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Viewing Files on the Web Considered Possession?
Packet Pusher writes "A Georgia lawyer is taking a case to appeals court to prove that the mere act of viewing a website does not constitute possession of the materials that were automatically cached on your hard drive." While the case in question involves pornographic photos, the implications of such a declaration could reach far further.
What if someone "Save As" illegal images into "Temporary Internet files" folder?
I thought if someone knowingly viewed some illegal images, he should at least have the commonsense of clearing the cache!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
They're going to try the "my friend put the crack in my glove compartment" line. It doesn't work in the real world; it won't work for data on a hard drive, either.
"He said most of the pictures were viewed between midnight on Dec. 2 and 4 a.m. on Dec. 3 in 2003."
I think it's absurd that someone could face 20 hours in prison for viewing illegal pictures for 4 hours. But that's just me.
to Temporary Internet Files :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Of why -acts- should be crimes, not simply states or possession.
What about malicious web sites or programs that secretly install said content on your computer? Porn Dialers?
This is going to get nasty. At some point--not in my lifetime. We won't have to deal with privacy issues or idiot lawyers trying to make a fast buck. Ambulance chasers--I tell ya...
- nightcrawler "Reality is an illusion, albeit a ver persistent one..." -A.Einstein
I agree with the lawyer in so far as the cache should not be considered property.
if i brought a newspaper, the paper is mine while i can not claim that i wrote the news... but sure hell i can do whatever i want with it...
put that perpective onto web materials, if i download something (say porn), that material is indeed mine, my possesion, while still i can not claim i create the material..
and if some fbi/cops come to my harddisk and find that the material is a kiddy porn, sure as hell i'll get a jail time for "possessing" the material..
i say, viewing (directly or indirectly --i.e. viewing slashdot.jpg) is considered as possesing.
http://aip.corolla.or.id/
for extra fun!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
"Sorry, but you can't very well look at the pics without downloading them...the file is just in your cache instead of a location you specify. As for not printing a hard copy, I fail to see how that is at all relevant."
The issue is that he's being charged with *posession*. Technically he's in violation, but if that argument can hold water in court, then anyone who views copyrighted images online using a cached browser can be charged with unauthorized copying of copyrighted images.
That's just not true. Well the first part yes. Yes with exactly how the internet works, it is indeed impossible to look at the pictures without downloading them. That doesn't mean that their defense is trying to base a case entirely upon the hopes that people won't understand how the internet works. Consider this...Have you seen goat.cx??? Have you seen Lemonparty.org or any of the other variant pictures? I bet you meant to go there. And just because that Jpeg was in your temp internet files I bet that you would say that you, "possessed" that picture. Guy might deserve to go to jail but simply looking does not mean possession.
Step two, go to Google and search on something
Step three, Mozilla will immediately start fetching the pages in the background and storing them on your machine.
Step four, get arrested for having every link on the results page cached on your machine. Even the crazy pornographic (and illegal) pages that you didn't click.
Agile Artisans
Someone could easily post an illegal picture as a 1-1 pixel image in a post on a site like this and it'd be in your cache. Are you sure you want to completely dismiss that defense?
But is all possesion illegal? I think that is the question. If I have a photographic memory, is that posssession illegal? Is memory in general illegal? This is the question, and the answer is that no it should not be.
Visitors to Shrubbery Porn may be in for a rude awakening when their bosses fire them for possesion of shrubbery porn on company computers.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Simple possession based laws, that try to make objects illegal, have inherent logical problems. I like to review this article when I run up against reports of abuse due to such laws. The abuse is inherent in the logical flaws necessary to declare objects themselves against the law.
Uhh what's GNAA?
I sort of disagree. (shoot me if you must).
My argument is that you have no control over what goes in the cache. *Everything* a web page sends to you goes in the cache, even if you don't actually view it. You could easily put a 1x1 picture of child porn in a legit looking web page and it'll be downloaded to the cache.
I'm not saying this guy's not guilty as sin, but you have to think before you lay down blanket laws.
If the lawyer loses this one, these companies are going to get screw Big Tim (tm). Just imagine, all the people who lost their suits start sueing these companies/foundation for making their web browser cache pictures.
Trouble is ahead.
Just look how "popular" tubgirl and goatse are. I doubt many of the people with those images in their possession on their hard drives viewed them on purpose.
I have a link in my sig. If there are illegal images there, should the people who follow the link be subject to prosecution?
Suppose this is an adware issue (which it doesn't seem like it is) or even an "oops, clicked the wrong link" issue. Your machine starts spewing out porn popups. Those got downloaded somehow, right? Did you download them on purpose? Probably not.
In the end, I guess it will come down to intent.
This all begs the question of why viewing anything should ever be illegal. Who is the victim here?
Sure, if someone creates porn from actual people, unwilling to or unable to consent, that's something the creator has done. And maybe if someone has paid to fund that, there's an issue. If this guy has paid, they should go on the money. If he's not, I don't see how they have any good cause even though they may have a case.
When you start to admit victimless crimes, the whole algebra of causality is turned on its head and lots of strange things result, not the least of which is this case.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
http://www.gnaa.us/
Consider newsbots...a user downloads massive quantities of material with a software. He doesn't know what he downloaded until he looks/hears it, because the whole point of newsbots is automation.
And, I haven't read the case the case, but what is the user supposed to do about cache/swap/temporary folder?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
In this case, if possession of kiddie pr0n requires mens rea, then the lawyer has a good argument. Most lusers do not know that the browser has caches and so did not know they possessed the offending material. The /. '1337 couldn't get off that easily :)
The prosecution can easily prove they viewed pr0n, but that may not be illegal. To posess something requires an act of knowingly taking possession. IANAL.
Whether what this guy did is morally or ethically wrong is a different issue than whether what he did is illegal. If you have kiddie porn in your browser cache, do you possess it? What if someone mails you some raunchy spam and your mail client caches a copy on your disk -- do you possess it? In either case, planting evidence that could get someone serious jail time suddenly becomes trivial! I could put a link to an obscene photo on my home page and with a small amount of effort make it invisible to you but trick your browser into downloading (and possibly caching) it. Or I could wait until the Google crawler comes by, and then extort a little cash out of Google because now I can show that they possess this photo, etc. (The links don't point to my site; there's no evidence that I've ever possessed the photo.)
This is far from simple.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Nice argument on the surface, but when you look at the particulars of the case, it just doesn't wash.
From TFA:
Over a third of the pics cached on his system were kiddie porn. That high a percentage cannot be contributed to 'clicking on the wrong link'.
Obviously, some threshold for the distinction between 'accidental' and 'intentional' downloading of contraband pics needs to be enumerated, but it's equally obvious that it's nowhere near 35%.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The scene of great feminine Lesbian ladies fucking eachother with strapon dildos is drying up! I can't find any new and unusual content! Can someone throw us a friggin' boner here? How about some Lesbian strapon domination where a big strong dyke manhandles a little horny honey, or post one of the most erotic sounding video of one going crazy with multiple climax from ascend/descending heat? It must be free, and no goatse!
.asf video, that gets hot at the 2/3 mark when they get out the strapon! If you get an error starting the download, you need to refresh the page to get a new download key. It sucks, but the clip is decent and worth the fudged download mechanism.
Here is one update; ~45MB
Until the on-topc Slashdot topic arrives, be well.
Sincerily,
Dr. Dean aDildo, BS, MSH, WD40
so teh google pwnes internets?
Canada recently passed a law against "accessing" child pornography; it seems quite likely that it was specifically intended to pre-empt the "I didn't possess it, I only viewed it" argument.
Someone could easily post an illegal picture as a 1-1 pixel image in a post on a site like this and it'd be in your cache.
Really. Do you know what the definition of 'pixel' is? Just how pornographic do you think a '1-1 pixel image' is capable of being?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This is a pretty tough one. I won't be able to decide until I see the evidence.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Even so, I could see how this would be accidental -- launch one dodgy website which pops up 50 others, and before you know it, 1/3 of your cache is filled with crud.
Unlikely as hell, yes, but I wouldn't want to totally discount it from the realms of possibility.
-- Why should I question authority?!
>>The issue is that he's being charged with
>>*posession*. Technically he's in violation, but if
>>that argument can hold water in court, then anyone
>>who views copyrighted images online using a cached
>>browser can be charged with unauthorized copying
>>of copyrighted images.
As they bring these laws up to date in the times of the internet, I think they're going to start looking at intent. If user X recieved an e-mail promising one thing and got kiddie porn... should he be charged?
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
If it's something you take, then accidentally seeing something on the web doesn't imply possession.
On the other hand, deliberately seeing something means that you are clearly taking it to your computer.
It's a subtle difference, but it seems to me important here.
