Three ISPs Agree To Block Child Porn 572
Goobergunch and other readers sent in word that Sprint, Time Warner, and Verizon have agreed to block websites and newsgroups containing child pornography. The deal, brokered by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, occurred after Cuomo's office threatened the ISPs with fraud charges. It's of some concern that the blacklist of sites and newsgroups is to be maintained by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an NGO with no legal requirement for transparency. Here are two further cautions, the first from Lauren Weinstein: "Of broader interest perhaps is how much time will pass before 'other entities' demand that ISPs (attempt to) block access to other materials that one group or another feels subscribers should not be permitted to see or hear." And from Techdirt: "[T]he state of Pennsylvania tried to do pretty much the same thing, back in 2002, but focused on actually passing a law ... And, of course, a federal court tossed out the law as unconstitutional. The goal is certainly noble. Getting rid of child porn would be great — but having ISPs block access to an assigned list isn't going to do a damn thing towards that goal."
Block for all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Block for all? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to CNET, they are blocking all of USENET (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's far worse than anyone thought. They aren't filtering a few minor websites, they are actually blocking major portions of USENET:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9964895-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Time Warner will now block all of USENET
Sprint will now block all alt.* newsgroups
Verizon will now block large, unnamed sections of USENET.
So, whoever said "USENET will be shut down in the name of 'protect the children'" on the poll last week, you win!
Re:According to CNET, they are blocking all of USE (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's far worse than anyone thought. They aren't filtering a few minor websites, they are actually blocking major portions of USENET:
In a way I want to say good, since this was not forced on these companies via a law, they're going to be violating their agreements with their subscribers! Time Warner might get away with it since they're just dropping Usenet entirely, but since that's part of the service their users paid for and they're doing it so suddenly I could see some lawsuits about deceptive business practices. Sprint blocking all of alt.* is asking for trouble since there are lots of groups that have very legitimate uses, non-b
Re:According to CNET, they are blocking all of USE (Score:4, Informative)
Who would've thought the day would come when you'd have to use a German news server to ensure freedom of speech.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I recommend all newsgroup denizens with TW, Sprint, and Verizon sign up for news.individual.net [individual.net]. It's 10 euros per year (about $15) and there are no binary groups, but they do a better job of spam and sporge filtering than any ISP I've seen.
Who would've thought the day would come when you'd have to use a German news server to ensure freedom of speech.
Er, you pay for access to nonbinary newsgroups? That's ... let's say as smart as paying for web browsers. Google Groups [google.com] has been providing access (and full archive!) to nonbinary newsgroups for years now. And you can even post through Google Groups!
On the other hand, if you want access to binary newsgroups, I'd highly advise against any kind of usenet provider that charges any kind of periodic fees (I use usenet-news.net when I need to, and the $10 I put in years ago still gives me enough transfers to play
Re:According to CNET, they are blocking all of USE (Score:3, Informative)
If the latter, it's honestly no great loss. ISP hosted usenet has been effectively dead for at least a year, as retention and article completion has gone to shit in recent penny pinching.
I'm sure the ISPs are thrilled to have a excuse to finally kill it.
That said, welcome to the magical world of internet censorship in America. I wonder what's next on
Re:Block for all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This would be precisely the wrong reason for implementing a block on these newsgroups. From my extensive watching of television, my understanding is that people who enjoy child pornography will go to great lengths to view it [and/or participate in creating it]. Just disabling access to a couple of newsgroups moves the posts to other newsgroups, mixing it in with the adult porn that I like.
To put it in Slashdot terms, it would be l
Re:Block for all? (Score:5, Insightful)
If people won't defend the rights of the most wretched and most wicked, then they deserve no rights themselves. And that's what they're getting; at civil protests, at TSA checkpoints and now online.
It's not about porn. (Score:2, Redundant)
It's about preserving an obsolete business model [slashdot.org].
