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US Intensifies Fight Against Child Pornography
TechnoGuyRob writes "BBC News is reporting that the Bush administration has recently stepped up its measures against child pornography. From the article 'Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more sadistic, using younger and younger children. [...] Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.'"
I know its been said before,
but come on.
When will the think of the children bullshit stop?
It's obvious why they want all this data retention, and it AINT child porn.
dataveilance...
oh, and btw
FIRST POST!
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
And I'm COMPLETELY sure that these records will only be used to fight child porn... this is frightning.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
that we open, photocopy and file away every piece of correspondence that passes through the US Postal Service?
Didn't think so.
Who in their right mind believes this crap about child pornography? Can't they at least come up with less transparent excuses?
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
This is yet another attempt by the Bush administration to increase domestic surveilance, and to create a de-facto state of permanent constant survelliance on all Americans.
They're just trying to sell it as "anti child porn" in order to get the gullible people to go along with giving up the remaining shreds of personal privacy.... and to keep the gutless wonders (of both parties)in Congress from trying to oppose it.
Will someone please think of the children?
One thing I'm surprized is that the RIAA/MPAA haven't tried to shut down the P2P programs with the goverment saying that they harbor child pornography. It is simply amazing what bullshit laws you can get passed if you play it off that it is in the best interest of the "children". But, dear god forbid some of the parents actually pay attention to what their kids are doing....
The real issue is not child pornography, the issue is anything to get access to your personal records. They are persistent. Every excuse they find, they use towards this goal. I, for one, am not falling for it. Be afraid, very afraid. The concept of personal freedom will soon be a ghost of what it once was unless we wake up NOW!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Funny thing is, I can take measures to protect my daughter from sex perverts, but how do I protect her from a government that is slowly turning into an orwellian police state?
Just enforce existing laws.
The thing about this is, these figures are absolutely empty. The "1 in 5 children is solicited online" thing gets me particularly. I would really like to know what they count a solicited. Anyone who uses AIM or Yahoo chatrooms (can't speak for the MSN chatrooms, but I would assume it is common in those as well) and to a lesser extent, IRC has experienced bots that automatically solicit people- usually trying to trick people into pay porn sites or to the peronsons personal escort service. If they are counting this as solicitation (and it seems the most likely way that they would get the 1-in-5 figure) then it's really not nearly as much of a danger as they are making it seem. If a parent has properly configured their network connection, the vast majority of sites that spambots in chatrooms would send children to would be blocked anyway; and it's not as though there is an actual person on the other end who is actively trying to lure a child into meeting for a sexual encounter.
Furthermore, I wonder if they cound instances of flirtation where the adult ceases communication with the child if/when they become away that the person with whom they are talking is a child. Once again, this isn't a case of an adult actively conspiring to lure a child to them in order to commit sexual acts- but both instances could be used to support the 1-in-5 statistic.
One thing that gets me too is, they are talking about cracking down on child porn, but in my experience this isn't really the case. Last year someone on a newsgroup I was on (this wasn't a pornographic newsgroup, but the person who posted it was someone I had seen post before, I can only assume that they must have posted to the wrong newsgroup or something) posted bunch of child porn photos. When I saw it I got all of the relevant information I could gather and called the local FBI office, and the local police department. Neither group even seemed interested in my call. The FBI told me to contact my ISP, my ISP told me to contact the local police, local police told me to contact the FBI- and after a day on the phone getting the runaround I ended up just posting the information I had to a child abuse pervention website and hoping that they could find the right people to talk to catch the guy.
No, instead of taking information that someone was trying to give them to catch a child pornographer, they want to log everyone's online activity. The thing is, logging all of that activity will do nothing to help catch child pornography. The amount of data would be such that it would still require someone to find and report the activity- and if someone can find it and report it, then there should be enough information already to catch the person.
This leads me to believe that the interest in logging all of this is in no way related to catching child pornographers. Instead it seems like the neo-cons are doing what they do best- brewing up an invisible boogeyman and using the threat of this boogeyman in order abridge the rights and privacy of the citizens. After all, if anyone tries to stand up against it, then they "are just a prevert who doesn't care about exploited children being used for sex and porography"- the same as with the patriot act and anyone who opposed it being "a commie american hating terrorist".
