About 20 states have enacted or proposed measures that deal with teenage sexters. Generally, the legislation is aimed at treating minors in a more lenient fashion than if they were prosecuted under existing child-pornography or child-exploitation laws, which include the possibility of prison time and sex-offender status.

Since May, states including Arizona, Connecticut, Louisiana and Illinois have enacted laws that impose relatively modest penalties against minors who sext, while maintaining harsher penalties for adult offenders.

While many of the new rules make sexting punishable by small fines and short stints in a juvenile-detention facility, there is still little agreement on what the appropriate penalty is—or whether prosecutors should be involved at all.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The issue is nicely framed in a WSJ story today by Law Blog colleague Dionne Searcey, who shines the spotlight on a sexting kerfuffle that took place in a small Pennsylvania town called Tunkhannock.

Read the rest of this post on the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog

There, Internet service providers, and we’re talking all of them, have agreed to block access not just to sites and newsgroups alleged to contain child pornography, but to those alleged to feature materials promoting terrorism or racial hatred as well.

“We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of child pornography,” Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in a speech today. “We have come to an agreement: access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer.” And then, pledging her support for the “fundamental liberty that is Internet access,” she added: “This is not a question of creating a Big Brother on the Internet.”

Well, not yet anyway.

There, Internet service providers, and we’re talking all of them, have agreed to block access not just to sites and newsgroups alleged to contain child pornography, but to those alleged to feature materials promoting terrorism or racial hatred as well.

“We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of child pornography,” Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in a speech today. “We have come to an agreement: access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer.” And then, pledging her support for the “fundamental liberty that is Internet access,” she added: “This is not a question of creating a Big Brother on the Internet.”

Well, not yet anyway.

Prodded into action by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S) and Time Warner Cable (TWX) have agreed to block Web sites identified by Cuomo as ones that disseminate child pornography. They’ve also agreed to restrict access nationwide to most, and in the case of Time Warner Cable all, of Usenet’s discussion groups, most of which are not repositories of illegal material. To repeat, Time Warner will now block all of USENET.

“It’s going to make a significant difference,” Cuomo said of the agreement. “It’s like the issue of drugs. You can attack the users or the suppliers. This is turning off the faucet. Does it solve the problem? No. But is it a major step forward? Yes. And it’s ongoing. No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on the Internet, but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with law enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act, we deem you responsible to an extent. This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe.”

Of course. A noble effort, this curtailing of access to child pornography. It would just be unfortunate if it became the first step in widespread Internet censorship.