Child Pornography & Censorship

Well, as an introduction, I’m going to talk about child pornography, and specifically, about censorship.  Before you go getting all up in arms here, this is not a cry for the so-called “freedom of speech” to produce and distribute such crap.  Let’s make this clear from the get go:  I do not, and would not ever, advocate or tolerate child pornography. But there is a movement afoot, born out of the efforts to eliminate this trash, that disturbs me very deeply.

Let’s have a little history lesson first, for those who are not aware of some of the more arcane corners of the internet…

Many people may not know about something called “usenet.”  And that’s unfortunate, really, since the world wide web was born from usenet.  It is one of the first bulletin board systems that gained wide-spread acceptance and use, enabling people from all over the world to communicate with one another via computer.  This is a short excerpt from Wikipedia, on the history of usenet:

“Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public got access to the Internet. It was originally conceived as a “poor man’s ARPANET,” employing UUCP to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software. This system, developed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was called USENET to emphasize its creators’ hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation (Daniel et al, 1980). “

I happen to be a heavy user of this thing called usenet.  It’s archaic, but I like it.  I have a lot of friends there from all over the world – including a couple of average, everyday folks in Communist China.  They don’t say how they manage to post to the outside world, and I don’t ask.  The point is that usenet provides a forum for hundreds of thousands of people to express their ideas and opinions; a place to discuss a myriad of topics and issues; a place to find the freedom to truly express one’s self.

Now, the Attorney General of the state of New York, Anthony Cuomo, wants to end that, and he is using strong-arm tactics to do so.  In a move that smacks of extortion, he has forced three major Internet Service Providers to either drop all usenet content from their servers, or to heavily filter the content.  Today, the target is child pornography.  Tomorrow, who knows?  It could be groups that do not like a certain politician, or a certain political party.  Or a group that does not believe in creationism.

This past Tuesday, Cuomo announced that Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would “shut down major sources of online child pornography.”  But, what he neglected to say is that his so-called “agreement” with these providers will severely restrict access too all of the approximately 100,000 usenet newsgroups.  Out of these groups, only a handful – 88, to be as precise as is possible – have been found to contain child pornography.  That particular number comes from Cuomo’s office, where staffers said that they had reviewed “millions of pictures over several months,” and found only “88 different newsgroups” containing child pornography.

That amounts to an odd claim:  Stopping the spread of child porn on a total of 88 newsgroups means strong-arming broadband providers into pulling the plug on thousands of innocuous ones. Usenet’s vast set of hierarchically arranged discussion areas include ones that go by names like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin.

Now, only Time Warner Cable will cease to offer Usenet.  Sprint has decided to kill off the alt.* hierarchy, Usenet’s largest.  A Verizon spokesman said he didn’t know details, saying “newsgroups that deal with scientific endeavors” will stick around but admitted that all of the alt.* hierarchy could be toast.  Yet Usenet’s sprawling alt.* hierarchy contains tens of thousands of discussion groups–one count says there are 18,408 of them–including alt.adoption, alt.atheism, alt.gothic, and diabetes.  Eliminating all of those means eliminating perfectly legitimate conversations.  It also means censorship and the thought police.  And while that thought policing may perhaps be the result of trying to protect children, I would counter with this:  We allow neo-Nazis to flourish here.  We allow white supremecists to flourish here.  The populace in general keeps them curbed, because we as a society despise them.  And we can do the same with child pornographers.  But to wipe out the means of expression of people who take part in over 100,000 discussion groups, simply to eliminate access to 88 groups that, make no mistake, people will find a way to access, is ridiculous.

Usenet is not a “web site” in the conventional sense.  However, it is to be hoped that what happened in Pennsylvania regarding web sites will be repeated with Cuomo’s strong-arming of these ISPs.  Quoting:

“In the United States, the idea of blocking Web sites is not new. The
state of Pennsylvania came up with that idea five years ago, and
Internet providers took issue with it through a lawsuit filed by the
American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and
Technology.

The Pennsylvania statute said “an Internet service provider shall
remove or disable access to child pornography…accessible through its
service” within five business days after the attorney general notified
them of its existence.

A federal judge in Philadelphia overturned that law on First Amendment
grounds, ruling that it constituted a “prior restraint on protected
expression” and that its “extraterritorial effect violates the dormant
Commerce Clause” of the U.S. Constitution.

New York’s attorney general surely knows about that precedent. That is
probably why he settled for strong-arming broadband providers into
curbing Usenet–perhaps with the threat of a press conference that
would all but accuse the providers of trafficking in child
porn–instead of the far more difficult process of defending a law
requiring them to curb Usenet.”

To be continued…

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9964895-38.html?tag=nefd.lede