New York
- Following similar actions taken against other broadband providers, New York
State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has sent a letter to Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), the nation's
second-largest broadband firm, threatening legal action if it does not
agree to take specific steps to block child pornography. The previous letters have
resulted in ISP's including Time Warner Cable, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint
Nextel blocking access to all or some newsgroups on Usenet -- a pre-Web online
forum that hosts tens of thousands of discussions groups, a handful of which
have been used to host child porn images.
The companies have also pledged over
$1 million "to fund additional efforts by the attorney general's office
and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
to remove child pornography from the Internet."
Comcast, which has already
signed on to a similar agreement with most of the other state attorneys
general, is expected to sign a deal with Cuomo.
"We appreciate the hard
work by Attorney General Cuomo -- and his Attorney General colleagues -- on the
pressing issue of child pornography on the Internet," Comcast said in a
statement published by Broadcasting & Cable.
"Comcast has been working
with the New York Attorney General and we expect to become a signatory to his
agreement, as well."
However, CNET News.com posited that Cuomo's campaign
"is likely prohibited by the First Amendment. Governmental efforts at
censorship must be narrowly focused, and censoring 100,000 newsgroups because
88 may have illegal images fails that test."
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/33tbi
(PDF of Cuomo letter)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9997051-38.htm
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6581004.html
http://www.comcast.com
http://www.nystopchildporn.com
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Comments
nys AG cuomo is on a slippery slope towards police state
we know what to call it when the chinese government uses a 30,000-strong army of censors to stifle web content, and then bullies ISP's into employing their own internal thugs to track down & turn-over anyone who wants to find "anti-social" material ...
we called it a police state.
And, if you believed that the thought police could never happen here in free societies (yes, the same ones which have suspended habeus corpus, institutionalized warrantless spying, and sanctioned torture!), then you havent been paying attention!
a recent example: the british minister of justice requested the power to prosecute artists for the content of their imaginations! Any work which sexually depicted persons /who did not exist/ participating in events /which did not actually occur/ would be a criminal expression of child porn if there was any erotic display of minors (which would make a cartoon version of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet a illegal artistic expression, pace Zefferlli's bed scene) - as he is 16 and she is 13).
remember: these people are politicians ... they crave power, for any reason & at any cost.
whether it is the war on terror, or the war on porn, or the war on drugs, or the war on lyrics, the war on p2p piracy, or the war on alcohol (aka prohibition), or the war on bird-singing & kite-flying & wedding-dancing (aka the Taliban), or the war on 'anti-state' defamation (eg turkey & egypt et al), or the war on sodomy (or whatever else offends the Moral Majority) ... you name the "War On" and you will find tyrants & wannabe tyrants trying to confect yet another excuse to have the state intrude into the most inviolable parts of our private lives (usually so that these people can sublimate their own neuroses!)
today AG cuomo will try to intimidate ISP's into censoring one newsgroup ... and tomorrow, what, there will be some Karl Rove-inspired Fascist proposing that the President be given emergency power to imprison millions of political dissidents in special military camps? (oh yeah, i forgot, that's not some scary orwellian future nightmare: the executive order has already been drafted; the funds appropriated by congress; and the contract to build them has already been publicly tendered!)
how is it that yahoo, google, microsoft & cisco et al have not learned there lesson from their fiasco's in china?! (they have been pilloried for collaboration with the persecution of dissidents)
how is that capitalism has evolved so that it is not in the self-interest of at least some companies to protect its customers when the state is determined to start a pogrom? (have none of these companies seen the fate of Yukos? do they seriously imagine that any of these governments - how is Bush any different from Putin in this regard? - would blink twice before dismembering them if they decide to protect their commercial integrity?
i guess - to paraphrase Nixon - 'we are all Vichyists now'
perhaps there is no one left anywhere who will stand up to these bullies
economic liberalism had to endure some long dark nights before its renaissance late in the last century; however, political liberalism does not seem to have the same share of intellectual champions who will defend its honour - always playing second fiddle in the sonata di libertà.
history tells us what happens to a democracy when its citizens are indifferent to their precious liberty!
They Lose It!
"the subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures" -- JUNIUS
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