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New York Attorney General's child porn crusade expands

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

July 11, 2008, 12:10 PM

After an investigation of newsgroups that uncovered large amounts of underage pornography, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began a large-scale expulsion of the material at the ISP level. Now there's an official Web site for the effort.

Last month, a statement from the Attorney General's office announced that agreements with Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint had been made to "purge their servers" of sites and Usenet groups that were found to contain child pornography.

Yesterday, Cuomo announced that the nation's first and third largest ISPs, AT&T and AOL, had joined in the endeavor, and will likewise block those same sites.

Furthermore, he has launched a site called nystopchildporn.com, which lists all participating ISPs, ranked according to national size: #1. AT&T, #3. AOL, #4. Verizon, #5. Time Warner, and #6. Sprint Nextel. Though it's listed as "email your ISP," the link actually serves as a list of all ISPs that have not yet joined in support for his cause. Number two US ISP Comcast, however, is missing both from the list of supporters and from the list of not-yet-supporters.

Comcast itself is under investigation by the FCC for blocking of a different kind: file sharing.

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By robesq

edited Jul 19, 2008 - 9:36 PM

I'm sure that ATT will reduce my monthly rate to reflect the reduced service they provide. I mean I signed up for a list of services, and since they have reduced these services they need to cut my monthly bill or else it is fraud. Yummy, I smell a lawsuit cooking.

Score: 0

By webanimal

edited Jul 13, 2008 - 4:32 PM

Slippery slope my friends. What's next? Gay literature? Black power literature? Conspiracy Literature? . . . This is not about child porn, regardless of what Andrew Cuomo wants you to believe. This is about censorship. . . . .Let's look at some of the newsgroups he's censoring:::: alt.british.drama. / alt.french.drama. / alt.binaries.battlestar-galactica / alt.binaries.goonies / alt.binaries.rock-n-roll / The list goes on. . . . It's interesting to note that Andrew Cuomo came into office after Eliot Spitzer was taken down by the morality of the American press (LOL). Eliot Spitzer was the country's premiere bulldog/watchdog, keeping an eye on Wall Street malfeasance. When Cuomo stepped into office, he said he wouldn't follow in Spitzer's footsteps - meaning he didn't have the guts or brains or ethics to go after Wall Street - but would instead go after the Lobbyists in Albany (an easy target) . . . But he didn't do that. His first major move was to perform a massive, blanket censorship sweep. . . . The Nazi's burned the works of Helen Keller and Bertolt Brecht. I guess those would fall under 'alt.drama.german' and 'alt.american.classic.literature'. . . . .again we let the "Government" take a small piece of our freedom. Is America still free, or is that slogan censored too? Say no to censorship now, before it's too late

Score: 0

By flibberyGiveIt

edited Jul 16, 2008 - 10:24 PM

redact/del by author 'cause maybe I was a, heh,
_little_ bit harsh.

Score: 0

By flibberyGiveIt

posted Jul 16, 2008 - 10:42 PM

Oh, and, it's all attention seeking actions by
a political, not about doing anything useful.

If he wanted to do something useful he could
try to legislate that all s'ware be secure and,
equally doable, yellow snow must taste lemony.

Score: 0

By bourgeoisdude

edited Jul 14, 2008 - 12:36 PM

First of all, this is not government censorship--it sounds to me like the ISPs have volunteered to do this. No judge or government official forced them to do this.

Secondly, child pornography is different from "Gay literature, Black power literature, and Conspiracy Literature" in obvious ways I needn't explain.

Again, is he forcing these ISP's to block the sites you mention? I guess that would depend on the "agreement" he had with them. Then again, since you're anti-American mindset comes in to play, to you there is no question that he is forcing them. Why would he have a letter there that he encourages the people to sign and send to other ISPs if he were forcing them, hmmm?

It's interesting to note that Andrew Cuomo came into office after Eliot Spitzer was taken down by the morality of the American press (LOL)

Irrelevant.

When Cuomo stepped into office, he said he wouldn't follow in Spitzer's footsteps - meaning he didn't have the guts or brains or ethics to go after Wall Street - but would instead go after the Lobbyists in Albany (an easy target)

Again, irrelevant and inaccurate. "Not following in Spitzer's footsteps" does not mean he is gutless or brainless, and after Spitzer spent millions of TAXPAYERS money on hookers you still implicate that he had good ethics?

But he didn't do that. His first major move was to perform a massive, blanket censorship sweep. . . . The Nazi's burned the works of Helen Keller and Bertolt Brecht.

Ahh, the Nazi comparison. Another sign that you really don't know what you're talking about.

There are very few people groups on this earth that can compare with the Nazis--and none of them are in the US right now. I don't know of any group here who is responsible for the murder of millions, do you?