Here, particularly, it seems to me that he took possession of many files, he was clearly deliberately possessing them.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"He meant a larger image resized as an 1x1 image by the browser you moron
Boot of a CD - problem solved right there! There are numerous stand-alone bootable OS'es out there (QNX comes to mind) not to mention all the live-CD's such as SuSE, Knoppix etc. It's your right to view any information you want. Even if it's questionable. If that right is taken away from you - you have no freedom anymore. Is that what we want?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I'd like to amend your statement to say "almost no control over what goes in the cache," instead of "no control."
o n.ap/index.html
You're completely right that malicious people could to exactly as you said. However, most sites aren't going to do that sort of thing. If I don't go to any porn sites, it's a pretty safe bet I won't have any problems of that sort with my cache.
But, as you said, blanket laws are very scary. It's obvious this guy (or someone using his computer) viewed those images. From what they say, many of them were illegal. Is the man in possesion of illegal material?
This is a very tricky issue. Could we judge it better if we ask the question: "is the guy technically competent enough to go back through the cache to make use of those pictures?" I don't know.
I do know there are some sickos out there http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/16/serial.molestati
and something needs to be done, but just what, I don't know.
and before you know it, 1/3 of your cache is filled with crud.
And the cache would show that these images were all downloaded in a few seconds, demonstrating that they weren't downloaded at the user's behest.
The answer is that in addition to the simple fact of the images being present, intent to view the images must also be present...and proven.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You think that's "viewing"? FTA: A federal agent said Barton's computer contained more than 450 pornographic images
From my computer:
$ find graphics/xxx/ -name '*.jpg' | wc -l
25584
Now, That's what I call "viewing"!
And I'm completely puzzled by how the police handles child porn.
If there is a murder on my street and I take a picture of it, I show it to the police. It helps them track down the murderer.
If there is someone abusing a child, someone takes a picture, the police gets the picture. Instead of saying "Thanks, this is going to help track down the child abuser", they send the guy 20 years behind bars -- not the child abuser, but the guy who has a proof of a crime he didn't commit!
... but why didn't you mention it was about pedophilia?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If he wins, one could conceivably argue that merely "viewing" (ahem, listening to) audio/video files does not constitute illegal copying.
If he loses, one can argue that a number of industries already allow the (temporary) copying of copyrighted material because they show it on the web.
This case may turn out to be not be about porn.
Doesn't seem fair, does it? You were just curious where the link went.
turn off caching in firefox?? just curious mind you.. not that i have anything to hide
I bet they are in possession of a whole lot of illegal porn. An ISP that operates a squid cache might be liable too.
For the sake of the argument, I'll assume he means "setting the height and width of a pornographic image to 1x1 pixels, thus making it invisible, tricking your browser into downloading the full, proper (or, if pornographic, not) image.
HTML can resize pictures.
If you use "height=1 width=1" in the IMG tag the browser displays at that size, regardless of its actual size. But the full image file is in your cache.
Apparently, you need to learn a bit about HTML. You could have a 1,600 x 1,200 image of some pervert doing a kid. If the image source reference in HTML explicitly stated "height=1 width=1" the image would be a single blip on the browser screen but the full image would still have been downloaded. And in the world of broadband, that image could have taken 1/2 second to download or less, meaning that the viewer would probably not have noticed.
/. by those incompetent jackasses who like to link supposedly valid pictures that end up being tubgirl or lemon party. Well, guess what's then in our cache even though we probably don't want it there.
Anyone who wants to be a real jerk could easily hide hi-res porn images on a site this way. And if the person was duped to visiting a web site that appears to be legitimate, he might never know what kind if images just ended up on his system. We often see this same type of thing on
And the vast majority of people don't even know what a cache is, let alone how to clean it out regularly, so the argument about "They should know to clean it out regularly" doesn't work.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
but it's gonna take a lot of work to tell if you were looking for it by examining the browser cache. unless looking for it is all you do.
If they showed that he knew what they were and downloaded them intentionally, then he is guilty, regardless of whether he knew they would stay on his harddrive.
This is no different than borrowing someone else's kiddie porn magazine and reading it. Even if it's temporary, you intentionally had possession at some point. That makes you guilty.
Whether he knew the copies would remain on his computer is irrelevant if he intentionally accessed them, knowing they were pornographic images of children.
If there was no evidence that he intentionally accessed them, knowing what they were, then he should get off.
An <img> tag's width and height scale the image, not resize it. You'd cache the full sized image; but you'd see it shrunk to 1px on the actual page (Or, if you really want to hide it; just do a:
img.pr0n { display:none; }in a stylesheet.) Someone could load an infinate amount of porn in the background, without you seeing anything but a longer-than-normal loadtime.
I do not believe this man was innocent (it seems unlikely that he accumulated that much child porn without actually looking for it), but it is certainly possible.
You could easily put a 1x1 picture of child porn
Ooh, single pixel porn...so hot...
235 Red, 12 Green, 67 blue.....oh god.....ohhhh...I gotta uh go to the ummm bathroom...to...molest pixels....erm uh pee
Monstar L
width and height tags for IMG... SRC isn't the only thing allowed. THe Pic could be 1600x1200, but look only like a dot on your screen with width and height set.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
What could possibly constitute an illegal 1-1 pixel image?
A peasant looking at a royal notice posted on the wall. The notice reads "Reading this notice is punishable by death".
Next they will get you for images that you deleted, but the OS did not eliminate completely from your hard drive. (With a further charge for attempting to conceal and/or destroy evidence.)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
In order to indict someone who has child porn images, the cops must at least prove that the person knowingly bought those images from the criminals who made the pictures in the first place. What happened to the basic principle that it's the state's duty to prove criminal intention, not the accused person's duty to prove innocence?
Is the internet like TV? Can you record personal backups for viewing later?
I gotta uh go to the ummm bathroom...to...molest pixels
Well that one is just too easy...
[insert 'penis size' joke here]
Really. Do you know what the definition of 'pixel' is? Just how pornographic do you think a '1-1 pixel image' is capable of being?
If it's just the right shade of pink.
Okay. We used the same example with the same resolution to demonstrate.
:)
I'm scared now.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Not necessarily. You can make the argument that anything that goes into the browser cache (or indeed, even just into RAM) is in fact a copy, BUT that whoever put those copyrighted images on the web in doing so gave everyone who visits the site implicit consent to make a temporary copy for the purposes of viewing the material. In other words, it would be authorized (implicitly) copying of copyrighted images, and would thus be OK.
If there was reasonable doubt as to how it turned up in the cache then that would be a reasonable defence. If however there was other information in the cache (ie webpages showing the images in a visable way) or some other evidence suggesting intention then I say tough luck.
A 'real world' analogy might be obtaining hardcopy child porn and then claiming you don't have possession because you've put it in your recycling pile with your other papers and don't intend to look at it again. Tough luck, you clearly possessed it at one point and haven't stopped posessing it until you make sure you get rid of it.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Why do I get the feeling that suddenly there are a few extra terabytes of free disk space across the country?
More information: http://psionicist.online.fr/article.html
I won't get into trouble this time; you've gone and gotten yourself slashdotted, it seems.
Time answers all questions. The problem is are we willing to wait long enough for the answers; and if we don't like the answers we get, can we go back and do over?
it's more complex then it seems, and is one of the reasons the internet is turning traditional law upside down and judges are contantly getting it wrong, as well as law makers. what about isp's proxies, if it's cached on their hd are they responsible, by your reasoning their are just by the fact it's on a hd in their possesion. and what about all the IE exploits, popups and url highjacking that goes on, people can't be held accountable when their webbrowsers get highjacked. anything which has clearly been cached should not be considered being in possesion. it's like saying because a crack addict spilt some crack on you bathroom floor, your in possesion of it. it's absurd. however, i think judges should be given some leverage on these things of cases. if someone has a cache FULL of kiddie porn, there is no arguement that they were acivitly viewing the stuff. i think it shouldn't be considered a crime in itself, but it should be considered valid evidence.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
AFAICT, the reason why the mere possession of certain things is illegal is simply because there is no reasonable explanation of why you have them other than the intent to break the law. Whether or not that's actually that case is another matter, but isn't the central question actually one of reasonable doubt? To extropolate a few examples... If a cop finds me with a bag of sweet, juicy crack in my back pocket, and I insist that someone shoved them there and ran off, it does indeed look bad. However, if I have no prior drug-related convictions, a battery of character-witnesses testifying to my law-abiding nature and a squeaky-clean blood analysis, reasonable doubt says that I'll almost certainly get off. Similarly in this case, if there is kiddie-porn in the guy's cache, it looks bad. However, if there's none anywhere else on his PC, or in his house, and no reference to kidde-porn sites in his browser's history, then IMHO, he should probably be allowed to walk... because there are numerous explanations of how that stuff could've got there 'by itself' that do not involve any illegal activity. For it to be illegal simply to be in possession of a 'bad thing' regardless of context, and without any recourse to any kind of legal defense, is obviously dangerous.
