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Cablevision to Block Online Child Pornography

Covad also complies with anti-child porn initiative

August 7, 2008

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Internet service provider Cablevision has agreed to move immediately to block customers' access to online child pornography. The company also said it will eliminate access to child porn Newsgroups, a major supplier of illegal images.

The announcement by New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo follows similar agreements with Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, AOL, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable, which were announced in the last several weeks.

In addition, Cuomo sent a letter to Covad Broadband Service, an ISP that serves the Long Island region indicating pending legal action if it does not sign a similar agreement with his office. Cuomo noted in the letter his grave concern that this company has continued to drag its heels in taking necessary action to eliminate child porn from the Internet. Covad said it plans to sign the code of conduct.

In a recent meeting with Long Island parents to discuss his office's fight against online child pornography, Cuomo encouraged residents to visit his new website, www.nystopchildporn.com, dedicated to fighting online child pornography.

The website provides details on which Internet Service Providers have signed agreements with the Attorney General's office to eradicate access to child porn on their servers. It also provides consumers with information on how to contact ISPs that have failed to make the same commitment to stop child porn.

"There are no more excuses. Internet Service Providers can no longer drag their feet when it comes to protecting children and purging this deplorable and illegal material from their servers," said Attorney General Cuomo.

The online child pornography initiative grew out of a six-month investigation that reviewed millions of pictures over several months, uncovering 88 different Newsgroups that contained a total of 11,390 sexually lewd photos featuring prepubescent children, and in some cases photos of children being raped and sexual activity involving animals.

As part of the undercover investigation, the Attorney General's office developed a new system for identifying online content that contains child pornography. Every online picture has a unique Hash Value that, once identified and collected, can be used to digitally match the same image anywhere else it is distributed.

By building a library of the hash values for images identified as being child pornography, investigators were able to filter through tens of thousands of online files at a time, speedily identifying which Internet providers were providing access to child pornography images.

Following the investigation, Cuomo secured agreements with Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, AOL, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable that for the first time completely block access to all child porn newsgroups.

In addition to eliminating the newsgroups, the ISPs also agreed to purge their servers of all child pornography websites identified by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC regularly reviews and updates its registry of these illegal sites to ensure the list reflects the current presence of such websites on the Internet.

Slippery slope?

Critics charge that despite Cuomo's agreements, many ISPs already block access to child porn newsgroups already, and that increased blocking of access to groups such as Usenet will deprive innocent customers of valuable news and information.

Comcast, which had initially disagreed with Cuomo's agreement in favor of different policies on curtailing child pornography, was cheered on by those who believed Cuomo's initiative might lead to a slippery slope of government authorities blocking objectionable content on the Internet according to their dictates.

"[N]ow other politicians have the blueprint for censorship: simply threaten the ISPs that you'll sue them and publicly claim that they're unwilling to be "family friendly" or "protect the children" or any other buzzword," said TechDirt's Mike Masnick.

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