Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn 572
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."
Re:slippery slope (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Block the Catholic Church (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Interesting)
More of a non-event than you'd think (Score:3, Interesting)
And the *chanboys win in 5...4..3...2... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:3, Interesting)
This will probably go down exactly like the GP thinks it will. Just in like here.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Common Carrier Safe Harbor (Score:3, Interesting)
Because this list of websites is being provided by a third group (CMEC) and the ISPs just accept it unconditionally, they aren't actually policing content. It seems like the same idea of spam white/blacklists-- "We don't make the lists, we just take them from Company X and apply them."
It's still a horrible idea, but it might still give them Safe Harbor provisions. It also means that they won't check the veracity of any submitted site; of course, I wouldn't expect that anyway, as it would require interest, caring, and good customer service.
The laws don't make sense for their stated purpose (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
We have the same provision in the Jamaican law. Both the 16 Year old age of consent and the deliberate leniency on persons close to the age of the "victim". Not like in America where a 14 Year old boy faces jail for having sex with his 15 Year old girlfriend.
Perhaps we both (Canada and Jamaica) inherited it from English common law.
Migrating the porn laws to match is pure genius.
As for telling the age of the person in the picture. Often you can't do this ontil you find the person. I remember meeting a 24 year old stripper who looks like 13 (despite the tattoos). After having the club raided a couple times to "rescue" her, the management blew up a copy of her voters ID and hung it near the door (With the name obscured).
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:1, Interesting)
How many of you ever played "Doctor" as a kid? How many of you ever "mooned" someone when you were under 18?
Now imagine today, a pair of kids today doing the exact same actions as you, but over a webcam instead of in person.
Presto, instant "child porn".
We are already seeing this. Youths have been arrested and charged with child pornography for sending pictures of themselves to their similar age boyfriends/girlfriends.
We need to stop making photographs of legal acts illegal. For instance, in many states, two 17 year olds can legally have sex. But if they take a photo of themselves having sex, they can be sent to jail and be forced to register as "sex offenders".
Photographs of murder, robbery, etc. aren't illegal: they are *evidence* of a crime. Photos of someone abusing a child should be used the same: as evidence to arrest and prosecute the abuser.
I am fine with forbidding commercial sale or revenue generation. Removing financial incentive of child abuse is a good thing. But criminalizing a picture of legal activities makes no sense to me.
Re:scratches head (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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?)
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
cocaine is traditionally grown in tropic mountain regions with long growing seasons... but the 'preferred' cocaine grows in slightly dryer regions, this means potentially that coca can grow in regions where sugar cane cannot because cane is a very water hungry plant.
with all the variables, if coca was legal it might just well be priced around the cost of sugar. but most likely it would be much higher, although if prohibition forces had never made it illegal I'm sure coca-cola would have done their best to make it as cheap as sugar. at least for themselves.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hey its about the kids - Stupid! (Score:2, Interesting)
I did a little cautious googling about child abuse statistics, without much success. I admit that I am a little reluctant to send words like 'child sex' or 'pedophile' in a query. I sometimes wonder if I should do all of my googling though proxies, since some day Andrew Cuomo might come knocking on my door, for all I know.
Nevertheless, in the absence of good data, I will posit that there are a lot more pedophiles out there than there are people actually sexually abusing children. Perhaps even many of the people sexually abusing (post-pubescent) children are not really pedophiles, to draw a distinction between general 'sexual abuse,' most often perpetrated by family members, and 'kidnapping and raping'. I think that there is reason to believe, that there are lots of pedophiles 'out there' who do not sexually abuse children, and lot of non-pedophiles who do commit sexual crimes. I really doubt that all of the ardent consumers of lolicon hentai pornography, for example, are raping children. That would be a tough conspiracy to hide. Nevertheless, despite the fact that lolicon hentai is legal (in the Japan and the U.S., for now), I don't think there is much of a commercial market for it, even in Japan. People draw it because they want to. It seems very likely that there are a lot of people out there who find children sexually attractive, but don't act on their desires with real children, no doubt either because they think that it is ethically or morally wrong to have sex with unconsenting children, or because they are deterred by the threat of legal punishment and societal ostracism. It is no secret that all sorts of sexual desires of other kinds can be and are repressed.
This brings me to a "startling" line of reasoning. I think that there are only two possible arguments for the criminalization of the possession of child pornography. The first has been made in this thread, and it is that criminalizing child pornography reduces the demand for it. The second is that such pornography will encourage pedophiles to escalate to violating real children.
I'm afraid that I think that the demand argument has been, at best, extended to cover situations to which it has little application. There is no way in hell that pedophiles who are sexually abusing children in the United States are doing so out of a profit motive. Actual child rape carries, without a doubt, the worst punishment of any crime. Assuming that a real child rapist avoids a life sentence, they are likely to die in prison at the hands of other prisoners, and if not, upon their release, they can kiss goodbye things like "jobs," "friends," and say hello to the scarlet letter of our day: sex offender registries. If s