Federal judge tosses Pa. child porn-blocking law

[Kadie]

Federal judge tosses Pa. child porn-blocking law

JOANN LOVIGLIO, Associated Press Writer
Friday, September 10, 2004


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(09-10) 11:44 PDT PHILADELPHIA (AP) --

A federal judge threw out on Friday a Pennsylvania law requiring Internet service providers to block Web sites containing child pornography, saying the tools to do so also cause "massive suppression" of constitutionally protected speech.

Enacted in 2002, the law gave Pennsylvania's attorney general the power to require that companies like America Online Inc. block customers from viewing Web sites the state had identified as containing illegal content.

No one challenged the state's right to stop the distribution of child porn, which is already illegal under federal law, but lawyers for the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that the technology used to block those Web sites was clumsy.

Much as the phone company can't control what people fax over phone lines, ISPs can't control content on the Web, and efforts to use sophisticated filters to stop people from seeing illicit sites have proven problematic.

more...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/09/10/financial1136EDT0095.DTL

[Catfight]

1. Thank God for the courts to protect our rights! n/t

[GizDog]

2. yes,

We surely need to protect the purveyors of child porn.

[w4rma]

3. No. You do not understand this ruling one tiny bit, GizDog. (nt)

[orthogonal]

4. I think you miss the point, friend.

We surely need to protect the purveyors of child porn.

I think you miss the point, friend.

This law allowed the state to give ISPs a list of websites to block.

Now, of course no governed would abuse that list to limit connections to sites critical of the government, or to sites of political minorities.

That would never happen, because we don't use laws that way in America.

I'd ask my friend to post telling you we can always trust the government, but he's in jail for peacefully protesting the Republican Convention.

And there's this girl I'm sure would agree with you, but she can't type right now, as the cops swabbed pepper spray directly in her eyes.

Trust the government friend! Those camps are only for terrorists and unpatriots (and a few Japanese-Americans)!

[Charlie Brown]

5. Today it's child porn

tomorrow it's anything that threatens "traditional values" and eventually everything that could shake the status quo. If they want to stop child porn, they need to go after the culprits and not the internet.

[mongo]

6. You don't understand the problem

Over two years, the groups said, ISPs trying to obey blocking orders were forced to cut access to at least 1.5 million legal Web sites that had nothing to do with child pornography or even legal pornography, but shared Internet addresses with the offending sites. When a service provider blocked the address for a child-porn site, it wiped out the entire cluster.

U.S. District Judge Jan E. DuBois agreed the law could not be enforced without also blocking protected speech.

"There is little evidence that the Act has reduced the production of child pornography or the child sexual abuse associated with its creation," DuBois wrote. "On the other hand, there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."

And now we get to the tricky part - and the true purpose of a lot of legislation:

Equipment is indeed available to shut down individual sites, but experts say such costly technology would force smaller ISPs out of business and larger ones to spend tens of millions of dollars on a weapon effective only until the peddlers of online kiddie porn change tactics.

But it's for the children....

[RoyGBiv]

7. That's not the point...

This is the kind of nonsense that thoroughly pisses me off. There's a problem? Pass a law. The law doesn't work? Pass another law. Keep passing laws until no one has any rights, and when someone complains about it, the retort will be "Oh, so you want to protect the <insert favorite villian here>." The end of this slippery slope is regulating every aspect of speech, online or otherwise. You oppose regulating speech? Oh, so I guess you want to protect purveyors of child porn.

Well that's idiotic crap. Child porn is already illegal. Law enforcement agencies already have the legal tools to combat it. What they don't have in many cases is the financial resources, competing as they are with the drug war and the terror war and the war on ugly shoes and the war on ... No law that merely imposes further restrictions is going to change that. In fact, in most cases, passing new laws adds financial burdens because not only are law enforcement officials tasked with hunting down child predators -- the appropriate target -- with this law they would also be required to police Internet service providers. In other words, the law makes the battle against child porn, and the root problem of the sexual abuse of children, more difficult; the perpetrators of these crimes are no longer the primary target.

So, please save your holier-than-thou attitude for someone who doesn't think about these things any more deeply than the latest sound bite allows him to.