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Verizon, Time Warner, Sprint cut access to child porn newsgroups
June 11, 2008
Mike Antonucci - San Jose Mercury NewsIssue date: 6/5/08 Section: Real News
New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday unveiled an aggressive new attack on child pornography built on an unlikely partnership between law enforcement and three large Internet service providers.
Cuomo announced an agreement with Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint to eliminate access to child porn newsgroups _ bulletin board style discussions found on a network of servers _ and to purge their services of illegal Web sites identified by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
But free speech watchdogs reacted warily, citing concerns about governmental pressure, technical problems and the abdication of First Amendment protections by the service providers.
Attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., said they were concerned the initiative, which is designed to stop electronic access to child porn, could end up blocking consumers from numerous legal, mistakenly listed or unrelated Internet sites.
"At the end of the day, as horrible as the problem of child pornography is, the First Amendment has to control any effort to combat it," said John Morris, general counsel for the CDT.
Cuomo's office said it conducted an investigation reviewing "millions of pictures over several months" and found 88 newsgroups containing more than 11,000 "sexually lewd" photos of prepubescent children, including some depicting children being raped. Many of those newsgroups were accessible through the Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, which agreed to contribute $1.125 million to further anti-porn efforts by the attorney general's office and the NCMEC.
The New York Times reported that the ISPs agreed to cooperate only after being threatened by the attorney general with charges of fraud and deceptive business practices.
Sprint told the Mercury News that its involvement is the result of an immediate "mutual effort." Time Warner Cable said it admitted to no wrongdoing as part of its cooperation and that "it became clear to us that working with the attorney general on this really tough issue was the right thing to do."
Cuomo announced an agreement with Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint to eliminate access to child porn newsgroups _ bulletin board style discussions found on a network of servers _ and to purge their services of illegal Web sites identified by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
But free speech watchdogs reacted warily, citing concerns about governmental pressure, technical problems and the abdication of First Amendment protections by the service providers.
Attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., said they were concerned the initiative, which is designed to stop electronic access to child porn, could end up blocking consumers from numerous legal, mistakenly listed or unrelated Internet sites.
"At the end of the day, as horrible as the problem of child pornography is, the First Amendment has to control any effort to combat it," said John Morris, general counsel for the CDT.
Cuomo's office said it conducted an investigation reviewing "millions of pictures over several months" and found 88 newsgroups containing more than 11,000 "sexually lewd" photos of prepubescent children, including some depicting children being raped. Many of those newsgroups were accessible through the Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, which agreed to contribute $1.125 million to further anti-porn efforts by the attorney general's office and the NCMEC.
The New York Times reported that the ISPs agreed to cooperate only after being threatened by the attorney general with charges of fraud and deceptive business practices.
Sprint told the Mercury News that its involvement is the result of an immediate "mutual effort." Time Warner Cable said it admitted to no wrongdoing as part of its cooperation and that "it became clear to us that working with the attorney general on this really tough issue was the right thing to do."
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UsenetJunkie
posted 6/20/08 @ 12:37 PM MST
My understanding is that Sprint and Verizon are cutting access to .alt newsgroups which are typically groups with binary files.
Time Warner on the other hand is discontinuing their newsgroup servers all together. (Continued…)
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