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Internet providers agree to block child sex content
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Associated Press

ALBANY — Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed with state officials to block access to child pornography.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today the Internet service providers will block child pornography newsgroups and eliminate the material from their servers. The companies will also pay $1.125 million to help fund efforts to remove child porn from the Internet.
The agreements follow an undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups and will affect customers nationwide. Cuomo said in a prepared statement that his investigation of other service providers is continuing.
“Online child pornography represents one of the worst abuses of the Internet,” said Time Warner Cable Senior Vice President and Chief Ethics Officer Jeff Zimmerman. He said Time Warner Cable is removing newsgroups from its service.
“By shutting down offending newsgroups and contributing to funds that will combat child pornography online, we are working to remove this content permanently,” said Verizon Deputy General Counsel Tom Dailey.
“We are doing our part to deter the accessibility of such harmful content through the internet and we are providing monetary resources that will go toward the identification and removal of online child pornography,” said Sprint Senior Public Affairs Manager Matthew Sullivan. “We embrace this opportunity to build upon our own long-standing commitment to online child safety.”
Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the five largest internet service providers in the world. Verizon has 8.2 million subscribers and Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner has 7.9 million. Sprint is one of the three largest wireless companies in the United States.

ha ha ha ha ha ha.....although I agree with this chivalrous act.....the internet is the what folks-----THE WORLD WIDE WEB----America DOES NOT LIVE IN A VACCUUM........

Okay...this might sound dumb here, but why did it take an act of government for Time Warner and Verizon to finally decide to block the child porn sites? They knew they were there. They knew they were being accessed. Why didn't they do this without being told to by the government? They clearly had the control and the means. Don't make sense to me!

I echo Bumble's sentiments.  If they knew this stuff was on their servers, why did they continue to allow it to remain there?  It's not like they didn't know it was illegal.  It's not like it wouldn't be a violation of their own TOS.  That should have been done before this even came to the AG's office.

Senders does raise a point about the global aspect in play here.  Sites and such hosted in other countries (mainly Eastern Europe according to Interpol), are going to be hard to block in a permanent fashion (short of eliminating the producers, not a bad idea really).  If law enforcement, here in the USA and around the world, can keep updating ISP's with info on newsgroups, the various ISP's can selectively filter thm out as the arise.  No sense in making it easy for these scum.

I think there's a misunderstanding here - it's not on THEIR servers - they're going to block it so that you can't see it.

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ALBANY — Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed with state officials to block access to child pornography.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today the Internet service providers will block child pornography newsgroups and eliminate the material from their servers.

I know what the article SAYS he said ... but I think it was misinterpreted there too. Verizon and TimeWarner don't provide websites, they provide access TO the internet ... therefore "agreed with state officials to block access to child pornography" is the correct statement.

But there you have it again - in the Gazette's eagerness to slant a story, the perceived result provided by the reporter/editor is different than what was intended by the news source.

I know they are just the 'server' and not hosting the websites. But if they can block child porn sites now...why didn't they do this before?

Quoted from bumblethru

I know they are just the 'server' and not hosting the websites. But if they can block child porn sites now...why didn't they do this before?

Oh, I absolutely agree with you ... to a point.

I understand child porn is illegal - that shouldn't be anywhere on the internet.  But - once they have this technology, what else can/will they block?

Quoted from 147

Oh, I absolutely agree with you ... to a point.

I understand child porn is illegal - that shouldn't be anywhere on the internet.  But - once they have this technology, what else can/will they block?

Our non-political correct forum????

I say send in the troops to hunt the scum down and then send them to the middle east as suicide/homicide bombers for the US....maybe we can launch them from a rocket?????

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CAPITOL
Internet firms to join child porn fi ght
User groups trading illicit materials to be blocked
BY MICHAEL GORMLEY The Associated Press

