RSSNew York's Cuomo deals with ISPs to block child porn
By Tim Conneally | Published June 11, 2008, 11:54 AM
Andrew Cuomo, New York's high-profile Attorney General, announced yesterday his office has made agreements with Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to block child pornography newsgroups and known sites.
The statement issued from the Attorney General's office contains the following passage: "An undercover investigation...uncovered a major source of online child pornography known as 'Newsgroups.'"
To anyone who has used the Internet more than casually for the last 20 years, this is the equivalent of a press release claiming the office of the Attorney General has uncovered the existence of crime in the inner city.
The investigation by the Attorney General's office reportedly found 88 different newsgroups with over 11 thousand sexually exploitative images of children. Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint, as a part of their agreement with Cuomo's office, have blocked access to these Usenet groups, and have agreed to "purge their servers" of all child pornography Web sites catalogued in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) database.
Additionally, three groups will contribute a total of $1.125 million to the ongoing effort by both Cuomo's office and the NCMEC's efforts to cleanse the Internet of such material.
The Supreme Court's 1997 ruling which struck down the Communications Decency Act that attempted to censor online speech, essentially cleared the way for most every type of communication on the Internet...except child pornography. Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor at the time agreed that all provisions of the CDA were unconstitutional except in their application to "communications between an adult and one or more minors."
Maybe they should start by blocking Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Groups, MSN Groups, Google Groups; maybe even Google, Yahoo, & MSN in general, since their search engines can be used to find child porn. Let's protect the children by pulling the plug on the entire Internet -- after all, there was no such thing as child porn before the Internet existed, and once we do away with it, then child porn will no longer exist.
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|Good luck on trying to police the Internet.
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|Isn't it odd that the only politicians that go after porn are often themselves (private) pervs? Remember Spitzer, Gingrich, Foley, Larry Craig, Fossella, Vitter — all of whom railed against porn in some form. For dog's sake, quit and get a real job if this is the best you can do. According to my teevee, the only weirdos peddling child porn online are cops to other cops!
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|They just want to be saved from themselves. If they can't handle freedom they should move to China or some other totalitarian regime, like New York, or Iran.
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|I read about the three internet providers who agreed to block child porn, who are the other two providers who did not agree on this issue?
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|I read about the three internet providers who agreed to block child porn, what about the other two providers who did not step up, who are they?
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|This has nothing to do with actually stopping child pornography. Big telcos like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, etc. have all been pushing for more power to act as internet Gatekeepers and internet traffic cops for a long time. All legislation and company policies that would normally be extremely controversial and unconstitutional suddenly become palatable in the name of "protecting the children". This will not stop with just child pornography. Telcos are already trying to apply this logic to sites that host some pirated music and videos. What happens when your site gets linked to by another site that has been banned and unbeknownst to you Comcast's filtering algorithms, or some other agency black-lists you as well because that link to your site is deemed as an association to banned material? This has the potential to allow the big Telcos to ban whatever site they want just by tweaking their filtering algorithms. Come on, this is not a good thing and has nothing to do with actually protecting children. Besides, once they shut the usenets down and other known sites, the peddlers of this kind of material will create other sites. Go after the people breaking laws instead of passing phony legislation to "protect the children" that only steals rights away from everyone. Arrest the pervaders of this material and amazingly we all get to keep our internet freedoms and the problem takes care of itself. It's funny how common sense and legislation don't seem to coincide with each other. If eliminating child pornography was the real reason for this sudden interest in news groups and other sites, they WOULD suggest going after the perpetrators. Instead, we get shady deals between government and big corporations once again that eventually affect everyone in a negative way and only benefit the people involved in making the deals.
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|"Additionally, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint will contribute a total of $1.125 million..."
How many $ millions $ did they make BEFORE this deal???
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|Thats an easy one to answer Pacruz. While I completely agree and also while I am insensed about it, the reason is oftentimes, the scumbags are in another country and also have software designed to change the IP addressing, making it difficult at best to catch them. Also, why don't the authorities scour Limewire and other Peer-to-peer networks. They ought to scour every IP addres shown to be dl'ing this stuff. many times you can search a limewire users shared folder. Anyway, I don't believe that enough is being done.
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|why the scum can't simply be bagged and thrown in the slammer is beyond me.
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