Of course, most people on slashdot probably already realize this, and other people aren't going to bother signing onto slashdot to read this post- let alone rethink their position based on it.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I'd like to propose a new mod category for the above: "-1, Foul"
The article also says that Gonzalez is looking at ways to force webhosts to track user activity, but this could easily mean just tracking user activity to the illegal child-porn websites, which also seems reasonable.
How do you log only child pornography? Sure, you could filter out keywords but if that is what they are trying to accomplish, then Google already provides this so why do we need to log anything in the first place?
I hate to say it, but the comment you made is the exact reason why we are losing our privacy.
It may suck to be cartoon guy—but I'm sure glad that I don't live in your country.
Yep, it's a new one, and they haven't tested it in the Supreme Court yet.
I assume this one will do the same, I certainly don't feel I'd have anything to lose that point... 20 years for downloading anime, perhaps resembling real but still... in my country you wouldn't get that if you abducted and violently raped a real girl.Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
Think about it: This artwork harmed no one in the making. Mr. Whorely didn't harm anyone by possessing it. One can't even make the argument that he was harming himself by looking at it, unless you want to really stretch it and say that it was causing him psychological trauma or somesuch drivel.
Actual child porn aside, this was a nonviolent thought crime, pure and simple.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
I think child ponography is just part of a huger social problem affecting most of the world. Pedophilia stems from somewhere, right? I'm going to point my finger at our culture. It's kind of fucked up how we can condone stuff like letting elemetary schoolgirls to dress up like hoochies, "Child Beauty" pagents, and the like. If you can't pull your own head out of your ass and see what's going on right around you, look at Japan. General society out there basically tolerates a lot of weird shit that you'd normally only see on 4chan.org's /b/ imageboard, such as lolicon art.
If the government was actually interested in curbing child pornography, they'd attack it at the source: Fucked up society. It may sound a little hard to reach a proactive solution, but really, the solutions aren't that hard seeing how easy it is to veil larger, equally scary ulterior motives under getting rid of something that everyone accepts as evil without the majority of the general public batting an eyelid.
So, even if these measures that they're planning don't mean to harm people's personal freedoms all 1984 style, they're just giving a reactive and therefore non-effective solution to just a small part of a much, much broader problem.
How many people are online? How many of those are surfing for child porn? A depressingly larger number than we'd want, yes, but compared to how mnay people aren't? So they're going to keep records of everyone's activities online and sift through all of that to find the people surfing kiddie porn? Wouldn't it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it? Hey, maybe we could have the FBI do that.... no wait, theye're too busy working for the RIAA and the MPAA instead investigating dangerous crimes like they used to.
This is pure BS. If they really wanted to do something about child pornography, they have the power to do so without spying on every citizen in the US. Like you say, they want to satisfy their socially conservative base, but they're just outrightedly lying about what they want to do this for. They want more power to abuse.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
If someone can be convicted for viewing ficticious criminal activity against a child why has the same not happened to those that produce and consume other fictional criminal activity, like The Godfather or even the movie Hostel, which I found stomach turning? It is nothing more than thought crime.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Where might one find voices or proposals which attempt to combat child pornography without encroaching on reasonable civil liberties or turning the internet into a police state? After all, I have no idea whether child pornography and predatory pedophilia is a problem which is getting better or worse with time-- but it surely is a real-world problem.
Perhaps it would be easier to protect civil liberties from false choice fallacies if we could say something like "I am opposed to the Bush Administration child pornography plan, because I support this other, superior strategy for fighting child pornography instead".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Correct title is "Bush Administration Intensifies War on Web Privacy, Uses Child Porn as Excuse."
Don't let the bastards frame the terms of debate. If the history of Bush's presidency has taught us anything, it's that they constantly lie about their motives. Look at the results, not the ever-shifting rationales.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Child pornography is illegal - and vile. Possession of child pornography is illegal - and vile.
And a Jamaican would tell you that homosexuality is illegal - and vile.
I think that laws making child pornography possession illegal are, at best, in line with laws making drug possession illegal to try to reduce the demand to squeeze out drug sellers. We want to step on sexual abuse of children, so we stomp on child pornography production. To stomp on that, we try stomping on child pornography consumers to reduce demand. You're talking about a pretty darn indirect benefit at a potentially steep privacy and civil rights cost.