    By the end of the month, newsgroups featuring thousands of images depicting child pornography will be stricken from three of the top five Internet providers in the nation.
    Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable agreed with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with like interests and cloaked in privacy.
    With the agreement announced Tuesday, Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that, unwittingly they all say, provided the route to sharing the illegal obsession.
    Cuomo said the service providers will block child pornography on the sites, which are designed for private communications and are difficult to police because of their numbers and privacy concerns.
    The companies also agreed to eliminate the material from their servers and will pay $1.125 million to help fund efforts to remove child porn from the Internet.
    The agreements follow an undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups and will affect customers nationwide.
    But, as Cuomo said, such online pornography is a difficult syndrome to stop. When one point of Web access is closed, the same perpetrators are likely to open another. And his agreements with the online services end at the nation’s borders.
    “They are very inventive and obviously a lot of this industry moves offshore very quickly,” said Professor Christine Corcos of the Louisiana State University Law Center. “As long as the people who produce this material think they have markets, and they think they can reach that market, they are going to continue and the thing is they can just move to other countries.”
    She also notes the concerns of advocates of greater freedom on the Internet who believe a crackdown like Cuomo’s could squelch freedom of speech among legitimate Internet groups.
    Cuomo’s investigators found 88 newsgroups devoted to child pornography in an investigation they said took six to eight months. More than 11,000 images were collected using software that identifies child pornography by tracking patterns in the pixels of the images.
    Cuomo said the companies acted immediately when told of the concern. He said the key is going after the Internet providers rather than trying to prosecute thousands of users posting the pornography.
    “There’s no doubt this is a tough issue,” Cuomo said at a news conference.
    “People are very creative and there is a market for this filth,” he said. “We have to work together.”
    Time Warner Cable acted when it learned users were posting objectionable material and eliminated the newsgroups, a mainstay of the Internet from its early days, said corporate spokesman Alex Dudley.
    “We are not admitting to any guilt,” he said of the agreement with Cuomo. He emphasized that Time Warner didn’t host or provide any of the content and was simply a portal, allowing groups to be created with content provided by the users.
    “As soon as we were made aware of the issue … we took steps to correct,” Dudley said Tuesday.
    Verizon admits no guilt and was never accused of wrongdoing, said Eric Rabe, vice president for communications at Verizon. He said when concerns were raised about some of the tens of thousands of newsgroups, Verizon acted immediately to shut down the sites.
    “There are people doing whatever they do on the Internet all the time and we can’t possibly scan every use group,” he said. “But there are some things we can do and as soon as it’s brought to our attention, we work very quickly.”
    “The tension there is between allowing customers the ability to communicate with their privacy rights protected and preventing people from doing things that are illegal,” Rabe said.
    “We are doing our part to deter the accessibility of such harmful content through the Internet and we are providing monetary resources that will go toward the identification and removal of online child pornography,” said Sprint Senior Public Affairs Manager Matthew Sullivan. “We embrace this opportunity to build upon our own long-standing commitment to online child safety.”
    Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the five largest internet service providers in the world. Verizon has 8.2 million subscribers and Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner has 7.9 million. Sprint is one of the three largest wireless companies in the United States.
    Cuomo said his investigation of two other large national service providers is continuing, but he wouldn’t name them. He has used similar probes and the possibility of civil or criminal charges to extract concessions on Internet safety in the past. Last year, Cuomo reached agreement with the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook to toughen protections against online sexual predators.

Quoted from 147

I think there's a misunderstanding here - it's not on THEIR servers - they're going to block it so that you can't see it.



I know what the article SAYS he said ... but I think it was misinterpreted there too. Verizon and TimeWarner don't provide websites, they provide access TO the internet ... therefore "agreed with state officials to block access to child pornography" is the correct statement.

But there you have it again - in the Gazette's eagerness to slant a story, the perceived result provided by the reporter/editor is different than what was intended by the news source.

Not exactly right either.  My comment over stated the situation, but  TW, Verizon, Sprint, et al, all do provide web hosting services, from the personal to the professional (somtimes through a subsidiary).  And as long as you pay your bill, and they get no complaints (especially of the criminal variety), they only manage web traffic, and act to restrict bandwidth for a site.  They almost never interfere with what is posted on a site, barring the aforementioned criminal complaints.

That all said, this will only put off the predators and sickos for a brief period.  They're as computer savvy as anyone, and will find new and creative ways around this.  

Oh, and the rocket idea?  Far too good for them.  Too easy a way out for them.  Use them as PMD's to searh for IED's in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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No one need apologize for censoring child porn
Mona Charen
Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

    Well, well, well. Look who’s censoring the Internet. It’s Andrew Cuomo, attorney general of the Empire State. On June 11, Cuomo announced an agreement with three of the nation’s largest Internet service providers — Sprint, Time Warner, and Verizon — to block access to child pornography and eliminate such content from their networks wherever possible. Negotiations are ongoing with two other, as yet unnamed, service providers.
    You might think that these companies would have cracked down on child porn purveyors without the assist of New York’s attorney general. But apparently not. Undercover agents from the attorney general’s offi ce first posed as subscribers and complained to Internet providers about the availability of child pornography. The companies ignored them. Only then did the attorney general drop the mask and switch to intimidation mode, threatening the companies with charges of fraud and deceptive business practices.
    The aptly named website Gawker is alarmed. “As despicable and exploitative as child porn is, blocking it this way is a terrible move. This is apparently the first time these ISPs have agreed to censor certain Web content.... And once that line is crossed, theoretically it could be pushed to block more and more porn.” Imagine! Get the smelling salts.
    As Irving Kristol so wisely observed several decades ago, “If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.” Most liberals in good standing profoundly rejected Kristol’s insight then and continue to resist it today. They believe themselves to be anti-censorship — yet they practice censorship informally and most assiduously. Liberals who publish magazines and newspapers scour them for any hint of racism or homophobia. No one in the United States today would produce a sympathetic play about apartheid or Nazism (the same cannot be said, of course, for plays expressing sympathy for communism, but that’s an old story). Moviemakers are at pains to eliminate images of cigarette smoking in films, lest they lend support to an undesirable behavior. And college campuses, in the hands of the tenured radicals, have become playgrounds for speech codes and other forms of liberal authoritarianism.
    So while liberals think of themselves as anti-censorship, they aren’t at all. This is not to scold them for their hypocrisy (or not entirely) but rather to attempt to move toward a consensus. Liberals tend to argue that child porn is a special case. If it involves real children, the very act of making the stuff is a crime. Children are obviously not consenting adults.
    But I’m for censoring child porn even if it is produced with computer generated children. That’s a much harder case for most liberals, who worship personal autonomy above virtue or (an old word) decency. In 2002, the Supreme Court invalidated a federal law criminalizing the production of virtual child porn. But that law was poorly drafted. A more narrowly tailored alternative might well pass constitutional muster even with the present court.
    Andrew Cuomo is to be commended. It’s a little shocking that he has not yet been excoriated by the ACLU or the editorial page of the New York Times. Would they be so biddable if the New York attorney general were a Republican?

