and trashed.. Perhaps, if *I* am the *only* one that can track it, and no one else can, i might consider it.. My car, my business..
Same goes for the ISP, they don't need to know content of the emails.. Monitoring bandwidth usage is acceptable as its part of good network management, but it stops there and does not go into tracking of content.. nope.. no sir.
As a side note what liberties our fore-fathers faught and died for that you willingly trade in for a bit of percieved 'safety', you dont desrve to have in the first place..
Bring on the PGP (Score:4, Insightful)
So then the government winds up with the average citizen PGP encrypting everything and their little Carnivore system is as useful as a clicking Zip-Drive. The sooner the better if you ask me.
Re:traci lords (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:protect yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
Then, by using the extreme examples of the category to implicate the whole class, it's easy to convince people to censor these "content ghettoes" (easily marked by a TLD or a tag), and even the marginal-but-useful content gets cut off.
Even if it's author-classified, that just means that the author will just be pressured by accusations of misusing the classification system. If not, then the classification system is pretty much useless.
For example: If I set up... say... an "Olde Tyme Horribly Violent Execution Pics" website, and self-rated it "Kid-Friendly"... either because I think kids should know the full history of violent execution, or just because I'm an asshole, one of two results would happen:
1.) I would be accused of misusing the system, and probably be forced to re-rate or drop from the rating system altogether (if it were a centrally-run system like RSACi).
2.) If I was not rerated, then many would consider the system to be inadequate, and choose a centrally-controlled rating system instead.
Re:Ehhh... (Score:2, Insightful)