ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn Newsgroups

Three Internet service providers, including two of the nation’s five largest, have stricken online forums where thousands of child-porn images have been posted, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint agreed with Cuomo to block access to child pornography disseminated through newsgroups and user groups, a hard-to-regulate sector of the Internet designed to bring together users with like interests.

Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that provided the route to sharing the illegal obsession.

The service providers blocked child pornography found in 88 newsgroups, said Cuomo. Newsgroups, a mainstay of the Internet from its early days, are essentially online message boards in which users can post text and files in any of thousands of categories.

The companies will pay $1.125 million to help fund efforts to remove child porn from the Internet. They will launch a six- to eight-month undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups and will affect customers nationwide.

“Online pornography is difficult to stop. When one point of Web access is closed, the same perpetrators are likely to open another. And his agreements with the online services end at the nation’s borders,” said Cuomo.

"They are very inventive and obviously a lot of this industry moves offshore very quickly," said Professor Christine Corcos of the Louisiana State University Law Center. "As long as the people who produce this material think they have markets, and they think they can reach that market, they are going to continue and the thing is they can just move to other countries."

More than 11,000 images were found in newsgroups by Cuomo’s Investigators using software that identifies child pornography by tracking patterns in the pixels of the images.

The companies acted immediately when told of the concern. Cuomo said too many people posted the pornography to prosecute them individually, so he worked to shut off the "faucet" they were using to share the illegal material.

"People are very creative and there is a market for this filth," Cuomo said at a news conference. "We have to work together."

Corporate spokesman Alex Dudley said Time Warner Cable acted when it learned users were posting objectionable material and eliminated the newsgroups. He said the company would eliminate all newsgroups by the end of the month.

"We are not admitting to any guilt," he said of the agreement with Cuomo. He emphasized that Time Warner didn’t provide any of the content and was simply a portal, allowing groups to be created with content provided by the users.

"As soon as we were made aware of the issue … we took steps to correct," Dudley said.

Eric Rabe, Verizon’s vice president for communications, said they acted immediately to shut down the sites.

"There are people doing whatever they do on the Internet all the time and we can’t possibly scan every use group," he said. "But there are some things we can do and as soon as it’s brought to our attention, we work very quickly."

Rabe said the tension is between allowing customers the ability to communicate with their privacy rights protected and preventing people from doing things that are illegal.

"We embrace this opportunity to build upon our own long-standing commitment to online child safety," said Sprint spokesman Matthew Sullivan.

Cuomo said two other large national service providers were being investigated, but he wouldn’t name them. He has used similar probes and the possibility of civil or criminal charges to extract concessions on Internet safety in the past.

Cuomo reached agreements last year with the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook to toughen protections against online sexual predators.

Verizon and Time Warner Cable are two of the five largest Internet service providers in the nation. Sprint is one of the three largest wireless companies in the U.S.