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Support for U.S. Mandatory Data Retention Laws
chill wrote to mention a C|Net article about an upswell in support for a mandatory data retention policy here in the U.S. From the article: "Top Bush administration officials have endorsed the concept, and some members of the U.S. Congress have said federal legislation is needed to aid law enforcement investigations into child pornography. A bill is already pending in the Colorado State Senate. Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months."
They want to prosecute child porn offenders? Fine. Put it in the text of the law. Retain the data, but make it unusable in court except for child porn cases.
Then tell all the privacy watchdogs to go back and chew their bones.
Fragging my father since 2004
How long till the US goverment mandates that all data, whether from phonelines, email, searches, etc, has to be maintained on government servers for safe storage. I'm being totally serious. First they use child porn and incidents on myspace to scare people... then once they get their foot in the door, its just a matter of time. It truly is scary. Wheneve I talk of stuff like this I am deemed a conspiracy nut or something similiar.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Someone else said it on /. long ago, but it bears repeating:
Child Porn is the root password to the US Constitution.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Just like the government would never ask at&t for the ability to monitor all internet traffic in realtime...
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Is child porn really as rampant and great a concern as they make it out to be?
Not by a long shot. Child porn is a gross violation of the rights of the child being used to make it. The violation continues through the continued proliferation of the materials.
Is it rampant? No one knows. For all we know, there could simply be a pool of say, 1000, images that are simply being recycled via digital copying over and over. No one has any hard data on this. We know nothing, yet laws are being drafted, essentially on the basis of rhetoric.
Is it that big of a concern? Well, for the person directly involved, it may become the biggest concern in their entire lives, and possibly the biggest concern in the lives of their loved ones too. They are still being violated in a very real sense. Depending on the circumstances, some might be able to cope with this others might not.
Is it that big of a concern for the rest of society? Well, yes. I am personally offended that people's rights are violated in this way. Those responsible deserve to face justice and the judgement of their peers under the law. Like all sex crimes, everyone can agree something needs to be done.
But should everyone elses rights be violated in order to "do something"? Will this even work? Should more people suffer because of what has been done to the victims? I, and most Slashdotters, realise that we should have our rights forsaken or violated in response to the violation of others. Rather, we should use the law as it surrently stands to both protect people and bring the guilty to justice. It is up to the task.
I would like to think victims of sex abuse would agree with my sentiment that the rights of everyone shouldn't have to be lost or violated in response the the violation of the rights of the victims. But I don't know that this is the case. I would like to hear the opinions of an actual victim of either child sex abuse or child pornography, on all of this. What do the people for whom these laws are suppossedly made for actually think about them?
In all this, I don't think I've ever even heard the voice of the victim. Even once.
May the Maths Be with you!