A Texas lawmaker has introduced a new bill to ban "real" (as opposed to "virtual") online child porn and otherwise tighten up laws against cyber-child porn. His action comes in the wake of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals barring enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act.
At the same time, a pair of reports being released March 13 warn that peer-to-peer file swapping could be called P2P2P - as in, porn-to-peer-to-peer - and that federal lawmakers aren't exactly going to look the other way if indeed such services as KaZaa are being used as a swap meet for child porn.
Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith unwrapped what he calls the Child Obscenity and Pornography Act of 2003, which would ban offering to sell or buy "real" child porn - as opposed to the "virtual" (artificial images) material which caused so many sticking points in legal arguments - as well as barring obscenity involving pre-pubescent children and banning the showing of porn to children.
The Smith bill could get through the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security as soon as March 18, Smith told reporters. "No cybercrime is worse than child pornography," he said. "Congress must do everything in its power to protect children from sexual predators. Without amending current law, we face a proliferation of child pornography.
"Sex predators have access to the most vulnerable members of our population," Smith continued. "With an estimated 24 million children online, the Internet has proved a useful tool for pedophiles and other sex predators as they distribute child pornography, engage in sexually explicit conversations with children, and hunt for victims in chat rooms."
The March 7 Third Circuit Court decision was the second time the court shot down the original COPA as a too-broad "community standards"-based violation of free expression. The first strike-down provoked a U.S. Supreme Court review that sent the law back to the appellate court on grounds it couldn't stop COPA on nebulous "community standards" alone.
Meanwhile, the House Government Reform Committee reports that blocking or filtering technology now in place has either no ability or very limited capacity to keep the P2P networks from keeping the porn out - especially the child porn. That's one of two reports set to be released at the committee's March 13 hearing. A General Accounting Office report says that searches on keywords like "preteen," "underage," and "incest" on KaZaa brought up a passel of child porn-qualifying imagery. The House committee lamented that filtering can't stop such swaps.
In the GAO report, investigators used file name evaluation and viewing actual files to identify porn, including twelve keywords "known to be associated with child pornography on the Internet to search for child pornography image files," the report's author, GAO Director of Information Management Linda Koontz, wrote.
"We identified 1,286 items, each with a title and file name, determining that 543 (about 42 percent) were associated with child pornography images," she continued. "Of the remaining, 34 percent were classified as adult pornography and 24 percent as non-pornographic." GAO auditors didn't open any image files, however, the report said - they may not have wanted to chance violating federal laws outlawing possession of child porn. But they asked a U.S. Customs division, the CyberSmuggling Center, to test a smaller number of images based on three unrevealed keywords.
The result? "The CyberSmuggling Center analysis of the 341 downloaded images showed that 149 (about 44 percent) of the downloaded images contained child pornography. The center classified the remaining images as child erotica (13 percent), adult pornography (29 percent), or non-pornographic (14 percent)."
