A Voice of Reason – 120 Days Too Late
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Finally, an article about the way that the attorney general of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has been running roughshod over the rights of people in his pet project of removing child pornography from the world.
It’s only about 120 days too late.
That’s about how long it has been since the ISPs in my part of the country stopped any sort of reasonable access to USENET. Back in June, when I found out that Verizon was removing 99% of USENET from the reach of its subscribers, I looked into why. Those who follow the ramblings put forth under this moniker may remember my vociferous protestations about the removal, and also the fact that any reasonable person wants to end the problem of child pornography, but that Cuomo’s ham-fisted attempts to do it were not going to achieve anything.
Well, several stories have come since, in small, out of the way places, but now another writer questions the efficacy of this plan.
Does Child Porn Fight Threaten Privacy?
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, The Industry Standard
Oct 25, 2008 3:17 pmNew York State has had a history of attorneys general who like to make headlines, preferably at the national level. Former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer targeted illegal prostitution and Wall Street corruption, and used the boost from those efforts as the foundation for his successful campaign for governor.
Now his successor, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, has found a new evil to fight in order to make a name for himself: child pornography. If we are to believe the headlines, child pornography is the most prevalent crime committed online, and it seems Cuomo believes selling, trading, or downloading child pornography online is one of the biggest problems online. He has focused his attention on curtailing Internet users’ access to newsgroups and pushing ISPs to take more responsibility for users’ illegal activities.
Cuomo’s “successes” in this battle already include forcing many ISPs to shut down access to USENET forums, as well as contribute US$1.125 million to a New York State fund dedicated to fighting child pornography. Cuomo’s latest move has privacy advocates up in arms: In conjunction with the CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Cuomo has “passed on” a slide deck from a company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment to AOL. Brilliant produces a product called CopyRouter, which uses deep packet inspection to allow ISPs to analyze every packet of information sent through their networks. CopyRouter compares the data it scans against lists of known illegal files, including child pornography.
While Cuomo claims that he isn’t endorsing the software, why else would a person forward that on? In his zeal to make headlines with his fight against child pornography, he’s threatening the privacy of every Internet user, and his actions have implications beyond the New York State borders. Imagine that the U.S. Postal Service was asked to open every envelope looking for child pornography — the public would raise such a hue and cry that it would never go through. Yet my request for a statement from the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that the increasingly intrusive mechanisms being pushed by New York State’s actions aren’t even being followed by the organization.
Virtually everyone agrees that child pornography is a problem, but in attempting to stop it at the consumer level rather than the producer level, all Cuomo is doing is pushing the producers further underground and compromising countless users’ privacy in the process.
Clearly two things are happening – Mr. Cuomo is getting everything ready for a run at higher office, which I think I spoke of before, and he is also getting his funding ready, as the more people he puts in the spotlight with this plan who make money are then in a position to become some of his biggest backers.
How nice for him.
Where is the public outcry for the abuses of power this idiot is perpetrating? Perhaps it is because the average person affected by this thinks that other things, like money spent on a traditional part of ISP service was allocated elsewhere, such as what happened with Verizon. This company could have made a stand against this ridiculous behavior, but instead used it as an excuse to save money by removing the large servers, and the service. (BTW, does Verizon even have an NNTP server anymore? Does anyone really use the Big Waste Big Eight?)
This is the problem we face today, too many people who arrive at any conclusion too late. People are being distracted by the latest (insert needless fluff item here), rather than concentrate on what will change their lives, and freedoms.
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Technorati Tags: freedom - rights - misguided efforts - abuse of power - Andrew Cuomo - attorney general - Verizon - ISP - USENET
6 Comments
kiko
October 27th, 2008
at 4:53pm
freedoms? - you actually think you still have freedoms? when you can be arrested, incarcerated, held without bail and without access to a lawyer or notification for however long they see fit to hold you ( you terrorist suspect you)…your freedoms are long gone - since about 9/11 say….ever wonder why?
the oracle
October 27th, 2008
at 5:02pm
kiko, true, but it didn’t go away in one fell swoop, it was/is by bits and pieces.
Every time something like this happens, it makes our lives that much worse, and our chances to get any of it back that much less.
Media-Ted
October 29th, 2008
at 1:04pm
Some of the problem(s) associated with the above subject(s) and their results stem from our removal from physical addresses to an “ether” system. (Ether, as you may know, was what past scientists and educators claimed “filled” the vacuuous “outer space” in which we live, move, and have our being(s).
When the telephone was available to millions, wiretaps were feared, but could be used by the normal “Constitutional” provisos to protect the privacy of the individual, yet they were not considered as fully guaranteed as the U.S. Post Office. The Post Office had physical locations for recipients, … or people could use boxes on the Post Office property, which gave authorities access to the persons who might be suspect of one thing or another.
People today fear the “loss” of individual privacy; but they should view “old” movies and read “old” books and detective stories. In those stories (we’ll use the movie, “Laura” here as an example), it was clear and well-known that the detective could question the aunt of Laura about deposits and withdrawals to her account(s) as well as accounts of those who had some “proximate” relationship(s) to certain activities; in this case her withdrawals were linked to deposits made to her paramour - the “fiance” of Laura. This was “common knowledge” and Standard Operating Procedure for decades, if not centuries. Bank transactions were not considered “private”, but today people expect that everything about themselves, incllucing such transactions are sacred and that “we have lost our historical rights to privacy”.
Wiretaps were commonly available - consider party lines where many people used the same phone line and had their certain “ring” to notify them of an incoming call for them. Anyone, including kids, could listen in on those conversations, … any time.
Historically, it may shock you to discover that - because of the huge amount of data trafficing around the world today - people enjoy more anonomity than ever before. Yes, our cellphone and cordless phones can be picked up by any kid or adult with a radio scanner capable of receiving their frequencies; we should know that and speak accordingly.
For those who believe in supernatural beings; how can there be any reasonable expectation of “privacy” with ghosts, and demons, and familiars, etc., running/flying around all over the place, … invisibly?
Remember something good you may have learned as a small child: “Oh you better watch out, better not pout; better not cry, I’m tellin’ you why; … He sees you when you’re asleep, he knows when you’re awake; he sees when you’re bad or good, …”
If you accept that “someone” always sees and hears, it can help you overcome the “privacy” thing. The biggest problem is overcoming the lies, innuendo, and mis-application of data against you from a foreign source.
the oracle
October 29th, 2008
at 1:55pm
Media-Ted, good points, BTW, what time frame is the movie ‘Laura’ from? I think it might pre-date me, and
I’m not much on older movies, although I must confess a weakness for the original ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon. Raymond Massey was great as Citizen Chauvelin.
HarryH
November 4th, 2008
at 7:18am
I hardly think that attacking Usenet does much. Most of the public doesn’t even know what Usenet is. Most ISPs provided poor Usenet service, if at all, so providing them cover to drop the service is fine for the ISPs. Usenet still survives, of course, but is no longer the global powerhouse. The functions of Usenet have been adsorbed by Yahoo, Google groups and various blogs or forums.
I suppose the kiddy porn still exists among that community but probably is deeper underground.
free public access servers | Download anything usenet info service
December 11th, 2008
at 9:05pm
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