Australian ISPs Required To Report Child Porn 655
rolling_or_jaded writes "As of the 1st of March 2005, Australian ISPs and web hosts will face fines of up to $55,000 if they can be used to access child pornography and do not refer the information to the police. Yikes. How on earth are the ISPs (and web hosts -- like my own very small-time and humble company) supposed to enforce this?"
How do they decide? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, if we're talking about pre-teens and the like then it's obvious - but how do you know for sure if someone is older than the appropriate age for the legal jurisdiction in which the download takes place?
Given the wonders of make up and photography and different countries/states may decide that 16 / 18 / 21 is considered under age.
Age of Porno-Consent? (Score:3, Interesting)
So this law might have significantly different effect there, considering how many sixteen and seventeen year olds own cheapass webcams.
Damn it, now I sound all creepy. But I really am curious.
--grendel drago
Re:With vaporware (Score:2, Interesting)
it's unclear to me what this actually means (Score:3, Interesting)
Solution! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Age of Porno-Consent? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not aware of any specifics relating to age of consent for photography, though I've no doubt they exist. I would imagine it depends on which state or territory you're in.
A new low... (Score:4, Interesting)
You know...I heard saw the Slashdot title on "Report Child Porn" in the RSS feed and I seriously was wondering why the editor was asking for links to child porn sites. A travesty indeed!
Since when has context been important, anyway?!?
Re:freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do you say that? We've had a similar law in the USA for years, and it hasn't spelled the death of the ISP industry.
Re:New jobs? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a free adult host. One thing I did was write a system to monitor the bandwidth usage of individual users and display the results, sorted high to low by megabits, everyday. The regular users were obvious, you knew who they were and what their sites consisted of. But pretty much everyday, 1 or 2 sites would jump to the top of the list. These sites were always newly created and they were always child porn. I would then go and delete the accounts and the files. The FBI, US Customs and local PD all told me it was illegal to delete, move or even shut down child porn sites. We had to rotate our logs 3 times a day, so by the time the authorities came by (on their own investigations) the evidence was always long gone. We hated the CP for what it was, but it also consumed huge amounts of bandwidth so we couldn't afford to keep it around.
This shit popped up every single day of the week. I used to roam the CP bbses which advertised the new sites and post stuff like "THE FBI IS MONITORING (the company I worked for.)" It would freak the shit out them.
Heh, I still have an old file cabinet from that company that is labeled "The PedoFile."
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Periodic Hysterias (Score:3, Interesting)
Definition of pornography:
It's not a legal definition, but I believe even the legal definition has something similar.
Re:This is SAD (Score:3, Interesting)
In my state they have actually ruled something is child porn if it involves a picture of child (any picture of any person under 18) and the viewer is in least bit aroused. The viewer is then guilty of possion of child porn.
At least IIRC that is how they convicted some guy who had some NEWSPAPER clipings featuring adds with minors in pj's.
Mycroft
Re:This is SAD (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:New jobs? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a set of 15 mirrored servers, which serve one site, where each server would collect 2Gb of log files in approximately 6 hours. I won't link to the site itself (adult), but Here [alexa.com] is the Alexa reference. It's rough hosting a site that's one of the largest on the Internet.
If we need the logs on a temporary basis (like for abuse monitoring), we 'cat
I like the sites, where we have the luxury of keeping logs, and it doesn't take forever to grep them for interesting things. My own site [freeinternetpress.com] is frequented by interesting agencies daily. That's all I read the logs for any more. The NSA and CIA visited on Feb 9th. We have a few regular readers at the Department of Homeland Security. It's no secret, We say "Hi" [freeinternetpress.com] once in a while.
Re:Maybe we can put the Asio racks to good use (Score:3, Interesting)
ASIO was purely an intelligence gathering organisation with no enforcement powers that worked with a variety of law enforcement agencies (Australian Federal Police, Customs, State Police etc). Recently it was decided to suddenly turn them into a law enforcement organisation - after a decision to be seen to do something about terrorism and possibly after the minister of the time saw a James Bond film. The Australian Federal Police is a fairly small organisation with limited juristiction so doesn't resemble the FBI either. It was actually formed some decades ago when someone threw an egg at the Prime Minister of the time in my home town, and the state police refused to do anything about it. It mostly deals with customs or immigration offences.
Here Here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:With vaporware (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, back on topic, if I knew that someone was downloading child porn, my first point of contact would be the police, not their ISP. The fine also seems pretty pointless, considering that its such a small amount. If its a major company like BT or NTL, they would probably make that sort of money in the time it took you to submit the report.
Don't demonise them (Score:5, Interesting)
US: Sexual acts depicted on women under the age of 18
UK: Sexual acts depicted on women under the age of 16
So it's sick if you bang a 17 yo in the US but fine and healthy to do it in the UK.
Also, the US proposed a law saying that child porn would include poses by adult women dressed up as underage girls (no dressing up as a tarty schoolgirl!).
Legally, kiddie porn is banging a young woman. According to what is used as the reason for all the draconian laws and rights removal, kiddie porn is screwing six year olds.
In several cases, the molester (not always male!) was assaulted as a child. They've been fucked up in the head and now, to prove they are grown up, they do what grown ups did to them.