Basically we need to rework the legal concept of possesion as it relates to information. Or perhaps abandon that altogether for the purpose of defining a crime.
...Is it the chicken and the egg time? Are we just yolks? Or perhaps, we're just one, of god's little jokes, We're Searching the Meaning of Life...
Of course this all gets into the debate over whether it should be against the law to look at or possess certain information (for whatever reason). Does someone looking at child pornography cause demonstrable harm? I suppose there are the crazy people out there who claim that looking at porn is harmful and addictive because it has been showen to alter brain chemistry, but guess what? So has sitting through a religious service, or even going for a good long jog. Even if looking at porn can be shown to be harmful, should the government be in the business of telling people how they behave when they are not causing harm to others? In anycase I don't see any way of solving the problem of whether someone with abnormal sexual desires looking for illegal porn causes that illegal porn to be produced or if persons with abnormal sexual desires look for child pron because they know it is being/has been produced.
"We can't stop here! This is bat country."
Lawyers for Edward Ray Barton say they'll ask a state appeals court to decide if a person should be punished for viewing pornographic photos of children online.
He was most definatly not arrested "for viewing pornographic photos of children online". He was arrested for having said photos, in his browser cache...
If he had been arrested for the act of viewing photo's there would be no appeal...
personally, I do not think viewing of 106 kiddy porn pics is a crime higher than 2nd degree murder, or child abuse; look at the sentances people get for these crimes.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Indeed. Point taken.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I hope you're just being intentionally daft, but to be sure... you do realize that you can display an image at a different size on the page from its real size? You could have a 1600x1200 image and display it as 1x1 and the user wouldn't have a clue beyond the delay from the download, and the full file would be in the cache.
I don't like you and I want to see you go to jail. I create a website that has the following tag:
<img src=kiddieporn.jpg height=1 width=1>
To you, it looks like a tiny dot, but your browser will still load it and it still goes in your cache. I call the fuzz. You get arrested for "possession".
Granted, to hide my trail I'd need to be a little smarter, but it's not very hard.
Then if I read a Micro$oft Word .doc online means I am possessed?
Simple. The children in CP are victimized every time it is viewed, because it violates their natural right to privacy. If it's a crime to look in a neighbor's window while they're showering or changing, then this should similarly to apply to erotic images, where the act depicted, or the photography thereof, is not consensual. Presumably, this applies to most child pornography; and from a legal perspective, where nobody under a certain age can consent to sex, it applies to all child porn. (However, I do think the age of consent should be lower, maybe corresponding to the average age when puberty begins, because declaring sex with a 15-year-old to be legally equivalent to sex with a 5-year-old is just silly.)
Signature.
Dude, he is getting 20 years not 20 hours! The man may be scum, but he is going to get longer for 4 hours of web browsing than most murders or actual child molesters get. He is being charged with a separate count for every image that his web browser displayed.
This is very, very dangerous. With typosquatting domains that make money of of pr0n pop ups and use endless "on exit" java script loops, anybody could wind up with illegal pr0n on their computer--and Walker County could prosecute you for each and every image as a separate count, regardless of whether you meant to download it.
This case is much, much bigger than the one person charge here. Charging people with possession for the mere act of seeing something is positively Orwellian.
Joe user goes to the newsgroups after reading about how to view naked pictures of women for free.
He has a fetish for small breasts and after searching for breasts in the newsgroup names find a category that suits him.
He then decidees to download all the jpg's from the above newsgroup along with 22 other newsgroups that sound like they might interest him.
He does this before he goes to bed and lets them download while he sleeps. He gets up in the morning and turns off this computer. Why not. He works all day. He forgets about downloading the pictures and doesn't look at them.
If some of those 10's of thousands of pictures is (even though the categories do not include young or pedophile or even teen) is he a convictable pedophile?
I would guess that if he is then EVERY user who downloads any pictures from Kazaa or any file from any newsgroup is at risk for downloading ANY supposed legal porn as the fact is that you DO NOT KNOW what is on the file you are about to open. Virus scanning doesn't help here.
This all begs the question of why viewing anything should ever be illegal.
No, it raises the question. Begging the question is another thing entirely.
Here come the IANAL jokes.
It's kiddie porn.
And this children, is why one should RTFA.
*cough*
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
As in "Yay, content should be free, but if somebody subscribes to Slashdot and starts posting the subscriber-sees-early material on some website before Slashdot opens it up, then they should burn in jail"?
Oh well. That would probably be some kind of "violation of terms of service" anyway. Or wouldn't it?...
The filesystem is the package manager
How about a digital picture with embedded data? .jpg?
What about a file that turns into a picture when viewed with Gimp and into a text when viewed with MS Word?
Now how about viewing a porn picture file with vi - is it still porn?
Is a file a picture only because the filename ends with
There are many questions about digital pictures that can keep an army of lawyers busy for a while.
Oh well, what the hell...
Child pornography costs money (I assume so, never have had a taste for it nor would pay for it even if I did). So, the more people who buy it, the more demand there is, so there's incentive to make more to get repeat business.
Seems to me that if the real concern is ONLY to not endanger children - then why doesn't the government create really good simulation software and simulate child pornography? Those who want to see child pornography get what they want, and the government gets what it wants since no children have to be abused anymore.
I'm sure such logic wouldn't prevail, though, since someone would come up with the equivalent of the 'marijuana is a stepping stone drug' argument - that viewing child pornography inevitably leads to actual child molestation.
Looking at things means I own them? Well, then... Slashdot: all your base are belong to me!
Right on! Throw the people who want to impose censorship against the ??AA!
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Another funny thing is, why did they make a "copy" of the hard drive? Why do you need to study porn for more than 2 seconds? Everyone at the pig shop is now viewing it at home and passing it on to their buddies. I bet the judge has a thing for prosecuting people and having child porn at the same time.
SICK SICK SICK. American laws can be viewed just the same way as the bible. Anyone can make a good argument but let's not Judge those except by Christ.
We have humans going around being facists by saying what you can view and what you can't. People need to go after the people that are making the crap, not the people that are just viewing it.
I think it's ridiculous that anyone could face jail (or any other kind of state punishment) for looking at anything. If looking at naked kids on the internet makes you a molester, does looking at dead bodies on the evening news make you a murderer?
;-)
Hm... come to think of it, people who watch Fox News do deserve to be executed...
Of course, if he sent money (or any other kind of payment) to a site showing pictures of exploited children, then he actively contributed to that exploitation. Otherwise, I think everyone has the right to look at whatever they want. Hiding something doesn't make it go away; quite the contrary.
I think many people have missed a possible abuse of this law. Say that it passes and that files in the cache are indeed not our posessions, what happens when the ad companies figure out that they can make persistent trackers or ad-bots that are "illegal" to delete because you (the computer user) don't own that file?
Laws like this are dangerous and ripe for abuse.
"Anything that's invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things" - Douglas Adams
but it is NOT a crime to look in a neighbor's window (assuming that you are not trespassing to do so)
That was pretty insightful.
You are all now guilty of position. This posted test is copyrighted by microsoft: MSCF[*ÀlmÆùÒRÒwÎvcÑùÕ{zãU^Õ^ýÿôTQeTê%¥"JÌ"ã4Uf#36.
Have fun in court
This isn't informative, it's just plain wrong. Neither point makes any sense. Looking at a picture on the internet doesn't create any "demand". Paying for it might, but, if anything, getting child porn for free decreases the profits of the pornographers and reduces demand (it's the same as with music piracy, only the molesters probably aren't quite as evil as the RIAA).
And the second point is even more stupid. Of course punishment reflects the damage a crime causes, and not how "hard to catch" the criminal was. When was the last time a murderer got sentenced to 2 weeks community service because he was caught in the act (and therefore "not hard to catch")...?
Seriously, Slashdot needs a moderation called "-1, Stupid".
I have been cajooled into visiting the above site many times. It is an image that has scarred me. Pls don't tell me that I legally own it too.
So what then is "posession" of a dataset, like an image, application or other file? Do they need to prove both simple posession, and knowledge of posession? Or just the request for transfer, and knowledge that the transfer was completed?
More to the point, do you trust the current generation of lawyers and Congresscritters to even care about these distinctions, let alone understand them - forget about codify them into workable laws and court cases? Is there any chance that any of these essential legal distinctions will be properly written, upon which the next several generations of info property, liability, rights and transactions will be based? We're doomed.
--
make install -not war
Good call.
