Cuomo: AT&T and AOL block child porn newsgroups

Thursday's announcement covers AT&T Inc., the nation's largest access provider, and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, the third largest. They follow similar agreements last month with Verizon Communications Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc.

Although the agreements are with New York officials, they are expected to apply to all customers nationwide.

Like the three previously announced providers, both AT&T and AOL are going beyond newsgroups known as Usenet containing child pornography.

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said the company would disabled all those with addresses starting with "alt.binary," which is where child-porn images are often exchanged. But not all such groups have child pornography.

AOL has agreed to block all Usenet newsgroups--something the company already stopped offering in 2005 because of shrinking usage of the groups.

All five companies are now agreeing to eliminate child porn images stored by users on the companies' servers--something they were already required to do by federal law, which criminalizes possession of child pornography. Notification of servers or newsgroups to eliminate could come from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Cuomo's office and customers.

Cuomo said ISPs can't "drag their feet when it comes to protecting our children and instead must quickly purge child porn from their servers."

The agreements came after investigators from Cuomo's office reviewed millions of pictures over several months and found 88 different newsgroups that contained 11,390 lewd photos of prepubescent children.