Major UK Child Porn Investigation Flawed 372
Oxygen99 writes "The Guardian (UK) is carrying a story on Operation Ore, a major police investigation aimed at catching online pedophiles. This has resulted in several high-profile arrests, such as those of Pete Townshend and Robert Del Naja (both falsely accused), while attracting significant press attention. Yet, the reality of the investigation is one of stolen credit cards, wrongful accusations, and ignorance leading to a significant number of the 7,292 people on the list being wrongfully accused of a very emotionally charged crime. There have been 39 suicides and a number of other people on the list will probably never be investigated. It seems to me this case highlights flaws inherent in the way law enforcement agencies handle evidence that only a small minority of front-line officers fully understand."
congrats you have yourself a police state! (Score:5, Insightful)
If only they could actually do anything meaningful with all this "order" they're creating.
Tom
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of the basic tenets of a police state.
There are laws to create opportunity, create a budget, make treaties, adjust punishments, and guarantee the little guy basic rights.
Heavy-handed police tactics are a hallmark of a police state.
Re:congrats you have yourself a police state! (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, because they didn't. It appears these people had their homes searched and ended up on trial because no one followed up on the evidence to see if it was legitimate
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
laws designed to control your behaviour
What other kind of laws are there?
Police are stunned! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, because child porn is such an emotional issue, everyone tends to leap without looking. Sadly this results in a lot of false accusations and lives ruined. Because these charges are so serious, officials must take more time before jumping to conclusions over any accusation.
But it gets the votes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone hates it. Everyone wants the government to "do something about it". Everyone wants it done today.
So very little thought is put into these projects and the more people that can be swept up, the better. That way you're fairly sure, statistically, that you'll get one of the "bad guys".
But it seems more likely that you'll catch an innocent, high profile person who's appearance in your project will reveal how flawed that project is.
Re:But it gets the votes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But it gets the votes! (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part is all of the people who are more than willing to give up liberties a-plenty to only slightly improve the safety of their children. The worst part is that they'll insist that you give up the same liberties and yet still their children aren't much (if at all) safer.
IMHO, this situation is likely to get out of hand if we keep going on the same path. For instance, poorly thought out legislation in Miami forces "sex offenders" (which can be a very broad term these days), to sleep under bridges because they literally cannot buy a home that is not in some form of restricted zone (too close to a daycare, school, playground, mall, etc...). As a result you have people who may have had some minor mental problems before being forced into vagrancy and the myriad of problems associated with that. Not to mention the difficulty in keeping track on someone who lives under a bridge. The very laws designed to make the children safer can in fact make them less safe because they've gone too far.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting... but does the law work the other way? Is it illegal to build a daycare, school, playground, mall, etc. near the home of a sex offender?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure about Florida, but in many states, if a daycare, school, bus-stop, playground, mall, etc. is built near the home of a sex offender, then the sex offender has to move.
Re:But it gets the votes! (Score:5, Informative)
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.
As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children,
the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
"
-- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, Publ. Houghton Miflin, 1943, Page 403
captcha: are you swayed by these arguments yet?
Re:But it gets the votes! (Score:4, Insightful)
The irony is that if they really wanted to make children safer, it would have much more of an effect if they monitored all parents 24/7 than Joe Random Sexoffender. A child runs a much greater risk of being molested by its parents than anyone else.
Yes, unfortunately it's a very emotional issue, and reason always loses to emotions. The same people who would march for liberty issues will often gladly ruin the life of someone on a mere possibility of being a sex offender.
And bad as it is, the reaction is way improportional to the crime. If you attack someone and cripple them for life, it's considered less severe than having sex with a minor, or even fantasies about sex with a minor. Mind you, most people who have had sex against their consent manage to lead normal lives. Some don't, but that's partially because it's blown so completely out of proportions. You're expected to feel devastated and incapable of going on. But even those that do get emotional scars are still not as harmed as, say, someone who has become paraplegic after being beaten up. Why should sex offense be punished harder than other violence?
