February 7, 2007 4:00 AM PST
Senator to propose surveillance of illegal images
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A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.
The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or "cartoon" minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.
The Arizona Republican claims that his proposal, a draft of which was obtained by CNET News.com, will aid in investigations of child pornographers. It will "enhance the current system for Internet service providers to report online child pornography on their systems, making the failure to report child pornography a federal crime," a statement from his office said.
To announce his proposal, McCain has scheduled an afternoon press conference on Capitol Hill with Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat; John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted; and Lauren Nelson, who holds the title of Miss America 2007.
Civil libertarians worry that the proposed legislation goes too far and could impose unreasonable burdens on anyone subject to the new regulations. And Internet companies worry about the compliance costs and argue that an existing law that requires reporting of illicit images is sufficient.
The Securing Adolescents from Exploitation-Online Act (PDF) states ISPs that obtain "actual knowledge" of illegal images must make an exhaustive report including the date, time, offending content, any personal information about the user, and his Internet Protocol address. That report is sent to local or federal police by way of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center received $32.6 million in tax dollars in 2005, according to its financial disclosure documents.
SAFE Act FAQ
Who must comply? "Any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications." (18 USC 2510)
Who must be alerted? Federal and state police through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
What images must be reported? Illegal images of minors, which includes clothed teens in "lascivious" poses, according to the Justice Department. Obscene "cartoons" and "drawings" also qualify. (18 USC 1466A)
What information must be included? Basically everything the reporting person knows about the image and who posted it.
Penalties for not reporting? Criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.
Afterward, the center is authorized to compile that information into a form that can be sent back to ISPs and used to assemble a database of "unique identification numbers generated from the data contained in the image file." That could be a unique ID created by a hash function, which yields something akin to a digital fingerprint of a file.
Details on how the system would work are missing from McCain's legislation and are left to the center and ISPs. But one method would include ISPs automatically scanning e-mail and instant messaging attachments and flagging any matches.
The so-called SAFE Act is revised from an earlier version (PDF) that McCain introduced in December.
Instead of specifying that all commercial Web sites and personal blogs must report illegal images, the requirement has been narrowed. Now, anyone offering a "service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications" must comply.
Most courts have interpreted that language to apply only to ISPs. But it could be interpreted as sweeping in instant messaging providers and Web-based e-mail systems like Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion that dealt with an airline reservation system, for instance, concluded that "American, through Sabre, is a provider of wire or electronic communication service."
The list of offenses that must be reported includes child exploitation, selling a minor for sexual purposes and using "misleading" domain names to trick someone into viewing illegal material. It also covers obscene images of minors including ones in a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (The language warns that it is not necessary "that the minor depicted actually exist.")
ISPs are already required under federal law to report child pornography sightings. Current law includes fines of up to $300,000 but no criminal liability.
Another section of the draft bill says that anyone convicted of certain child exploitation-related offenses who also used the "Internet to commit the violation" will get an extra 10 years in prison.
That would dramatically raise sentences for a whole swath of crimes that do not involve adults having sex with minors. The Justice Department, for instance, indicted an Alabama man in November on child pornography charges because he took modeling photographs of clothed minors with their parents' consent and posted them online. The images were overly "provocative" and therefore illegal, a federal prosecutor asserted.
Marv Johnson, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the extra 10 years in prison was an odd requirement because the Internet is not inherently dangerous like a firearm. Rather, he said, the bill proposes to punish someone for using a perfectly legal item or service in an illegal way.
"It would be like punishing someone additionally for driving a car in the commission of an offense," Johnson said.
The proposed SAFE Act is not related to the 2003 SAFE Act, which stood for Security and Freedom Ensured Act, the 1997 SAFE Act, which stood for Security and Freedom Through Encryption, or the 1998 SAFE Act, which stood for Safety Advancement for Employees.
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sorry but I would really be upset about being punished for sending a picture of popeye.
Where has respect for other people's speech gone?
They guy is a total idiot.
They guy is a total idiot.
The guy is a total idiot.
what about TV commercials?
While the intent of the law is commendable, the reach certainly exceeds the bounds of free speech.
This proposed law strikes me of something that would have originated in a communist country. Since when did we start having the KGB in the United States and since when was it illegal not to report your neighbor. I thought that communism fell a few years ago. It is scary that a few senators are trying to revive it in our country. I think they need another means of stopping this activity by the porn pusher rather than punishing people for not turning them into the KGB.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Impeach McCain!
RON PAUL for president!
"Clearly your cartoon, though it is a fictitious character, depicts a teen in a sexual manner"
Artist: "The person in the cartoon may look like a teen but I assure you that they are 21, here's my artist's statement"
And almost as bad, or maybe worse. The sidebar of the article noted:
What images must be reported? Illegal images of minors, which includes clothed teens in "lascivious" poses
Who gets to decide what constitutes Lascivious?
Police: "You're under arrest for indecent pictures"
Dad: "That's a family picture of us on vacation in Hawaii"
Police "The teenage girl in the bikini is in lascivious pose"
Dad: "That's ridiculous! We are all doing the same pose!"
Police: "Yes, but she's the only cute one"
If you remember from your Civics or Government Classes from High School and or College, "The Senate is immune from any laws enacted by the Senate." What this means then is that you will have to get your pornography and or art (you know the non-existent model) from your good Senator!
Those that didn't know that the Senate was immune from prosecution. Sometime ago there was a young woman that went after a Senator for sexual harassment and lost because the Senate is immune from the laws that govern you and I!
Or, if I'm a child pornographer, generate 100,000 files with the same hash (=an afternoon's work) and put them on a P2P network, posting them on public sites (YouTube, Flickr etc), or spamming them along with some Viagra emails, thus invalidating the entire system since law enforcement can't keep up chasing after my fake child porn?
The only reason such a system would be put in place is to pave the way for a censored US Internet - once the legislation and system has been in place for a while, pass a new law that makes it illegal for ISPs to transmit files matching the hash, thus blocking the American public from viewing "inappropriate" content. A national firewall a la China can't work, as has been shown - but legislating that all ISPs do content matching and selective delivery might.
Too bad, I thought McCain had half a brain before this.
I guess you could graft this on to the virus scanners that most (Not all, some can't afford to do it) ISPs run. If you do this, they will have to cut quite a bit out of the virus database.
Even if you scan for hashes, all a bad guy would have to do is make a very small change to the file, and they will completely change the hash.
Having a known list of child porn, with known hashes is a good thing. It should help with prosecution. Scanning every email, PM and FTP in the US for these hashes is a bit overboard.
Perhaps $300,000 is too small amount. How about Jail? 30 years?
But as with all forms of controversial art, where is the defining line? What characteristics separate a photographers "art form" from a "pornagraphic image"? Who makes the decision that an image is "too provacative"? What about the boundary where the "model" in the photograph has reached 18, a legal consenting adult?
With any of these types of bills that get passed into law, where are a definitive set of rules to prevent personal beliefs, views and biases from entering into the mix? The law cannot be something to viewed from a single individual perspective. It must be something that is applicable to everyone, everywhere, equally.
Free speech has both freedoms and limits. Unpopular, controversial speech must be protected under the First Amendment. At the same time, you can't walk into a crowded theater and scream "FIRE".
- Not everyone that has kiddy porn on their PC is aware of it
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by NerdPatrolAJ
February 7, 2007 8:12 AM PST
- What about the the thousands of infected PCs with hidden folders serving illegal websites? This is commonplace in a world where people have been suckered by anti-virus solutions like Norton's and McAfee that claim to offer protection, but in reality do not. These poor schmucks do not even know these files exist or are even possible, but does that indemnify them from this law?
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