What to do about child pornography.

Usenet has been in the news again for not good reasons. Like most ISPs, Easynet run a Usenet service, and someone noticed groups such as "alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.12-17". On the face of it, it's difficult to see why ISPs don't just remove groups with names like this.

The fact I even feel the urge to write this is disheartening. Usenet is a very good mechanism for discussion, with some good and productive groups out there. Lately, it seems it's been hijacked by pornography (legal or not) and various copyright infringemnets. At least they have been keeping themselves within the "alt.binaries.*" section and keeping out of the rest of Usenet.

First thing to say is that some have taken these groups off. The only thing to ask is if it was simply a gesture or did it do the job.

I'm suspicious if these groups do actually contain this material. You don't get paid for posting into Usenet and each posting comes with a trail, tracing it's way back to the poster. Usenet is delivered to anyone who asks, including the police, with no obligations placed on the recipient.

Where's the incentive for a child pornographer to post thier material to Usenet? You don't get a reward, only attention.

Perhaps for advertising? Well, when we do see the police report thier successes, it usually in undermining secretive underground groups. We rarely hear of international advertising campaigns.

For all this speculation, it would be easy to actually check if these groups contain child porn or not, by having a look.

I hope you'll forgive me if I don't. Aside from the fact I don't really want to see what's there, I don't even have the luxury of being a famous rock star should the police catch me doing my research. My speculative doubts will have to remain just that.

But let us suppose for a moment that child porn is being posted to Usenet (by stupid people) to groups such as ...12-17. A clear step would be for all ISPs to remove these groups. No real harm done, as we are only losing child porn and off-topic material.

So what do the producer's do next? How about posting to a newer group? alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.21-71 perhaps?

Is this a group for porn featuring 21 to 71 year olds? It's a legal, but odd, range of ages. 21 is certainly plausible a lower age but 71 seems a rather arbitary upper limit. Perhaps its a thin disguise for that child porn group? The point is we don't know what's in a Usenet group just from the title, but the content itself. I don't know for sure what is in ...12-17 and I wouldn't know for sure what's in ...21-71, unless I had a look. (Which I'm not going to.)

So what can society at large do about this without taking the foolhardy step of banning Usenet entirely?

Given the volume of data that goes through a newsgroup, it would be too impractical to hire people to look at all the content and filter out anything illegal. Computers couldn't really help automate the process since the state of the art is pornography filtering can't reliably tell porn from non-porn, let alone tell a 31 year old from a 13 year old.

Instead what I would suggest is a much simpler approach. Usenet was designed for small text messages, and that's what it's good at. Usenet is a very bad way to transport large files, such as images and music. Web sites or file sharing networks can do the job a lot better.

Since computers can tell the difference between text and pictures quite easily, I'd like to suggest to all the ISPs and Usenet providers out there to just stick with the text. "Binaries" are huge files which take up gigabytes of hard disk. Let people with large files to distribute use thier own web site, instead of burdening you with the storage costs and the legal liability.

Let Usenet stick to whats its good at.