Don't bother asking Pennsylvania to identify the Websites the state attorney general's office has forced America's largest Internet service providers to block under its anti-child porn laws. You'll get the same answer the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Associated Press got this week - no way, Jose. And the CDT, for one, is pondering an open-records lawsuit as a result.
The CDT wasn't looking for child porn, but they were looking to learn which non-child porn Websites got blocked anyway. The civil liberties group has argued the Pennsylvania law blocks Websites in "the same electronic neighborhoods" as child porn sites might be, but without seeing the listed blocked sites the group said it can't find the examples to back up their claims.
They also insist the law doesn't do a thing to help any actual children who might have been involved in making the child porn in question.
The Pennsylvania law in question was enacted in 2002. State attorney general Mike Fisher has used it to order blocking of a reported 423 Websites worldwide, and the law calls for a $5,000 fine on any company offering Net connections to sites with illegal photographs - but not on the sites themselves. The law is also criticized for denying a site in question both proper notice of a pending block and the chance to challenge the blocking.
Fisher has said the law is the easiest way to keep people from seeing child porn, but the CDT has argued that the law allows non-child porn sites to be blocked just because those sites use host services sharing a single Internet Protocol address among multiple Websites some of which do feature child porn.
Thus far, according to several published reports, America Online, Comcast, EarthLink, Microsoft, and Verizon Online are among the ISPs Fisher's office has ordered to block sites. WorldCom actually challenged a block order but a judge ordered the ISP to comply. WorldCom, too, argued they were being ordered to block Websites that actually had nothing to do with child porn themselves despite sharing an IP address with sites that do.
And the CDT has expressed concerns about technical overload as well as free speech. "Compliance with the law will carry potentially significant technical risks for the ISPs' networks, and the Internet in general," the CDT said in a February position paper, which they titled "An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet."
CDT staff counsel Paula Bruening, a former TRUSTe compliance director who is handling the Pennsylvania law for CDT, did not return an April 3 call from AVN Online.
But the CDT position paper emphatically argued that, above all, the Pennsylvania law ignores the most important victims of all - actual children who might have been used for child porn. "The law merely shields Pennsylvanians from the objectionable material, while the abuse of children is allowed to go on elsewhere," the paper said.
"(We) share the belief that child pornography has no place in civilized society," the paper continued. "Powerful laws are already in place to combat child pornography, and (we) endorse their full enforcement. The Pennsylvania ISP liability law, however, is not an appropriate or effective way to solve this difficult problem."
