New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has announced an agreement with Sprint, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, that will see them block subscriber access to newsgroups that distribute child pornography, and act to purge any images from them that are stored on their servers.
Read Cuomo’s statement.
Federal law already dictates that ISP’s should report child pornography
to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), but it
often takes customer complaints to trigger a report.
The agreement follows a sting operation in which investigator’s
complaints about content were routinely ignored by the ISP’s. It
includes provisions under which the ISPs will pay $1.125 million to the
Attorney General’s office (AG) and the NCMEC to fund further efforts.
The AG & NCMEC will maintain a blacklist of images and websites
with which the ISP’s will have to comply.
“No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on the Internet,
but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with law
enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act, we
deem you responsible to an extent,” Cuomo said. “This literally
threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than
keeping our children safe.”
No list is available, as yet, of the USENET groups to be blocked.
[source|NY Times ]
Declan McCullagh reports
Dean Collins has written an opinion piece on this topic and also started a facebook group to follow up.
*Update: He has closed the Facebook group due to lack of response.
10July 2008: Cuomo today announced that AT&T and AOL will also start blocking Usenet. He has also initiated a site http://www.nystopchildporn.com with form letters for the public to harass their ISPs into compliance.