Sad, but not sick.
Personally, I don't recognise kiddie porn. I recognise rape. I understand that even consentual sex may not be correct if the situation is such that consent is not informed (rape drugs, retarded adults, young children), but that is only loosly correlated with age.
Think about this: it used to be absolutely fine and dandy to marry at nine (especially if you were royalty). Now we say "you must be 16" or 18, or 21, or 14... The fact that the age of consent changes shows that there is a band where it's not right, but it may not be wrong.
For these reasons and more, I will not demonise people accused of child abuse.
Re:With vaporware (Score:3, Interesting)
No, this is worse. As I read it, if I were in Australia and someone who didn't like me called up my ISP and said I had child porn on my site, the ISP would be required to report me to the police, even if I don't have any such thing on my site. This makes it easy to harass innocent people.
It's quite possible, since I haven't read the text of the bill, that the ISP is required to verify the complaint, but that seems like it's forcing the ISP to play the role of investigative agency.
Finally, this law would make it easy for an unscrupulous telco, not that I'm saying there are any, to shut down small competitors. They simply flood them with complaints about child pornography. They could simply report every site handled by the ISP, forcing the expenditure of outrageous resources by the ISP to prevent having to pay out the fee for every site they provide.
No matter how you look at it, this is a silly law. It's already a law in most countries that you report crimes that you become aware of. Perhaps the legislator's energies could be better spent on funding intervention programs to break the cycles of abuse that lead to the problem in the first place.
Re:Fuck You (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't you dare tell me that we are NOT locked into a behavior because of what happened to us as children. It is very, very difficult to overcome your sexual erges.
If this is legit, then I'm sorry for what happened to you...but you are NOT locked into your behavior. You do NOT have to go out and molest a child. You DO have control over yourself. You're coping out and are a complete coward if you really think like this.
The FACT is that you are in complete control of what you do. If you molest a child, then YOU did it. You made a conscience decision to molest that child...and for that you should be punished. NO EXCUSES! I'm so sick of this bullshit of "oh, don't blame me, blame the guy that blah blah blah blah"...sorry pal, rationalize this all you want, but the fact is it's on your shoulders.
It's a tough road I'm sure. I'm sure you have really bad feelings and yes, it will haunt you the rest of your life...but think about the kid that you may molest. Do you want to condem him or her to a lifetime of horror?
Sexual urges are one thing...ACTING on those urges is another. Seek help and GET help...it's ok to get help you know. We all need a little help in our lives. And do not act on your urges. I wish you well.
Re:Don't demonise them (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard that sgant likes to molest children. So now anyone can demonize him/her.
Really though. When I was 16 I was accused of molesting my sisters. The time when these sick things were to have occured, I wasn't even in the same state. It's fortunate that I was out of town. A friend of mine and I were taken into custody and questioned without our parents or an attorney present. We were asked questions like:
"Are you sure you and your friend didn't smoke a little weed and decide to have a good time?"
My mother was out of town that week on business and my father (whom I was visiting when the alleged acts occured) lives in another state.
It turns out the people in daycare got it in their heads that my sisters had been molested. My sisters were taken by the police and questioned. Medical exams, preformed on my sisters without the consent of or even informing my mother or their father, showed no such abuse.
During the questioning, they never asked me where I was when these acts were to have occured. This all came up later. In the absence of any physical evidence and going on the coerced word of 4 and 2 year olds, they turned to the only other man in the house. They then started accusing my mothers boyfriend (my sisters father). Now I have a pretty low opinion of the man, but he's not a child molester.
See none of these facts mattered. I had been accused of molsesting children in a small town. That was enough to demonize me in the eyes of some of the parents of my friends. One of which was a juvenal probation officer who believes to this day that I'm a child molester.
Re:Don't demonise them (Score:3, Interesting)
But again, I'll repeat it here. I didn't mean to put accused into that sentence. But see how things as little as putting "accused" into a sentence can be totally blown out of whack?
being falsely accused has to be one of the worse things in the world, because in the eyes of the community, you ARE guilty. I certainly didn't mean to suggest if you're accused of child molesting I would demonize you. Convicted in a fair trial, yes, just accused, no.
And no, I'm not backpedaling. My original feelings about people taking responsibility for their actions stands....which is what I was writing about anyway. See how fast these things get run off the road?
What about the people who report it to the ISP? (Score:1, Interesting)
Think that's far fetched? In this totalitarian system we live in, there is a long standing tradition of shooting the messenger.
Would you dare to report it if you stumbled across it? Or would you just run a secure delete on your browser cache and move on?
Does the law require... (Score:1, Interesting)
- It will also be a federal offence, carrying a penalty of 10 years' jail, for a person to use the internet to
- access, transmit or make available child pornography or child abuse material.
You see, I would never EVER report child pornography if doing so meant being arrested as a child pornographer. If you report it, then it stands to reason that you've accessed it.I remember a case a couple of years back in which child porn showed up on Microsoft's linkexchange banner network. Regular people shopping for professional football cheerleader calendars were greeted with the porn. I hope you aussies don't surf web sites that host linkexchange banners.