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:slippery slope (Score:5, Interesting)
So it's not a question of whether or not someone will try to use such a list for their own goals, but how soon that will happen.
Re:slippery slope (Score:5, Informative)
Re:slippery slope (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Accidentally listed innocent sites. Some place like Whore Presents [whorepresents.com] getting listed as pornography when it isn't.
2) Intentionally mis-listed sites. Somebody will claim that The Pirate Bay [thepiratebay.com] has child pornography on it (which it may) just to keep people from downloading cracked copies of Spore.
3) They're easy enough to bypass. There are plenty of free proxies out there that'll happily slap some advertising on your screen and then serve up whatever page your ISP doesn't want you to see. Or you could tunnel your traffic elsewhere to avoid the filter lists
These blocklists will be enough to stop some people from accidentally stumbling upon child porn... Maybe stop some very casual attempts to intentionally view child porn... But nothing more. They won't actually put a dent in folks who are genuinely trafficking in real, illegal child pornography. They're already well aware of what they're doing, and that it's illegal, and they're already going to some effort to find the material. Making them use an additional proxy or VPN isn't going to accomplish a whole lot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:slippery slope (Score:4, Informative)
On that note, things may become worse now that the UK Government has decided to start criminalising adult porn [slashdot.org](!). The scope of material that could be banned is far greater, especially due to the vagueness of the law (since the IWF will likely err on the side of caution, whether or not the material has been declared to be "extreme" in a court of law). There is also the point that unlike child porn, there is no divide between "extreme" adult porn and non-extreme porn (there is no legal or ethical consensus - it's only the UK Government that imagines this), so plenty of more mainstream sites risk getting banned because of a single naughty image that is too "extreme". The Register speculates on this issue [theregister.co.uk].
Child porn (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Are you sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do you have proof?"
"We don't need it, it's on the list, now move along, nothing to see here."
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Funny)
"Do you have proof?"
"Why are you asking? You must be looking for child porn! STONE HIM!"
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do you have proof?"
"Why are you asking? You must be looking for child porn! STONE HIM!"
"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"Of course! Why don't you visit the sites and check yourself? Oh, sorry. Guess you can't. But for trying to access a blacklisted site you'll now be on permanent watch as a potential pedophile."
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you're accessing adult porn sites. Well, some of them might contain child porn. So we'll block those too.
Accessing a site that's anti-Center for Missing and Exploited Children? Must be trying to get around our system. Well, guess what buddy, we blocked that too.
Oh, Mr. ISP, now you're claiming you can't block sites after you just proved you could? Well, guess who's getting sued for not blocking the Pirate Bay!
Yes, that's a wild idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo have already blocked email based on political content [truthout.org]. We can be sure that ISPs will abuse "porn lists" too.
The right thing to do about kiddie porn is to catch the people who make it.
The right thing to do to censors is to show them out of office.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This will probably go down exactly like the GP thinks it will. Just in like here.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as ISP doing the blocking, it's a matter of practicality as much as we try we haven't really put a dent in phishing sites or spam. Someone who wants kiddi p()rn is going to find it. the danger is that other speech may get knocked out as collateral damage, intentionally or not.
JACEM
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like the legal system? Or anything else?
Those public officials are accountable to the public. Last time I checked the Center for Missing and Exploited Children doesn't have any such public accountability.
Of course not but then the question becomes how can you stop the abuse. Can people the use the internet to commit crimes? Yes it can. So do you eliminate the internet or do you try and prevent the abuse by passing laws about spamming and phishing?
Yes, you pass laws that create a system of transparency and accountability. You don't allow a private organization, who has no such obligations, full control of the policy. If you can't see the difference, then I don't know what to say.
You said that someone attempted to put Pirates Bay on kiddie porn list.... They didn't so it would seem that in that case the system worked.
Only because there was intense pressure brought to bear because the Swedish police were publicly accountab
Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:2)
So, how?