Re:But it gets the votes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Your daughter is more likely to be raped by the guy she goes to the prom with than some stranger in a dark alley.
Your children are far more likely to be sexually abused by someone in your own family than a stranger in a car offering candy.
Your gun is more likely to kill someone you know than a criminal breaking into your house.
Seems to me that we're fighting bogeymen we create so hard because we're scared shitless that someone we know could be capable of something like that.
Skip back several years ... (Score:2)
There's always SOME hysteria around that can be used to drive a personal agenda.
Re: (Score:2)
But true to form, the media was more then willing to loudly claim he was doing something wrong, publicized his admission however minor it was but I have heard nothing on him being proved innocent nor have I heard that his credit car numbers were swiped. This is just typical and example of how this can ruin someone. I heard he was a kiddie porn watcher but not that th
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at the article; it's even worse, a whole lot of the supposed transactions werent even that, they were scams set up by the webmasters themselves to cash in on credit-card fraud. Apparently the police didnt even check enough to notice that a whole lot of the cc transactions were more or less batch registrations run from the same IP adresses to scam the payment service.
Re:Police are stunned! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Police are stunned! (Score:4, Funny)
I hate to break it to you, but the UK government is only just realising this.
True story: a couple of years ago I wrote to my MP (parliamentary representative) and pointed out that criminals, by definition, do not obey the law.
Several weeks later I received a reply informing me that "the government was aware of this, was trying to think of ways around it and wanted to know if I had any suggestions",
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You have to give us (Americans) credit though. We don't even bother with spurious or weak evidence, our officers just make shit up wholesale and abuse/intimidate 4 year old girls into saying whatever their sick psyche's want to he
Re: (Score:2)
You got that backwards. The stolen credit info was used by a few people who also sold Child Pr0n. Not even a major percentage of them either. It was association by remote proxy. The 'Investigators' (and it sickens me to call them that) might as well have used a regular copy of the yellow pages found at the crooks house and picked names randomly, "We found their names at the crime
this is what they want (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent insightful as hell (Score:2)
Re:this is what they want (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nice rhetoric and a few years ago I would have believed this too.
However, having lived in the United Kingdom and having been involved in a prosecution of an offender, I can say that this could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that it is very, very hard to prosecute somebody for child porn possession if they're will to fight it. The "It was a virus defence" almost always gets the case chucked before it even reaches a jury. There's this thing called "continuity of evidence" and it's a hard hurdle to jump over (and rightly so).
He who alleges must prove and if you can't show any evidence that the virus didn't put it there then the guy walks free. Remember, to convict you must disprove the defence's point.
The defence is always better funded. To see why this is so, consider this: wouldn't you be if your liberty and life was at stake? People well gladly sell their house for the best lawyer in these circumstances. By comparison, the state fights these cases with people just out of their pupillage.
In the case I was involved in, I was certain the man was guilty. I was willing to get up on the stand and testify to that fact. He should have gone to jail for a long time and the fact he still walks the streets and cares for his children leaves me sick in the stomach.
That said, it is better than ten guilty men go free than a single innocent go to jail. This principle is the basis of our entire criminal system. Even after this experience, I still believe in this principle one-hundred percent. If ten paedophiles have to go free to prevent an innocent man's life being destroyed, I begrudgingly have to accept that. That, as they say, is the price of freedom.
Simon
Re: (Score:2)
Someone uses something like that as a sig, seemed appropriate here
Re:this is what they want (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure that's really a shining example of justice in action, assuming the person accused was actually innocent (as were so very many of the accused in TFA).
Re:this is what they want (Score:4, Interesting)
Over here on the other side of the pond, it also doesn't exonerate you. A mere arrest bars you from getting a lot of jobs, no matter how innocent you were. You can, in some states, fight to get the arrest record cleared, but that's at your own expense, and is a time consuming process. And money is something you don't have if you've been arrested, lost your job over it, and all your savings already having gone to lawyers in the first round. So chances are that even if acquitted, you'll end up without a job, without money, and having to move a new place due to stigmatisation. I'm not surprised that there are a lot of suicides, even among innocents. That's worse than what most children go through.
