Senators OK $1 Billion for Online Child Porn Fight 529
A bill that could allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years to combat those who trade in child pornography has been unanimously approved by a Senate panel. "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote. [...] An amendment adopted Thursday also adds new sections to the original bill that would rewrite existing child pornography laws. One section is designed to make it clear that live Webcam broadcasts of child abuse are illegal, which the bill's authors argue is an "open question." Another change is aimed at closing another perceived loophole, prohibiting digital alteration of an innocent image of a child so that sexually explicit activity is instead depicted."
Re:thought crime (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly, you would think that $1 billion IS real money. Sadly, our government doesn't always see it that way...
Re:thought crime (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find interesting about that is that a similar law was struck down in the supreme court a few years back. I'm surprised they'd pass a law so similar, seeing as how it's likely to get struck down in the future. Does anyone know what the differences are between this one and the one that was struck down?
Politicians! (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, child abuse is illegal for one thing, so if they're broadcasting an illegal act, what's the point of making the broadcast itself illegal. I guess so the prosecutor can add another charge to the list and eliminate it in the plea negotiation?
Fucking politicians....
Re:thought crime (Score:5, Interesting)
It could be worse. In the UK our moral guardians are trying to protect us from harm by criminalising the writing of descriptions of violent sexual acts. Violent sexual acts between consenting adults, of course, is not illegal under most circumstances (there have been a few cases brought, but generally involving disgusting homosexuals, not us fine upstanding god fearing straight folk), but as soon as you put it into writing you'd be arrested and charged.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:1, Interesting)
600,000? (Score:2, Interesting)
But apparently there are 600,000 of them identified on Kaazaa in the US alone.
To me, that would imply there are probably 4-5x that many in the population.... which leads to a number of around 2.4 million people in the US have strong pedophile tendencies (on a low end).
Need I point out that this is a full 1% of the population?
Perhaps the approach of hunting them like they're cattle isn't the right one. I know the US is fully prepared to toss several percent of their population in prison (they already do that), but it also points out the concept that this battle is more akin to the "war on drugs" than most people are willing to admit.
In other words, there are simply too many to ever make a significant "dent" in the population with ad-hoc arrests and prosecutions.
So perhaps the approach is flawed?
I don't have any suggestions, but that's how it seems to me.
While we're on the concept of numbers, don't a bunch of wacko victim-advocate types parrot the idea that the average offender carries out 300-some assaults in their life.
With 2.4 million in the population if the US, wouldn't that come out to 720 million different children in the US subject to sexual assault? (o wait there are only 30 million of them in the US).
So one of the numbers is blatantly false.... probably the concept that every pedophile molests a kid is false. I would bet they run a whole spectrum from sorta good folks who hate being into kids... all the way to the sicko perverts who abduct and kill little girls in the night.
But wait.... Isn't the standard line in child-porn legislation the assumption that child porn creates real abuse? Isn't that the justification for some of the "virtual" porn laws and the "fictional porn" laws, etc?
Now seeing that there are 600,000 people with porn on Kaazaa (they must represent the stupider portion of the population who views child porn).... wouldn't that suddenly imply that either there should be more sexual assault.... or, the common assumption is false?
Whenever I see real numbers on child sex and child porn, my eyes glaze over and cross because they're all so contradictory.
But if someone asks questions they get branded "pedophile sympathizer"..... you can lose your job with that brand following you around...
So which is it.... pedophiles are drooling lunatics with no self-control? Or... there are millions of pedophiles in the US.
You have to pick one, you can't have your pie and eat it too.
Re:whom exactly is this part meant to protect? (Score:1, Interesting)
In Canada the simulation of child porn is a crime. So no matter how you make it, even if it is made only with adults, if the end result is child porn, it's illegal.
Re:Uhuh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, thanks to Dubya and Dick, you won't need bridges and roads for very much longer...no one can afford to drive on them
Ending a century of cheap oil prices may end up being the only good thing the Bush administration accomplished.