Easy.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The AG got the companies because they had in their TOS a clause that specificly prohibited child pornography. Therefore when the sting operation's user complained about it and the ISP's did their standard "nothing" it became fraud.
The ISP's will use a hash database provided by the Center of pictures they've collected, blocking anything tha matches the hash.
Re:Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the easiest way around this is to create a program that automatically changes the value of a random single pixel in a graphic. Problem solved, crisis averted.
What I want to know is will the list of sites being blocked be publicly available for review? I bet not...
Re:Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Are you kidding? I want this technology in my fucking camera phone. Then I can point it at a chick and find out if she's over 18 or not.
Re:Not that I read TFA, but... (Score:5, Funny)
18? That's way too inflexible.
The phone should have a internationalization feature so that using GPS and an online database it will figure out the age of consent wherever you are, where you're from, and all the relevant laws.
Killing the Internet. (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see:
If all of these things come about, the internet will be like cable TV and there will be no free press.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice try, and let them try.
Re:Killing the Internet. (Score:5, Insightful)
You already see it's start with metered internet. Once they have that, they can offer you "free" sites. Everyone loves free, aren't they nice? Then they hike the price of visiting other sites to something stupid like $5/GB so that it's cheaper to buy physical media and presto - no more internet. They are already blaming "pirates", kiddie porn and terrorists. That's essentially a smear for their competition and anyone who disagrees with them.
If they get their way, things will really get ugly. All rights fall after free press does.
Mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
No mixed feelings here. It's A LIE. (Score:3, Insightful)
1) It's a blacklist vs. whitelist problem (like the one i mentioned about blocking pirated videos uploaded in youtube). It has no solution unless the actual content is monitored.
2) If the actual content is monitored, we're dealing with indiscriminate wiretapping - invation of privacy and constitutional rights.
3) It opens the door to outright censorship of subversive content. Good morning, 1984!
4) It still won't work. The bad guys (i'm talking about the pedophiles here, not the OTHER bad guys - the draco
What's going to be the first false positive? (Score:2)
Re:What's going to be the first false positive? (Score:4, Funny)
Let's go ahead and get this out of the way (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let's go ahead and get this out of the way (Score:5, Funny)
Won't Work! (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who has had to deal with Internet filtering systems like Websense knows they are problematic at-best. I can't imagine using an ISP that runs something like that.
It seems to me that if they know enough about the kiddie pr0n sites to block them- they should have enough information to provide authorities to get them shut down.
Very mixed emotions (Score:4, Insightful)
I would much prefer them not to block it themselves but rather cooperate with law enforcement. If the cops want it shut down, they can get a warrant to shut it down. On the other hand, the cops may want to keep it up for an hour or two so they can see the logs in real-time and knock on the customers' doors as they are up- or down-loading it.
As for newsgroups, if the KP-suppliers can't post in alt.kiddie-porn-group-de-jour, they may start invading alt.fractals.mandelbrot or some other group that has no tolerance for such material. That would be quite disruptive.
Besides, unless they are just plain stupid, people won't upload or host illegal material without encryption, with the passwords traded through other channels. Good luck to the ISPs telling encrypted kiddie porn from encrypted photographs of CowboyNeal's mother.
Politicians (Score:2)
sure - as soon as they can define it... (Score:2)
Worse than useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
All it is is scoring political points, and providing the illusion of action while really making the situation worse.
Re:Worse than useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think they coordinate their drop-off points and move them around, instead of having one group where they could go and get their fix.
This is stupid. (Score:2, Informative)
False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Insightful)
Child porn is a terrible thing, but it's virtually impossible to classify something as child porn unless someone has manually classified an known image and corresponding hash as child porn.
There's also the issue of determining ages of the children in the picture if they're not obviously too young. Who took the pictures? Was it taken by a 15-year-old girl's 17-year-old boyfriend, or did she herself take it for him? This is legal in some states/countries, but a felony in others.
I don't want to get into an argument about these specific cases, but the possible cases are simply too wide and a single government authority cannot effectively press its morals onto its people. Romeo and Juliet will deviate from the norm.
