How to Handle ISPs Who Turn a Blind Eye to Criminal Activity?

Sun Oct 14 01:45:20 UTC 2007

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007, J. Oquendo wrote:
> Personally, if I were a business owner, I would attempt my
> best to keep my networks in order and ensure that traffic being
> sent *from* my network to the world wasn't tainted in any
> shape form or fashion.

This is basically the clause for terminating service which may "damage
the reputation" that several bloggers found objectionable last
week in some ISP's terms of service.  You can propose many provocative 
statements, groups which murder unborn children, engage in illegal drug 
trafficking, corrupting the morals of youth, and so on.  As I said before, 
I expect next month some group will be protesting that an evil ISP 
blocked their activities.

If you want to turn the Internet into a broadcaster style environment, 
where only content the network owner considers acceptable to their
reputation is allowed, that's probably not the Internet anymore.
Just because a particular group uses an ISP to transmit something
doesn't mean the ISP approves of the activities of that group or
its content.

In the UK, ISPs helped create the Internet Watch Foundation to block 
"illegal" material on the Internet.  BT blocked those web sites from
all its downstream networks. That didn't stop the biggest child 
porn group in the world to date operating from the UK, and it took the 
Canadian RCMP to crack the case since UK law enforcement apparently 
wasn't aware of the group operating in the UK.  Arresting the members
of the group was needed, because the network "blocks" simply made it
harder to find.

In the USA, the Wire Act allows law enforcement to issue orders to
disconnect gambling operations.  Several other countries have filed
international complaints against the USA for blocking their countries'
gambling operations.  The US has also arrested the executives of several
gambling operations, and companies that assisted those gambling 
operations.

Out of sight, out of mind may help politicians show they are doing 
something because the voters stop complaining.  But trying to suppress
communications usually isn't that effective at stopping criminals.

On the other hand, what can we do about the victims?