Frankly, politicians are playing off the fears parents have for their kids when they invoke child pornography to squeeze something through. They're grabbing whatever generates the strongest emotional response. Right after 9/11, it was terrorism:
"Well...I don't know...that law seems to violate my civil rights."
"In this day and age of terror striking from the skies and from among us, we need to prevent a unified front. All Americans must work together. Vote in my law."
Terrorism may not be scaring enough people any more -- we may be back to "what about the children" in the form of child pornography.
Point is, if someone brings up child pornography while pushing a law, they're trying to make an emotional appeal as to why the law needs to pass. If they're stuck trying to make an emotional appeal, one has to ask why they just didn't make a good, reasoned argument. Is it because such an argument cannot stand on its own merits?
Pushing for increased government surveillance and control online particularly pisses me off, because in the past, government surveillance has been used to damage the mechanisms that are used to correct and limit the government -- free speech and the ability to promote political challenges to the government. There has to be an absolutely overwhelming benefit to granting a power that allows the administration to make life difficult for its detractors before I want to see it accepted.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
He may be generalizing beyond the point of usefullness, but that doesn't mean he doesnt have a point. When high level figures in the government are guilty of this themselves, then they can't claim "It's all for the children."
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
Before I was born, my parents lived in the San Fransisco area, and enjoying certain freedoms (nice jobs, good friends, etc). Upon my arrival, they moved away, as a rash of crimes had made SF a place where they didn't want me to be raised.
Today, I'm beginning to feel the same way. I enjoy certain liberties here right now. However, unless the next administration makes major changes in the interest of freedom, I do not feel that America will be the place I want my children to be raised.
Fear is the number one tool used to eliminate freedoms, no matter how small.
Hitler used very similar tactics to rise to power and advance his own power once he had risen. Fear and the 'Patriot' factor were his strongest tools in the manipulation of the German society. Freedoms were lost as well as untold lives, all for the 'homeland.' The rest of the world sat back and let it happen too, just like now. The current administration must have some sort of Nazi handbook....
I wonder how many more are going to die this time.
While extreme criminalization of even such a simple act as viewing/possessing images seems appropriate due to the repulsive nature of adulteration of innocence, it kind of scares me. I live in a dorm, a public place.Sometimes I leave my door open. So what if I step outside for a moment, and someone downloads some child porn on my machine? Or what if it gets compromised and begins downloading such things in the background? Then I'm completely screwed. I think people need to step back from the visceral response of terror and hatred that comes from sexually abusing children, and consider things rationally for a moment. I full-heartedly agree, child pornography is very morally damaging to both the author, viewer, and victim, and I agree we should do something about it. However, is it worth infiltrating the privacy of every single person (in the US at least, in thise case)?
Furthermore, this seems like a very dictatorial response. There is a new decriminalization philosophy dubbed restorative justice. In this model, the offender is encouraged to become acquainted with the victim (or their family). By learning about the damage that one has caused, and seeing it through one's own eyes, remorse is stimulated much more effectively. Sometimes, prison can be a reforming experiences. However, there are also the hard-ass idiots that want revenge, and continue, if not increase, their crime life after prison. Honestly, I don't know if this is the best approach. Not only does it violate the public's privacy, it isn't guaranteed to be very--or even at all--successful. It has been proven, starting back with Ivan Pavlov's research, that negative reinforcement is not as effective as positive reinforcement. Why should this be any different?
Once again, I don't mean to criticize my government (of course, many do), but who's with me?
You're missing the point. The point is that cartoon child porn is icky. Just like gay sex. Anything that offends my sensibilities, anything at all, must banned and its participants jailed, regardless of whether they're doing any harm or even affecting me at all. The mere thought that something out there is icky fills me with pure rage; rage that causes me to go out and vote for any canditate who'll stop the ickiness.
On an unrelated note, Eastern Orthodox Easter today, so happy Easter! Here's a picture of a cute bunny to offset any negative feelings I might have caused with the above paragraph.
Person 1: You! You're against furries and their furry pornography, right?
You: Yeah, lets create a police state to hunt them down.
All you got to know is what buttons to press. For some it is child porn. For others it is furry porn. Whatever works to get you to sign up for a police state.
