While welcoming any form of constructive method to filter out child pornography, Satellite Data Networks, a local Internet Service Provider (ISP), claims that it is not humanly or technologically probable for an ISP to stop this activity, aside from entering a freedom of speech infringement.
This follows last week's press announcement that the South African Police has new legislation regarding ISPs as accessories after the fact, if the bandwidth they provide is used to view child pornography.
The company feels strongly regarding the child porn issue and undertakes to conform to the local laws, particularly in this respect.
Omar Y Jhavary, Network Services Consultant at SDN explains that it is virtually impossible for an ISP to monitor or control Internet users from using the bandwidth they provide to view sites. "Firstly, because there are so many child pornography sites that are constantly changing names and sites, due to the illegal nature of them, that they unfortunately cannot keep track." According to him the best software in the world cannot sufficiently block out these sites. This was recently highlighted on CNN, where, when trying to filter out child porn, a software package mistakenly filtered out innocent sites.
The only real method of combat is to hamper child porn site access through newsfeeds, a service that ISPs provide and that SDN provides to educational institutes around South Africa. Jhavary, clarifies, "Childporn is filtered out of the SDN newfeeds from the USA, in an effort to halt all viewing activity." Additionally SDN limits clients from hosting childporn sites as stated in all SDN contracts.
"There is legislation being put into place in countries such as the US to stop child porn from being accessible but these are all in the beginning stages and have sadly not yet shown success without hampering freedom of speech clauses," he adds.
SDN advises clients that want to hamper child pornography access on their networks to invest in an ISP that adheres to the laws and makes efforts to filter child pornography access or to utilise a software solution to control this, rather than look to law enforcing organisations to combat it.
In conclusion, Jhavary says SDN supports all endeavours to bring access to child pornography to an end and hopes that in the future this will be also be motivated from the user aspect!
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