Congress cracks down on P2P porn

[hershie]

Congress cracks down on P2P porn


By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
March 12, 2003, 5:30 PM PT


The U.S. Congress is targeting peer-to-peer networks again--and this time politicians aren't fretting over music and software piracy.
A pair of government reports scheduled to be released at a hearing on Thursday warn that file-swapping networks are exploding with pornography--much of which is legal, and some of which is not.

Searching for words such as "preteen," "underage" and "incest" on the Kazaa network resulted in a slew of images that qualify as child pornography, the General Accounting Office said in a 37-page report, one of two obtained by CNET News.com. The second report, prepared by staff from the House Government Reform Committee, concluded that current blocking technology has "no, or limited, ability to block access to pornography via file-sharing programs."

The two reports will be released at a hearing titled "Stumbling Onto Smut" that will be convened before the Government Reform Committee on Thursday morning. Among those scheduled to testify are a 9th-grade girl, a 10th-grade boy, a psychologist and Daniel Rung, the chief executive of peer-to-peer company Grokster. Also on the list are a Department of Homeland Security official and Randy Saaf, president of MediaDefender, an antipiracy start-up that tracks peer-to-peer networks.

The GAO used two techniques to identify pornography: evaluating file names and viewing the actual image files. "We used 12 keywords known to be associated with child pornography on the Internet to search for child pornography image files," wrote Linda Koontz, director of information management issues for the GAO. "We identified 1,286 items, each with a title and file name, determining that 543 (about 42 percent) were associated with child pornography images. Of the remaining, 34 percent were classified as adult pornography and 24 percent as non-pornographic."

Using this technique, GAO did not open the image files, which means that mistitled images could be erroneously classified. The GAO's auditors chose not to open them because under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly possess child pornography. The GAO did not disclose which 12 keywords its auditors typed in, except to say they were supplied by law enforcement.

The auditors did, however, ask the U.S. Customs' CyberSmuggling Center to test a smaller number of images found using three keywords related to child pornography. "The CyberSmuggling Center analysis of the 341 downloaded images showed that 149 (about 44 percent) of the downloaded images contained child pornography," the report says. "The center classified the remaining images as child erotica (13 percent), adult pornography (29 percent), or non-pornographic (14 percent)."

The committee staff did not respond to a request for comment on the reports because they had not been released yet.

The release of the reports will come at a time when Congress is increasingly focused on the Internet, children and pornography, and could presage more legislation aimed at curbing online indecency. Congress' first two attempts to restrict sexually explicit Web sites have been rejected by courts, and last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over a law tying filtering software with federal grants to libraries.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Child Pornography Prevention Act, which banned any image that "appears to be" of an unclad youth in what could be viewed as an erotic or sexually suggestive pose. "First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end," a 6-3 majority of the justices wrote. "The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."

David Greene, director of the First Amendment Project in Oakland, Calif., said the two reports use the old definition of child pornography that existed before the Supreme Court's ruling. "They don't indicate that the images they identify as child pornography would meet the (Supreme Court's) definition of child pornography," Greene said. "So it's hard to assess the significance of the finding without knowing (whether) what they found would be illegal child pornography, or whether it's legal computer-generated images that appear to be child pornography...which would be a waste of money to direct law enforcement funds. That is potentially an enormous hole in the report."

Green added: "It's hard to assess the methodology, because we don't know the search terms that they used. That makes it difficult to assess how likely it is that a child will stumble across pornographic images inadvertently."

Of the 177 images the CyberSmuggling Center downloaded from Kazaa using "three keywords representing the names of a popular female singer, child actors and a cartoon character," it classified only two as falling into the category of child pornography. The remainder would be legal to possess--and legal to distribute assuming they did not violate other restrictions such as obscenity or copyright laws.

In July 2001, the same committee, headed by Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), released a report titled Children’s Access to Pornography Through Internet File-Sharing Programs that struck a similar cautionary tone. It warned, "Teenagers who use these programs to search for music or videos of popular artists can be unexpectedly inundated by files containing explicit pornographic content."

http://msnbc-cnet.com.com/2100-1028-...&subj=cnetnews

[Evil Chris]

I thought this might eventually happen, and I have to say I'm all for it.
P2P has been much too easy a method for the sickos out there to share their kiddie porn.

[Danny_C]

I agree.

Prevent teenagers from seeing porn ? Bull-fuckin'-Shit !
When we were teenagers, and mind you, we were lawyers and doctors and accountant's kids, we were actively seeking every bits and piece of scrap paper with the faintest leeched image of skin on it ! We regularly went to an abandonned field with friends were we searched for porn hidden under rocks and hideouts. And we usually found some.

Nothing our parents could have done would have stopped us.

A-fucking-men !

Now, pre-teens (not-yet sexually aroused) and teens are an entirely different thing.

The real question is -- should children (non-teen) be let unrestricted access to computers ? Would you leave your kid walk downtown with no supervision ?

As for teens, if you don't like them seeking porn, just don't have children. Get into wax statues....

Life is tough, and in the end, nobody gets out of it alive. Deal with it !

Governments are organisms that are there to protect themselves and only themselves.

Those who sacrifice freedom for an allegation of safety neither deserve nor will get any.

[Kat]

They wrote and I'm happy to quote....


Certain people (including parents and schoolteachers) have complained to us and stated that rotten.com should not be "allowed" on the net, since children can view images on our site.

One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn't be on the net, and other claptrap.

This is our response. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.

We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.

Nearly all of the images which we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.

The images we find most obscene are those of book burnings.

Please remember that no child has access to the Internet without the active consent of an adult. And absolutely no child should be left on the Internet alone. Supervision of children remains the responsibility of parents and teachers, as it always has and always will.



The rotten staff, May 1997.

Here's a post by a friend of mine.

Abstract: P2P kiddie porn might actually REDUCE overall kiddie porn occurence because it undermines the financial incentive to produce it.


========= forwarded comment ========

It is hard to see any legitimate federal interest in this.

The official reason for the federal ban on child
pornography is to protect children from being used
for this kind of purpose. This makes some kind of
sense. Note Supreme Court decision which excludes
images that APPEAR to depict children but in fact
do not, typically because they are either showing
what are in fact adults or because the images are
artists' renditions (whether human or silicon).
This decision was based mainly on first amendment
considerations, but also on the fact that the
only LEGITIMATE federal interest is in protecting
actual children.

Now, the same principle, applied to P2P porn, even
dealing with actual children, would indicate that
since there is little financial incentive, the
harm to children is null, or rather, the INCREMENTAL
harm is null, the pictures, however obtained, already
exist and the P2P stuff (unlike for-pay stuff) will
not provide incentives to produce more. In fact, borrowing
a leaf from the movie and music industries, the claim
is that P2P networks REDUCE the incentive to produce
more. Thus, P2P kiddie-porn should be WELCOMED, as
it reduces the financial incentive to produce it.

===================================

[Bobby Vicious]

Well its about fucking time. They need to shut down all those P2P networks. God damned freeloaders.