Re:whom exactly is this part meant to protect? (Score:4, Interesting)
It could be considered a piece of art, much like pictures of the Virgin Mary smeared with feces could be considered art, and art has over and over again been held up as something worthy of protection under that amendment. You and I might find it distasteful, but no one was directly harmed in its creation, so why should it be illegal?
Re:ridiculous straw man (Score:2, Interesting)
the problem with that, then, is that he/she isnt the only one doing that in america. pretty much everyone does that, or we wouldnt need pages like this [shopliftin...ention.org] to set them all straight on things like "There is no profile of a typical shoplifter. Men and women shoplift about equally as often.".
he/she's right though, about the society and culture thing. we're conditioned to believe certain things by our entire life experience, and as a logical result of that, we do. politicians and the ones lobbying them constantly get it the worst, and since they're the decision makers... the idea that people who posses child porn are more likely to molest children based on available data that X% of those arrested on those charges had HDDs full of the stuff is just as reasonable to them as the idea that since X% of the prison population is race Y, race Y must be more/less likely to commit crime Z than race A would be, which is a little silly, and the point the great grandparent was trying to make.
i've heard from conflicting sources during various times that whomever was more likely to steal from a given store, and even been turned down on a job application because i "was at high risk of shoplifting based on available demographics". this was a funny example of perceptions because they'd told my parents previously that they'd surely hire any of their offspring. your logic has to account for their emotions.
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that a minor can't sign a model release, there would already be no legal avenue to take a benign photo of a minor and make pornography of it. If the model is over 18 and gives consent, it is already legal in the US to make her "look younger" than she really is.
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't recall where I saw it, perhaps someone here will have a link...but some web forum(s) out there has artwork by users where they make porn "Safe for work" by painting over the naughty bits in creative ways...lots of porn star girls singing into microphones, eating ice cream cones, etc. Some funny stuff. Google "making porn safe for work", and you're bound to come across some of it.
Re:thought crime (Score:4, Interesting)
If indeed people in general are protected, then it seems like double, treble or more damages might be implied if a minor is involved. I'm guessing, although IANAL, that any protections would be civil rather than criminal, but if I had a kid and some sicko (adult or minor) photoshopped it so that my child's recognizable face was doing something suggestive, inappropriate, outright sexual or deviant, I think it would be appropriate for that creator/distributor to have to face some consequences.
Re:What a waste of money (Score:2, Interesting)
My friend's dad worked in a civil engineering firm and he was caught picking up girls under 5 by their private parts. They gave him a severance package and gave him letters of recommendation to civil engineering firms outside the state. 20 years later...last year he was arrested after picking up a 14 year old girl in high heels, makeup and with a bag full of sex toys when some snowbirds staying in the same motel called him in when he raised their suspicions. The girl's mother was her pimp she had a datebook that listed him as picking her up since she was 12. He got 3 whole years because the state he was prosecuted in still considers a 14 year old sex slave a prostitute. The guy I was talking about earlier that had child porn on his computer got a 5 year sentence. What is wrong with this picture?
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm going to man up and not post AC... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm single, and I look at a lot of porn. A *lot*. Nothing too deranged, but let's just say I know my way around the net that you use when you're looking for binaries. In my experience, real child porn is damned hard to find. Jailbait / "lolita" porn that features girls who are post-pubescent and legal in their home countries gets spammed to damned near eve4ry binaries group in existence on a daily basis, but *real* child porn? The kind that really damages kids? I just don't see it. The people who produce it have gone way underground compared to just a few years ago. You used to be able to see some pretty horrifying stuff in every group on any day, but that seems to have been driven out. It seems to me that the billions of dollars that are "needed" to fight "child pornography" are really fear-mongering dollars that we have to spend in an effort to pretend that 16-year-olds are as tingly and curious as *we* were when we were 16. If anything, I think that this whole campaign is making our (US-ian) culture even more damaged and sex-phobic. Do we really need specific legislation to outlaw webcam broadcasts of baby rape? Seriously? How often does that happen, and how is it not covered by existing statutes?
You're being rather shallow (Score:5, Interesting)
Paedophiles aren't inherently driven to commit crimes, because most of us have restraint. I like the idea of having sex with young boys, but I don't go out and do that for the same reasons that you don't rape women.