It also sounds like Superior Court Judge Kristina Connelly might not have been in agreement with the not guilty verdict (or for that matter, terribly pleased by it) and handed him a 20-year sentence for possessing child porn by (ab-)using consecutive sentencing - a sort of reverse "jury nullification." Now I don't know for sure that's what happened, and I hate pedophiles as much as the next guy, but every time a judge reshapes a jury verdict to his own liking during sentencing, justice loses. If pedophiles felt at risk of getting 20 years in jail for every 4 hours of binging on kiddie porn, they'd figure they might as well go out and try the real thing.
A few years ago, I mis-typed the URL for a search engine, and ended up at a porn site that displayed images that I won't describe here, but I'm fairly sure they're illegal in my country. What's worse, it was one of those sites that opens up 2 new windows every time you shut one down, re-directs your browser home page, etc etc.
I was at work, and in no mood explain to my workmates why I had such images on screen, so I powered off the PC, disconnected the network plug, re-started the PC and cleaned things up while off the net.
Should I be charged with 'possessing child porn' ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
(Well, it certainly should be.) Maybe in the US it's not a crime, but it is in some areas, including the UK if I remember correctly.
Signature.
If 100 images is "that much", I suspect that you underestimate the amount out there.
Not only that, but what about caching proxies that store the images on an intermediary machine?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Why is the Submit button SO close to the Preview button? :(
Why does the submit button even exist before you've clicked on the preview button?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
That dime bag wasn't mine. I was just looking at it I swear!
For all the people, before there is a holy war, let me set some things straight. If a person arranges to meet someone underage, send them to jail. If a person chats with someone underage and tries to solicit sex, send them to jail. I am all for sending people to jail who harm others.
But when it comes to looking at something, should this be a crime?
I am afraid the direction we are going in. Are we protecting children, or are we making ourselves feel like we are protecting children because we locked up people who looked at the wrong websites?
This is an issue that is only going to get worse. What about websites with instructions on how to make bombs? What about websites that don't explicitly tell you how to make a bomb, but give you all the information in a way that anyone could figure out?
Okay, so you want to talk about intent. What is the intent of the person looking at a website? What is the intent of a person looking at a website with a naked girl? Are we going to start measuring the sexual excitement a person has?
If the real goal is to protect children, how about going after the website owners? Why not spend the money which would lock up joe sixpack for his browser cache violation, and use that money to find and hunt down the people who abuse the children? It seems to me that hunting down the website owners, and those who commited the violent act is much more effective than spending money on joe blow because one morning at 2am after drinking all night he went on the web and found the wrong website.
I feel like it is so difficult a position to defend, yet if we want free speech, free expression of ideas, then we have to draw a line when it comes to throwing people in jail, to those crimes that harm someone or something.
I would hate to see what society would do to Newton if he was alive today. There is a guy who 100% would look at anything and everything, and probably not be able to tell the difference of right and wrong. How he figured out calculus between the fits of emotional turmoil and pychological collapse is beyond me. Maybe we can have a wing of the prision for thinkers, people with an IQ over 140. Wait... that might be a bad idea.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It certainly should be? Draw your fucking blinds and keep the poliz out of issues they have no part in. What a crap example, to trivialize child porn to being like someone too lazy to take care of their own privacy- nice.
"Because it's an illegal business. The same way the bootleggers were machine-gunning each other in Prohibition. Make it legal, tax it, the price goes down and violence goes away."
Substituting one problem for another isn't "going away". Human nature is human nature, and you can't finesse that away.
I'd like to think myself as someone that's somewhat trusting of people, but if this ends up being the way it's going to be because of come crooked lawyer that wants to set a dangerous precedent for a buck, then I'll have no reason to trust anyone online, that's for sure.
Just loading this post has now made you a scum-sucking music (lyrics) pirate, even if you didn't read a word of the above. While you're sitting there letting them take away the kiddy-fiddlers, ask yourself who will be left when they come for you? It doesn't matter to the law how vile your crime is, once the precedent is set, it can be used for anything.
THIS is why organizations such as the ACLU exist, and why they defend organizations such as nambla. Because people like you are too short-sighted to fight for their rights even if you're next in line for the firing squad.
Oh, and if you value your freedom and sanity, leave $200,000 in unmarked, non-consecutive twenties under the bench across from the pad at 34th and Vine. Otherwise, I'll be e-mailing you an mp3 a day from Spears' vast collection of truly classic music. Don't try anything funny either, if my server doesn't hear from me once every 24 hours, I've instructed it to make use of the backstreet boys' greatest hits.
NAME
mlock - disable paging for some parts of memory
SYNOPSIS
#include
int mlock(const void *addr, size_t len);
DESCRIPTION
mlock disables paging for the memory in the range starting at addr with
length len bytes. All pages which contain a part of the specified mem-
ory range are guaranteed be resident in RAM when the mlock system call
returns successfully...
Do not tell me that Windows does not have anything similar! Though maybe it does not...
Paul B.
They are sick people who post images that a goatse-hardened individual like myself cringe over.
Crimethinkers beware.
I was just reading the Dutch Copyright Law (Dated 1912, amended 2004), and it mentions (in a convoluted way) that copies you make, purely for a viewing experience, are not considered an infingement of the copyright.
i.e. a while ago, a discussion arose wether or not the cached copy of a copyrighted page on the web, would constitute copyright infringement. Well in Holland it doesn't: The law explicitly mentions this situation.
Basically, bring a bunch of laptops to court. Give one to each jusry member, the prosecution and the judge. Then send them each an html email with the "evidence" photos embedded and have them each check thier email. Now simply point out that everyone in the courtroom is currently "guilty" of the same crime you are being prosecuted for. Nobody would find you guilty after such a simple demonstation, and even if you actually *are* found guilty at the end, you can file for an appeal and win on the technicality that all the jurors were also guilty of the same crime as you. There has to be some conflict of interest going on there, right?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Georgia court of appeals email form: http://www.gaappeals.us/ask_clerk/
We should do our civic duty and politely inform them of the consequences this interperatation of the Georgia statute will have. And for the love of pete, respect the court.
All goatse spam should be sent to district attorney Herbert E. (Buzz) Franklin:
http://www.co.walker.ga.us/DA.htm
yup... the implications could reach all the way into my pants.
"I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed." -- Bruce Lee
Ok normally I'd keep my proverbial mouth shut on this, but this time I have to speak up. I am a victim of a sexual predator: Rape (technically sodomy), for some FOUR YEARS, starting when I was around FIVE years old, by a man who was well endowed at the time, in the back door and orally. More information can be found on my website (don't waste your time trying to draw any conclusions about my sexuality, that has been dealt with professionally; it is not related.)
It IS a crime, whether or not these people have some kind of mental disability. It's not about being able to connect sex or acts thereof to the emotions and mental state they yield - it's about keeping your G-D damned penis in your pants where it belongs! You can't sit there and tell the rest of us that the criminal has no control over what he does - it still takes effort to pull your pants down or click a mouse (especially for four hours straight). If you're that much in need of relief, go masturbate or something! Or crawl in bed with your wife, if she's in the mood! Or hire a hooker FFS!
You try living for around 25 years with the memories invoked by the crime in question. Do you know what it's like to smell ordinary body/hand lotion and nearly throw up each time because of what it was used for back then, or to go into convulsions from a(n unwanted) memory of the TASTE of semen? How about crying your heart out more than once a week from the emotional scars he left? How about getting sexually aroused during the normal course of lying with your (future) husband only to fall into a deep depression and lose the moment because of the memories?
Counselling indeed. It isn't the criminals who need counseling, it's the victims who need it. Do I sound bitter? You bet I am. Do I need counseling after 25 years? Probably. Punish the offenders to the fullest extent of the law; do not spare the rod! CUT IT OFF or send them to the electric chair/gas chamber/injection table. Stop wasting MY TAX DOLLARS to support these sick bastards while they sit in jail!
Karma: I don't care too much, but it's 0.0% (mostly due to lack of interest)
What I find amazing. This guy supposedly downloaded pictures off the internet. What about spyware, viruses.
What if somebody else owned the computer previously? What about the ISPs and website owners who are hosting the sites?
This is amazing to me, our justice system is really screwed up. Michael Jackson owns a ranch called Neverland Ranch, has kids over his ranch over the course of many, many years. Sleeps with kids and gets off????? This place is crazy.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
That guy's just dumb.
So, if I go to a pr0n site, the images in the cache are mine and thus I can be prosecuted for them if they're illegal, but if I go to the new Batman movie website, the images in the cache are not mine - I would instead get prosecuted for treating the images as mine, such as by printing them on t-shirts to sell.
:)
So... (struggling to reconcile the difference) that would mean that possession isn't 9/10ths of ownership...
