New York’s AG gets three Internet providers to block child porn

Several bullet points in the news coming out of the New York Attorney General’s office regarding the “unprecedented” decision by Time Warner, Verizon and Sprint to block child porn from their servers and keep it off them:

• New York AG Andrew Cuomo credited the three ISP’s with setting a voluntary “standard of responsibility…that should serve as a model for the entire industry.” but he had to have been aware of previous failed attempts to persuade ISP’s to do something about child porn. Pennsylvania tried the legislative route in 2004 when the state tried to force providers to block child porn images from servers. A district court agreed with privacy/First Amendment advocates who argued that “overblocking” of legal, legitimate sites that resulted from the law was unconstitutional.
• Advances in software technology are allowing law enforcement to zero in on the offenders. Cuomo’s statement mentions investigators’ ability to cull more than 11,000 images “using software that identifies child pornography by tracking patterns in the pixels of the images.”
• In case you were wondering about who would continue to use newsgroups in these Web 2.0 days, the AG office says 88 newsgroups devoted to child porn were found over a six-month period. The National Association of Missing and Exploited Children (NAMEC) helped to identify the newsgroups.

Cuomo says the state’s investigation of child porn newsgroups and ISP’s continues. It will be interesting to see if any other ISP’s will make their own announcements joining Verizon, Time Warner and Sprint in what Cuomo is calling the “new standard of responsibility.”

Read [Associated Press via Yahoo!] Read [Center for Democracy and Technology] Read [NY Attorney Generals Office]