A Complete Waste of Time

Oh Goody! Three major carriers have joined with the NY AG to help stamp out child porn on the net. Link. The problem is, all that time and effort should be spent expanding infrastructure. –

Internet providers Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to child pornography and eliminate the material from their servers, New York’s attorney general said Tuesday.

The companies also will pay $1.1 million to help fund efforts to remove the online child porn created and disseminated by users through their services, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said. The changes will affect customers nationwide.

Investigators said they found 88 newsgroups devoted to child pornography in an investigation over six to eight months. More than 11,000 images were collected using software that identifies child pornography by tracking patterns in the pixels of the images, Cuomo’s office said.

Do I like child porn? God no! Its a scourge. But like the drug trade, every effort to stamp it out will fail. Its too easy to spoof addresses and turn up temporary sites that are gone before they are discovered.

Two points:

1) If you want teeth then those that abduct children for this purpose need to be brought up on kidnapping which is a much more restrictive punishment. The problem is much of the ‘content’ is produced overseas in countries that turn a blind eye to such things.

2) The consumers of such tripe need help of course. Doing so hopefully would dry up the demand. But what does one do with the purveyors who are overseas? They remain untouched. Becoming more draconian on the homefront does not help that.

Sadly this will be nothing but a case of chasing pixies.