Or something...
whatever.
Firefox 1.1 will have it built in for easy access and "one click" clearing of sensitive info, but in the mean time the best one to use is "The Cleaner" extension which puts a little target icon in Firefox's statusbar which you can customise to clear only what you want (You may need to update version string to install):
c =1173
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopi
Also CCleaner will erase all the sort of info you want erased to keep your browsing safe from prying eyes (Windows only):
http://www.ccleaner.com/
HTH
Visceral Psyche Films
Does anybody know whether child porn is a well defined term in (US) law? I would assume that child porn is material depicting sexual acts etc. with people below the age of consent. And that the relevant age of consent is that of the state the viewer lives in.
This would mean that f.e. viewing porn legally produced in the Netherlands would be a crime in most of the world.
Some countries have an age of consent as high as 21. So visiting pretty much any porn site could get you in trouble in such a country.
I can understand your pain my wife was abused and is much like you as far as bringing up memories. Let me ask you this now.
Pretend for a minute, that an angel saw what happened to you. Maybe he/she looked it up on the heavenly internet and saw a video, or some pictures. Now if GOD found out, do you think the angel should go to hell for seeing it? Would you feel better knowing those actions ruined even more life than your own?
I'm not saying this guy's not guilty as sin, but you have to think before you lay down blanket laws
:)
No, that is the point of blanket laws - everyone is guilty, which makes it easier for the police to nab the bad guys. (The bad guys being retro-actively defined as "anyone the police nab")
I get the distinct impression that there has been a shift of emphasis in some areas of lawmaking towards writing laws that leave it to police discretion as to who gets convicted as guilty, because pretty much everyone is guilty, so convictions are easy once someone is charged, so it's just left to the police to decide whether or not to bring charges.
Current police complaints that it is too hard to prove kiddie pr0n involved child abuse has prompted a bill that would outlaw even a pencil sketch that someone might interpret as being underaged, and interpret as titilating. If that kind of crap passes, anyone who watches anime is guilty. Add to that, everyone has nekkid kids in the family photo album, and those pictures have already been included in prosecutions.
So everyone is already guilty. We just trust the police to only prosecute the bad apples, not the rest of us.
And the police record here is spotless of course, since anyone they prosecute is undoubtably a bad apple.
The Feds have physical possession of this stuff and have full-time jobs looking through it. Gonna charge them? What effect do you think this has, long-term? And isn't it the perfect job if you already LIKE that kind of stuff?
Additionally, just about anyone could be at risk from malware planting "evidence" on their computer.
The cache of a browser is technically part of the transmission process, not property.
This is important because otherwise you would permanently have to ask for licenses that allow you to copy the images or documents.
On the other aspects of the issue, I think there should be other ways to remind people not to do bad stuff, especially if the bad stuff didn't cause damage directly. A monthly payment that starts out with a 100% lost wage penalty and drops down to 0% penalty over 20 years would be a sure reminder to the guy.
Now, I find kids gross and sex with kids even worse, so I would never EVER go looking for child porn... but if I saw a link that sounded interesting and professed to be something entirely different, I can imagine being tricked into accidentally viewing it.
I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't want to go to jail for mere harmless curiosity.
Another thing that I thought of when I read the article... it says that the guy viewed the images for 4 hours or so, but unless I missed something, it says nothing about his motives for viewing them. Did he know they were pictures of children? I mean, when I was in my early teens, I had lots of people thinking I was over 18, though I never bothered to take advantage of that. Also, assuming that he did know they were children, why was he viewing the pictures? Did they turn him on, or was he just curious? Or was he just looking at them to find a creepy picture to send to a friend?
Without knowing these things, I don't think we can honestly judge him as either a horrible evil pedophile or an innocent man who just made a mistake.
(Now why doesn't anyone go after the people who make the creepy pro-pedophelia websites that Something Awful links?)
Under Australian Property Law he would be guilty. Two elements are required:
1. the intent or knowledge to control the item
2. the ability to control
In Flack/ 1997/1331.html
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct
the woman was held to have title to the $20,000 of confiscated drug money her son had hidden in her house, despite her lack of knowledge that it was there.
The NCA had raided the house, found the money, used it in evidence - but then she wanted it back ! , they refused, it went to Federal Court..
She claimed (and won) possessory title to EVERYTHING inside her house, including things that she didn't know where there.
Now, how different is your computer to your house ? Following Flack,this guy had even more knowledge of what may have been on his HDD than she did as he was actively surfing.
So, even if he was unaware that the files were on the computer, he probably can't deny that he has possession / legal title to them.
Now, the question becomes is it a strict liability offence ? If you have legal possesive title, you are guilty, regardless of your mental intent , or knowledge.
However, without seeing the relevant legislation , and reading he got 20 years, I would guess it's probably a mens rea offence, where your mental state/knowledge IS relevant.
So, guilty of possesion, but probably not guilty of the legislated offence.
Anyone point me to the legislation he was convicted under, and /or a transcript of the case ?
cheers.
PS: I seem to have been mistaken about the age of consent in the Netherlands. It is 16 and is pretty much in line with other European countries. Inside Europe, Spain seems to have the lowest age of consent - 13.
I'm quite surprised.
A georgian lawyer does only count in georgia, not in the rest of the world.
On the other hand, I don't and will never support the actions of a person who looks at that stuff the way this guy supposedly did. Furthermore, as someone else said here, if you pay to look at something like that (didn't notice if the guy in the article did), you certainly deserve to be suitably repremanded for helping to support the person who created the obscene material, unless of course it's for research purposes, fighting crime, and the like.
There are things I consider profane or repulsive, and child porn is certainly one of them, but my comment was addressed at the question of whether or not the "average" sexual offender (who actually DID something in the real world) should be marked as a criminal. I say they should be, and punishment should fit the crime. It's not about some pervert who gets his jollies looking at pictures on the web late at night.
Karma: I don't care too much, but it's 0.0% (mostly due to lack of interest)
The problem is that these laws were written before the Internet was even a twinkle in the eye of [ENTER YOUR OPINION OF WHO CREATED THE INTERNET HERE]. Heaven forbid he should be found not guilty - but if he is, new laws should and most likely will be passed, that are more relavant to this case. just my opnion anyway.
So then if I tape myself "happy slapping" you, and send it around the net...are you being "victimized" every time? You're "privacy" violated?
Also, from a true legal perspective (though I'm unsure whether it applies to illegal materials at all). If an individual doesn't have lawful authority to consent to sex, they actually have no say in the matter, and I do wonder about said "privacy" issue here. In any case, it isn't something that should fall upon a viewer...no more than the people who watched "happy slapping" or the beheading on Fox News should be liable for what they've seen.
Seeing is seeing. GOD sees everything...
should we put him away too?
Why is viewing anything illegal? There's no need to cross that line and make viewing illegal because distribution laws already cover the person who transmitted something in the first place. I think in some Middle-Eastern countries you can get your eyes removed for viewing certain things, why do we have to emulate that in any way?
I can understand why distributing something could be illegal and bypass free speech - if you were raped and photographed would you want those pictures being spread? But even then the original distributor would be covered by laws that prevented that material from being created in the first place.
In any case, possession could only be considered if you knowingly kept particular data, if your computer caches everything on its own that's certainly not possession by you, but if you chose to save something individually while knowing its content, then that is. If you backup your whole drive regularly and just happened to backup the cache that's not possession either. Its clearly automation vs human intervention, any court should see that.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Archive.org only displays sites at least 6 months old. And yeah, you can email them to ask them to not archive it when you first create the political site.
The law is unworkable.
Nobody should give a hoot what other people read or view, whether it's snuff or kiddie porn I don't care. All this does it make it very easy to frame someone.
The real answer is to examine the cash flow and prevent the act of making the media itself! - in the real world!
A blog I run for the wealth
As I have recently said, this is the way it begins; not by huge and obvious destruction of citizens' rights, but by small, insidious steps, portrayed as the 'next logical step' for fighting whatever the state seems to think will manage to get little resistence.
I mean, what, you're not soft on childporn, are you? You don't want terrorist roaming around and using the internet without punity, do you?
If it's emotional and self-righteous enough, they know few will dare to oppose. Think of the children! think of 9/11! Ok, and now agree to our huge privacy invasion, because, you want to stop those people doing it again, don't you? Or are you pro CP and terrorism?
With such demagogic tricks they can fool the public almost every time.
