(Friday, June 27, 2008)
The upcoming election for President of the United States may be one of the most important in this country's recent memory. Many Americans on both sides of the contest have strong feelings and emotional stakes in the outcome of the election. For the last few months, I've been reading along in a few of the political newsgroups ("lurking" is the term old-time Usenet fans might remember) to try to get an idea why people have the opinions they do, and how the candidates are doing in the polls. As might be expected on the newsgroups, there's a lot of useless bickering and name-calling, but the software makes it relatively easy to ignore anyone or any topic; this is one advantage of old-fashioned news readers over some of the newer web-based forums. So it came as a rather large shock to me when my Internet service provider suddenly discontinued its Usenet service.
For some reason, the main news sources I rely on didn't seem to think this particular news was important enough to give me any advance warning that this was coming. If I'd been reading Declan McCullagh's blog on Cnet.com, I might have known about it ahead of time. More details have come out in other articles. It seems that Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, did a study that found child pornography in 88 out of the many thousands of Usenet newsgroups. According to this article in Slyck News, the illegal images amounted to only around 0.25 percent of the articles in the 80 newsgroups deleted by Giganews. As a percentage of the entire Usenet at the time (as available on Giganews' servers), the "around 11,390 sexual abuse images" represented only about 0.0003% of the total. These facts strongly suggest that the real reason for the shutdown is something else entirely. The really shocking fact in this case is that child pornography can so easily be used as a weapon against legitimate forums for discussion, particularly political discussion, at a time when discussion is so critical to our future.
Although child pornography may be the final straw in this case, the real reasons for the shutdown may be more varied. Usenet providers have been pressured by the RIAA and MPAA for providing the means for users to illegally distribute copyrighted recordings and videos. The binary groups, which can contain pictures, audio, programs, or any other kind of file (in an encoded text format) do take a huge amount of storage space and potentially can use up a lot of bandwidth. But in any case, it would have been a simple matter for ISPs to switch to a "text only" plan, as many free news servers do, including the text-only groups but not the binary ones. Readers would miss out on pictures of cute kittens and local wildlife, but at least the all-text discussions would be unaffected. So the "copyright violation" hypothesis still fails to account for why the newsgroups were dropped.
The logical conclusion is that something is going on behind the scenes, and this may be the first step in a gradual erosion of free speech rights in this country, formerly known as the "land of the free". Or could it just be an enormously unlucky coincidence that Sprint, Time Warner, and Verizon all chose the same time to drop their support for these groups? A little reminder of recent history may be helpful. In 1996, the Communications Decency Act was passed (as part of the overall Telecommunications Reform Act). One of the arguments for why so-called "indecent" speech should be made illegal was provided by Senator Exon in his notorious "blue book", a collection of pornography downloaded from the binary newsgroups and shown around to the other Senators. Exon quoted a misleading figure from a Time magazine article of the number of pornographic images found on the newsgroups (which was later discredited). While politicians might not want to go on record as opposing free speech, all you have to do is add a little pornography to the discussion and it's a different story. What politician wants to be seen or portrayed as voting in favor of porn?
What if the real motive behind all this is an attempt to cut off access to international points of view? That might seem like an odd hypothesis, but think of how convenient it is for the politicians that definitions of what constitutes "child pornography" vary from one country to another. Thus, in any forum that may be accessed around the world, there are likely to be some images that may be legal at their point of origin, but illegal in the United States. With this first step, they've shown that even a vanishingly small amount (0.0003% !!) is enough to cause a panic and shut down the whole system. Oh, but it's only a handful of servers, you might think; commercial Usenet servers are still widely available. But for how long? Okay, this sounds absurd. Still, it troubles me that I can't come up with any other explanation for these circumstances that makes even a bit more sense.
Update (July 15): AT&T has dropped the alt.binary newsgroups. News articles continue to have misleading headlines referring to "child porn", although such groups are a tiny fraction of the total. A typical headline: "Cuomo: AT&T and AOL block child porn newsgroups" (Valerie Bauman, Associated Press). If you go on to read the article, you find that:
"AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said the company would disabled all those with addresses starting with "alt.binary," which is where child-porn images are often exchanged. But not all such groups have child pornography. AOL has agreed to block all Usenet newsgroups — something the company already stopped offering in 2005 because of shrinking usage of the groups."
Considering that only 88 of the thousands of newsgroups (over 4,000 in the alt.binaries hierarchy) were alleged to have had child pornography at the time, the weak statement that "not all such groups have child pornography" is suspiciously misleading. Yes, it is literally true (88 is "not all" of the groups), but it gives the false impression that a significant number of the groups might have had the material in question. It remains odd that articles like this rarely have any mention of potentially copyright-infringing material, such as songs or videos, which are far more likely to be found in the binary groups (and may be the real reason behind dropping the groups). The legitimate uses of these groups (such as people from around the world sharing their photos) are also seldom if at all mentioned.
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