The Chris Hansen approach works much better because it shows provable evidence of intent/motive and catches them in the act, perhaps even literally with their pants down.
Re:False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not. That's what the police officers, and (maybe) the PJ decoys do. Chris Hansen creates a public spectacle out of it to titillate prurient interests, that's what's sick.
Re:scratches head (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, to play Devil's Advocate, the police and Perverted Justice are entirely capable of catching "pedophiles" without Chris Hansen's involvement. He is someone who takes advantage of underage sex for his own self-aggrandizement--do you see the difference?
To be honest, I'm a little squeamish about theses sting operations... essentially you're arresting people prospectively for a crime they have not committed. In some cases the decoy is over the age of consent, anyway, no matter what she may have said online--if she wasn't a decoy and the act had been carried out, no crime would have been committed. And you never know if the crime "would have" been committed, anyway--if the perp would have chickened out; if he was internally judging this to be a game of age play between people capable of consent, and so forth. To make an analogy, driving angrily to your ex-husband's house with a gun in the car is not a crime.
I suspect what ends up happening is that these people are so scared they accept some kind of plea bargain or diversionary treatment and the real punishment is the disruption in their lives by revealing their scumbag-ness to their friends and relatives. So in that sense maybe the Chris Hansen show really is the point and the law enforcement so much window-dressing. I don't know.
Re:False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Insightful)
Also men are biologically inclined to find girls who have gone through puberty attractive.
When I was 15 I wanted to have sex with older men...including as old as 21-22 (and even much older on on occasion). They wanted to have sex with me. So what? I hardly think they are pedophiles.
Someone needs to stop lumping all "child porn" into one category. A 20 year old man having sex with a consenting 15 year old is not nearly the same as a 40 year old having sex with an 8 year old.
This reminds me what they do with the war on drugs. Lump all drugs into one category, whether it be marijuana or crack cocaine.
Re:False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, my point kinda was that the laws ARE messed up to begin with. For thousands of generations marrying off daughters under age 15 was the norm--did the men wait until their new brides were 18 to have sex? Hardly.
So basically men HAVE the urge to look at child pornography. All men must--it's hardwired in to find a 16 year old nubile girl attractive. Are all you guys crying "Child porn is so awful!" really saying that if a hot young, busty and curvaceous 15 year old was standing naked in front of you, you wouldn't be aroused? So what makes it awful is searching for it on the internet? Or are we just talking about prepubescent child pornography? No body seems to want to make this clear, which bolsters my argument that all this is just another witch hunt used to control the masses.
Re:False positives, misleading true positives (Score:5, Informative)
Blocking vs. not subscribing (Score:2, Informative)
People confuse where responsibility lies.
Libel? Common carrier? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, if ISPs become censors, don't they lose their Common Carrier status under the DMCA, and put themselves on the hook for any bad stuff that comes over their wires?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
IOW, if your innocent website gets on such a blacklist, you certainly can sue them AND the blacklist-keeping organization for libel, provided the ISP(s) doesn't take steps (or takes way too long) to remove you from it
More of a non-event than you'd think (Score:3, Interesting)
Common Carrier Safe Harbor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Insightful my ass.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because this list of websites is being provided by a third group (CMEC) and the ISPs just accept it unconditionally, they aren't actually policing content. It seems like the same idea of spam white/blacklists-- "We
And the *chanboys win in 5...4..3...2... (Score:4, Interesting)
thinkofthechildren explicity in last paragraph (Score:3, Insightful)
Summarized in a phrase: Accept the mantra, just don't think.
Seriously, I can think of lots of priorities higher than keeping our children safe. Keeping our children safe means never letting them outside, never letting them take risks, never exposing them to the dangerous rays of ultraviolet light, never letting them go swimming, never letting them surf the net.