Please note that I understand the author is making a sorta joke with his furries comment BUT the old fact remains. Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom. Better people then me said it better. Read books to learn what freedom really means. (Cause you sure as hell aren't going to experience it anytime soon in this world.)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So what is your point, that homosexuality and child pornography are really both OK? Even though homosexuality is consensual and child porn is often not?
Also, can the posession of anything, by your logic, be illegal? What about knowingly possessing human organs, which have been illegally harvested? Gee, why stomp on that? We all know it's only the harvesting of a liver from someone who does not want to give it up that is actually harmful. We will give the distributors a slide.
Look, unless you think that the creation of child pornography is ok, (which maybe you do, since you equate it with homosexuality), you have to concede that attacking child-porn's chain of distribution is a reasonable move. If you cannot make posession illegal, how do you stop the website operators from selling their wares?
The point is that whatever legal and technological barriers you try to invent, the child pornographers will get around them. It's like trying to stop the flow of drugs. Short of some very orwellian schemes, it's not possible to stop. There is a big demand for it, in turn there is a large fiscal incentive to import it, and as a result, fairly intelligent people will go to work on ways to circumvent whatever barriers we create.
Have you ever looked on Freenet lately? There is definitely (what appears to be -- I've never visited, but based on descriptions on the indices) underage porn on there, and that's a network that's designed by some very intelligent people to be anonymous. Sure, it wasn't designed for porn, but the porn people aren't stupid. They take advantage of those things when it exists. If HTTP gets too dangerous, they move to Freenet; if Freenet gets too dangerous, they'll move to total trust-based Darknets. At the end of the day, even if you shut down all the open WWW underage-porn websites, in all the countries of the world (managing somehow to harmonize laws concerning the age of consent) you'd really just drive that particular subculture back to the pre-internet days, when I can only assume people traded stuff on physical media via darknets, or private BBSes.
And of course, you have the ever-present threat that, with decreased availability of prerecorded porn on the Internet, that pedophiles will decide to make their own; featuring your neighborhood kids at gunpoint as the co-stars. I've never once seen this aspect of the problem seriously considered. What if we're actually stopping would-be child molesters through the availability of Internet porn? So what happens to these people if that supply is shut off?
The whole "child porn argument" is poorly thought out. It's a knee-jerk line brought out by politicians when they don't have any other way of garnering support for an unpopular and invasive policy, which is so polarizing that it automatically casts a shadow on anyone who opposes it.
As a society, we should invent something like "Godwin's Law" for child pornography. It's something so near-universally offensive, that when you drag it out as an argument for a particular widespread action, it's almost certain that you're using it as a weak justification for an otherwise unacceptable course of action. If you have to bring child porn in as reasons for doing something, it's a good sign your policies aren't well planned. If they were, they'd probably have any number of totally valid, separate reasons for doing them, and wouldn't need the spectre of child porn to back them up.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When they came for the pedophiles, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for the bestiality fans, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for the hentai fans, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for the bukkake fans, I didn't speak out; the only porn site I go to is Aunt Judies.
When they came for viewers of porn involving mature women there was noone left to speak out for me...
(My stated favorite porn site is purely fictitious and serves only as an example, I am not actually a subscriber to Aunt Judies. Honest.)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
No, when you are 40 and married, your need to look at porn will be infinitely greater than it is now.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It sounds to me like this proposal simply makes mandatory practices that are probably already widespread but rarely discussed. Where I live, ISPs provide practically zero information to users regarding the degree to which they record their activities - what is logged, how long it is retained, and who has access - and privacy policies are quite vague. Given that many people live such a large portion of their lives online nowadays, what I find remarkable is how rarely people show some interest and merely ask about how they're being monitored, and when they do, the frequency with which such inquisitiveness and concern is ridiculed with the standard "what have you got to hide?" line of retort.
Does your ISP retain the contents of the e-mails you've sent and received? Lists of each URL you've visited? IM traffic? Roughly how long do they retain such data? Two days, two months, two years? Who has access? 99% of people wouldn't have a clue as to the answer to any of these questions, and most don't show much concern, which is scary. I'm with an ISP that is relatively open and conversant with its users, and even though I received long-winded and seemingly earnest replies when I raised the matter some time ago, none contained a direct answer to any of the aforementioned questions. Good luck to anyone else who tries.
