The New York Times Saul Hansell has a piece today about a joint effort by leading online portals and ISPs to fight child prnography. (Note: Our web hoster, being the good citizen that it is, bars any customer from posting any items that deal with certain topics — hence, the * in the word prn. Given that the word p*rn is in the URL for Hansell’s piece, the hyperlink above doesn’t connect directly to Hansell’s article.)
AOL, Yahoo, EarthLink, Microsoft and United Online have formed a group that will pay $1 million for a new project by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to develop systems that help law enforcement identify child exploitation on the Internet. Initiative number one: create a database that helps identify unseemly images of children sent by email.
The announcement is timed to coincide with two days of hearings by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The announcement also follows a request by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez that Internet companies retain data that can help law enforcement catch purveyors of child p*rn.
The online companies are reluctant to amass the mounds of user data requested and my guess is that they’re hoping this initiative will head off any further demands for this kind of data storage.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:41 AM|Comments(0)
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