ISPs help in child-porn fight

Five of the US’s biggest Internet companies have announced they will help the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) build a database of child porn images as a tool in the fight against child pornography. AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, EarthLink, and United Online (which runs NetZero and Juno) have formed a coalition and together pledged $1 million to develop the database “and other tools to help network operators and law enforcement better prevent distribution of the images,” the Associated Press reports. The database is expected to be in place by year’s end, and the ISPs will probably scan images associated with IMs and emails sent by their users against the database and report offending ones to the NCMEC, but the details are still a bit fuzzy. “AOL chief counsel John Ryan said the coalition was partly a response to US Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales' speech in April identifying increases in child-porn cases and chiding the Internet industry for not doing more about them,” according to the AP. Here’s the New York Times’s coverage.