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So while liberals think of themselves as anti-censorship, they aren’t at all. This is not to scold them for their hypocrisy (or not entirely) but rather to attempt to move toward a consensus. Liberals tend to argue that child porn is a special case. If it involves real children, the very act of making the stuff is a crime. Children are obviously not consenting adults.

They dont even know what a sex offender is----but, it does appear that only liberal Democrats have sex(and alot of it)---Mr.Clinton, Mr.Spitzer for 2small examples in my recent memory(it needs to be put in the back files now).......

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AT&T, AOL move to purge child porn
Newsgroups, Web sites containing material face removal
By VALERIE BAUMAN The Associated Press


    Two of the nations largest Internet providers have eliminated access to newsgroups that featured child pornography, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday.
    AT&T, the nations largest Internet service provider, and AOL, the thirdlargest, also agreed to purge their servers of child porn Web sites.
    Cuomo said ISPs cant drag their feet when it comes to protecting our children and instead must quickly purge child porn from their servers.
    He announced similar commitments last month from Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable.
    The agreements came after investigators from Cuomos office reviewed millions of pictures over several months and found 88 different newsgroups that contained 11,390 lewd photos of prepubescent children.
    They developed a system for identifying illegal images by their unique hash values a kind of digital fingerprint that could then be used to search for the same image anywhere else it appeared on the Web.
    By building a library of the images, investigators were able to filter through tens of thousands of online files at a time, speedily identifying which providers were allowing access to child pornography.
    Cuomo also announced a new Web site, http://www.nystopchildporn.com, that provides details on which Internet service providers have signed agree- ments with his office to eradicate access to child porn through their servers.
    It also provides information on how to contact providers that have failed to make the same commitment to eliminate child porn.
    Cuomo has used similar investigations and the possibility of civil or criminal charges to extract concessions on Internet safety in the past. Last year, he reached agreements with the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook to toughen protections against online sexual predators.
    Cuomos office also drafted the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act, which was signed into law by Gov. David Paterson in May. It restricts certain sex offenders use of the Internet.      

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Cuomo threatens to sue cable company
Child porn Web prevention at issue
BY VALERIE BAUMAN The Associated Press

   ALBANY — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo notifi ed Comcast Corp. on Monday that the state will take legal action against the media company if it doesn’t agree to eliminate access to child pornography through its Internet service. Cuomo wants major Internet access providers to agree on steps to remove certain newsgroups that contain child pornography and purge their servers of child pornography Web sites.
   New York has already reached such agreements with AT&T Inc., AOL, Verizon Communications Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc.
   “Last week, Comcast joined with nearly the entire cable industry and 48 state attorneys general and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to sign an unprecedented, and highly praised, industrywide agreement to fight child pornography,” Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said. “Comcast has been working with the New York attorney general and we expect to become a signatory to his agreement as well.”
   Cuomo was not one of the 48 attorneys general to publicly support the efforts of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the National Association for Missing and Exploited children, because it was not as tough on online child pornography as his own code of conduct.
   According to Cuomo’s offi ce, the agreement that Comcast and others in the cable industry agreed to has targeted Web sites with child pornography, but had weak language when it came to eliminating newsgroups — where illegal images can proliferate.
   Cuomo was also concerned that the agreement Comcast has signed so far would not require the most thorough reporting to law enforcement.
   Cuomo accuses Comcast, the second largest Internet service provider in the country, of being unwilling to sign the code of conduct his office created and to commit to removing all child pornography.
   Possession and distribution of child pornography isn’t protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, Cuomo said. His office has tried to avoid forcing removal of legally protected content from the Internet.
   “Time is of the essence here, as every day without these measures is another day that this illegal material is sluicing through the Internet,” Cuomo said in the letter.  

  
  
  

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Cuomo accuses Comcast, the second largest Internet service provider in the country, of being unwilling to sign the code of conduct his office created and to commit to removing all child pornography.

Why would ANY internet service provider even want to keep child porn sites on their servers? It's not like you can use 'art' or 'free speech' as an argument. It is illegal to begin with and the people who participate in, create websites and put it out on the web INCLUDING THE SERVICE PROVIDERS are ALL scum bags. I hold the servers just as responsible IF they don't block these sites and prevent new ones from reinvention.