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Internet
Service Providers Move Against Child Pornography
Verizon,
Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to purge their servers of
Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate
child pornography. The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with
the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally
announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to
curtail access to child pornography. Many in the industry have
previously resisted similar efforts, saying they could not be
responsible for content online, given the decentralized and largely
unmonitored nature of the Internet.
The agreements will affect customers not just in New York but
throughout the country. Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the
nation’s five largest service providers, with roughly 16 million
customers between them.
Negotiations are continuing with other service providers, Mr. Cuomo said.
The companies have agreed to shut down access to newsgroups that
traffic in pornographic images of children on one of the oldest
outposts of the Internet, known as Usenet. Usenet began nearly 30 years
ago and was one of the earliest ways to swap information online, but as
the World Wide Web blossomed, Usenet was largely supplanted by it,
becoming a favored back alley for those who traffic in illicit material.
The providers will also purge Web sites that traffic in child pornography and are hosted on the three companies’ servers.
While officials from the attorney general’s office said they
hoped to make it extremely difficult to find or disseminate the
material online, they acknowledged that they could not eliminate access
entirely. Among the potential obstacles: some third-party companies
sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups
privately, preventing even their Internet service providers from
tracking their activity.
The agreements resulted from an eight-month investigation and sting
operation in which undercover agents from Mr. Cuomo’s office,
posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were
allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer
service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for
example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they
transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.
After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the
attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud
and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and
began weeks of negotiations.
By pursuing Internet service providers, Mr. Cuomo is trying to move
beyond the traditional law enforcement strategy of targeting those who
produce child pornography and their customers. That approach has had
limited effectiveness, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office, in part
because much of the demand in the United States has been fed by child
pornography from abroad, especially Eastern Europe.
“You can’t help but look at this material and not be
disturbed,” said Mr. Cuomo, who promised to take up the issue
during his 2006 campaign. “These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds,
assault victims, there are animals in the pictures,” he added.
“To say ‘graphic’ and ‘egregious’
doesn’t capture it.”
“The I.S.P.s’ point had been, ‘We’re not
responsible, these are individuals communicating with individuals,
we’re not responsible,’ ” he said, referring to
Internet service providers. “Our point was that at some point,
you do bear responsibility.”
Representatives for the three companies either did not return calls or
declined to comment before the official announcement of the agreements
on Tuesday.
Internet service providers represent a relatively new front in the
battle against child pornography, one spearheaded in large part by the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Federal law
requires service providers to report child pornography to the National
Center, but it often takes customer complaints to trigger a report, and
few visitors to illicit newsgroups could be expected to complain
because many are pedophiles themselves.
Last year, a bill sponsored by Congressman Nick Lampson, a Texas
Democrat, promised to take “the battle of child pornography to
Internet service providers” by ratcheting up penalties for
failing to report complaints of child pornography. The bill passed in
the House, but has languished in the Senate.
“If we can encourage — and certainly a fine would be an
encouragement — the I.S.P. to be in a position to give the
information to law enforcement, we are encouraging them to be on the
side of law enforcement rather than erring to make money for
themselves,” Mr. Lampson said.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children collaborated on
Mr. Lampson’s bill and with Mr. Cuomo’s office in its
investigation and strategy.
“This is a major step forward in the fight against child
pornography,” Ernie Allen, the president and chief executive
officer of the center, said in a statement. “Attorney General
Cuomo has developed a new and effective system that cuts online child
porn off at the source, and stops it from spreading across the
Internet.”
As part of the agreements, the three companies will also collectively
pay $1.125 million to underwrite efforts by Mr. Cuomo’s office
and the center for missing children to purge child pornography from the
Internet.
One considerable tool that has been assembled as part of the
investigation is a library of more than 11,000 pornographic images.
Because the same images are often distributed around the Web or from
newsgroup to newsgroup, once investigators catalog an image, they can
use a digital identifier called a “hash value” to scan for
it anywhere else — using it as a homing beacon of sorts to find
other pornographic sites.
“It’s going to make a significant difference,” Mr.
Cuomo said. “It’s like the issue of drugs. You can attack
the users or the suppliers. This is turning off the faucet. Does it
solve the problem? No. But is it a major step forward? Yes. And
it’s ongoing.”
The most graphic material was typically found on newsgroups, the online
bulletin boards that exist apart from the World Wide Web but can be
reached through some Internet search engines. The newsgroups transmit
copies of messages around the world, so an image posted to the server
of a service provider in the Netherlands, for example, ends up on other
servers in the United States and elsewhere.
The agreement is designed to bar access to Web sites that feature child
pornography by requiring service providers to check against a registry
of explicit sites maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited
Children. Investigators said a few providers, including America Online,
had taken significant steps on their own to address some of the
problems their competitors were being forced to tackle.
Mr. Cuomo said his latest investigation was built on agreements he and
other state attorneys general had reached with the social networking
sites Facebook and MySpace to protect children from sexual predators.
“No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on
the Internet, but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with
law enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act,
we deem you responsible to an extent,” he said. “This
literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority
than keeping our children safe.”
Source: NYTimes
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