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Child Porn Database Bill
A new bill proposed by Sen. John McCain seeks to create a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers could use to find and flag suspicious content, such as child porn images, that would be reported to the police. I have heard the government already has such a database, but that is second hand knowledge from a pretty reliable source, this gentleman had worked for the FBI and was in a computer forensics class I was attending, so I am pretty confident in his statement. Anyway, the proposed bill places all of the burden squarely on ISP’s and makes no mention of how it would even be implemented, but it does say that not reporting child pornography would be a federal crime.
A federal crime? How can he propose that with a straight face?
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.
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. Source: Senator to propose surveillance of illegal images
How easy would it be for an ISP to miss something? Of course it depends on the technology used and their personnel, so they should start with warnings and not hand out penalties until a pattern develops or the ISP demonstrates a complete lack of compliance.
Automatically scanning email and instant messaging attachments would probably be the only way to catch this type of stuff, but brings up the possibilities of false positives, and people being accused or flagged without doing anything wrong. It also assumes that these would have to be downloaded, how easy would it be to pass these around without having to actually download them through your ISP? I could easily send and receive pictures using gmail, without viewing them, and then go to a Starbucks, or jump on someone else’s wireless connection to download them. Another thought is that it would be very easy to swap pictures and movies through the mail.
This bill is similar to one proposed in December of last year, with one of the main differences being anyone who provides a service that would allow anyone the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications. Depending on how this is defined, it could just include ISP’s, or it could go all the way to including email providers, message boards, and sites like Myspace, Facebook, and thousands of others.
This sure sounds like one of those bills that politicians like to propose because it makes them look good, and feel good about themselves, something to get some extra publicity and public support. It also sounds like a perfect use for a shopping tool that has been discussed here before. Like.com would be a perfect tool for this, as it searches inside images and could detect images that have been changed or modified in an effort to get by such programs. It sure sounds more useful than a shopping tool, and could benefit children everywhere.
Wow. What an incredible waste of my money. I can think of many ways this can be bypassed. And since I am not terribly tech savvy I am sure there are smarty people out there… some of them pedophiles… that can figure this out. After this I hope Mccain builds a national database of spam emails so we can block those.