The Supreme Court is considering a case today that will likely decide the fate of yet another law aimed at controlling child pornography. The specifics of the case are related to an esoteric aspect of the law — they are trying to determine what is meant by pandering — but it got me thinking about the most difficult problem surrounding this issue: defining what exactly child pornography is.

While it may seem like the distinction between adult pornography and child pornography should be easily defined, in practice, it’s actually very difficult. The individuals engaged in creating this gruesome stuff are expert at walking very thin lines and skirting attempts at legal definitions.

Congress has struggled mightily with this problem. In fact, it’s the core objection raised by the defense to the statute that the Court is considering today. The law is extremely broad — the defense argues that it could be construed to cover promotional materials for the film American Beauty or the novel Lolita. The prosecution contends that the law will only be used to prosecute the “real” stuff, which can be determined by common sense, and therefore doesn’t need to be spelled out in the law.

This is an issue that we here at 8e6 deal with directly, because we are one of the few web filtering vendors that makes the distinction between adult pornography and child pornography. The folks that care deeply about web filtering (like K-12 schools) think this distinction is important, so we provide separate categories. Of our major competitors, only Lightspeed also makes the distinction; Websense, Surf Control, Secure Computing, St. Bernard and Blue Coat do not.

Most of these vendors shy away from this difficult distinction because of the ensuing legal issues. You fire an employee for viewing adult pornography. But you might prosecute an employee for viewing child pornography, especially if that employee is a teacher! If the web filtering vendor’s categorization is incorrect, and the customer wants to pursue legal action, then the vendor has wasted that customer’s valuable time and money by raising an unnecessary alarm.

Earlier this year we teamed up with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to make our Child Pornography category bulletproof. The IWF sets very clear standards for what child pornography is, and they maintain a list of sites that is human verified and regularly reverified. Almost all of our competitors are IWF members, but I can’t speak to their integration with the data.

We do two things with the IWF:

(1) Their list is our Child Pornography category. If the IWF adds a URL to its list, it goes into our database. If the IWF removes a URL from its list, it comes out of our database.

If you see a hit for child pornography in your reports, then you have something actionable.

(2) If any 8e6 staff member or automated tool identifies a site as possible child pornography, our backend systems automatically send it to the IWF’s email hotline. While the IWF is reviewing the site, it goes into our database in the regular Pornography category.

Our goal is to all but eliminate false positives while still giving our customers actionable data. Some of our customers are extremely passionate about this issue. Others aren’t — we actually lost a sale once when an eval box showed child porn hits made by one of the prospect’s executives. It’s part of our ongoing business strategy to support those passionate customers above making every sale.

Tags: 8e6 Database, child porn, IWF

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm and is filed under 8e6 Database. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.