ISPs Agree to Block Child Pornography Sites:
The Washington Post reports:
New York's effort is different in that the state has reached an agreement with the ISPs; the ISPs have agreed to "voluntarily" block the connections rather than be forced to do so. Off the top of my head, I don't know whether customers of these ISPs could still challenge the agreement on some of the constitutional grounds raised in the Pennsylvania case. I would think not, but I don't know.
Some of the nation's largest Internet service providers have agreed to block connections to newsgroups and Web sites that offer child pornography, according to an announcement today by the New York State Attorney General's Office.The announcement over at the New York AG's website adds some details:
The move follows an eight-month child pornography investigation. The probe turned up 88 newsgroups involving 11,390 sexually lewd photos featuring prepubescent children. Among them were photos of children being raped and sexual activity involving animals, according to state Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo.
[T]he Attorney General’s office developed a new system for identifying online content that contains child pornography. Every online picture has a unique “Hash Value” that, once identified and collected, can be used to digitally match the same image anywhere else it is distributed. By building a library of the Hash Values for images identified as being child pornography, the Attorney General’s investigators were able to filter through tens of thousands of online files at a time, speedily identifying which Internet Service Providers were providing access to child pornography images.When Pennsylvania tried to do something somewhat similar -- albeit with court orders rather than a voluntary agreement -- Pennsylvania's effort was struck down as unconstitutional. I blogged about Pennsylvania law here in 2003, and the law was invalidated in CDT v. Pappert, 337 F. Supp.2d 606 (E.D. Pa. 2004).
In addition to eliminating the Newsgroups, the ISPs have also agreed to purge their servers of all child pornography websites identified by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (“NCMEC”). NCMEC regularly reviews and updates its registry of these illegal sites to ensure the list reflects the current presence of such websites on the Internet.
New York's effort is different in that the state has reached an agreement with the ISPs; the ISPs have agreed to "voluntarily" block the connections rather than be forced to do so. Off the top of my head, I don't know whether customers of these ISPs could still challenge the agreement on some of the constitutional grounds raised in the Pennsylvania case. I would think not, but I don't know.
Related Posts (on one page):
- "France Blocks Online Child Porn, Terrorism, Racism":
- ISPs Agree to Block Child Pornography Sites:
Declan is known to spin stories into notorious trolls on occasion, so I'd look for additional confirmation before treating this as gospel. Yet, Declan is also a well-known and somewhat respectable reporter who writes for a major online news outlet, and the chances are he's got backup for his facts and quotes.
Are the newsgroup participants unaware this is illegal, or do they think they won't get caught? Are there "newsgroups" I'm unaware of where people are routinely and openly perpetrating or conspiring to commit other crimes? What a strange world.
Personally, I have downloaded approximately 16 GB of "news" in just the last 24 hours.
(Emphasis added.)
It's worth mentioning that the NY OAG's press release contains the statement:
This is consistent with the report that Time Warner is dropping all Usenet service.
Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server.
In other words, the way Usenet works is that ISPs actively run servers that host the content. This is unlike web content in general, for which ISPs act (for the most part) only as a conduit, not a store.
In other words, it doesn't appear that these ISPs are blocking access to Usenet, they are simply declining to host Usenet content themselves. Their subscribers can simply access Usenet via a server hosted elsewhere.
To be sure, this will have a detrimental impact on Usenet, which depends on ISPs and others to choose to host Usenet content.
Similarly,
the ISPs have also agreed to purge their servers of all child pornography websites
In no case does it appear that any ISP is blocking access to any Internet content. They are simply taking steps to avoid hosting this content themselves.
It's a fine line, but not a meaningless one.
(Emphasis added.)
This may indicate that people are going into full PR damage-control mode.
Or it may just indicate that no one's ever heard of Mashables, and no flack is going to return their calls.
Want to shut down some usenet newsgroup because the discussion there isn't to your liking? Just flood the newsgroup with material that will cause the ISPs to drop it from their usenet servers under this "voluntary" agreement with NY government.
It's also apparently a one-way ratchet, somewhat like the more stupidly administered anti-spam blacklists. Once a newsgroup is removed from a cooperating ISP's servers, it is unlikely ever to be carried again, even if the flood of objectionable material ceases.
I've been posting to Usenet for over a decade now -- and using it for its original purpose of an online forum -- and I'd be quite annoyed if my ISP cut off access. Luckily I switched to a German server five years ago.