The proper thing to do is to take reasonable measurements to keep everyone, including vulnerable populations such as kids and the elderly, relatively safe without incurring high costs in terms of money, civil liberties, etc. Words like "no higher priority" indicate the speaker is either intentionally lying, or worse, not thinking straight.
What I want to know is... (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell do you build this list? (Score:5, Funny)
Government: It has to block child porn.
Me: OK, how do we define child porn?
Government: An adult and a child in sexual acts.
Me: Right, how do we flag that to block it?
Government: *frusterated* You block it!
Me: We need to define a process or this won't work.
Government: We'll make a list then.
Me: So your going to scour the internets for child Porn and add it to this list. Nothing automatic?
Government: Yes
Me: So what venues will you block, HTTP, SSH, FTP, Torrent, MQ, Skype?
Government: All of those things.
Me: You can't decrypt HTTPS or SSH traffic, how do you know it's child porn?
Government: Because we know those servers have porn since some guy flagged it.
Me: You've heard of dynamic IP's right?
Government: *MAD* DO WHAT WE SAY OR WE KILL THE BUNNY.
Me: Um.... do it.
The laws don't make sense for their stated purpose (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea is that we prevent the trading of child porn images over the Internet in order to protect children from abuse.
But this doesn't make sense. The laws making it illegal to produce child porn are completely disconnected from the laws that make it illegal to distribute child porn over the internet. If someone publishes indecent images of children over the Internet they are incriminating themselves for the former crime, making the latter one superfluous.
The real purpose is clearly not the stated one. It probably isn't just a naked power grab, rather a callous bit of populism ("Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!?")
When such laws fail, as the nature of the Internet makes them bound to, the same motives that caused them to be created causes the laws to be 'toughened'. If you had stuff like the DMCA that would make it illegal to provide any service that might conceivable allow a person to trade child porn over the internet, then you would have a law usable against any proxy server, encryption, and a host of other technologies that can protect your privacy.
I am not saying that this is a deliberate attempt to crush peoples freedom - more like a hamfisted populist attempt to crush peoples freedom.
Wrong solution, period. (Score:3, Insightful)
But, since we can't to seem to advance mental health care beyond "here, take the red pill...it might help" and public floggings are no longer in style, we do fruitless crap like TFA describes.
I see child porn folks as either mentally ill or just sick, selfish slime looking to make a buck off of the truly ill. The first group needs help and isolation from society until they are well. The second group needs to be publicly horsewhipped.
Censoring and controlling the Internet does little to no good.
Standard Form.... (Score:4, Insightful)
(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting illegal porn. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Perverts can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Other legitimate Internet uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop porn for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from pornographers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the web
(X) Open proxies in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in HTTP
(X) Use of protocols other than HTTP to distribute
(X) P2P Applications
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of pornographers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
(X) Getting sued for damages due to false positives
(X) Getting sued for damages due to false negatives
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
(X) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) I don't want ISPs reading my traffic
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The demand comes from perverts who like to watch the abuse of children. So what happens if you simply block their access to child porn produced by other people?
They go off and produce their own. Which means more children abused.
Far better to use the ISPs to track those who produce or regularly seek out child porn and then prosecute them or treat their mental issues as is necessary. Several jurisdictions in Europe have broken up "Child porn rings", arresting as many as 50 people at once.
finally: There is a new category of child porn that has started to pop up lately. Child produced pornography. This means 3 or 4 children, all the same age who take turns operating a cameraphone and performing for it. Then they send out the video to other children via MMS, Bluetooth and Email. The 1st such "work" that came to public attention locally was on the cellphones or computers of thousands of children before the 1st adult saw it.
How do we deal with that? Who do we prosecute? I honestly don't know, suggestions from the Slashdot crowd would be welcome.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
This assumes that the profit motive is a significant driver and that the non-commercial supply is limited or non-existent.
I have heard stories of people paying for porn on the Internet and I would assume that the same thing might happen with child porn.