Is retaining the best way to go? Does it actually help at all? Is the very unlikely possibility of stopping a relatively few worth the privacy invasion and the further degradation of civic rights of millions? Nowhere is that question ever raised by those that propose these laws. Instead, they continue to use platitudes: "We need the way to stop terrorists!" But as I said before:
Ah, yes, but who are the 'terror suspects'? Everyone reading books the state deems dangerous? Everyone using the internet? No? Then why should their privacy be invaded? Why not adher to decades of legal provisions, where it used to be that you could only be 'tapped' when you were considered a suspect, and AFTER a court agreed to it. Nowadays , everyone is a suspect, and the courts don't come into play anymore when your communications are being tapped.
Eroding ones' privacy and other rights because one is merely 'suspected' is the right way to go, if you want to end up in a policestate.
But, we ALL know the state will ONLY use its powers for the purposes it is meant, without ever abusing it. History has shown this already numerous times in the past, no?
Besides, 'if you have nothing to hide, why care that your private life is being invaded', right?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
darn, wrong thread/article!
:-)
How did this happen?
The post above was meant for 'DOJ Wants ISPs to Retain All Customer Records'. sorry!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Of course! Seeing is not doing... While it may be twisted for people to look at, I don't believe someone should suffer legal consequences merely for viewing or downloading pictures of someone else's crimes. Definatly those creating the pictures or otherwise harming children, or anyone profiting from the material. But not onlookers. It's funny that we have a "statute of limitations" that will exempt rapists from their crimes after a certain amount of time. There's much less mercy for those engaged in online (virtual/no real harm) porn, it seems.
:..(
->BTW sorry to hear about what happened to you
Are you FUCKING STUPID or just a troll?
...because that is exactly what happened to me after being slap-dash when using Kazaa. I had _5_ illegal files amongst thousands of legal ones. This was not considered a defense because all the CPS (UK prosecutors) had to prove was that I had been "reckless" in obtaining those files. I had to plead guilty and got a 6 month sentance for it. I also have to suffer 3 years of "assessment and treatment" and am being kept apart from my family while this goes on.
I accept my careless actions were harmful and i was prepared to accept a reasonable punishment - but the labels that have been applied to me and the fact that this will follow me for the rest of my life is overkill. I have no interest in the illegal material - my family, friends and fiancee know that but this is irrelevant to the authorities.
All I can say to EVERYONE is be EXTREMELY careful about what is on your computer. Know the contents of EVERY file because ignorance is not an excuse.
If one thing has any MONETARY implication, you sure can bet that sooner or later there will be a law, or a lawsuit filled, for it.
Next... let's try to figure out if an image stored at your videocard memory belongs, or not, to you.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
I hear #7F8A56 is pretty evil!
Some jurisdictions do make a distinction or two on ages.
Here in this state under 14 is a no-no no matter what. But 14-17 is o.k. if the other person is 14-20.
And over 17 is O.K.
All this assumes normal competence, mental retardation, being drugged, etc. change things.
Also the 14-17 age group is a lesser crime for those over 21 than under 14 is for anyone.
And "I though he/she was over 17" can be an 'affirmative defence', say if you met them in a bar where they were being served, or saw a drivers liscence with thier pic that said they were 19, etc.
Looked this up for someone I knew who was 19 but had a GF who was only 16 and was told that he could get statutory rape charges against him (her over protective brother). So it may have changed in the last few years.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Sounds like something Tyler Durden, from Fight Club, would do.
It's not so much whether you are tresspassing (though that's a good indicator) but rather a reasonable person wouldn't expect to be seen.
Now if your neighbors are walking around naked in front of thier big front window with no curtains where passing traffic couldn't fail to see it then they have no room to complain.
However if they're in thier upstairs bathroom and you have to climb out on a tree limb and use binoculars, even if it your tree, things are probably different.
However IANAL, so go get one before considering a peeping tomm hobby and don't blame me if this turns out totaly wrong.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Kiddie porn aside, every conventional porn site -- not to mention every pay-to-visit site at all -- better hope that the browser cache doesn't count as "possession". Otherwise it's impossible for any legitimate subscriber to comply with the site's terms and conditions, which presumably always state that subscribers may only "view" the content, not "download" or otherwise "possess" it.
What do you think?
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
gave everyone who visits the site implicit consent to make a temporary copy for the purposes of viewing the material.
Unless, of course, the person who put it there had no right to grant such permission.
I'm forgetting the exact name of the act in the US, but there was a law put into force about 5 years ago, got repealed a few years ago, that specifically targetted simulated pornography for the reason you state, that the people involved might be emboldened by the viewing of the pictures to actually try something with a real child. *wry grin* I remember that when the law went into effect, the people who were most frightened were fanfiction authors. Suddenly, they had to come to grips with that the Sailor Moon characters were, in fact, defined to be about 15 and were therefore illegal to write sex scenes with. It did raise an interesting question, though, as to where exactly the line between appearance and reality needed to be drawn. In the case of these fictional characters, most of them looked much older, but official backstory was that they were younger. As an analogue, I have a female friend from high school who's currently 23, but doesn't look a day over 13, just something that runs in the females of her family line. Are pictures of her illegal? She looks underage and without context, any picture of her would seem to be illegal, but in actuality, she's in her majority. *wry grin* It raises all kinds of thorny questions, which is probably why the act was repealed.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Imagine if someone posted some child pornography images in a hidden layer on Slashdot... there could be quite a few arrests ;)
In the literal sense, of course you possess pornography if the images reside on your computer. Doesn't matter what folder they are in; if they are there, you possess them. Heck, even if you delete them, you still possess them.
The good news is that any rational judge or jury would take intent into consideration. If it could be proven that you never intentionally viewed the pornography, and were unaware that it resided on your computer, I could see some leniency.
Still, it is the end user's fault for having spyware on their computer. Nobody will hold it against them though, since the majority of computer users are on the same low-level of knowledge and suffer from the same inabilities.
Yes, *that* Bob Vila.
No it doesn't. An argument that begs the question does not forcefully raise anything. What it does is assume to be true exactly what it is trying to proove. That is all.
Based on that argument, if I take a photograph of something (ie copying its likeness to a paper medium for my own perusal later) doesn't it mean that I own whatever I "make a copy of"?
Hell, that means I should be receiving the deed to the Russian winter castle, the parthenon, the sistine chapel... hrm, so many monuments to lay claim to. (I can't forget about stonehenge and the white house! They can keep that washington monument. Its too pointy for my taste.)
And they said zombies weren't real!
Whoever runs the child porn site is able to track how many people view it. There's a reason the webmaster is risking jail time to provide child porn to you, whether it's psychological or financial. By viewing (or purchasing access to) the child porn, you're encouraging the entire process.
Yes, *that* Bob Vila.
...more idiots not taking personal responsibility for their own actions....such bullshit...
Many, MANY moons ago when Yahoo was just a bunch of static links maintained by a couple of college kids in a tree structure. They had a page with links for porn (They later dropped it because it brought too much traffic and need too much maintenance). Many links were to FTP sites.
Late one night while installing SunOS 4.1.3 on a new server (from TAPE!!!). I fired up Mosaic, found some new porn sites, and started downloading in bulk (mget *). Well, weeks later when I actually looked at the pics on my 256 color high-rez screen, I discovered that lots of the pictures were scans from some german nudist magazine. The pictures were often of nude families, but mostly of teens and children.
I eventually deleted these pictures and others because we needed more space on the massive (literally massive) 1 GB SCSI hard disk.
Even if the backup tapes have not desintegrated, it would be hard to find a drive that could read them. 10+ years later I'm a free productive member of society. I guess I'm safe. Yahoo no longer links to kiddie porn.
There is no moral to the story.
Step one, install Mozilla and turn on the background prefetching.
Step two, go to Google and search on something
Step three, Mozilla will immediately start fetching the pages in the background and storing them on your machine.
Step four, get arrested for having every link on the results page cached on your machine. Even the crazy pornographic (and illegal) pages that you didn't click
Step five , ...?
Step six, PROFIT!
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Viewing on-line child pornograhy will result in the charge of "making" not just possession.
R. v. Bowden [2000] 1 Cr.App.R. 438, CA; Atkins v. DPP, Goodland v. DPP [2000] 2 Cr.App.R. 248, DC.
Just another example of porn paving the way for newer and better things... this time, it's the law, not VHS.
definitely a good idea... I think the other slashdotters would enjoy having us cordoned off in our own little area.
The fact that my signature states I'm a lawyer seems to elicit hatred at times.
I got broadband.
I don't need cache...
So with a 0 (zero)K cache, a browser where cookies are only allowed for one session then auto deleted AND the fact that firefox is for everyday browsing and the finely tuned Moz for "the rest", that is almost security thought simplicity...
Also, using "user agent" so people know you're a Beos user and such small time tools (proxychain + one of those nifty "deported bookmark engine" where all your Bookmarks are hosted somewhere else, like an ftp) can help you with a fuzzy sentiment of almost security...
like "No, nothing on my computer, Oh mighty GF..."
