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The hypocrisy of avowed liberals with regard to censorship makes a good case for libertarianism. Libertarians reject censorship of material sympathetic to Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan, or censorship of politically incorrect speech on college campuses, for the same reason they reject censorship of pornography: Adults have the absolute right to read, see and hear whatever they choose. Child pornography is, as you point out, a special case. When real children are abused, that's where the law comes in. But if we criminalize even the private possession of computer-generated pornographic images of children, where does this slippery slope lead us? What about pornographic drawings of children? What about written descriptions? What about a book like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which is universally considered a literary classic? The idea that normal people may turn into pedophiles simply because of the availability of kiddie porn is, to put it mildy, simply preposterous. Do people become murderers after reading detective novels? And if "certain kinds of stimuli" are "reprehensible and corrupting," then how do we know that the censors themselves aren't corrupted by constant exposure to "filth"? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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Let's try a different spin. The three ISPs want to get out of the Usenet business. The load of binaries (mostly copyright violations) is tremendous. Dropping the binaries would cause some customers to switch and that was just unacceptable, They couldn't all decide to do it at same time since that would bring the illusion of collusion. So what to do? Answer: find a way to force the government to shut us down (for the children, of course). All you need is a willing government type who isn't afraid to look like an overbearing jerk. .... and as they say, the rest is history. The ruling will probably not stand a Constitutional challenge - how can a New York state ruling legitimately prevent my access to the Usenet in California - but the precedent will be set to have government "force" companies to do what they want to while shrugging their collective shoulders and saying "Can't help it, it's the law"!

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Ms. Charen would have done well to research the matter before fitting this into her usual brainless template of feigned surprise at the defense of "moral virtue" expressed by- Oh my God!- a "libb-uh-wuhl." This is the act of a grandstanding fool of an Attorney General named Andrew Cuomo. Fresh from his brilliant stint at HUD, which left thousands of foreclosures in the aftermath of his stewardship. Mr. Cuomo is now aiming for the governorship, and doing it loudly. So he came up with this rubbish. There were 88 sites found on the Usenet system with child pornography. THERE ARE OVER 100,000 USENET SITES. Used by millions of people who are not perverts, covering ever subject from biblical archeology to cooking recipes. They have now been silenced, and Ms. Charen squeals with delight. Ms. Charen, in her usual parroting tone, may cheer this censorship. However, it is the intellectual equivalent of shutting down the phone system because someone was heard using a four letter word in a conversation. But leave it to Ms. Charen to make it a moral issue and delight in infantile glee over this. We in the tech community are appalled at this move. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080616-alt-blocked-verizon-blocks-access-to-whole-usenet-hierarchy.html