The fact remains that the vast majority of Internet porn (of all sorts) is exchanged free of charge.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Same broken logic that fuels the anti-drug war. Same broken logic that fuels police to arrest johns and prostitutes. It does not curb it; rather it only makes it move and change tactics while wasting huge amounts of money and man power.
Find me one sane person that can justify the war on drugs and I'll agree you have a leg to stand on.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
cocaine is traditionally grown in tropic mountain regions with long growing seasons... but the 'preferred' cocaine grows in slightly dryer regions, this means potentiall
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
the fundamental flaw with that argument is that laws can change human behavior.
let's step away from the pedophilia rates, because there just aren't good statistics globally for this problem, and switch to something i can quickly draw statistics for.
Let's switch to homicide. Right up there with the world's oldest profession, homicide is so important, it's the first thing humans do, after they get kicked out of paradise (cain and abel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate [wikipedia.org]
now, let's see, murder has been illegal for as long as i can remember, i think that cain and abel reference is a good cornerstone for about when murder became illegal, in the stone age.
so with all out modern technology, surly such an old, such a fundamental problem has gotten BETTER hasn't it? well, the number jumps around A LOT the important thing is that per capita, homicide rates have not ever really made much of a downward run, they've been higher than they are now, but they really don't want to drop below 5 per 100,000 people, in the past 100 years of record keeping...
so now magically laws are 'supposed' to protect our kids from pedophiles when they can't stop 5 people per every 100,000 from dying every single year?
but it never ceases to amaze me, the people who think 'they're making a dent in crime' they think we as humans will stop killing each other, stop raping women or children, just because of a few words on a piece of paper.
if you want to protect your kids from pedophiles you damn well better have a better strategy than 'the government will protect us with their vorpal law + 12 against pedophiles!' that's all i'm saying.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if the person in possession of the photos is legally allowed to have sex with a person of the age of the person in the photo (i.e. you're 19 and have a photo of a 15 year old girl), then the data should be destroyed, but no one should be prosecuted. Otherwise, go right ahead with prosecution. The problem being there's no way to tell how old they were at the time, so obviously someone will eventually have to make a judgment on the photo in question.
So my suggestion would lead to the following.
- A (pornographic) photo of an 18 year old would be legal.
- A photo of a 16/17 year old would be taken from you, but not result in prosecution.
- A photo of a 15 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 20. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
- A photo of a 14 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 19. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
- A photo of a 13 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 16. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
- A photo of a 12 year old would result in a prosecution for anyone over the age of 13. Otherwise the photo is taken from you.
Granted, this is not a perfect situation, but it does reduce the risk of an idiot 15 year old having his life ruined for a photo of his naked girlfriend.Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We have the same provision in the Jamaican law. Both the 16 Year old age of consent and the deliberate leniency on persons close to the age of the "victim". Not like in America where a 14 Year old boy faces jail for having sex with his 15 Year old girlfriend.
Perhaps we both (Canada and Jamaica) inherited it from English common law.
Migrating the porn laws to match is pure genius.
As for telling the age of the person in the picture. Often you can't do this o
citation (Score:3, Informative)
Possession laws suck....
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't.
To me at least, the fact that the tools to produce pornography are falling into the hands of children and it's being used as such is evidence that we need to completely rethink childhood, adolesence, sexuality, and age of consent. I know parents will be horrified at the thought of their precious little fuzzy-lumpkins actually being as curious as they were when they were that age, but it's true.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I completely agree with you in principle. If children want to do porn, they should be able to. You need to protect them from manipulative adults, but this clearly isn't the case -- the children are producing and distributing the porn themselves.
However, legally, you're wrong. Every child who in possession of an indecent picture of an underage child (that isn't themselves) is guilty of possession of child porn. Really, that sort of makes sense. The idea is that the child isn't old enough to decide to act as a porn star. Whether he was convinced to do this by an adult or another naive child is irrelevant.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a case (in Florida, I think? Heard about it second hand) where a 15 yo girl takes an indecent photo of herself and sends it to her boyfriend. Numb-nuts shows it off to his friends, and the next result is that he gets busted for possessing the image, she gets busted for both possessing it and for production.