As far as child pornography is concerned.. a few months ago, I was staying in a country where accessing child pornography is not a criminal offence. At the time, it was not illegal to act contrary to my home jurisdiction's laws abroad (unless the act also constituted an offence in the foreign jurisdiction). While I was in the foreign jurisdiction, I bought a hard drive to use only in said foreign jurisdiction. I was legally able to browse without restriction (although the cache etc had to be disabled due to the strange laws of the foreign jurisdiction). Although there was virtually no "pornographic child pornography" to be found on the internet, it was possible to find a lot of posed images which would be illegal if I'd viewed them in my home jurisdiction.
And I can still control myself around children....
The problem with applying the "supply and demand" theory to people who possess but don't purchase child pornography is that they are not contributing to demand, because the supplier is not interested in producing images for people who are effectively "stealing" them by viewing them for free, for the same reasons that artists don't record music for people downloading it from file sharing networks. Supply and demand is an economic theory - a buyer-seller relationship - which applies to commercial sale, not products being used for free. Producers of any material do not want their material to be used freely, so an increased interest in freely available pornography is going to harm them. People will be less likely to purchase child pornography if viewing freely available child pornography is legalised, as viewing freely available child pornography will become the safe and legal option. Production of child pornography will therefore fall because of a lack of demand, meaning that less children will be abused by child pornographers.
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What I vaguely remember (Score:5, Interesting)
So they had an anime/hentai collection? Seriously, most of the main characters in anime are high school age (read: under 18), and there are frequently purposefully erotic scenes (if not tentacle rape) Does this mean that everyone with a Sailor Moon DVD is open to prosecution for child porn?
Re:ridiculous straw man (Score:1, Interesting)
Particularly, in a future where everyone has universal access to cheap, and powerful video editing, production, and distribution technology. No? Attacking a problem which is mixed up with evolutionary biology from a statutory and quasi-religious perspective seems doomed to fail. Not that it hasn't worked wonders in the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and the war on terror.
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thought crime, thoughtless legislation (Score:2, Interesting)
They don't. The way they apply the law, if the person in the picture could in any way possibly be a minor they go ahead and prosecute. Then it becomes the responsibility of the person who had the picture to provide the affadavit or other proof that the model was legal at the time the work was created.
What's more, such an affadavit might not help any more, since the application of the law has so widened that if the model looks young enough, whether or not he or she actually is, bang goes the gavel. And it's no help when there is no model in the first place (digital art, painting, etc).
It's a subtle, clever erosion of that whole concept of "innocent until proven guilty" that people like to wave around when they're obviously guilty of something.
Re:ridiculous straw man (Score:3, Interesting)
I really hate acting as devils advocate for this...BUT, what if said images are computer generated, NO real kids abused? Where is the harm in that?
I don't think that there has been any study conclusively showing that viewing kiddie pr0N causes you to commit the real act in person any more than viewing simulated rape makes you want to go out and commit real rape. And yes....some people get off on the real thing.
In this light..does this sound reasonable to you? Disgusting, sure...but, reasonable in cases where no real person was harmed? Today's laws do make this now criminal. Heck, today...you can no longer make a movie like Endless Love [imdb.com] .....just because the subject portrayed underage sex...which does occasionally happen these days....as in the past....
Re:alteration illegal?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's try a thought experiment. Pornographer #1 hides a camera, and manages to get a photo of a child masturbating. He distributes this.
Pornographer #2 is not so lucky. All he gets is photos of children clothed, not doing anything sexual, so uses his 'leet Photoshop skills to fix them.
Neither pornographer, in producing their photograph, has harmed his subjects. The harm comes from when the photographs are distributed. In the case of pornographer #1, the photo displays child #1 in a way that will cause great embarrassment, and could subject the child to ridicule or worse, and I doubt you'll find many people arguing that child porn should be OK to produce as long as the child is merely being spied on performing sexual or erotic acts on their own and don't realize they are being recorded.
But can't the same be said for pornographer #2? Will people believe child #2 when he says that the photo has been Photoshopped and he never did those things?