Another issue is that many of the pedophiles, while guilty in the eyes of the law, never ever laid hand on a child, nor paid a single dime to anyone who did. Downloading pr0n from newsgroups or publicly accessible websites, and they still are treated like they have raped these children? I don't get it. Yes, they have a problem. As long as they haven't hurt anyone or paid anyone else to hurt them, give them help, not punishment!
Re:this is what they want (Score:5, Interesting)
The evidence presented was extremely slim, the witness statements all changed significantly, and several charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. In the end the jury only had a few charges left, but with hardly an hour of deliberation found my friend guilty on all of the charges. The judge noted, in court, that he believed the jury had come to the wrong conclusion and wasn't looking at the evidence, but merely reacting to the accusation. Because of minimum sentancing guidelines he was left with no choice and sentanced him to 25 years (parole possibility at 5).
After my friends family dumped their public defender and got a real lawyer he has a new trial up for scheduling soon. Assuming the new jury only hears the evidence not thrown out (things like testimony given during "play-therapy" and accusations from a person who's accused practically every man she's ever come in contact with of the same thing) he could be out of prison by the end of the year. The problem is, the damage has been done. He's been discharged from the navy, he's got 40k in student loans, 4 kids, and his reputation has been tarnished beyond repair. Any future employers who do a background check will never give him a second chance. He's trained as a nuclear reactor technician, but it's that's definately the kind of job that requires a background check.
Assuming he ends up spending the next 5 to 25 years in prison (and this the [state.ut.us] federal rape-him-in-the-ass, shiv-me-50-times-until-I-stop-moving, not-in-a-racist-gang-before?-you-are-now prison) he'll end up on the sex-offender registry. On there he'll be hounded by neighbors everywhere he lives. Neighborhood kids will pelt his house with eggs just because.
Assuming he doesn't kill himself inside prison (he's off the suicide watch now, thank god) he's not looking at a pretty shitty life whether he wins or loses.
For a good description of exactly the kind of thing that happened to my friend, read The Dark Tunnels of McMartin [geocities.com]. This is probably the best site on the horrific media frenzy involving preposteruous claims by dozens of preschool students against their teachers (among other similar cases about sex abuse and the like). It started with one small claim, then it escelated. When the parents asked if the teachers had done bad things to them they made up stories in an attempt to make their parents happy. One of the absurdaties involved a tunnel for underground sex orgies and animal torture. If this sort of thing was brought up in a court about a car theft, the whole case would be thrown out. Because it was a think-of-the-children case, it was taken all too seriously by not just the court, but the media as well.
The truth is, child testimony is too easily coached. The only statements worth looking at are the original statements made. In the case of my friend, the original statement was that the girl had walked in on my friend masturbating. He was in a closed room at night. His wife was at a girls-night-out party, and apparently he got a little bored/lonely. He committed no crime, but because a child saw it things blew out of proportion. Even worse, she was less than three at the time and didn't really understand what she saw. However, as the years passed her parents kept pressing if anything else had happened. The constant bombardment of questions led to her changing the story and giving the police a statement that my friend wouldn't let her play a specific video game unless she touched him. Never mind the fact the video game in question didn't exist when the supposed event took place, but she would have been two at the time. She didn't play video games, and my friend didn't have the console to play it on, or a T
Re:this is what they want (Score:5, Insightful)
It taught me something, though: I have nothing whatsoever to do with children, and actively avoid being in a room with them unless their parents are there. I used to work in science education for primary students, as a volunteer and tutor, but never again.
Credit card? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with your entire message, I just want to point out that if you lose a credit card and don't immediately report it stolen then this type of thing can happen. People need to take the personal re
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Flag your account (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
uhhhh, because its YOUR CREDIT. Seriously, this attitude is part of the problem. Who do you want to be in charge of monitoring your credit?
Re: (Score:2)
If it's MY CREDIT, what gives the credit reporting agencies the right to have it at all?
Re:Credit card? (Score:5, Insightful)
You point an inherit flaw that the government and businesses work. It is your responsibility to figure out if "THEY" gave out fraudulent credit cards, SSN cards, birth certificates, drivers license.
I would say, if businesses and the government had to pay for hardships they caused someone else they would not be so quick to shrug their shoulders when an obviously questionable situation arises.
No such thing as a credit agency in Europe AFAIK (Score:2)
Did you realize the title of the article included the two letters "U" and "K", juxtaposed? It means "United Kingdom", not "United States."
Re:No such thing as a credit agency in Europe AFAI (Score:2)
http://www.experian.co.uk/ [experian.co.uk]
-and all the others I can't be bothered to find for you.
Re: (Score:2)
My question is: What kind of "research" was Pete Townshend doing? [thesmokinggun.com] He seems to have used his own credit card and visited a site where this stuff was available.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the problem TOMORROW. (Score:2)
So the bad guys are swapping/selling LOTS of info.
Re: (Score:2)
They still arrest the guy who lives at the address where the bill goes (I would think). If the bill goes to the perpetrator, they have their man. If the bill goes to the identity theft victim, that's something of a tip-off to the person under whose name you're trying to hide.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Honey, what's this $50 charge from pedo.com?"
Most likely whoever was running this charged the cards in small amounts to an account like "Joe's BBQ" or something else far less suspicious.
yeah really (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Or not realizing quite what they're getting. Until a couple years ago when stuff that was clearly children started showing up, I always assumed a porn website advertising "Illegal Lolita!!!" material was recording 18 year olds in pigtails -- basically like the sites that pretend to be tricking people into having sex on camera.
Re:Credit card? (Score:4, Informative)
Lost Generation (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They also volunteered for Vietnam in greater total numbers and percentage of servicemembers than did their parents for WWII.
Their counterpart in the US, Attorney General Gonzales, is live on TV right now (unconvincingly) lying his way through his botched conspiracy to replace the US prosecutors with ones more completely in the pocket of the "Permanent Republican Majority" scheme that's turned this country into a lawyer's paradise littered with victims amidst corporate anar
Re: (Score:2)
but baby boomers were also the hippies then. that means much.
Related Cases (Score:5, Informative)
The inquest into his death heard that computer equipment and a camera memory chip belonging to Commodore White had yielded no evidence that he downloaded child pornography, and a letter was written by Ministry of Defence police to Naval Command on 5 January this year indicating that there were "no substantive criminal offences" to warrant pressing charges. But the Second Sea Lord, Sir James Burnell-Nugent, feared that the media would report the case and on 7 January removed him from his post anyway
In one case at Hull Crown Court last year, a distinguished hospital consultant was acquitted after it emerged that hackers had used his credit card on Landslide. The judge dismissed some police evidence as "utter nonsense".
careful in your replies folks (Score:3, Informative)
it doesn't mean that law enforcement should stop hunting child pornographers
you would think this is an obvious difference, but you watch the kinds of comments these sad events conjure here
the problem, of course, is shoddy law enforcement. but whenever something like this happens- the police bungle it big time, people come out with comments pointed against the very concept of law enforcement itself
Re:careful in your replies folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Accusing someone of accessing child pornography is just about one of the worst that one can come up with right now. It's the vogue crime-to-catch, and whether it's some prime time news magazine setting up these guys or cops running out to find every one of them that they can on the Internet, it's all about public paranoia. But once you've been labeled, I'm not sure there is a way out. Sure the judge might toss it out with prejudice if the case was particularly bad, but you're likely to be stuck with the stigma forever (He just got away with it, got off on a technicality.) and that sort of thing.
I think the proper way to handle this in the future is for prosecutors to be threatened with disbarment and cops be demoted or outright fired if they institute "operations" like this that go as wrong as this one has. Making the people who actually have the power personally responsible is the only way to assure that in the future they think long and hard before they make public accusations that they can never really take back.
Re:careful in your replies folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrongful arrest is nothing less than kidnapping and assault. Cops and prosecutors who make false arrests should get nothing less than hard prison time.
Re:i agree with you 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO it's not exactly a "little mistake" when nearly 40 people -- many evidently wholly innocent -- kill themselves as a result.
But hey, I'm just one of the ones with "crazy priorities".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And for the record, the police are in a position to to a heck of a lot more damage, and that's just due to simple incompetence. The problem is exponentially worse if your blind assumption that the police don't act out of maliciousness doesn't hold up.
evil is a worse threat to you than stupidity
Really? You do realize you're far more likely to die of an accident than you are from a crime, right?
Re:well yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
You, my friend, are mistaken.
Not stupid, not "sheeple", just plain misinformed. Happens to the best of us.
Unfortunately, being misinformed in this particular matter is dangerous (both to yourself and to others) so I feel obliged to add to the discussion.
For starters, please consider:
You have more protection from criminal action than from abuse of power (police or otherwise).
Abuse of power is criminal action, but performed by people who
(a) are less likely to be investigated for their crimes,
(b) are less likely to be punished for their crimes, and
(c) have more tools at their disposal to commit those crimes.
Corruption destroys a society from the inside.
To me, this is much scarier than criminal activity.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The police like to complain about having their hands tied, and other complain about our military having their hands tied... and when we don't, we get this and Abu Ghraib.
This illustrates exactly why it is dangerous to assume that people with the power of sanctioned violence over regular people will handle that power responsib
at least one person.. (Score:2)
IIRC... (Score:5, Informative)
There could certainly have been developments in this since however many years ago that it happened, but didn't Pete Townshend acknowledge having sought out and downloaded child pornography, claiming it was "research"? Whether or not you believe that, he certainly wasn't "falsely accused" in the sense used in the story.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In my mind Pete Townshend has had do deal with a lot more abuse in his life then he's let on to the public. I think his music, his book and even his "research" were honest attempts at dealing with things in his personal life.
I don't think he went about it the right way and I question the benefit of subje
I knew someone (Score:3, Interesting)
The story I heard was that he claimed innocence but pleaded guilty as the legal advise he got was that he would be let off with a fine but he would definetly be found guilty and sent to prison if he tried to fight it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First: to the eyes of the public, you're _already_ a child molester, nevermind the outcome of the case. So going to jail will only mark you as "the _convicted_ child molester". Maybe someone will make a movie out of your misery, though, a few years later. Woo hoo.
Second: learn to spell "Kaiser".
Re:I knew someone (Score:4, Insightful)
Why yes... "Research"... That's it... (Score:2)
Why yes... "Research"... That's it...
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, Pete (who has a parallel career as a writer) posted an article on child pornography on his web site before the charges arose [wikipedia.org].
Typical of Britain (Score:4, Informative)
The way they try to fix this is to create new agencies in between agencies.. all this creates is more paper work that never finds its way into the correct hands and causes more problems and tax pounds which could be better put elsewhere.
Britain is essentially becoming a broken beurocractic piss hole.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Having watched rooms full of English people feeling *so happy* and *so righteous* to be giving another 1% of their income per year to the NHS, I have to say if ever there was a national decline that was the fault of the individual people of the nation, this is it. The UK has got *exactly* what it demanded.
Seriously, I will never forget that budget with the giant tax hike for the NHS. The public really were literally *happy*. They don't pause and think whether giant IT projects with no defined results, bu
An obvious lesson (Score:2)
There is no crime so horrible... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Stolen numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, let's say that they found that a paypal account was used to sell illegal pornography. The smart thing to do would be to determine which goods sold were illegal, and if possible follow up on the buyers. What seems to have been done, instead, was to go after EVERYONE who bought from the seller, whether the purchase turned out to be for fuzzy bunny slippers or underage smut.
Unfortunately, these type of charges, and the revulsion the instill, tend to inspire an automatic assumption of guilt coupled with overzealous prosecution and an lack of desire to delve too far into the evidence (after all, if there are illegal images, who would want to be the one that has to sort through them all). What I really can't understand is that while the actions against the assumed purchasers of said material were rapid and heavy, the providers of the material were left fairly untouched.
Maybe it's just my point of view, but I'd imagine that the sellers of this variety material - especially those with enough resources to start a full payment network - would be much less than the seekers. However, it's easier for the police to leave those that actual peddle in and commit atrocious acts active, as it allows them to dragnet all the possible users. Bust the drug addicts and leave the dealers?
Police must be responsible for their actions (Score:2, Insightful)
The best example of this by far is the exclusionary rule in the United States. (I don't know how this sort of thing works in other countries.) It is rare for a police officer who obtains evidence improperly to be punished for their (sometimes outright illegal) ac
Suicide is painless... (Score:5, Insightful)
(disclaimer: from a US perspective)
Before a trial you are destroyed. Your face gets in the local paper. Reporters show up at your home and place of work and hassle you and your family. Your home is ransacked in the name of gathering evidence. Local politicians and big wigs claim it's a victory for the children and call you a monster. News interviews your neighbors who are all amazed and shocked and now they, of course, don't feel safe. They might just deny you bail on a judge's whim and toss you in a jail cell. You better believe that when guards hear "that pedophile pervert" calling for help to protect him from other cellmates they're not going to rush to his aid. You're let out? Expect lots of threatening phone calls and letters.
Assuming you're aquitted because you didn't break any laws, the damage is DONE. Nobody will ever see you the same way again. News of your name being cleared isn't shouted quite as loudly as the accusation. What a surprise.
Can you really blame the falsely accused in this case comitting suicide? It's really tragic how lives can be ruined just by pointing a finger.
I know if I was falsely accused I'd probably kill myself, too.
And under discussion currently in the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
And currently up for discussion is the UK is a new law that would ban fantasy depictions of underage (that includes imaginary 17 year olds) having sex. Here is an interesting link and some quotes from it.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007 -depiction-sex-abuse?view=Binary
In other words, the proposal discussed is based on no scientific research. It is purely aimed to ban a specific minority fetish. Violent video games is another minority fetish that has been under attack in the news lately.
It is all pure bullshit. Banning soccer games would be more logical, since there is a clear scientific link of soccer games leading to hulligan behavior. Of course, this doesn't mean that I want to ban soccer, but I am just pointing out the obvious bias of the legislators.
Just to point out that this isn't the same as the US child pornography laws, that explicitly bans images/drawings based on real children/photographs (which was a loophole used to circumvent previous laws). This law explicitly targets fantasy drawings, the most common type probably being the japanese hentai artform.
I don't. And I am pretty sure most hentai viewers/readers don't. Oh, and in case you wonder, I am mostly interested of the highschool based hentai (which would also be illegal if the proposal above was passed as a law). I fully support the rights of lolicon viewers though. This is a classic case of the "First they came for the Communists, and I didnt speak up..." scenario. They target a minority fetish because they can get away with it.
Anyway, What research do they base their statement on? Unless they have asked XXXX number of people randomly about it...and I doubt that would work either, because very few people would admit they had child porn on their computer.
The relation in the other direction may be more likely though. Child porn collectors are probably likely to have hentai drawings. That relation is easy to find, by looking at the computers of people arrested for having child pornography.
Finally, Don't begin complaining that hentai sucks and I should watch real porn instead. I can't stand real porn with their payed actors and actresses having mechanical sex without feelings. Not, to mention that the redicioulus story lines in hentai movies/mangas are light years beyond the stories in the average porn movie. Oh sure, there are a few exceptions of great scenes, but they are by far the exception. If I didn't have hentai, I would probably stick with sex stories (which I still use sometimes). And I am not saying that you shouldn't watch porn. I am just explaining why I and probably some others prefer hentai. And, oh yes, having real sex is of course the best, but that has nothing to do with masturbation needs.
Even more interesting is the way Google.... (Score:3, Interesting)
As another poster has already pointed out, this is just another example of thought crime and those who wish to use it as a bid to take more control over the lives of others.
--I*Love*Green*Olives
*Almost* 40 suicides... (Score:3, Interesting)
That night he slit his wrists.
*Luckily* another friend went round there the next morning, and found him barely alive in a pool of blood.
Since then, after several months of recovery, he's lost his flat and had to file for bankruptcy. And yes, he was one of the victims of credit card fraud.
That's just one of the reasons I've since moved from the UK.
Don't let anyone tell you the UK isn't a Police State - they're too blind to see the reality.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What do you mean flawed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm reasonably sure you have to act on your desires in some way before being arrested ResidntGeek.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This distinction gets a lot blurrier with CG and drawn porn, but from what I understand the cops tend to focus on real porn instead of the fake stuff. Otherwise you'd have to imagine a gigantic crackdown on things like the Tokyo Doujinshi shows and whatn
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What do you mean flawed? (Score:5, Insightful)
So in other words consumption is illegal because they're trying to target the producers. Well, since that tactic has worked so well with the War on Drugs, I guess it'll work here, too.
What's the Goal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Strike the 'child' part, and re-evaluate for legal adult porn. Does the downloader intend he'll be having sex with a porn star?
and if so, are they still pedophiles?
Repeat the above process - does the adult *wish* he were having sex with a porn star? I'd guess both cases are true - some of those folks really do think that, some would rather be happily married. Unless you go in for the whole 'adultry of the mind' or 'adultry against God' theories (then they're all going to hell, but don't suffer legal consequences).
So, if the test is to capture all pervs who think little children are sexy, then it's a fair net. If the test is to capture all pervs who are likely to commit a crime, it's probably too wide a net. I'm not sure anybody has defined the requirements adequately. But to equate viewing pictures with intent to commit a real world crime - that's a big leap.
That's not to say that they're not in possession of contraband or that they're not enabling the commission of crimes (they are) but that's a separate issue. Due to the high emotional impact of the various crimes they're often conflated, but that's not helpful for proper legal prosecution of the actual crimes.
The case of CGI versions of the above really gets to the heart of the issue, because the contraband and creation crimes aspect is factored out, leaving the original question to stand alone.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
if being gay is the desire to have male-male sex, are there cases when men download gay pornography with no intention of having sex with a man?
and if so, are they still gay?
Now, many parts of the world have legalized it and more (or less) accepted it, but surely there's plenty people now and in the past that either out of fear of the law, or fear of the public opinion, or fear of their family, or fear of their religion and so on don't practise what they desire. If you look at su
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Uh, no? Do you know what sex is? Here's a clue: it takes more than looking at a naked person.
Re:What do you mean flawed? (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, no? Do you know what sex is? Here's a clue: it takes more than looking at a naked person.
Re:FP! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Pat Benatar said it best (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, that's entirely related to the story. Don't you see? Anything that protects The Children must be done, no matter what the consequences and fallout. Even if it doesn't actually protect The Children. If you're not with us, you're against us. You perv. The cops are on their way to your house right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
to be fair to the Sunday Herald, it's quite possible that they've been asked specifically not to name anybody against whom an ongoing investigation is in progress.
I'm sure the name will come out in the future. It may even be released by the minister in question, as part of a Government statement on the issue.
If anything it's about bloody time the media gave a little more privacy to those accused but not convicted of various crimes. Personally I loathe the anonymity given to people that make accusations of r