Now, who am I to speak...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Damn,That's evil at it's finest!The empire needs evil talent!--http://www.stardestroyer.net.nyud.net:809 0/Empire/
The /. article says "pornographic photos". But the case is not about pornography, it is about child abuse. Child abuse has nothing to do with pornography.
no, I don't have a sig
1) Web cache would show changes in the site over time. Easy money for defense.
2) You think there would be any proceedings without finding the site owner? They may seem to be a consumer, but you would be the provider. They would hunt you down sooner than him/her.
2) In order to even try it, you would have to get your hands on kiddie porn. In this case, you should be publically gutted, after ebing castrated first.
Fun to read, but a weak strategy.
The term you're looking for is Ephebophilia, attraction tothose who are sexually mature, if not of age. It's listed in psychology textbooks as being distinct from pedophilia. For one, it's not considered to be an actual mental illness. And honestly, doesn't that make sense? Being sexually attracted to a child is clearly against human nature, as there's no reproductive capability there. On the other hand, a sexually mature adolescent...
OTOH, to me, mental age should be a condition of ages of consent. I know some people who would have been able to handle sex from age 14 and a large amount of people will never be mature enough to deal with sex and its consequences.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
How can you tell wether someone knowingly viewed the pictures or not, just from looking at their cache? It could have been a popup or something...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There is no such thing as victimless viewing of child pornography.
Anyone who takes pleasure in looking at children in this way needs to be locked up if not castrated, then locked up. It's not only a crime because someone has paid for the stuff and contributes to "demand", or personally is responsible for creation of the content and therefore the destroying of a child. It's a crime because anyone who knowingly partakes in this sick shit, whether paying or not, is a menace to society.
Your last statement is meant to make you look intelligent and spark debate. Logic has no place in discussions of morality and decency. Something is right or wrong. Viewing child porn is wrong, period. Should we turn a blind eye to horrible shit because it disrupts soneone's concocted logical view of things?
Your label of victimless crimes does not apply here. You ask anyone (and get an honest answer) whether knowingly viewing child porn can be victimless. I have never told a lie and didn't know I was doing wrong. People have never knowingly pursued child porn and believed it was right. They may do it anyway, but they either know that it is wrong, or they are ceritfiable.
...after spending 4 hours driving around inside a Bolivian crack warehouse.
Hmmm...
In Canada, the age of consent is 14. Face it, kids that old know exactly what they're doing... Of course, persons in a parental role - teachers, guardians, police, etc. - are forbidden to exploit children under their control up to age 18. For explicit pictures, the age is 18.
The fedral guidelines seem clear, but have some hidden mines. "appears to be under 18" is very subjective. This also means hand-drawn and written items are illegal. It also means you can be charged for possesing pictures of your wife, if she's under 18.
I've always thought the rules should be the same as the ASPCA rules for Hollywood - "...no animals were hurt in the making of this picture..."
20 years????? For inavertant possession, 1 time, no evidence of re-viewing or passing on the pics... No wonder American jails are overcrowded.
If I view a picture of a nuclear device, it does not mean I possess a nuclear device.
The law specifically includes an affirmative defense. See here.
please mod the parent post up, this is the most sensible comment on this article and probably took more bravery to share than most of us could ever imagine.
http://www.inspircd.org - Modular C++ IRC Daemon
So, I could use a script to pre-cache images I'm never going to display on my webpage... and turn joe-legal into joe-porn-king without him even knowing... and it's _my_ fault?
What is the world coming to?
The answer is that in addition to the simple fact of the images being present, intent to view the images must also be present...and proven.
.html files that were also cached had links like "click here to see teh little girls!!!1!"... and with damning evidence like that, the only reason it wouldn't have come up in court and the article is if it just didn't exist.
I suspect that the only reason this is news at all is that that intent could not be proven. Maybe he was surfing a japanese or korean imageboard like moeboard on the wrong day? It talks about looking at pictures for 4 hours, but going through moeboard would take days of browsing through mostly harmless, mostly cute drawings posted by random users, plus the occasional handful of crap posted by a troll. The article neglects to mention if the
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
While I feel sorry for you, you seem to be falling into the same mindset as your attacker was which allowed him to do such an act.
The person that attacked you at the young age of five years, was so emotionally disconnect and devoid that their diluted mind let them to sexually molest you without even thinking about it.
You, as a victim, have become so emotionally disconnected and devoid that you believe sexual predators should be put to death for their (albeit painful to deal with) actions. Do you honestly think your life would be any better if the person that molested you was dead, rather then finding help? If thats true I beleive you need more counseling than most, as your anger toward one person and directing it toward all persons with the same problem.
The point about keeping their penis in their pants is moot, because its not about that. Sexual predators dont feel that their is a problem that they NEED to keep their penis in their pants, they usually think its fine. Also, obviously if your having sex with children, or looking at their pictures online, the normal pornography or sex isnt having the same effect it used to, and thats why they went to look for something more... satisfying (as disgusting as that sounds).
Yes, someone that physically assaults someone else needs substantial prison time, but both those that physically assault someone and just browse around the web need counseling to determine where their mind got so disconnected from the sympathy of the situation that it allows them to commit such acts. Sexual Predators feel no sympathy.
To get prosecuted for possession, you have to:
1) have it
and
2) know you have it
While #2 is argueable if you didn't view it and didn't ask for it, if you DID view it you KNOW the image or at least one still frame at a time is in your video card's memory buffer. That's sufficent for a conviction.
For most people, about the only real legal defense to KP being on your hard drive is "Your honor, I didn't do it, another user did or I was 0wned."
Another possible exception is if the KP was part of a package you downloaded or installed, and you didn't know it was there. For example, if Microsoft Windows shipped with 10yonude.bmp and you installed it as part of a larger package without knowing it was there.
Some states allow an "omygawdwhatjustpoppeduponmyscreen" defense, which should help if you unintentionally view KP. If you are surfing KP web sites though this won't help.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Look, I don't want to spend any time lauding these people as great folks, but at the same time, I'd like my country to have an orderly set of laws. Hence, please don't take my remarks here in defense of a law as any kind of endorsement of the behavior. (It's such a charged topic that it's sadly hard to even discuss without a prologue of this kind.)
We are a country that is a great experiment in Freedom and a set of laws based on what people do, not what they think. There are many vicious kinds of people who walk the streets--people who would like to kill others, people who would like to take the money of others. People who want to just make each other feel bad. But we don't lock them up for "being bad people".
First, the someone(s) you're taking issue with is not me but Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and others. I didn't found the nation and make up the Great Experiment, they did. I'm just explaining how it works.
Second, I'm not advocating turning a blind eye to anything. I'm advocating that every citizen be offered "due process". To understand why, refer to Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (the relevant scene prominently quoted here, though the whole play or movie is worth a watch).
You're advocating a policy of "prior restraint" and using a certain degree of circular reasoning to get their. The reason you think merely seeing this content is bad is that you think it identifies people who will do other things (and, implicitly, you believe that making a mere guess of this kind won't come back to bite you personally). You seem to want to catch them in time by just proceeding on this guess before they do something concrete. But what if the mere viewing doesn't mean that? As others have noted--should we lock up the judge and jury? They also viewed it.
And what if it were some other issue? Could the government just guess about all things it thinks citizens might do? Should we lock up people who buy certain chemicals because they might be used in the drug trade or the making of bombs? Should we just assume that anyone who ever tells a lie in some venue is willing in some other venue to cheat on their taxes by lying there, too? We could stop a lot of tax cheats that way. Where does this kind of thing end?
By their nature, Free Societies are not Safe Societies. We buy some of our freedom at the cost of loss of safety. We could be a lot safer if we were not so free. You seem to me to be clearly advocating yielding freedom for safety, and I'm merely noting that while this is a possible thing to do, it's got dangers of its own that go far beyond what you're advocating. For a good analysis of this tradeoff, see William Gibson's Disneyland With the Death Penalty in Wired Magazine (Issue 1.04, Sep-Oct 1993). Or see the movie Minority Report. Or read George Orwell's 1984 .
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
cannot help myself .... ...
just have to think of an app, that goes to a bittorrent site, and quiclkly cache-s all the songs, games and warez on the disk
more seriously: what if i come from an unwanted popup, now all those naked teen pictures on my disk are my property and if any of them turns to be under 18 i am charged with pedophilia ?
this is just not right....
This is simply an outright lie, and if you honestly believe it, you are deluded.
Now - really, the question becomes one of "what is a child", when it comes to sexual maturity, right? The problem is, you probably can't define it based on age. Most people could say that such maturity begins with puberty, I suppose. But I know that myself, prior to puberty, that I was a masturbating fool - furthermore, I first "came" when I was 11 years old. I know that I looked at swimsuit ads and such (Kathy Ireland, Cristy Brinkly, etc - dating myself here) - and I know that yeah, if given the chance, I would wanted to fuck them.