Basically, appearing in child porn is probably harmful to a child, as long as they are recognizable, even if the photos have been altered somewhat.
Also, note that if #2 is OK but #1 is not, pornographer #1 is just going to claim when caught that his photos aren't real. Sometimes, when something might not in itself be harmful, but it serves as a mask that allows people to get away with other, harmful, activity, it makes sense to ban the first, unless there is a compelling reason not to. And I can't think of a compelling reason for fake child porn made with photos of real children. I think we can produce all the fake child porn we need without using photos of real children--and that should be legal.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
and the accused rights (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You're being rather shallow (Score:2, Interesting)
Paedophilia can't be "cured", for the same reasons that homosexuality can't be cured. See this article [psychiatryonline.org] by Fred Berlin [fredberlin.com]. I'd actually like to know what makes you think that paedophilia can be cured. It is not an "addiction".
There was a time when I considered "therapy" for my sexuality, before I realised that paedophilia can't be cured. I did not seek therapy because I was concerned about the consequences of admitting my fantasies to a therapist.
I don't understand this statement. People don't just become attracted to children by watching too much children's television, etc; paedophilia is a fixed sexuality. I remember, for example, being extremely attracted to a friend's 9 year old brother when I was 12/13. I was attracted to boys around the ages of 8-13 then, and the age which I'm attracted to just never changed.
Re:thought crime (Score:3, Interesting)
As laws get more complex, though, the complexity creates loopholes which then have to be patched. I wasn't actually seriously suggesting we should go back to only ten laws, but if you've ever read Title 17 (the copyright act), the whole thing could be simplified to about three pages just by cutting out all the weird special statutory exceptions built in for special interests, codifying the exact rights that copyright holders have in a bulleted list form, and codifying fair use similarly. The result would be a much more easily comprehensible body of law that would actually create fewer problems because you wouldn't have redundancy, self contradiction, etc. as the title does now in several places, IIRC. Frankly, it's a mess.
Humans trying to exploit every weak point in the law can be trivially solved by always appointing justices who interpret the spirit of the law rather than the letter. Take the pedantry out of the law profession entirely and most of that complexity is unnecessary. The complexity is there in part to provide continued employment for the lawyers and in part because the lawyers' attempts at using the letter of the law to defy its spirit has made the complexity necessary, in effect creating an endless spiral of escalation, making the laws harder and harder for ordinary people to understand. When the law becomes so complex that it is impossible for an ordinary person to know when they are breaking it, the only possible result is tyranny.
Re:whom exactly is this part meant to protect? (Score:3, Interesting)
a dude is sexually attracted to kids, and he grew up ethically well-adjusted and has gone to great effort to suppress his urges, and he finds that if he blows off some steam watching, say, CGI kid porn, he has an easier time convincing himself to take the longer route to work that doesn't skirt the playground?
We can't even guess at how common or uncommon this might be, since almost [youtube.com] all pedophiles make a point of not telling anyone.
However many or few people there are who fit into this category, they're not going to disappear, and we have a legitimate interest in helping them to find safe outlets for their creepy urges. If completely fake, licensed-and-certified child porn is legal and readily available, I expect most closet pedophiles will jump at the chance to get their jollies and not spend every moment they're outside the house worrying that the FBI is imaging their hard drives that very moment.
I'm happy to take income away from real child porn rings. If someone can do so without harming any real children, I want to remove every obstacle for them.
Re:What I vaguely remember (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, how exactly is it that you can be charged with child pornography for cutting and pasting a childs face onto a young looking naked person?
I believe pretty strongly in the radical theory that if you sell oregano to someone claiming it to be marijuana and get busted, you can't get charged with selling marijuana.
Furthermore.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to see some evidence for your claim; the only studies in this area are correlational. Even if child pornography did "fuel people to rape", arresting people for possession of such material would still not be justified. Think about what you're saying; "This material may encourage you to rape, so we're going to arrest you in case you do attempt to rape". Do you really support such ideas? How do you feel about hardcore adult pornography?
As I have said, I don't look at child pornography, for legal reasons.