Cuomo has announced an agreement with 3 ISP's to block access to certain websites that post child pornography. Here is the story from the Washington Post:
Three of the nation's major Internet service providers have agreed to block customer access to newsgroups and Web sites that offer child pornography, according to an agreement announced yesterday by the New York attorney general's office.
The agreements, which were hailed by child-welfare advocates as a significant step, push the service providers to take a more active role in monitoring what takes place over their lines.
But by forcing providers to act as censors, the agreements may also violate the First Amendment, free-speech advocates said.
Under the deals with Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications and Time Warner Cable, which are expected to hold nationwide, the companies agreed to shut off access to newsgroups believed to traffic in child pornography and to remove from their servers any Web sites offering such images.
The targeted sites will be based on a list compiled by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy highlights some potential problems with the move:
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).
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.
A separate Washington Post article raises other concerns:
The decision yesterday by three Internet service providers to block access to online child pornography is the latest in a series of steps by companies and government officials to curb the distribution of such materials. But a report to be published later this month questions whether such actions are making it more difficult to track users.
The report, by the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, formed by credit card issuers and Internet service providers to cut off money for these crimes, states that the efforts are pushing child pornographers toward unregulated Web companies that allow anonymity in purchases.
"One of the first things that happened when we began shutting down the credit card avenue is that these guys began to look to other ways to get money quickly," said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, based in Alexandria.
I'm not sure I buy the arguments from the Washington Post. The child pornography users that we are concerned with are not going to be using their real credit card to purchase such images online absent these new agreements by the ISPs. The argument just seems bizarre when it states that "the efforts are pushing child pornographers toward unregulated Web companies that allow anonymity in purchases" - as though most child pornography sites are "regulated" Web companies that maintain complete financial information on customers. Child pornography is already an illegal business that is dangerous to be involved in. Adding these new restrictions would hardly seem to be the tipping point to push users to some other, more dangerous underground.
No oversight, no appeals process, no transparency. And what happens when someone click's on that blocked web address, does their customer info automatically get routed to NCMEC and the feds?
And if they have a list of known cp sites, why not target the Registrar of the domain name or the administrators of the site? Because they are more interested in the users; numbers which can be used to justify legislation, offender restrictions, "voluntary" corporate censorship, etc.
Since half of the commercial cp sites are housed on U.S. servers, look for more "agreements".
Posted by: jjoe | June 11, 2008 at 05:51 PM
If the ISPs are now going to block these sites, doesn't that admit guilt that they have been guilty of helping to distribute child porn in the past???
Posted by: Dennis | June 23, 2008 at 11:51 AM