I use a program called Miro for watching plenty of legitimate videos, and it uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute all sorts of videos with explicit consent of the content owners, from TED talks to PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries. Norwegian public broadcaster NRK was able to cut costs of internet video delivery by using BitTorrent. Hell, the original developers of BitTorrent now use p2p to distribute movie rentals with licensing deals from the studios. It's a pretty bold claim to say that p2p has no legitimate uses.
Miro Channel guide for English-language channels - content owners from Wired and PBS to small filmmakers trying to get noticed have voluntarily decided to make their content available over p2p.
From the content creator's point of view, p2p is the most cost-effective distribution method without following the terms of someone like Youtube. For example, if I want to distribute HD video, or video with profanity, or something that otherwise does not comply with the TOS for YouTube, Vimeo, etc., then p2p is probably the best method to reach my audience. NBC, ABC, and others hosting free videos of their entire television shows would probably realize huge cost savings if they distributed video in this manner - they can still embed advertising, etc. as they currently do.
This strategy for fighting child pornography sounds like it would be way too expensive for near zero impact.
A child pornography distribution ring would probably only have to spend 5 minutes putting together a script that does the above automatically as some plugin for whatever software they're viewing the usenet posts with.
Also, I agree with Fub and Tom Cross, and hope that randal is right.
Committing a multitude of federal felonies (assuming the material you're talking about is child porn, as under this agreement it would have to be) is hardly a cost-free way of exercising a heckler's veto.
If you're interested in data, check out the web site www.top1000.org. You'll notice that Sprint, Time Warner (roadrunner) and Verizon do not appear anywhere near the top of the list of largest Usenet providers. The largest providers all charge a nominal fee per month - $5 to $15 a month - for access to an enormous amount of data. These providers typically store data for a much longer time than the large ISPs as well -- especially important given that the data is primarily digital media (most pirated, of course).
Anyway, like I said, I'm not sure why people are concerned about this. If you really cared, you could run your own server, or pay someone for a superior class of product. Those who aren't trafficking in child pr0n or copyrighted materials will lose nothing. I mean, the commercial Usenet providers don't offer SSL-encrypted for no reason. And this hardly seems like it tramples on first-amendment rights: a bot searching for jpegs that match known child pr0n hashes? Pretty basic, and then those groups are no longer carried by the big ISPs...
1. the heckler is subject to USA jurisdiction; and
2. US authorities actually bother to track down and prosecute.
At least so far, authorities appear to prefer to ban all speech in the medium than to trace and prosecute the actual perpetrators. It's much easier to ban all speech in the medium and get extra political points for pontificating "it's for the children".
But it won't do anything significant about child porn.
The standard answer, and I have no reason to doubt it, is that this type of piracy continues to exist for two reasons. First, it's moderately difficult, which means only a small number of people can figure out how to work it. And second, because there's no central communication to intercept ala p2p protocols, there's no way to know what's going on. So, small in the grand scheme of things and too hard, so the MPAA/RIAA/etc let it slide. Child pr0n has apparently altered the equation, which is fine by me.
Finally, I wanted to mention that google offers a free web-based portal into Usenet: groups.google.com. Not only do they have the most complete Usenet archive but you can access everything through the web. So, anyone who claims they're being denied their Usenet, they can use Google's interface to flame like it's 1988 again.
So, it looks like Declan's CNET account is confirmed.
The New York Attorney General just pressured Time Warner into eliminating a vast diversity of communications. In the AG's zeal to go after child porn, he's nuked Usenet.
True, but the feds do actually make child porn prosecutions a fairly high priority, particularly if you're trafficking in high volumes of it. I saw a lot of child porn prosecutions in the 2 years I spent clerking; at least 3 or 4 before the judge for whom I clerked and many more before other judges. Not just producers, either; anyone trading large amounts of the stuff online is taking a risk-- assuming, as you point out, that they are subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
Sometime we are going to have to face up to the witch hunt that has been directed at child sex offenders. Under the leadership of John Ashcroft, we now have large number of police trolling the internet entrapping these fantastists and seeking to maximize their sentences. We have sex offender web pages, the majority of whose denizens were convicted of nothing more than what was found within one's right of privacy under Lawrence v. Texas. We have residential exclusion laws that leave released sex offenders free to live under remote highway bridges. We have the pseudoscience of the penile plethysmograph. We have the post-incarceration incarceration of Kansas v. Marsh.
This has been as much a force in the narrowing of civil rights in the Bush years as has the intelligence community, because child sex offenders and illegal immigrants are the means by which intelligence methods are entering the world of domestic criminal law enforcement.
This action by the New York State AG is just a publicity stunt. He can block, but not shut down, child pornography sites because they are not in the U.S.
