The New York State Attorney General’s office won another pair of
victories (PDF) in its fight against kiddie porn on Usenet, and announced
last week that it successfully convinced ISPs AT&T and AOL to drop large
chunks of alt.* hierarchy in their Usenet offerings.
“These agreements with two of the nation’s largest ISPs to eradicate child
porn websites from their servers tighten the noose around this despicable
trade,” said New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in a press release.
“Today’s agreements with AT&T and AOL send a message to Internet Service
Providers across the nation that they can no longer drag their feet when it
comes to protecting our children and instead must quickly purge child porn from
their servers.”
AT&T and AOL are the nations’ first and third largest ISPs,
respectively. As such, their recruitment in Cuomo’s ongoing child pornography
campaign represents both a major victory for Cuomo, and a major disappointment
for Usenet surfers who make use of the alt.* structure. AT&T says it will
drop service to the entire alt.binaries.* sub-hierarchy, and AOL – whose parent
company, Time Warner, previously agreed to block child pornography on Cuomo’s
terms by dropping
Usenet service entirely – is already in compliance.
Cuomo’s campaign also includes an instruction for ISPs “purge” their servers
of “all child pornography websites,” although the meaning of that statement is
unclear.
Last month, Cuomo concluded an investigation against Usenet that found over
11,000 images of child pornography scattered on 88 separate newsgroups. The
N.Y. Attorney General’s office anonymously requested that ISPs remove the
images via their each company’s normal complaint system; when the ISPs failed
to respond appropriately, it made its identity known and threatened the ISPs
with a breach of contract lawsuit. Sprint,
Verizon, and Time Warner signed on in response, and agreed to provide
$1.125 million to underwrite Cuomo’s investigation.
ISPs typically maintain a policy of noninterference when it comes to
policing their networks, citing legal safe harbors that evaporate if they
demonstrate that they can, and are willing, to step in.
“The ISPs’ point had been, ‘We’re not responsible, these are individuals
communicating with individuals, we’re not responsible,’ ” said Cuomo in a
previous press release. “Our point was that at some point, you do bear
responsibility.”
Cuomo’s office also opened a new website,
showcasing its ongoing campaign and providing visitors with a form letter and
contact points for 20 other ISPs that do business in the state of New York.
A similar movement against child pornography is
beginning to take place in California, with governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Attorney General Edmund Brown Jr. urging California ISPs to block access to
kiddie porn. While the state’s request is not legally binding, the California
ISP Association issued
a response stating that it is open to working together in the future.