Blocking online kiddie porn
p2pnet.net News views:- Canadian Net expert professor Michael Geist believes the plan to block child pornography is a risk worth taking.
“My last post on this issue [Toronto Star, Geist homepage] generated considerable discussion with many valid criticisms of the ISP plans to block access to child pornography,” he says.
“In developing this column, I posed many of the criticisms to Cybertip.ca and found that there were good answers to many concerns along with a willingness to address other issues. In particular, Cybertip.ca:
- is amenable to incorporating judicial review of the block list
- will issue regular public reports that identify the number of sites on the block list along with the number of participating ISPs
- will only block images of pre-pubescent child pornography, thereby limiting the prospect of overblocking legal content
- is developing an appellate process that includes review from the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre
- is subject to several internal accountability mechanisms including an independent board of directors and pressure from funders (60 percent of its funding comes from the federal government) to avoid potential liability by overblocking
“I should also note that Cybertip.ca was open to further changes in response to suggestions from the Internet community,” he says.
Here are two views from p2pnet readers:
From my point of view, Michael Geist has lost a lot of credibility with his supporting Cleanfeed. He just doesn’t get it – this is going to be the thin edge of the wedge. He states, correctly, that child pornography is already illegal – so is hate literature – are hate literature sites going to be blocked next?
On Michael’s site, Cory Doctorow and others have all eloquently outlined their objections and fears with respect to this scheme; I will not reiterate those here, except to say that I fully agree with them.
I suspect that within the next 5-10 years, we are going to see a ‘perfect storm’ of sorts with respect to censorship; we’ll have Cleanfeed and the MITA (Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act).
In essence, everything one does on the Net will be scrutinized, for fear that someone, somewhere might be breaking the law.
Sophisticated users will find ways to circumvent these restrictions (crypto); the flow of visible child porn may slow, but it will never come to a complete stop. All that will happen is that it will move further underground, where the authorities will be unable to detect and/or suppress it.
Prohibition doesn’t work! It didn’t work with alcohol, it doesn’t work with drugs. If it doesn’t (and hasn’t) worked with tangible goods like drugs and alcohol, how do they expect to be able to control the flow of bits down a wire or through the air?
Mark my words… it may /start/ with child porngraphy, but it most certainly won’t end there. We’ll end up no better off than the users in China or Saudi Arabia.
Baal
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?” — “Who will watch the Watchmen?”
- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347. circa 128 AD
Who would have thought that lessening of national [sovereignty] would be more a threat to the rights of the individual. IMHO it shows that the bigger the tent of a government (World, National, provincial, county, local) the more the monied interests and the police can control the process and the less responsive it must be to voters.
Whatever rights we give up in the name of security will only allow our government to do more, not do better. We will invariably get more of the same, and while our feeling of increased safety will be illusory and fading, our loss of rights will be real and permanent.
- Facekhan, Ars Technica
And …
It *ALWAYS* starts with children.
Child protectionism is the key to the undoing of any modern society. It worked on the German people and it’s working on us now. It takes a “real man” to think about the bigger picture and realize that EVERY SINGLE CHILD PROTECTION MEASURE IS ENDANGERING CHILDREN MORE.
Sex offender registration and restrictions prevent offenders from re-integration into society, and offenders being able to make their life right is how they get past their offense and become productive members of society. What happens when offenders can’t get housing, jobs, or even food and clothing legally? They’re going to commit more crime. Adopt a “why the hell not?” attitude. They might even rape AND MURDER YOUR CHILD, just because they see no future and figure they might as well end it with a bang.
(I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but there actually IS NOT a sex offender behind every tree, waiting to brutally rape, beat, kidnap, and dismember your kid. Just something notable.)
Forcing the Internet to be open to anti-child-porn or anti-terrorist monitoring, from E-mail to IRC to FTP, will put “unspoken limits” on freedom of speech, which means less peer review of ideas and less sharing of information for fear of being mis-identified as a terrorist or child pornography distributor, among other things. Blocklists have time and time again proven ineffective as far as prevention of this stuff from getting to a computer in the first place. If you cannot be an informed citizen, how can you keep your children safe in the first place? Mass media will get away with saying all kinds of things, but bloggers will be silenced by the fear of being “investigated” and slapped with a “gag order.”
Mandatory Internet filtration software in libraries and schools? False sense of security. When I was 16, I was bypassing the Cyber Patrol Proxy at my school easily, all by using a “bouncer” that takes a URL in a URL and proxy-loads it. That’s it! Didn’t take anything more and I had insta-porn at school, yayyyyy. A false sense of security is far worse than a true sense of insecurity. If anything, your child will want to bypass it to reach the forbidden fruit, and that pretty much negates what you were trying to do in the first place.
30 years ago, you rarely would see high schoolers arrested for a fight. Now, if you get in a fight at school, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get CRIMINALLY CHARGED. Same if you steal ten packs of candy from someone and they find out. I know–they almost charged me for stealing candy when someone else did it. They threatened, but they ultimately left me alone. Children do stupid ass things and make big mistakes, but now we scar them for a long, long time for being kids.
