Under pressure including a freshly filed federal lawsuit, Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher will stop forcing Internet service providers to block Websites in the interest of stopping child porn sites. He'll stop, that is, until a federal judge decides whether the tactic – which imposes filtering programs critics say indiscriminately blocked non-child porn and non-adult sites – violates the First Amendment.
Just as significantly, Fisher's eastern regional office chief, John Shellenberger, said that while his office might still move against child porn sites by seeking formal court orders instead, he would also contact the American Civil Liberties Union before seeking those orders, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which said that was to allow the ACLU attorneys "to protect the interests of legitimate Websites that might also be closed."
These followed a September 9 suit filed by the ACLU, the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, and PlantageNet, a Doylestown, Pennsylvania ISP, and a hearing by those groups asking federal judge Jan DuBois to issue a temporary restraining order against Fisher's blocking orders.
Fisher's orders customarily involve contacting ISPs by letter advising them of a child porn site and threatening legal action if the site isn't blocked, the Inquirer said. ISPs who get these letters would have five days to block or face up to $30,000 in fines and jail terms up to seven years.
Fisher has maintained the idea came after being developed at ISPs' requests, according to spokesman Sean Connolly. "We are perfectly willing to obtain a court order," he told the Inquirer. "We've done it in the past and we're willing to do it again."
ISPs like PlantageNet, however, say that in addition to the problems with filtering technology, outsourcing dialup networks leaves an ISP with little "physical way to prevent any user from accessing any site, because we don't control the network that users dial into," as he told the newspaper.
The ACLU has insisted Fisher's orders violate what Pennsylvania's state legislature suggested, since it blocks legitimate Websites without owners' knowledge and denies them a chance to challenge the orders in court.
Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine was unavailable for comment before this story went to press.
