With his heavy-handed crusade against online child pornography, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has already crushed more than a little free speech, all but destroying America's connection to Usenet newsgroups. And now he's eying ISP-level porn-blocking hardware that would run roughshod over the country's wiretapping laws.

As reported by msnbc, Cuomo's office recently sent AOL an anti-porn business proposal from Bright Digital Networking, an Australian company once accused of distributing spyware. According to the PowerPoint proposal (PDF warning), Bright Digital offers deep packet inspection hardware - dubbed CopyRouter - that would identify and block known porn images by sniffing every single file passing over an ISP's network.

Cuomo's office did not respond to a request for comment. But the office told msnbc it was not promoting Bright Digital's technology, saying it was merely sharing Bright Digital proposal with a committee of ISP representatives "brainstorming" new ways to combat child pornography on the net.

A coalition of seven big-name tech outfits - including AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Earthlink, United Online, and Verizon - works closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private organization that maintains a child porn black list on behalf of ISPs across the country.

AOL also received the Bright Digital proposal directly from NCMEC - whose efforts dovetailed with Cuomo's grandstanding anti-porn crusade early this year. NCMEC CEO and president Ernie Allen said he can't speak for Cuomo offices, but in a conversation with The Reg, he said he forwarded the CopyRouter proposal to AOL merely to get an opinion.

"What [Bright Digital] was doing came to our attention and the PowerPoint was sent to me," he told us. "I sent it to the guy who coordinates our technology coalition and is an associate general counsel AOL. I said 'I just got this. Don't know anything about it. Let me know what you think.'

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