Not that I much care what happens with child porn, but I do worry about the internet coming under effective state control as ISPs consolidate and Big Internet and Big Government make deciswions for the rest of us.
Overestimate the willingness of investigators to trace usenet posts from the destination usenet server through endless chains of IP proxies, anonymizing email relays, and mail-to-news gateway servers. Any number of the intermediaries may not be USA domestic, and even a successful trace might turn up somebody posting usnet articles from Lower Slobbovia, which has no extradition treaty with the USA.
Underestimate the degree to which well applied pseudonymity described above can approach actual anonymity.
No anonymizing techniques are perfect, but plenty are considerably more difficult to crack than just a single subpoena for the IP from which an article was posted. The techniques aren't rocket science, and they are very old news.
My point is that shutting down a few major ISP usenet servers, or even a few websites, will prove ineffective in its stated purpose. It is pure grandstanding for the rubes. It will, of course, inconvenience large numbers of people who do not traffic in the prohibited material, but use usenet for perfectly legitimate purposes.
It also sends a message that should alarm any citizen: some American prosecutors are willing to imitate the totalitarian communists who rule China, just to score political points.
This is the real message here, but it's not remotely new.
As has been pointed out above, the real damage done in this particular instance is very close to zero.
But the precedent (precedent only in scale and relation to the internet - the government has used "voluntary" agreements to do all kinds of things it's not allowed to do, and it's been doing it for years) is indeed very bad.
Apparently you have never heard of a little application called Skype. Or a marginally successful game called World of Warcraft. Both use p2p. The newest version of the Adobe Flash player will have p2p built in. Of course not that many people use the Flash player, it only has a 98% penetration.
(I'm not going to go looking over the whole alt.* hierarchy for a list, but I'd be shocked if there weren't 80-odd newsgroups aimed at such things, especially if we go with the legal definition of "child pornography" as "any sexual content involving someone under 18", which includes plenty of content legal in most of Europe (eg, 16 and 17 year old women having sex), and thus not uncommon on Usenet.)
Asking them to block 88 specific newsgroups sounds like a narrowly tailored restriction, and my understanding is that child pornography bans have held up very well under Supreme Court challenges, so I'm not sure I see any Constitutional issue at all.
If ISPs are lazy and block the entire alt.* hierarchy, that still doesn't make it Government censorship of 18,000 groups - because the State didn't ask for it, and indeed doesn't desire that action.
PC: By "P2P" was plainly meant "P2P file 'sharing'", which derails the Skype and Games argument. (And details of the new Flash suggest that it's "P2P" features are not suitable for "file sharing" use.)
Bullshit.
New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, in the prepared statement linked above says:
The New York Attorney General got exactly what he wanted. He threatened the ISPs with criminal prosecution to obtain the result he got.
It is reasonable to believe that the AG intended the consequences of his acts.
I'm sure if pressed the AG would take the argument there, but it doesn't hold water. Frankly, the actual consequences of the agreement are more important than the theoretical consequences on paper.
First, the AG most likely knew and agreed to what the internet companies were going to actually do as a result of the "agreement" and as xyzzy points out he clearly doesn't have any problem with the scope of what was taken down.
Second, no one asked anyone to block 88 newsgroups. What the AG asked the ISPs to do is institute a hash based image filter on Usenet content. This may be prohibitively expensive or it might not even be technically feasible. There is no way to know, because none of the companies party to the "agreement" actually did this. This narrow proposal is included specifically because it can be used rhetorically as you just did. It is not a serious idea as evidenced by the fact that no one is actually implementing it.
You would think that if you went to the trouble of architecting something like this and getting a bunch of people to agree to it you'd be interested in whether or not they were actually going to do the specific thing you were proposing. Furthermore, to my first point, you'd think that if the AG came to you with something like this and you decided to do something else instead (such as block a large subset of the newsgroups) you would think it important to check with the AG to make sure that what you were actually going to do was "OK" with him. Its possible, in fact, likely that the ISPs proposed blocking the 88 specific newsgroups and the AG turned them down.
Third, from a Constitutional perspective, there is a "least restrictive means" test that applies to prior restraint on speech. Were this agreement a piece of legislation, the fact that all of this legitimate content got pulled as a practical result would almost certainly be enough to overturn it.
Fourth, this sort of thing ought to be done by legislation subject to judicial review, and not by coercive pressure from an AG. Who gave the NY AG the right to architect a mechanism for Internet censorship for the United States absent input from any legislature and operate it absent any judicial review? People talk about "legislating from the bench." Clearly the invention and implementation of such a censorship regime whole cloth from a state prosecutor's office is WAY outside the scope of the political authority of that office!