Cuomo and Child Porn
Posted on July 13, 2008
By now, you’ve no doubt seen the ‘coup’ that Andrew (Andy) Cuomo, Attorney General of NY pulled off this past week. He got AT&T and AOL (more on that one later), to join some other major players like Verizon and voluntarily shut off access to a large segment of newsgroups hosted on the ISP’s own servers and which contained child pornography.
If you happen to not be familiar with Usenet or newsgroups, they are simply the groups (many of which have been around way before Al Gore ever invented the Internet), that provided access to discussions from the earliest days of the bulletin board era and later on added binaries (which simply means files - programs, pictures, video, audio, etc.). These are accessible by using a mail reader like Outlook Express and adding the newsgroups that you ’subscribe’ to so you can view the latest discussions right from your email or for more detailed access and especially with binary files, you can use a reader program which specializes in handling and formatting the posts from the groups. Programs such as Forte and Newsbin provide this functionality.
OK, now the background is set, let’s see what took place. Anyone who knows the state of the newsgroups and newsservers today will readily acknowledge that the system has primarily been taken over by the binary side. While there are several legitimate groups, the vast majority offer illegal movies, music, books, images, etc. Included in this grouping are several groups that cater to child pornography. So there is a lot of bad stuff out there.
Someone in his organization convinced Cuomo that it would be a great political move to get the ISPs to ban all this illegal stuff and help set him up to become the next governor of NY. You don’t think that was the motivation? Then keep reading.
This was a no-brainer on his part (and that means he didn’t think at all about what he was doing) because there are certain subjects that will get you the support of people every time with no real work on your part - topics like flag burning, supporting our troops, and child porn.
Now here is where he didn’t think at all or at least do any reasonable investigation into the issue at hand. Someone told him there was child porn in the subgroups of alt.binaries (this is simply the way the naming schemes have been for many years to provide quick reference of what a group is about before subscribing to it). So if I subscribed to alt.binaries.pictures.automobiles, guess what I would expect to find? So Andy says if there is child porn in the alt.binaries then lets get them banned. And so they did. They quickly got several ISPs to sign on and with no delay at all, they shut down the alt.binaries* tree, which means if any legitimate groups you followed were under that branch, then they got cutoff too. Sorry, but that’s the price you pay to protect the children.
Really? Well, I did a scan today of an alternate server newgroup list, one that isn’t blocked by my ISP, and you know what I found? Under the tree branch of alt.sex*, there were 350 groups. Now, I don’t know how active any of them are or what they contain (I sure wasn’t going to look in them just to find out), but 350 groups! In fact, a half dozen of them proudly flaunted their name as alt.sex.pedophilia*. Are you kidding me? Yep, there they are, big as day. I can only conclude that no one technical looked at this issue at all, only politicians. How could anyone who really knows anything about Usenet have blundered so terribly?
Do you have any idea why these ISPs jumped on the bandwagon without question? They must really be concerned about child porn. Hardly. What they are concerned about is bandwidth. I wrote recently about AT&T’s pending surcharges for high volume users of their service. They don’t like bandwidth, don’t like you using it, that is. The ISPs have seen Usenet as an albatross they woud like to be rid of for a long time, but haven’t been able to come up with a way to do so without massive outcries. Now they have. Flags, troops, porn. Who can argue? We’ve done it for the good of mankind.
Now let’s examine that. I forget the exact numbers, but did you know that in the last year, something like 35 or so arrests were made of peddlers in child porn? Do you know how most of them were made? They were because the pedophiles felt they had a safe place to operate in the publicly accessible groups. What they didn’t know was these groups were monitored so most of the arrests came about because of Usenet. So Usenet has been shutdown (or at least access to it by a number of providers).
So what happens to the pedophiles out there? Who knows? That’s a big question right now. Who knows? Though those groups were easily accessible, their very nature drew in the offenders. One thing is for sure, they won’t go away. They will just find another source (if alt.sex* ever gets shut down or they will probably operate right there). Understand that just because AT&T and other ISPs shut off access to Usenet does not mean it ceased to exist. It’s still there, you just can’t get it for free anymore. But for 10 bucks a month, you can get access to any groups you want from many different providers and download substantial amounts of data, around 10GB on average for that price.
Now we know the answer to ‘where do they go’. Further underground, more out of the public eye, harder to find, less traceable. And that’s not good. Sex has always been big business, both on and off the Internet and the seedy side of life will always flourish. Prohibition proved that. Whiskey still flowed freely, but it was underground and hard to find and hard to control.
It’s difficult for right thinking people to put themselves in the shoes of the nefarious ones and try to think like they think. So our best served attempts to control them are usually countered and very quickly as their perverted minds find alterante approaches to do the same things they have always done.
When it comes down to discussing child porn itself, our first line of interest should not be the Internet but real life where the events take place that wind up as images on the net. That’s where programs and laws such as offender address registration requirements are good in helping us protect our inncoent ones. The likelihood of your child having contact with a convicted pedophile hundreds of miles away is very small, but if one has moved in four blocks over, that makes them a person of special interest in your life. In other words, the root of the problem is out there in society, where we live, so the best efforts at dealing with those things are also where we live.
The best we can do concerning the vile things of the Internet (Usenet is just one facet of the problem), is to avoid them ourselves (self-control) and shelter our children from them, as we have the responsibility as caring parents and grandparents to do.
But to take such a sensitive subject and use it as one’s own personal fight for power with no real regard for the problem and without addressing it fairly and showing there is real interest in the problem, should make the good citizens of NY state shake their heads in disbelief and wonder what’s next.
Oh, and I said earlier that I would give more on the AOL side of things later. Later is now. Here is more evidence of the political panderings going on in this process. The headlines look great but the reality of things is that AOL discontinued all access to Usenet all the way back in 2005. Zilched it out way back then. Wonder how they are signing on to this great mandate when they don’t even offer newsgroup access to begin with? A spolesperson for AOL said ‘this doesn’t change a thing for us’.
No one is more against child abuse than I, whatever form it takes. No one wants these perverted abusers of our children out of circulation more than I do. Unfortunately, Mr. Cuomo has gone a long way toward not solving anything.
One more thing, I wonder did he make some kind of ruling on the legitimacy of what he has done? I was under the impression that all control of the Internet was under the jurisdiction of the Federal government and not local or state. I suppose his argument would be that he simply campaigned for it and the providers willingly signed on to support him.
» Filed Under AT&T, Internet, Usenet, Verizon
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