Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn

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."

Block for all?

What about providing *optional* proxies that does that filtering to their users?

Re:Block for all?

And then arresting everyone who chooses not to use the filter, on charges of seeking child pornography?

Are you sure?

"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"We don't need it, it's on the list, now move along, nothing to see here."

Re:Are you sure?

"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"Why are you asking? You must be looking for child porn! STONE HIM!"

There, fixed it for you.

Re:Are you sure?

"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"Why are you asking? You must be looking for child porn! STONE HIM!"

There, fixed it for you.

Even better:
"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"Of course! Why don't you visit the sites and check yourself? Oh, sorry. Guess you can't. But for trying to access a blacklisted site you'll now be on permanent watch as a potential pedophile."

Re:Are you sure?

I was gonna put 4chan in my post but decided not to upset the hackers on steroids, since if I've learned anything from Fox news it's that everyone choosing to be anonymous on an imageboard are invariably out to destroy me.

Killing the Internet.

Let's see:

• Plans to charge per site access [ning.com], as if they were cable channels.
• Plans to kick off people at will [slashdot.org], as if it were about "piracy".
• Now, plans to block sites.

If all of these things come about, the internet will be like cable TV and there will be no free press.

Re:Killing the Internet.

You already see it's start with metered internet. Once they have that, they can offer you "free" sites. Everyone loves free, aren't they nice? Then they hike the price of visiting other sites to something stupid like $5/GB so that it's cheaper to buy physical media and presto - no more internet. They are already blaming "pirates", kiddie porn and terrorists. That's essentially a smear for their competition and anyone who disagrees with them.

If they get their way, things will really get ugly. All rights fall after free press does.

Mixed feelings

While on the one hand I see no reason whatsoever for child porn-related sites to even exist let alone have anyone visit them, censorship by ISPs is a very obvious slippery slope. Unfair and damaging compromises without number have already been made "for the sake of the children"; it's as obvious a ploy as "..or the terrorists win", and I for one feel my intelligence is insulted whenever those cards are played. In the final analysis, I think this will be found to be a bad idea. Providers of bandwidth should not be allowed to decide what content will traverse their network any more than they should be allowed to interfere with P2P traffic. Determining the appropriateness should be the domain of hosting services, and the legality should be determined by the courts and by law enforcement; ISPs are neither -- which is as it should be.

Worse than useless.

I use newsgroups quite a bit. Once alt.underage.porn (or whatever) is shut down, that material is just going to be posted somewhere else - and probably end up being seen by more people. If they ban keywords, they'll move onto new euphemisms. No automatic filter will do this job - and the results of the attempt will be worse in every way than if no filter was used.

All it is is scoring political points, and providing the illusion of action while really making the situation worse.

Re:Worse than useless.

Maybe this is just step one. Step two being, "They're too clever, our only choice is to shut all of USENET down." After all, it's just the seedy "back-alley" of the internet according to TFA.

False positives, misleading true positives

What happens when Mom sends via email or an online album pictures of Baby's first bath to Grandma, and Grandma's ISP's software classifies the email or album as child porn? Does Grandma get a visit from the FBI/CIA/DEA/NSA/IRS/TSA/DHS in the form of a raid looking for more child porn? News gets out that Grandma was investigated for child porn and her reputation is demolished, even if some people know that it was a case of mistaken intent/identity.

Child porn is a terrible thing, but it's virtually impossible to classify something as child porn unless someone has manually classified an known image and corresponding hash as child porn.

There's also the issue of determining ages of the children in the picture if they're not obviously too young. Who took the pictures? Was it taken by a 15-year-old girl's 17-year-old boyfriend, or did she herself take it for him? This is legal in some states/countries, but a felony in others.

I don't want to get into an argument about these specific cases, but the possible cases are simply too wide and a single government authority cannot effectively press its morals onto its people. Romeo and Juliet will deviate from the norm.

The Chris Hansen approach works much better because it shows provable evidence of intent/motive and catches them in the act, perhaps even literally with their pants down.

Re:False positives, misleading true positives

Yea, that would be great and all, but Chris Hansen is doing it to make money. That seems a bit sick too.

What I want to know is...

If they can create a list of sites that contain this vile shit, wouldn't it make sense to, oh, I don't know, maybe shut them down, prosecute the scumbags that are running the sites, and then use their client records to find and prosecute the people who were paying for it?

How the hell do you build this list?

Great Idea in theory, "lets block all this bad stuff", OK now please define the rules...

Government: It has to block child porn.
Me: OK, how do we define child porn?
Government: An adult and a child in sexual acts.
Me: Right, how do we flag that to block it?
Government: *frusterated* You block it!
Me: We need to define a process or this won't work.
Government: We'll make a list then.
Me: So your going to scour the internets for child Porn and add it to this list. Nothing automatic?
Government: Yes
Me: So what venues will you block, HTTP, SSH, FTP, Torrent, MQ, Skype?
Government: All of those things.
Me: You can't decrypt HTTPS or SSH traffic, how do you know it's child porn?
Government: Because we know those servers have porn since some guy flagged it.
Me: You've heard of dynamic IP's right?
Government: *MAD* DO WHAT WE SAY OR WE KILL THE BUNNY.
Me: Um.... do it.

