During one of my regular excursions into the scary world of online news outlets the other day, I came across an article from the New York Times stating that three of the country's biggest ISPs, Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner are planning to block access to websites and newsgroups containing child pornography.

I suppose on the surface, this looks commendable enough, I mean polarized as the community of MySLOCounty is, I think we can all agree that fighting child porn is never a bad thing. Except that you know I'm about to tell you why it's a bad thing...

Let me start by saying that I am in no way advocating for child pornography. Pedophiles and child molesters are among the most abhorrent and sickening individuals alive, and there's no punishment harsh enough for them. The methods being outlined by the ISPs are what I take issue with.

OK, so what the ISPs are essentially planning to do is to make a list of all the websites that they can find containing any of 11,000 images that are commonly found on child pornography websites. These images are identified using "hash values" (think, "digital fingerprint"). These websites will then be blacklisted and blocked to users of these ISPs. Sounds pretty foolproof, right?

No. You see, for one thing, any change to a file changes it's hash value, meaning that all a potential site owner has to do to circumvent the blacklisting technique being used is to open the photos in question with any photo editing software, and re-save them to change the files enough for them not to be recognised. Or they could do the unthinkable, and CREATE ALL NEW IMAGES, which would be far, far worse.

The thing that strikes me as ridiculous though is, once the ISPs have the list of sites to blacklist, why not, oh, I don't know, ALERT THE AUTHORITIES? Forget blocking access to the sites, why not just have the sites removed from the Internet altogether? If a site is blocked, it won't take minutes for five more to replace it, but if the owner is in jail, that becomes a little more difficult.

The problem isn't really with the perverts that go to the websites and look at the pictures. Sure those people are scum, and deserve all sorts of bad things to happen to them. But really, the effort needs to be placed with stopping the people who actually generate the pictures in the first place.

Now, as an interesting aside to this story, it was recently reported that Verizon have decided to block access to the alt.* hierarchy of newsgroups based on having found child porn on 88 of the newsgroups. That's 88 out of the 100,000 newsgroups that exist within the hierarchy. In a time where ISPs are finding it harder and harder to provide the bandwidth they promise, doesn't this seem like a simple way of reducing said bandwidth?

Finally, if all it takes is for a site to be placed on some blacklist to be blocked for all time by these ISPs, what's to stop them "accidentally" putting the websites of their competitors on that list? It's a slippery slope that we're on here, and one that's filled with the potential for abuse. Once we accept ISPs blocking content in the name of "sanitizing" the Internet, we'll never know how far they could go.