NY attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access

motivez · 06-11-2008, 08:30 PM

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would "shut down major sources of online child pornography."

What Cuomo didn't say is that his agreement with broadband providers means that they will broadly curb customers' access to Usenet--the venerable pre-Web home of some 100,000 discussion groups, only a handful of which contain illegal material.

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

It's not quite the death of Usenet (which has been predicted, incorrectly, countless times). But if a politician can pressure three of the largest Internet providers into censorial acquiescence, it may only be a matter of time before smaller ones like Supernews, Giganews, and Usenet.com feel the squeeze.

Cuomo's office said it had "reviewed millions of pictures over several months" and found only "88 different newsgroups" containing child pornography.

"We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business," Cuomo said in a statement released after a press conference in New York. "I call on all Internet service providers to follow their example and help deter the spread of online child porn."

That amounts to an odd claim: stopping the spread of child porn on a total of 88 newsgroups necessarily means coercing broadband providers to pull the plug on thousands of innocuous ones. Usenet's sprawling set of hierarchically arranged discussion areas include ones that go by names like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin. It has been partially succeeded by mailing lists, message boards, and blogs; AOL stopped carrying Usenet in 2005, but AT&T still does.

Many of Usenet's discussion groups are scarcely different from discussions you might find on the Web at, say, Yahoo Groups. Because there's no central authority, however--Usenet servers exchange messages in a cooperative, peer-to-peer manner--politicians are more likely to look askance at the concept. (For that matter, so is the Recording Industry Association of America.)

It's true that of the three broadband providers Cuomo singled out, only Time Warner Cable will cease to offer Usenet. Sprint is cutting off the alt.* hierarchy, Usenet's largest, which will primarily affect its business customers. A Verizon spokesman said he didn't know details, saying "newsgroups that deal with scientific endeavors" will stick around but admitted that all of the alt.* hierarchy could be toast.

Yet Usenet's sprawling alt.* hierarchy contains tens of thousands of discussion groups--one count says there are 18,408 of them--including alt.adoption, alt.atheism, alt.gothic, and alt.tv.simpsons. Ditching all of those means eliminating perfectly legitimate conversations.

"The Internet service providers should not be blocking whole sections of the Internet, all Usenet groups, because there may be some illegal material buried somewhere," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program. "That's taking a sledgehammer to an ant."

For their part, the three broadband providers that Cuomo singled out on Tuesday said that it makes sense for them to curb Usenet.

"We're going to stop offering our subscribers newsgroups," said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "Some of the early press on this indicated we were going to block certain Web sites. We're not going to do that."

That was a reference to a New York Times article with the headline: "Net Providers to Block Sites With Child Sex." It said "the providers will also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography."

That is common practice in some countries. The French government and broadband providers have reportedly inked a deal to block Web sites with child porn, terrorist, and hate speech, for instance.

What Time Warner Cable will do, Dudley said, is remove illegal content on its network when alerted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. (This is already required by law, has been standard business practice for many years, and is not a change in policy.)

Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said much the same thing: "We're not blocking any access to Web sites."

In the United States, the idea of blocking Web sites is not new. The state of Pennsylvania came up with that idea five years ago, and Internet providers took issue with it through a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The Pennsylvania statute said "an Internet service provider shall remove or disable access to child pornography...accessible through its service" within five business days after the attorney general notified them of its existence.

A federal judge in Philadelphia overturned that law on First Amendment grounds, ruling that it constituted a "prior restraint on protected expression" and that its "extraterritorial effect violates the dormant Commerce Clause" of the U.S. Constitution.

New York's attorney general surely knows about that precedent. That is probably why he settled for strong-arming broadband providers into curbing Usenet--perhaps with the threat of a press conference that would all but accuse the providers of trafficking in child porn--instead of the far more difficult process of defending a law requiring them to curb Usenet.

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater completely. There are far more Usenet groups that contain access to legal material (a lot of which is useful, productive discussion) than there are which contain illegal material.

I mean, what's next? Should we ban cameras because they're used to take the pictures in the first place?

The result of this will be those who use it illegally now will still be able to use it via other websites that require a fee to access, and those who use it for legitimate, legal purposes will be fucked over for no good reason.

Two good points I read on a blog:

Of broader interest perhaps is how much time will pass before "other entities" demand that ISPs (attempt) to block access to other materials that one group or another feels subscribers should not be permitted to see or hear. How long before search engines are urged, pressured, or ordered to remove search result listings that the government or other groups deem inappropriate under the political criteria of the moment?

Lauren Weinstein's Blog: ISPs Agree to Block Access to C-Porn Web Sites and Usenet Groups

Using the presence of illicit materials in some portion of a content stream as an excuse to abolish or decimate the legal content is inexcusable. In fact, that sort of "guilt by association" and "we can get away with this because most people don't know about it" action is the very essence of a particularly insidious form of censorship.

Lauren Weinstein's Blog: Update on ISP Actions Regarding C-Porn and Usenet

Kytro · 06-12-2008, 08:56 AM

I read that, but if people really want that stuff, they will move the newsgroup.

The law is slower than the internet

Phantom · 06-12-2008, 10:37 AM

I thought they were only blocking access to certain newsgroups?

I don't like where this is going, but I don't think there's much room to stop it. It seems like more and more ISPs aren't even including newsgroup access in their services...

motivez · 06-12-2008, 01:01 PM

Originally Posted by Phantom

I thought they were only blocking access to certain newsgroups?

I don't like where this is going, but I don't think there's much room to stop it. It seems like more and more ISPs aren't even including newsgroup access in their services...

No, Time Warner is cutting off access for everyone, Sprint is blocking alt.*, and Verizon is going to eliminate large portions of it from being accessible

I don't understand it really. I mean, it seems like they'd do better to investigate individual newsgroups and shut them down instead of punishing everyone

thewise1 · 06-12-2008, 02:04 PM

So are they blocking the protocol or just not offering access anymore?

usenetserver.com
giganews.com
etc

These will solve the problem

motivez · 06-12-2008, 05:11 PM

They're not offering access, you'll still be able to get it through other sources.. but they're effectively blocking access for millions of subscribers who've never had to pay an extra cent to get access to it.

It's certainly within their right to stop providing access to a certain service, but their reasons for doing so are disturbing from a freedom of speech standpoint.

How long until other big interests come and want them to block access to specific sites? And if they cave?

One example I can think of is Wikileaks - Wikileaks

I mean, it's a very slippery slope they're heading down here. I intend to write Time Warner and call to let them know how I feel about it.

Kytro · 06-13-2008, 02:13 AM

What they are blocking almost all the newsgroups, crazy. I have access to a copy of Supernews or whatever it is called (pulled to a local cache at my ISP - so I get near 1200 k/sec) I hope that isn't affected.

Apparantly there a few newsgroups in Australia blocked by law, and ISP's cannot legally say what the list is