Norway to block child porn

Starting next month, Telenor, Norway's government-controlled telecommunications company, will be blocking illegal child porn for its nearly 1 million Internet customers, Agence France-Presse reports. This is a joint project between Telenor and Kripos, a national law-enforcement agency, which is providing the database of child porn sites against which Telenor's filters will check all Web site requests. Telenor says there is no consumer privacy issue because "it would not log nor keep other records of those who attempt to access blocked sites, and that it would only block sites listed by the police." The project sounds similar to the Cleanfeed child-porn-blocking technology BT has announced it will soon be providing its customers in the UK (see my 6/11 issue). In other anti-child-porn news, Swiss police announced this week that more than 900 people have been arrested as the result of an international investigation into subscriptions to child-pornography Web sites. The Associated Press reports that 140 of those people were in the US. "The other arrests were in Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland."