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Comments: 663 +- Your Rights Online: US Intensifies Fight Against Child Pornography on Saturday April 22 2006, @10:32PM
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ScuttleMonkey
on Saturday April 22 2006, @10:32PM
from the embarrassing-repositories dept.
from the embarrassing-repositories dept.
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usa
TechnoGuyRob writes "BBC News is reporting that the Bush administration has recently stepped up its measures against child pornography. From the article 'Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more sadistic, using younger and younger children. [...] Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.'"
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Your Rights Online: The Slippery Legal Slope of Cartoon Porn 933 comments
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Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
but come on.
When will the think of the children bullshit stop?
It's obvious why they want all this data retention, and it AINT child porn.
dataveilance...
oh, and btw
FIRST POST!
Re:Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Person 1: You! You're against the exploitation of children in child pornography, right?
Person 2: You bet I am!
Person 1: Then you'll sign a petition in support of this bill that turns the United States into a police state?
Person 2: Heck no! I'm against police states, too.
Person 1: Then you support child porn?
Person 2: Didn't I just say that I don't?
Person 1: But you won't sign my petition! Look, you're either with me or you're with the kiddie-porn photographers.
Person 2: But there's probably more sane ways to go about-
Person 1: Bah! It's bleeding-heart liberals like you that make this country full of kiddie porn makers, potheads, and atheists! Go back to Soviet Russia, you commie pinko!
Person 2: But-
Person 1: EVERYONE! This man supports kiddie porn! Let's think of the children and BURN HIM!!
(Hordes of angry people tie Person 2 to a stake and light him on fire. Person 2 burns to death.)
Person 1: (Turns to another passerby) You, sir! You're against the exploitation etc. etc.
And so on.
(Footnote: The above may not be entirely accurate. Please do not lynch, behead, or negative-moderate the Author due to thoughtless ad-hominems. I swear, I never meant to insult anyone. Well, except maybe furries. I hate furries.)
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Re:Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
While this might be hyperbolic (for now!) it is not by any means a troll, and is actually an excellent way of summing up the situation. Never have my points when I need them, someone correct this?
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So you hate furries eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Person 1: You! You're against furries and their furry pornography, right?
You: Yeah, lets create a police state to hunt them down.
All you got to know is what buttons to press. For some it is child porn. For others it is furry porn. Whatever works to get you to sign up for a police state.
Please note that I understand the author is making a sorta joke with his furries comment BUT the old fact remains. Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom. Better people then me said it better. Read books to learn what freedom really means. (Cause you sure as hell aren't going to experience it anytime soon in this world.)
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Re:Great.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only answer to these poeple is to be against them. They have it exaclty right. These people are intolerant and power-greedy and want to dominate everybody. Civilisation as a whole benefits if such people are neutralised and put in a place where they cannot cause damage. A cell on that certain island sounds like a good solution.
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One wonders (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it would be easier to protect civil liberties from false choice fallacies if we could say something like "I am opposed to the Bush Administration child pornography plan, because I support this other, superior strategy for fighting child pornography instead".
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Re:One wonders (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not entirely sure the ones that survive are the ones that got the better deal.
Virtually all children who are molested are molested by their parents and step-parents, not by strangers on the internet.
Okay. If you're right, let's concentrate on that then.
If the real problem in protecting children from predators or child pornographers is family or acquaintences and not random scary internet people, how can we take steps to combat that problem without resorting to passing globally-invasive internet legislation just to make it look like we're doing something?
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Re:One wonders (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, bring up the idea of telling 2nd-graders about sex organs (even if you aren't talking about sex in any way), and some parents are going to freak the hell out.
It's been hard enough this century to get decent education about safe sex into high schools.
Some of the reason we have so many problems in this country is that it's "socially inapproriate" to talk about some sexual topics, in fact, most of them. If it wasn't such a big deal if kids said things like "my penis itches" in public, then maybe kids wouldn't be afraid to say things like "daddy touched my penis funny" to their teacher, even if daddy threatens them.
Education should almost always be the first step in trying to fix any social problem. You can't just turn the country into a police state or throw everybody in jail in order to "fix" a social problem. Social problems are things that are wrong with society; they're things wrong with people's minds. Supervision and lock-up aren't the most effective tools for repairing damaged psychologies.
And don't doubt children's abilities to protect themselves (but don't DEPEND on those abilities.. it's still the adults' job to fulfill some sort of guardian role, even if we teach kids how to take better care of themselves, too).
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Re:One wonders (Score:5, Informative)
Citation, please. And "molested and killed" is unquestionably a poor metric, since I personally know two people who were molested, and not killed, by strangers. And I don't know very many people.
And on top of that we can add in the figures for child sex trafficking [rutgers.edu], for which the US has allegedly become one of the largest markets.
--
Dum de dum.
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Re:One wonders (Score:5, Insightful)
I dated a girl shortly after high school who had been molested by a family member. She was a really sweet girl, and I adored her, but she was just too emotionally broken for me to heal, so in the end, I had to walk away. That experience broke my heart in ways I never imagined possible. I've seen first-hand what child molestation can do, and I do think that it should be addressed. However, even after that experience, I am STILL against you, and I'm quite certain she would be, too. Don't you DARE try to twist that sort of horror into an excuse to force people to give up their freedoms.
I simply cannot agree that I, someone who would never even consider doing something like that, should have to lose some of my freedoms because some total nut case somewhere might use the internet to prey on kids. I don't agree that everyone in the United States should have to subject themselves to constant surveillance in the name of so-called "safety". That is a line that simply cannot be crossed, or else we have no right to call ourselves a free nation.
Somebody mentioned that on average, 50 kids were molested by a typical child molester prior to being caught. If that is true, then we have a real problem, and it isn't that the child molester should have been watched more carefully. It is that A. parents should have watched their kids more carefully, and B. those kids should have been taught how to handle that sort of situation at a younger age. There is really nothing practical that you can do to save that first short of considering everyone a suspect and devolving into a police state, which is unacceptable. However, if you catch them after the first one, at least that's 49 other kids that won't eventually be abused by the same sicko.
Indeed, this isn't about a police state. It's about a nanny state. It's about the government trying to save parents from actually having to take responsibility for their kids. If we're worried about kids being molested by strangers, the way to solve that is to spend money on education campaigns to inform parents about the problem, to spend money on protective technologies so that parents can protect their kids, and education campaigns to teach kids what inappropriate touching is. They taught us that back in nursery school (pre-K). If that isn't still happening, then you've found the real problem.
According to child protective services, only one tenth of one percent of children in the U.S. population are actually molested each year with any degree of plausibility. If only 1% of those are non-familial, then this law would only have the potential to help 730 kids a year or so. Why should 300 million people have to give up essential civil liberties to MAYBE help 730 kdis? Also, the number of verifiable child molestation cases has been plummeting since the advent of the internet, not increasing. The way I look at it, what we're doing already is doing a great job at solving this problem already. What's the point of doing something fascist like what is proposed?
Finally, I'll close with this: the best thing parents can do to protect their kids is to give them a cellular phone. Teach them how to call 911 in an emergency. If the kid gets kidnapped, the police immediately know where to find him/her. Of course, if the predator is a parent or family member, education is the only method that will be in any way helpful at combatting it, and no amount of internet surveillance will help.
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Re:Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, and I know this is cynical as all hell, I really think the child porn thing is just an excuse to aggrandize their power. I mean, the child porn people are smart. They'll just encrypt their traffic. Thus the power will never be used for its intent, but they certainly will not *ever* relinquish it. Once the government has its hands around something it holds it like a crack head holds his pipe.
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Re:Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If America sacrifices its ideals and stops being America, there won't be any "American" children to protect. Your proposal is not a solution to the problem.
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Re:Great.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite possible that increasing government surveillance will result in an increase in neither.
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We need a "Godwin's Law"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever looked on Freenet lately? There is definitely (what appears to be -- I've never visited, but based on descriptions on the indices) underage porn on there, and that's a network that's designed by some very intelligent people to be anonymous. Sure, it wasn't designed for porn, but the porn people aren't stupid. They take advantage of those things when it exists. If HTTP gets too dangerous, they move to Freenet; if Freenet gets too dangerous, they'll move to total trust-based Darknets. At the end of the day, even if you shut down all the open WWW underage-porn websites, in all the countries of the world (managing somehow to harmonize laws concerning the age of consent) you'd really just drive that particular subculture back to the pre-internet days, when I can only assume people traded stuff on physical media via darknets, or private BBSes.
And of course, you have the ever-present threat that, with decreased availability of prerecorded porn on the Internet, that pedophiles will decide to make their own; featuring your neighborhood kids at gunpoint as the co-stars. I've never once seen this aspect of the problem seriously considered. What if we're actually stopping would-be child molesters through the availability of Internet porn? So what happens to these people if that supply is shut off?
The whole "child porn argument" is poorly thought out. It's a knee-jerk line brought out by politicians when they don't have any other way of garnering support for an unpopular and invasive policy, which is so polarizing that it automatically casts a shadow on anyone who opposes it.
As a society, we should invent something like "Godwin's Law" for child pornography. It's something so near-universally offensive, that when you drag it out as an argument for a particular widespread action, it's almost certain that you're using it as a weak justification for an otherwise unacceptable course of action. If you have to bring child porn in as reasons for doing something, it's a good sign your policies aren't well planned. If they were, they'd probably have any number of totally valid, separate reasons for doing them, and wouldn't need the spectre of child porn to back them up.
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Re:Great.... (Score:5, Informative)
"Most sexual abuse is committed by men (90%) and by persons known to the child (70% to 90%), with family members constituting one-third to one-half of the perpetrators against girls and 10% to 20% of the perpetrators against boys" (Finkelhor, 1994).
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Re:Great.... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a shame about Rumsfeld screwing up in Iraq. That's been really hurting the President. Still, you don't always have the luxury of going to war with the Secretary of Defense that you want, sometimes you have to go to war with the Secretary of Defense that you have.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, this is the same old bullshit that has happened at election time from time immemorial. If you're the incumbent and you're facing trouble, bust some whorehouses and some drug users, make some headlines to remind people that you're "tough on crime".
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OMG Think of teh Children!!!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm COMPLETELY sure that these records will only be used to fight child porn... this is frightning.
Re:OMG Think of teh Children!!!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:OMG Think of teh Children!!!!1 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:OMG Think of teh Children!!!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that the word you're looking for is 'patriot'.
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Re:OMG Think of teh Children!!!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
If Gonzales et al. agree, then we have a deal. If they don't, they've tipped their hand.
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What would you say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't think so.
Yah, right. (Score:5, Funny)
Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
Wholly 1984 Batman!
this might be a bad idea... (Score:5, Funny)
And I'm going to hell...
This isn't about child porn. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another attempt by the Bush administration to increase domestic surveilance, and to create a de-facto state of permanent constant survelliance on all Americans.
They're just trying to sell it as "anti child porn" in order to get the gullible people to go along with giving up the remaining shreds of personal privacy.... and to keep the gutless wonders (of both parties)in Congress from trying to oppose it.
Re:The two aren't mutually exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people are online? How many of those are surfing for child porn? A depressingly larger number than we'd want, yes, but compared to how mnay people aren't? So they're going to keep records of everyone's activities online and sift through all of that to find the people surfing kiddie porn? Wouldn't it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it? Hey, maybe we could have the FBI do that.... no wait, theye're too busy working for the RIAA and the MPAA instead investigating dangerous crimes like they used to.
This is pure BS. If they really wanted to do something about child pornography, they have the power to do so without spying on every citizen in the US. Like you say, they want to satisfy their socially conservative base, but they're just outrightedly lying about what they want to do this for. They want more power to abuse.
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Younger and younger children? (Score:4, Funny)
Will someone please think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I'm surprized is that the RIAA/MPAA haven't tried to shut down the P2P programs with the goverment saying that they harbor child pornography. It is simply amazing what bullshit laws you can get passed if you play it off that it is in the best interest of the "children". But, dear god forbid some of the parents actually pay attention to what their kids are doing....
Re:Will someone please think of the children? (Score:5, Interesting)
Never mind seems like they already have. [com.com]
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Just an excuse (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
To finally end the production of child pornography, unlicensed private possession of photographic equipment is now to be banned. Requirements for a license to possess photographic equipment will include background checks, fingerprint and DNA collection, as well as locks on all photographic devices that require submitting a copy of every image taken with that device to law enforcement agencies before they may be viewed/developped by anyone. Not only will this prevent perverts from taking pictures of naked children, but it will also stop terrorists from photographing buildings and other illegal photographs to plan their attack on our freedom. Anyone found to be in possession of a photographic device without a license, or bypassing the mechanism to submit copies of all images taken to the government, will be imprisoned with tough mandatory minimum sentences regardless of the content of their photographs. Selling these devices illegally will result in a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence. This new prohibition will be just as effective as our prohibition on drugs; it will solve our nations child pornography problem by keeping cameras and camcorders out of the hands of child molestors.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of. Having all your photographs viewed by law enforcement a small price to pay to protect our children and protect our freedom! If you oppose this new policy, you're either a child pornographer or a terrorist, and will be arrested for treason.
You know what the saddest thing is, I had a conversation with a friend who actually believed that such overt invasions of privacy were completely justified to protect the country. Including warrantless interception of every single phone call, even completely domestic. She even said it would be fine if the government wanted to read her diary for no reason. A device in your car that automatically ticketed you for going 1mph over the limit? You're breaking the law, so you deserve punishment. Preventing people from breaking the law was much more important than privacy. She was dead serious, and of course a fanatical right wing republican. She was otherwise intelligent too, science major at my (tier 1) university. This was the last conversation I ever had with her. People like her show what's wrong with this country that allowed these kind of measures to pass.
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Re:Just an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
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First Amendment Nullified (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think Whorley or his ilk are the best arguments for the importance and necessity of free speech, but Whorley's plight is of particular concern because the material he has been convicted of downloading was concocted from imagination. They were cartoons. In other words, Whorley has been jailed for what can only be seen as pure speech. Whether the current administration really is interested in protecting society from child pornographers is irrelevant. Whorley's successful conviction and extraordinary sentencing set the precedent that pure expression (which may have harmed no one) can be found illegal.
We live in dangerous times and I worry that it won't be long before critics of the US government and/or political opponents of the powerful find themselves in straits similar to Whorley's.
Why hasn't anyone been arrested for The Godfather? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why hasn't anyone been arrested for The Godfath (Score:5, Insightful)
On an unrelated note, Eastern Orthodox Easter today, so happy Easter! Here's a picture of a cute bunny to offset any negative feelings I might have caused with the above paragraph [demon.co.uk].
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Re:First Amendment Nullified (Score:4, Insightful)
When they came for the bestiality fans, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for the hentai fans, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for the bukkake fans, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for viewers of porn involving mature women there was noone left to speak out for me...
(My stated favorite porn site is purely fictitious and serves only as an example, I am not actually a subscriber to Aunt Judies. Honest.)
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Re:First Amendment Nullified (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, it's a new one, and they haven't tested it in the Supreme Court yet.
I assume this one will do the same, I certainly don't feel I'd have anything to lose that point... 20 years for downloading anime, perhaps resembling real but still... in my country you wouldn't get that if you abducted and violently raped a real girl.Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
Think about it: This artwork harmed no one in the making. Mr. Whorely didn't harm anyone by possessing it. One can't even make the argument that he was harming himself by looking at it, unless you want to really stretch it and say that it was causing him psychological trauma or somesuch drivel.
Actual child porn aside, this was a nonviolent thought crime, pure and simple.
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Re:First Amendment Nullified (Score:5, Informative)
The linked article said that there were no photographs of actual children. Just drawings.
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Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
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Lets protect the children (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lets protect the children (Score:5, Insightful)
Sincerely,
The Government
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Homeland Security official in child porn sting (Score:5, Informative)
In my humble opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Another Boogeyman (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, I wonder if they cound instances of flirtation where the adult ceases communication with the child if/when they become away that the person with whom they are talking is a child. Once again, this isn't a case of an adult actively conspiring to lure a child to them in order to commit sexual acts- but both instances could be used to support the 1-in-5 statistic.
One thing that gets me too is, they are talking about cracking down on child porn, but in my experience this isn't really the case. Last year someone on a newsgroup I was on (this wasn't a pornographic newsgroup, but the person who posted it was someone I had seen post before, I can only assume that they must have posted to the wrong newsgroup or something) posted bunch of child porn photos. When I saw it I got all of the relevant information I could gather and called the local FBI office, and the local police department. Neither group even seemed interested in my call. The FBI told me to contact my ISP, my ISP told me to contact the local police, local police told me to contact the FBI- and after a day on the phone getting the runaround I ended up just posting the information I had to a child abuse pervention website and hoping that they could find the right people to talk to catch the guy.
No, instead of taking information that someone was trying to give them to catch a child pornographer, they want to log everyone's online activity. The thing is, logging all of that activity will do nothing to help catch child pornography. The amount of data would be such that it would still require someone to find and report the activity- and if someone can find it and report it, then there should be enough information already to catch the person.
This leads me to believe that the interest in logging all of this is in no way related to catching child pornographers. Instead it seems like the neo-cons are doing what they do best- brewing up an invisible boogeyman and using the threat of this boogeyman in order abridge the rights and privacy of the citizens. After all, if anyone tries to stand up against it, then they "are just a prevert who doesn't care about exploited children being used for sex and porography"- the same as with the patriot act and anyone who opposed it being "a commie american hating terrorist".
Of course, most people on slashdot probably already realize this, and other people aren't going to bother signing onto slashdot to read this post- let alone rethink their position based on it.
Not the internet's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
If the government was actually interested in curbing child pornography, they'd attack it at the source: Fucked up society. It may sound a little hard to reach a proactive solution, but really, the solutions aren't that hard seeing how easy it is to veil larger, equally scary ulterior motives under getting rid of something that everyone accepts as evil without the majority of the general public batting an eyelid.
So, even if these measures that they're planning don't mean to harm people's personal freedoms all 1984 style, they're just giving a reactive and therefore non-effective solution to just a small part of a much, much broader problem.
Re:Not the internet's fault (Score:4, Insightful)
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oppression (Score:5, Insightful)
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
This might not be the best measure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, this seems like a very dictatorial response. There is a new decriminalization philosophy dubbed restorative justice [wikipedia.org]. In this model, the offender is encouraged to become acquainted with the victim (or their family). By learning about the damage that one has caused, and seeing it through one's own eyes, remorse is stimulated much more effectively. Sometimes, prison can be a reforming experiences. However, there are also the hard-ass idiots that want revenge, and continue, if not increase, their crime life after prison. Honestly, I don't know if this is the best approach. Not only does it violate the public's privacy, it isn't guaranteed to be very--or even at all--successful. It has been proven, starting back with Ivan Pavlov's research, that negative reinforcement is not as effective as positive reinforcement. Why should this be any different?
Once again, I don't mean to criticize my government (of course, many do), but who's with me?
Re:Remember - Child pornography is illegal, after (Score:5, Insightful)
And a Jamaican would tell you that homosexuality is illegal - and vile.
I think that laws making child pornography possession illegal are, at best, in line with laws making drug possession illegal to try to reduce the demand to squeeze out drug sellers. We want to step on sexual abuse of children, so we stomp on child pornography production. To stomp on that, we try stomping on child pornography consumers to reduce demand. You're talking about a pretty darn indirect benefit at a potentially steep privacy and civil rights cost.
Frankly, politicians are playing off the fears parents have for their kids when they invoke child pornography to squeeze something through. They're grabbing whatever generates the strongest emotional response. Right after 9/11, it was terrorism:
"Well...I don't know...that law seems to violate my civil rights."
"In this day and age of terror striking from the skies and from among us, we need to prevent a unified front. All Americans must work together. Vote in my law."
Terrorism may not be scaring enough people any more -- we may be back to "what about the children" in the form of child pornography.
Point is, if someone brings up child pornography while pushing a law, they're trying to make an emotional appeal as to why the law needs to pass. If they're stuck trying to make an emotional appeal, one has to ask why they just didn't make a good, reasoned argument. Is it because such an argument cannot stand on its own merits?
Pushing for increased government surveillance and control online particularly pisses me off, because in the past, government surveillance has been used [wikipedia.org] to damage the mechanisms that are used to correct and limit the government -- free speech and the ability to promote political challenges to the government. There has to be an absolutely overwhelming benefit to granting a power that allows the administration to make life difficult for its detractors before I want to see it accepted.
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