Let's also consider that in some areas, any unclothed photo of a child is automatically child pornography, including the sort that many normal parents might have of their children and never consider them in that fashion (kids in bath, that kind of thing).
Actually, according to his bio, Marilyn Manson tried to use such a photo from his parents photo album in the liner notes for his first album, and the label refused because they might get into legal troubles over the possibility of child pornography (which was precisely his point -- this was a fairly common, normal sort of photo with no pornographic intent, so what does it say about a VIEWER who declres it to be CP?)
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for example, am the proud owner of Nirvana's "nevermind" album. And so are 26 million other people [wikipedia.org]. (Don't click that link, it contains child pornography!)
I also own pictures of myself in the nude, when I was about one and a half years old. Some of those pictures have other nude babies in them, alongside myself.
I don't understand what has happened to this society. At which point did we all just stop thinking and handed in our brains to the mainstream media? It's not hard to avoid this whole bullshit. Just don't call it "child pornography" if no child was harmed in its creation! Oh, yes, there will be some people who get off on pictures of naked babies at the beach. You know what, I don't care! Just as I don't care if people get off on watching a 25 year-old woman walk down main street in a short skirt from 50 yards away. Do what you want, as long as you don't infringe on other people's rights. If someone is so keen on watching a picture of my naked self from a time I can't remember any more, maybe, just maybe, he's not actually causing any harm to me, or anyone else.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How do we deal with that? Who do we prosecute? I honestly don't know, suggestions from the Slashdot crowd would be welcome.
Given the parties involved are clearly doing so voluntarily, *no-one* should be "prosecuted for it".
And you shouldn't refer to such individuals as "children" - even though they might be from a legal perspective - in the context of "child abuse". It detracts from those who have suffered genuine abuse, rather than voluntarily engaged in completely normal "coming of age" activities.
Re:Child porn is NOT the problem (Score:4, Informative)
A common misconception: Child porn laws have generally been expanded - at least here in Scandinavia - to also include paintings, drawings and text, and non-nude photos "interpreted" as raunchy. But the public believes that child porn == abuse pictures.
Re:Hey its about the kids - Stupid! (Score:4, Insightful)
ITYM because some guilty people may be found innocent. HTH, HAND.
Regardless, here's why you're wrong: Blocking child porn will be ineffective, and Blocking child porn is treating the symptom, not the disease. Thus this is handwaving bullshit designed to convince people that something is being done about child porn when in fact it is not.
The base problem is that the way to stop child pornography, and rape, and all the other sex crime in the world (or at least, the percentage which can be prevented) is to create a healthy society, and that is not in the interests of the powers that be - it's an incompatible goal to that of milking every man, woman, and child for every available dollar. It's not just indifferent to the idea of a healthy society, but actually hostile to it; well-balanced people do not buy massive volumes of possessions which they don't need and will never use again, they don't willingly buy food which is non-nutritious, unhealthy or even downright toxic; they don't intentionally decide to purchase and burn fuels which pollute the environment in which they live. They do these things because they feel nervous, trapped, and helpless in spite of the fact that there clearly are alternatives to being a rat in the maze.
Call me a hippie if you like (I was born and raised, if you can call it that, in Santa Cruz) but happiness isn't derived from getting what you want, but from knowing what you want - especially when you already have it (often the case) or when it's available without buying into the crapfest that we take for granted and refer to as "daily life".
Fear Has Won (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely. Nothing so successful neuters an argument as seeing the proponent falling prostrate and begging forgiveness before he even begins his speech. The audience sees where the true power lies, and sides accordingly. No one is going to follow someone marching on their knees.
People are afraid. That's why they feel the need to profess their innocence. The child porn shriekers have succeeded in fostering a clima