The law requires techies who encounter what appears to be child pornography while working with a computer to report the name and address of the owner or person in possession of the computer to police.
While penalties for non-compliance have yet to be determined, the measure has drawn criticism from civil libertarians and information technology professionals.
"It deputizes private individuals to perform public functions," says Chris Hoofnagel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Very quickly, someone can be publicly accused of a very stigmatizing crime."
In recent years, there have been several well-publicized cases of parents being falsely accused of child pornography after photo- finishers reported nude pictures of their children.
"I applaud legislators' intent, but they didn't understand the real issues involved," says Parry Aftab, a lawyer who heads Cyberangels, an organization that fights online child pornography. Aftab says that reporting mandates must include educational programs to help technicians identify child pornography correctly and correctly handle the potential evidence. "This is going to start witch hunts all over the place," says Aftab.
Some ultimately false prosecutions are a price Bruce Taylor, chief counsel for the National Law Center for Children and Families, is willing to pay to combat child abuse. Taylor says reporting mandates for photo labs were effective in combating child pornography in the 1980s. "It's an awful process, but the only method we have in a democracy to determine whether something was in fact, illegal," he says.
