US ISPs agree to block child sex abuse sites
Under duress
THREE MAJOR US Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have said they will block child sex abuse web sites as well as Internet bulletin boards nationwide.
The New York Times reports that the move came at the behest of New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, who has been fighting for the removal of child pornography from the Internet for quite a while. “These are four year olds, five year olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures,” he stold the paper. “To say ‘graphic’ and ‘egregious’ doesn’t capture it.”
Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have all agreed to close newsgroups and bulletin boards hosting or transmitting sex abuse images of children, especially on the veteran Internet discussion system, Usenet.
Usenet, which is at least 30 years old (a true dinosaur of the Internet) was one of the first ways people came up with to exchange data online. It was eventually replaced by the World Wide Wobble, but managed to retain somewhat of a dodgy following from those favouring its dark, dingy almost covert networking system.
Cuomo’s deal with the ISPs was not as easy to attain as some might have thought. Despite the fact that service providers clearly state in their customer service agreements that certain activity (including child sex abuse) is severely discouraged, they rarely do anything to prevent it, or to remove the sites once they are up.
Sprint, Verizon and Time Warner only agreed to enter negotiations after a sting type operation proved that the companies totally ignored any ‘consumer’ (or undercover attorney general employee) complaints about illicit material.
Using the stick rather than the carrot, the Attorney general then apparently threatened to bring charges of fraud and deceptive business practices against them if they didn’t clean up their acts. Unsurprisingly, the companies came to the negotiating table quick as a flash.
The NY Times says that several more ISPs have also entered negotiations with New York’s Attorney General on the subject.
Nice to know that horrific child sex abuse is something Internet companies swear they can do nothing about until their cash flow is actually threatened. Truly heartwarming. µ
L’Inq
New
York Times
Comments
Pointless - unfortunately
For a moment, remove the fact that that the content being filtered here is highly offensive, sexual material related to children and the abuse of them. Instead consider the impact of this as a precedent to filtering any material that the AG of New York doesn't like. The same precedent set here will apply. Not good.Of course every moral, right thinking person will agree that this kind of material doesn't belong anywhere and those involved in it's production and distribution are criminals that should be thrown in jail. However the ISPs are simply providing a communications medium, and not involved in distributing this crap to anyone. Like Phone companies (which at least two of these ISPs are) ISPs don't control what someone does with the service that they pay for. Whether it's sending highly encrypted and criminal material or highly encrypted personal material or simply stupid pictures of your wife at the topless beach, it's all data. The ISP has no idea what it is or why it's there. All they know is someone bought a service plan and is using it.
However it's a pointless exercise, because filtering access to particular sites and killing some or all of the Usenet groups hosted by the ISP will do nothing permanent. The criminals involved will simply switch to other sites or third party news services. Unless the ISPs start filtering content by actually looking at it, or by banning the NNTP protocol all together, this move is essentially pointless.
Now, the one thing in this that I think the ISPs could have done better (would have been a smart idea too), was for them to act on reports of abuse and abusive material/sites. Even if all they did was a cursory investigation before passing the information on to the authorities and blocking the particular site/user/newsgroup. That would have been sufficient, but doing nothing left them open to this.
Again just like the phone companies, they have some responsibilities, If you report abusive calls, the phone company can do something, as can the police. So if you report abusive Internet use by an ISPs customer. The ISP should respond in a similar manner. In this situation they apparently didn't, and that's their own fault.
Blocking content is not really the answer, finding and jailing the criminals involved is.
Hard to fathom
I've never understood why ISPs won't participate in filtering. We have clients that WOULD pay for a porn free stream to their homes/offices. We setup complex filtering for our corporate clients now.On the application;
ISP Broadband Product A (porn filtered)
ISP Broadband Product B (raw)
Tick the service you require.
What they really did
What Verizon really did is use it as an excuse to pretty much kill news groups all together - see linky _> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9967119-38.htmlI thought gezz it's about time the big companies filter that crap, but I'm wondering if it's being used as an excuse to go deeper into restricting free speech all together. Did China take over already? I missed that news cast, or did they bother to tell us?
(I used to wonder why they didn't get busted by the FBI for hosting that those groups on their servers in the first place)
who decides?
male circumcision meets all the requirements of child sexual abuse, will that be banned as well, whoever is in charge will decide what is right and what is wrong