Score: 0

By The Faceless Master

posted Jul 13, 2008 - 3:27 AM

they aren't blocking any websites at all, only removing newsgroups, and AOL removed their newsgroups long ago, so they did absolutely nothing to make it onto the list.

this is basically a free pass for isp's to ditch usenet support, and i'm guessing a lot of backdoor wink and nudge handshakes happened for this to come about.

Score: 0

By kbsoftware

posted Jul 12, 2008 - 2:22 PM

Putting a stop to child porn on the internet, I'm all for that, but this is not even close to an attempt to get rid of child porn because they are not dealing with the problem directly but instead just farting around with it indirectly. Which leaves me to believe that this is nothing more then a publicity stunt.

All this will do is chase away the child porn scum away from those groups and go somewhere else, somewhere where they are better hidden etc.
Basically like the drug problem. Chase them away from one area, they just go to another.

Score: 0

By Brewskie

posted Jul 12, 2008 - 11:38 PM

I just refreshed my AT&T newsgroups and it come up saying that 2950 newsgroups were deleted.

Every single one of the alt.binaries groups are gone.

That should tell you that this is not about child porn, because not all of the alt.binaries groups were even about sex.

Score: 0

By sagum

posted Jul 13, 2008 - 9:11 AM

Totally agree, the removal of alt.binaries.* from a ISP's archive is a very bad way to stop child abuse.

Firstly, there are very few ISPs will be hosting usenet servers themself and even less with be pushing content to other usenet servers.

So if most ISPs are pulling content from some of the few main usenet service providers, why isn't the government working with them instead.

There are only a few groups on usenet that do child abuse and the few users who post content there should be tracked and dealt with. This is a very easy task, even with forged xpaths if they go to the usenet provider they can trace if they wanted to.

So, it seems like the RIAA (or group like these) have more of a hand in the sharing of binary content on usenet... many have commented on other news stories regarding when usenet will be attacked next. This seems to be it.

If they really wanted to deal with child abuse they'd track and arrest the idiots who put the pictures on there.

Score: 0

By cupsdell

posted Jul 11, 2008 - 4:53 PM

This action by the New York Attorney General is disgusting: Internet users should be up in arms, protesting: the AG apparently found 88 newsgroups with child porn; its response is to pressure ISPs to shut down access to thousands or tens of thousands of useful, innocent newsgroups.

Does this means that, if the AG finds child porn distributed by email, they will pressure the ISPs to shut down their email services? Or if the AG finds child porn accessible through web pages, the AG will pressure ISPs to shut off web access?

Score: 0

By flibberyGiveIt

edited Jul 12, 2008 - 1:25 AM

>88 newsgroups

Wow, that many. I thought it was like six or 800
Of about of about 29 (news.grc.com (which has zero
kiddie porn)) or of about 70,000 for a server
that has abuse@ people who actually exist.

IIRC, percentage wise more cops are baby rapers
than than 88/67,000, and I'd rather not talk local
politicals, thank you very much.

And Of course, I've no interest in finding out how
this elected official defines a group that has
kiddie porn but my opinion is that he defines as:
"[I heard that somebody said so]."

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 11, 2008 - 5:02 PM

The safety of the morals of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

Didn't you know that?

Score: 0

By flibberyGiveIt

edited Jul 11, 2008 - 2:12 PM

Such a Nice soapbox he has -/sarky-

What they'll do: use this as reason to shut down
the service.* **
What they should do: hire somebody to deal with
the emails to abuse@isp's-name.com.

*Not that mine really has usenet: when I checked,
a year or so ago retention was about six hours.
**I've seen discussion that IIRC Comcast has
already shut it down.

Score: 0

By ktron

posted Jul 13, 2008 - 7:02 PM

Couldn't just pour water thru ascreen door? Just as usefull as trying to ban child porn or any porn at that.

Score: 0

By flibberyGiveIt

posted Jul 14, 2008 - 11:01 PM

An abuse staff that responds to complaints from
customers can 1) take the stuff offline very
quickly and 2) tell the FBI/whatever and give
a lot of info that, in the late 1990's, the FBI
would ignore. -----
Sorry to say, when I trip over something bad now
I just move on because I've heard that a def. of
crazy is repeating the same action(s) and expect-
ing.... -----
But this of course won't stop me from-now that
I'm not a kid? Uh? 'K? That old guy who musta
been like, 19? If I see the the likes of him
slap his kid off its tricycle or such? I hope
the flucker has his shoes glued on real good so's
to make it tough for me to "slap" him out of them.

Perhaps worth pointing out is that it took me
less than a month to notice that I almost never
saw bad stuff posted via services that respond
to customer complaints, and when I did I was not
the first to inform them.
And the kid who got slapped off his tricycle got
back on without crying and without looking up.

Score: 0

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