First they came for the Terrorists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Terrorist.
Then they came for the Pedophiles,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Pedophile.
Then they came for the Immigrants,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a citizen.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
Mr. Whorley downloaded child porn at work: strike one. He would have had to transport it from his work to his house through public places where it might have been exposed to unwilling recipients or juveniles: strike two. Did I mention, he worked for the State of Virginia, at a Virginia Employment Commission office? Strike three, he's out.
You really have to work better on that one. Exposing children to regular pornography is also illegal, but I never heard of anyone being sued for walking home from the video store with their XXX rated DVD concealed in a bag. Do you think the images in question would jump off the CD, print themselves and hand themselves to bypassers?
How does the fact that he worked for the government and not a private entity factor into this? Not at all, as far as I can see. The people that could have been exposed are co-workers and network admins, same as in a regular workplace. Yes, he did it in a misunderstood conception of "privacy" at the workplace.
However, in the verdict most of the arguments focus around "interstate commerce", that is Internet. I think this one pretty well sums it up: "The latter class of materials, involving simulated images of children engaged in a sexually explicit conduct, can only be prohibited if they meet the definition of obscenity set forth in Miller." and "For this Court to adopt the defendant's position and expand the contours of the zone of privacy articulated in Stanley to include the transportation of material in interstate commerce would be a clear break with long-established precedent. Even in the context of recent technological advances, this Court declines to do so."
So basicly what the court said was that in your own home, you enjoy the protection of the Stanley case. But when passing it around on the Internet, it is not protected from obscenity laws, covered by the Miller test and states may ban its exchange. I believe this is already the case with some kinds of porn, that suppliers will not ship to certain states. What they've done though, is to place a massive penalty on the private aquisition of such material. Personally I think this is a huge abuse of the Miller test because you're using a public standard to regulate private actions.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
These people victimize the children again by using them to further their own agenda, which has nothing to do with child pornography. It is about better surveilance, givinig the appearance of doing something which is good and that nobody dares to speak out against. Personal guess: This is a try to do something about the abysmal popularity ratings of the current president and his team. Also more surveilance would definively be good. Could be used against all those that think Bush is not doing a good job. Even if they only fear that the surveilance would be used for that would be nice.
I think that the child-pornography problem is being blown entirely out of proportion today, for the usual selfish reasons. I think that the existing laws and penalties are adequate and that it is the job of the police (and not the government) to find the people creating and using this stuff. So far they seem reasonable successful. And to say it quite clear: A free society is worth a lot more than a society free of child pornography. Even is some people seem unable to see that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Funny, isn't it? We need a 100% intrusive government to stop .01% of crime. Meanwhile, Head Start is getting slashed into non-existence, "No Child Left Behind" is destroying an already-faulty education system, and 8.3 million children live without health insurance. 1500 children die each year from neglect and abuse. And so on.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Oral sex was also considered abnormal (inhuman, disgusting, yada yada) once upon a time. I hope we don't have to go back to pre-BJ days, because that would suck. Or not suck, I guess. If you go back far enough, the norm was to throw a woman down and jump her, whether she was willing or not, and raping young boys in conquered cities was not at all abnormal. Depends on the society, where they draw moral lines as relates to sexuality. Personally, as long as everyone involved is consensual, and nobody involved is prepubescent, and everyone's happy after they're done with their business, then I figure it ain't up to me to try to overlay MY sexual values on people who are happy without my interference.
Liberals are more of the 'do whatever you want as long as there are no children involved and everyone consents' whereas conservatives tend to be more of the 'do it our way or it's wrong and you need to be punished, because our morals > yours anytime the two aren't aligned'.
Congratulations, Slashdot. You've turned what was an anti-child porn initiative into a conspiracy-preaching, Bash-bushing session. I knew when the phrase "Bush administration" was used in the summary that it would be another Bush-bashing session with conspiracy theories flying wildly. It's like pressing a button on a robot.
"Police state?" Oh, please. I put as much stock into that phrase when liberals use it as when they use "fascist dictator" and "regime." Such people have neither lived in an actual regime nor under a fascist dictator in a police state. Ask a Holocaust survivor sometime what a fascist dictator really is.
"Sufferin' succotash."