Most people would consider that child molestation - but I wanted it - I am sure that those women, or most any woman (but not all, of course) - didn't want this. Now, I am a heterosexual male - but I am certain the same thing applies to females as well, as well as homosexual/lesbian "children" and "adults".
The fact is we base a lot of this bruhahah on stuff that is so maleable that it is like runny putty. I will say that children under the age of 5 likely DO NOT want to have sex with an adult. After that age, all bets are off. I would say that the majority of children between the ages of 5 and 12 likely do not want to have sex with adults, with the likelyhood of not wanting to increasing as the age decreases (ie, inversely proportional to age). Twelve years old and up though...
Most people still define children as being through the age of 18. The fact is that some are (and beyond, unfortunately for all of us adults), and some aren't. Why is it that a 13 year old and a 15 year old can have sex, and it is looked at as "shocking" maybe even "deplorable" - but having a picture of a 13 year old in a "sexually suggestive" pose by an adult is considered by most akin to "child abuse", and at the least "child porn"?
Ultimately, it comes down to consent - but we adults for some reason, especially in the United States - don't want to give our kids the ability to consent. Unless of course they commit murder, or another heinous act. Then, all of a sudden, they could be 13, but now stand trial as an adult! That's fair - let our children have consent to go on trial and jail for an adult crime, but not let these same children have consent to vote on their rights and laws which may convict them...right.
I think the truth of the matter is people are afraid that if they really allowed consent, and voting, by children on children's rights, etc - that they might see how "adult" these kids can be when they want to be, which might shame the "adults", and remove power from them. I think "adults" are afraid that they will lose the image of "innocence" that seeing children gives them (talk about exploitation in ideas - how about we clean up our own backyards first?).
So - no child wants sex with an adult - not true in the strictest sense, and only true in certain cases which are currently ill defined. It is like saying no child wants to commit murder, yet it happens every day, so that statement is false. No child wants to have sex - same thing, happens every day. No child wants to have sex with an adult - I guarantee you there are children out there that want and do have sex with adults. Some, most assuredly, and sadly, are or were abused prior to such acts and "wants". But some (and granted, they are a minority), didn't - and are wanting and having sex with adults because of a mature decision they made for themselves.
Currently, not just illegal drugs are illegal to possess - I believe under Federal law (not sure about State laws - but probably many of them as well) it is illegal to possess immediate pre-cursor chemicals/compounds to illegal drugs.
Most of this was done to (supposedly) stop production of LSD and other hallucenagenics - but I suspect it also allows LE to tack on extra charges for meth labs and such (because in the making of meth you are bound to have in the lab precursors to the meth).
Now - this is being taken into even further extremes - many states, in efforts to combat methamphetamine production, are passing laws where you can't buy certain amounts of main pre-cursors (like pseudoephedrine - cold pills) in a certain time frame, and others are instituting putting these compounds behind the counter, and selling them only if you provide ID and sign a log saying you bought them!
FOR COLD PILLS!!!!
How long will it be before it is illegal to have Sudafed in your home? It is a precursor, right? RIGHT?!
The stupid thing is that ultimately, all this legislation and law activity on "illegal" drugs is doing is causing new drugs to pop up. I am certain that if meth is outlawed, something new will be created, using other common chemicals and such (hell, I can't remember the name of the book, but there is a publication out there describing about a bajillion different drugs and how to make them - for a chemist, of course - based off the same idea as behind LSD - TCB is one of these drugs. Most haven't been scheduled, because they don't exist, yet).
Personally, I can't wait for the day that a form of "drug use" is created that does some kind of direct neural interface of some sort - jack in, bliss out. May be science fiction, but we all have seen the rat that presses the button to jolt the pleasure center. Furthermore, they have stimulated this area in ways when doing brain surgery (a necessary thing, actually - to determine what they are doing, while the patient is kept "awake"). I think it is only a matter of time...
BTW - on this subject - does anybody remember the device/toy that appeared at some concerts in the 1990s that you blew into a straw, aimed it at the sun, and it supposedly produced trippy visuals and stimulation that was supposedly like LSD? I never went to one of these concerts, but I had heard about the toy on the radio - but I never saw one - anybody know anything about it, or have a picture or something? Personally, I think it was probably something like a manually operated "brainwave" machine - but I want to know for sure...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
As RAM prices go down and capacities go up, this will become more feasible:
/dev/ram0 /dev/ram0 /home/username/.mozilla (or wherever)
mkfs.ext2
mount -o loop
Well, someone else here quoted the statute (18 USC 2252A).
All it required was knowingly being in possession of it. If he didn't know of the browser cache, he should've gotten a better lawyer to help establish that.
Note that it also provides a safe harbor if you immediately take reasonable precautions to destroy it without showing it to anyone else except law enforcement, or if you show it to law enforcement & only law enforcement.
I'm sure there are separate offenses for soliciting it, etc. so don't think you can get away with viewing all of it you like and then just emptying your cache, though.
Comone guys this is stupid. Along with the cached picture would be the cached HTML it was displayed with.
Such an html page with the image set to 1x1 would be OBVIOUS PROOF that said image was *PLANTED* and downloaded *WITHOUT CONSENT*. There woul be no problem dismissing such a case.
to have a copy of any sort of image, kiddie porn or otherwise. Though the actual tranmission and creation of such content should definitely be punished.
And on that note I'd like to say that every argument I've read in this thread is just as ridiculous. I have trouble believing this guy wasn't aware of the fact that he was viewing child porn. He could have been aware of the fact that they were stored locally on his computer. He was probably just too dumb to delete them all properly and regularly, and this is the only defense his attorney has left. A few pics mixed in with 10,000 other pics, sure, but how about this quote for those who didn't RTFA:
156 child porn images out of 450. I don't consider that to be accidental stumble-upon rates. I think I've stumbled upon maybe 5 child porn images in my many years of surfing the net for porn. Without a proper copy of the full history it's hard to be the judge on this one, but I'd assume that if you kept running into child porn on a website and DIDN'T want to continue viewing child porn, you'd find a different site.It also says in the article that he was convicted of "106 child sex exploitation charges". Shouldn't viewing child porn be a different law? Or is that where the molestation law comes in? 20 years seems a bit excessive for someone found not guilty of actually molesting anyone.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
> There is no moral to the story.
There is a message, though - pictures of nude children are not necessarily considered "kiddie porn."
Google for "Jock Sturges" if you doubt it - people were protesting his photography books at Barnes and Noble, even destroying them. The FBI looked at the books (several times, wink wink) and found nothing "pornographic" about them.
Remember that Georgia, part of the BACKWARD, REPRESSIVE South, still has its Secretary of Education and county school boards (Google "Cobb County") wasting time on bullshït like "creationism" and "intelligent design."
Don't get your hopes up that Georgia will release a man sent away for 20 years SOLELY because of child-porn pics in his browser cache.
The South has a punishment mentality, as any trial lawyer can tell you.
The religious-fundamentalist, fücked-up South loves the idea of Thought Crime, and longs for the day when technology can read the human mind so that the Bible's fairytale punishments may be meted out on the non-believers.
SHERMAN DIDN'T BURN ENOUGH OF THE SOUTH.
Thank you for injecting reason into this thread!! I deal with US District Court often in child porn cases and they have a very simple criteria:
o ries.nsf/meramecjournal/news/story/50043336D0D5B4E 486257019004B435C?OpenDocument
on the other hand, will get their interest.
If the only place CP exists is in the cache, there is certainly plausible deniability that you intended to possess it and a charge will not be filed. They realize what browser hijackers and popups can do.
I regularly see suspects with GB's of CP in meticulously catalogged directories and on DVD's. The "oops" defense evaporates.
Some folks miss asking a basic question: How did the agent/detective/deputy come to believe that a specific person has cp? Despite what the tinfoil hat crowd thinks, searching for "small breasts" in Google photos will not lead to a search warrant and computer seizure. Publicly seeking an 11 year old girl for sex http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/neighborhoods/st
Presumably, if people pay for this stuff then it's a ludicrously simple matter for law enforcement to follow the dollars to the criminals. You might not get the head kiddy-fiddler but you can get whoever takes the money out of the bank. While you're about it get the credit-card processor and the isp too.
... no one gets locked up for downloading car-crash pictures, do they?
But I agree that we're not looking at a simple supply and demand system. And that the analogies with violence are intriguing
Just because you are a moral relativist doesn't mean I don't believe in absolute truth.
that's why you get 30-to-life for stealing penny-chews (cheap chewing candy) from your brothers room
(and no that's not justice!)