Oh yeah, in some places, teachers are told what they are allowed to explain to children about sex in sex ed. Someone in my class asked about anal sex. The teacher said “I’m not allowed to talk about that.” The child WILL find out about it one way or another…you see what I’m getting at. Couldn’t even tell the child the dangers and give precautions in case they decided to do it, and anal sex can be extremely dangerous if done very badly (think perforating your intestines).
The next time you hear the word “children” in any sentence about law, politics, policies, and so on, think about the big picture.
Don’t let the loaded gun that is the word “children” blind you to common sense, logic, and facts.
Also See:
this issue – Canada kiddie porn blocks, December 4, 2006
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December 5th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
It’s tough. As a parent, I don’t want to see my kid exposed to unnecessary danger, and there are some really bad people running around loose. But I don’t want to see our rights eroded further than they are already, either. So on balance, I don’t think I want to leave things up to the ISPs or Cleanfeed Canada. That realy would be the thin end of the wedge, as someone else said.
December 5th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
You folks are forgetting one thing.
Child porn is a crime scene. It involves the rape & abuse of a child, a child who did not agree to it, who is not of age to consent, who is often forced or coerced into it. IT IS NOT A VICTIMLESS CRIME.
It is not “hate literature”, which only involves someone writing down thoughts & words, no matter how despicable those thoughts are. It is not like “Prohibition”; the drinking of alcohol harms no one save the drinker.
By viewing child porn, you perpetuate the abuse of that child. Those who create it are abusing children; whether it is a “common” issue or not, the ABUSE MUST STOP.
You cut off the channels that allow for easy access to it. You cut off their funding. You make it hard for them to produce & distribute this rape of humanity, so hard they move on to other things. Yes, there will always be ways to work around the protections; there’s ways around any law. But without the law in place, you have no means to prosecute the perpetrators. Laws aren’t a deterrent. They’re the means to prosecute when the perpetrators are caught.
For the person talking about “overprotection” of children, you can’t seriously be talking about making this bullshit legal. Are laws against murder and rape of adults somehow “overprotecting” us? Hell no.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
How this can be up for genuine debate is beyond anyone with common sense. The sexual exploitation of children, at least is one of those freedoms that must be given up for membership of a democracy. In reality however how nonces, rock spiders and other gutter dwellers think sexually exploiting the most defenceless in our society can in any way be appropriate or tolerated is astonishing. This is one freedom we can all do without!
December 6th, 2006 at 3:09 am
I don’t get it. This whole Internet censorship of child porn is just hiding the problem under a mat. I’m sure the governments around the world can find ways to use their power to take child porn websites down by putting pressure to the ISP and local authorities.
It doesn’t matter what you censor off the Internet, it’s just wrong in my opinion.
-LW-
December 6th, 2006 at 4:25 am
no one is talking about “making this bullshit legal”!
they are talking about not censoring the net in the name of “this bullshit”.
The stuff is still illegal and against the law!!
Even if you DO NOT try to censor the internet.
You know, in the Internet you only have 0’s and 1’s.
00010101 <- kiddyporn (which is already illegal)
10101010 <- your freee speech against an undemocratic government
censoring the net in the name of children is NOT to prevent 00010101 but mainly to prevent 10101010!
December 6th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Unless you are the one producing child-porn, how is your child in danger due to an uncensored internet? A child viewing material that a parent doesn’t approve of is not dangerous to the child.
Besides, if you are a parent of a young child, you have the ability to regulate that child’s access to a computer if you are really worried about you child being gullible enough to get lured into something in a chat room. Perhaps if people didn’t raise such stupid kids these days this wouldn’t be such a problem.
Personally I feel that censorship is not enough and we should all take implanted microchips and cameras so we can prove to the government we’re all good little boot-lickers. Also these chips could monitor our brains for any sign of thought-crime.
December 6th, 2006 at 7:58 am
the previous post goes to show just how easy it is to control the ‘average’ person’s opinion. This fellow thinks an uncensored internet is implicit permission to molest children. Arguing against such illogical opinions is like trying to argue the answer to a multiplication question with someone that doesn’t even understand basic addition.
Is it any wonder people who want to censor all sorts of other things online start with something under the guise of ‘protecting children’? It’s a good way to manipulate all the hot-button non-thinking types to your side of an issue without fail, as is being demonstrated.
December 13th, 2006 at 4:11 am
In this day and age, laws are treated as a deterrent, especially regarding sex offenders. How many times has some pretentious wench at some kind of “victim advocacy group” spouted that “they knew what they were doing and if they didn’t want to suffer [this new and more ridiculous form of] punishment, they wouldn’t have done it!”
December 15th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
It’s to be expected that some small-minded people will resort to the argument that if you’re against censorship, you’re in favour of child porn.
But in this case, it won’t work. You’ve just declared yourself in favor of replacing:
1. the present system, whereby any child porn found on the web is reported to the police, who shut down the site and arrest the owner (or notify the police in other jurisdictions so they can do the same), with
2. the proposed system, whereby any child porn found on the web (and possibly anything else that someone dislikes) is reported to Cybertips, who have the ISPs hide the sites from view, giving child pornographers the cover they need to continue with what they were doing.
Sounds to me like YOU’RE the one who is willing to sacrifice children. Maybe you’re even a child pornographer yourself.