Re:slippery slope

There is such a list in Sweden, and some of the big ISPs use it. There was quite an uproar when someone tried to put The Pirate Bay on it, claiming they had torrents of child porn, and it never got on the list. Almost everyone agrees that the list is useless, but it's still there. :-/

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.

Re:slippery slope

Also in Finland. Caused somewhat of a stir when a site listing banned addresses got banned itself, for linking to kiddie porn. Exactly how can a list like that be held to any standard of accountability rather than sliding into full-blown censorship if you can't even keep a list of *what* gets banned?

Re:slippery slope

While I can't stand the kiddie pr0n,this simply won't work. it has been tried in the past in other countries and it always ends up getting legit websites along with the bad ones.But that is my 02c,YMMV

You've got probably three major problems with any kind of list like this...

1) Accidentally listed innocent sites. Some place like Whore Presents [whorepresents.com] getting listed as pornography when it isn't.

2) Intentionally mis-listed sites. Somebody will claim that The Pirate Bay [thepiratebay.com] has child pornography on it (which it may) just to keep people from downloading cracked copies of Spore.

3) They're easy enough to bypass. There are plenty of free proxies out there that'll happily slap some advertising on your screen and then serve up whatever page your ISP doesn't want you to see. Or you could tunnel your traffic elsewhere to avoid the filter lists

These blocklists will be enough to stop some people from accidentally stumbling upon child porn... Maybe stop some very casual attempts to intentionally view child porn... But nothing more. They won't actually put a dent in folks who are genuinely trafficking in real, illegal child pornography. They're already well aware of what they're doing, and that it's illegal, and they're already going to some effort to find the material. Making them use an additional proxy or VPN isn't going to accomplish a whole lot.

Re:Not that I read TFA, but...

According to TFA, they have about 11,000 images that they generate hashes for. Then they scan the web for images with the same hash.

So the easiest way around this is to create a program that automatically changes the value of a random single pixel in a graphic. Problem solved, crisis averted.

What I want to know is will the list of sites being blocked be publicly available for review? I bet not...

Re:Not that I read TFA, but...

How will they do it? How can they detect kiddie porn? Because if they can do that at the packet level with 100% accuracy and 0% false positive, I wouldn't mind having this in my router at the hardware level.

Are you kidding? I want this technology in my fucking camera phone. Then I can point it at a chick and find out if she's over 18 or not.

Re:Not that I read TFA, but...

Oh, so in other words, all this does is create a huge market for constantly original child porn instead of all the same old 70's nudist images floating around? The idea...it's brilliant!

Re:Not that I read TFA, but...

Well obviously the ISPs and the state attorney are sick of looking at the same child porn images they have for years

Re:Let's go ahead and get this out of the way

But the phone companies are forced to keep a list of numbers that are illegal to call (crack dealers and such) so people can't call them right?? Oh wait.....

Child porn is NOT the problem

The problem is the production of child porn which of course involves abuse of children.

The demand comes from perverts who like to watch the abuse of children. So what happens if you simply block their access to child porn produced by other people?

They go off and produce their own. Which means more children abused.

Far better to use the ISPs to track those who produce or regularly seek out child porn and then prosecute them or treat their mental issues as is necessary. Several jurisdictions in Europe have broken up "Child porn rings", arresting as many as 50 people at once.

finally: There is a new category of child porn that has started to pop up lately. Child produced pornography. This means 3 or 4 children, all the same age who take turns operating a cameraphone and performing for it. Then they send out the video to other children via MMS, Bluetooth and Email. The 1st such "work" that came to public attention locally was on the cellphones or computers of thousands of children before the 1st adult saw it.

How do we deal with that? Who do we prosecute? I honestly don't know, suggestions from the Slashdot crowd would be welcome.

Re:Child porn is NOT the problem

The answers is you don't prosecute, unless there was abuse. Here's a suggestion of mine: look at the age of consent in the area being considered. For example, in Canada, 16. If you're 14/15, you can consent to sex with someone no more than 5 years older than you, and if you're 12/13, the rule is 3 years. So work the child pornography laws around that.

For example, if the person in possession of the photos is legally allowed to have sex with a person of the age of the person in the photo (i.e. you're 19 and have a photo of a 15 year old girl), then the data should be destroyed, but no one should be prosecuted. Otherwise, go right ahead with prosecution. The problem being there's no way to tell how old they were at the time, so obviously someone will eventually have to make a judgment on the photo in question.

So my suggestion would lead to the following.

• A (pornographic) photo of an 18 year old would be legal.
• A photo of a 16/17 year old would be taken from you, but not result in prosecution.
• A photo of a 15 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 20. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
• A photo of a 14 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 19. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
• A photo of a 13 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 16. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
• A photo of a 12 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 13. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.

Granted, this is not a perfect situation, but it does reduce the risk of an idiot 15 year old having his life ruined for a photo of his naked girlfriend.