Attorney General John Ashcroft is not having a good month. First, the Detroit terror convictions come undone. Then, the First Circuit rules that the Bureau of Prisons cannot make federal inmates do 90% of their time in a jail before being allowed to go to a half-way house. Now, a federal judge in Pennyslvania has thrown out a state law requiring internet service providers to block child porn sites.

Enacted in 2002, the law gave Pennsylvania's attorney general the power to require that companies like America Online Inc. block customers from viewing Web sites that had been identified by the state as containing illegal content.... Over two years, the groups said, ISPs trying to obey blocking orders were forced to cut access to at least 1.5 million legal Web sites that had nothing to do with child pornography, but were part of the same Internet cluster as the offending sites.

In finding the law unconstitutional, the Judge ruled:

.... [the] current state of technology meant the law "cannot be implemented without excessive blocking of innocent speech in violation of the First Amendment."

The text of the decision is available here (pdf.) The suit was brought by the Center for Democracy and Technology.