After a little more review of the material, the reasons for the announcement of the blockade of all alt newsgroups on Verizon newsgroup servers (ostensibly) has been made a little clearer.

An article on Gawker gives more detail concerning the first reason given, and fully fleshes out the details of the problem with these things. I was simply going to comment this, adding it to the other article, but it seems that here too, there are problems with free speech – as the letters ‘p-o-r-n’ are blocked in any comment – even if it was as part of the URL of the cited story.

The Gawker article points out that this is a very difficult beginning – one that can lead to more of the same type of first amendment abuses that were typical of the Reagan administration. By the way, Ed Meese was that president’s chief of staff, later becoming U.S. Attorney General, and had been a crony since Reagan was a governor of California.

from Wikipedia

Meese Report

On May 21, 1984, Reagan announced his intention to appoint the Attorney General to study the effect of pornography on society[1]. The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, often called the Meese Commission, convened in the spring of 1985 and published its findings in July 1986. The Meese Report advised that that pornography was in varying degrees harmful[2].

Although Meese had no formal training in any field that would allow him to make the determination, Meese was famous for his quote that “he did not know the definition of pornography, but knew it when see saw it’. It is precisely that sort of ‘impeccable logic’ that causes many of the problems we are now experiencing with our rights in many areas.

Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York is apparently a student of Meese, and also unaware that ‘ throwing the baby out with the bath water’ has never been considered a good policy.

from the Gawker article

A filter doesn’t stop child porn; it just moves the problem somewhere else. The distributors will just find new ways to pass the porn along, new ways to disguise it, ways to get around the cataloging system that Cuomo’s office uses to search for child porn. (Since only law enforcement is allowed to view child porn so they can make sure no one else ever does, one can only speculate what leads a person to land a job on the child porn task force and how much Cuomo’s description of child porn — “These are 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, assault victims, there are animals in the pictures” — comes from direct experience.)

The decision also turns the country into Cuomo’s de facto jurisdiction. If the content is coming from inside New York, why hasn’t Cuomo’s office shut down and prosecuted the source? If it’s not from New York, how does Cuomo have authority? He argues that ISPs are responsible, and it is hard to refute the logic that no one should knowingly allow someone else to view child pornography. But isn’t stopping it his job in the first place?

It is exactly this type of irregular thinking that destroys the integrity of government. Beginning with the misplaced method of stopping the problem, and ending with a method of moving himself up the political hierarchy on the rails of a train charging toward the destruction of proper procedures and personal freedoms, this man causes many to look askance at every person who aspires to political service.

While Verizon is directly responsible for the problem (loss of coverage), it is this ‘crusade’ undertaken by the effete and lethargic attorney general of New York, who is unwilling to do the hard work to track these offenders down, that is at the center of blame. Instead of removing the offenders by IP tracking, it was easier to force a deal where large ISPs capitulated to the demands of this ‘public servant’.

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