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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.
Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
Wholly 1984 Batman!
Who in their right mind believes this crap about child pornography? Can't they at least come up with less transparent excuses?
Would this be a bad time to bring up the Aristocrats? I love that joke!
And I'm going to hell...
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.
Super young child porn on wikipedia
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. "
I don't think Whorley or his ilk are the best arguments for the importance and necessity of free speech, but Whorley's plight is of particular concern because the material he has been convicted of downloading was concocted from imagination. They were cartoons. In other words, Whorley has been jailed for what can only be seen as pure speech. Whether the current administration really is interested in protecting society from child pornographers is irrelevant. Whorley's successful conviction and extraordinary sentencing set the precedent that pure expression (which may have harmed no one) can be found illegal.
We live in dangerous times and I worry that it won't be long before critics of the US government and/or political opponents of the powerful find themselves in straits similar to Whorley's.
blog
Is there a study somewhere indicating the prevalence of child pornography, preferably one that has been carried out over a number of years, and perhaps has a timeline that one could compare against the prevalence of Internet access?
> child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more
> sadistic, using younger and younger children.
This, of course, has led to hordes of scientists meticulously documenting the wanton torture of stem cells. If it goes on, we'll soon be seeing the entire population of Earth making holograms of themselves setting fire to the concept of a zygote.
http://www.secret-cinema.com/ Cult, Arthouse, Badfilm, and more!
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?
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/04/homeland.arrest/ index.html
Just enforce existing laws.
New technology such as file-sharing meant that law enforcement agencies are no longer able to control child pornography.
Napster came out in 1999, and I think it's getting rather late to call p2p "new" technology. And if they can't even control regular p2p, what will happen when we finally manage to get well working anonymous networks? Yes, I know about Freenet, TOR, i2p, ants etc., none have mass market penetration. Also, they speak about "molestation on demand" which is in other words pedos on webcam. Big surprise that they might take use of them like the rest of us. Everything gets so distanced away when they want to talk about pedos. Do you have a "Home Kiddie Porn Photo Lab" aka digicam at your house? This can't really come as a surprise to anyone that's taken a look at technology and tried to apply it to a pedo community.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Do they mean track down ALL users or those who have specifically had a warrant filed against them?
Usually any time information is collected, they also file gag orders against the ISPs preventing them from telling anyone what information was taken, or why.
Child pornography is illegal - and vile. Possession of child pornography is illegal - and vile.
RTFA:
The proposals have been sent to Congress and include new laws that will require ISPs to report child pornography and bolster penalties for those companies that fail to do so.
Mr Gonzales also said that he is also investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
As long as the ISPs themselves report the violations of EXISTING law, I have no problem with the first part, and neither should most rational people. I could easily have a problem with the second, but that is not a proposal to Congress yet - just a potential future idea.
Now, could this be expanded on to cause problems in the future? Yes, of course. But just because something may have the potential of being expanded upon later and misused does not mean never do it. New technologies bring new areas of illegal activity that current laws cannot naturally handle. A free society needs to remain vigilant against the natural tendency of government to seek more control, and make sure those new laws aren't misused.
Hey... I've got some HOT sonograms of NAKED PRE-natal fetuses... interested?
They're WET in amniotic fluid and there's no telling what these NAUGHTY fetuses will do when they think no one's watching!
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"
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
I am!
This is about the Bush Administration wanting to satisfy its socially conservative base. They don't like child pornography, and they'd like to eliminate it. I see no duplicity in their goal of eliminating child pornography. Their preferred means of fighting child porn simply dovetails with their overall approach to "securing the homeland" from domestic and foreign threats of all kinds. Whenever possible, obtain maximum lattitude to conduct surveillance on Americans and foreign nationals.
The Administration's desire to fight child porn with more surveillance helps them satisfy Bush's core constituents, while furthering his goal of broadening the Executive Branch's surveillance capabilities.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'd like to propose a new mod category for the above: "-1, Foul"
Anyone who puts "FP" or any permutation of "first post" in their otherwise useful post should be moderated down, because it's stupid *.
* Except for posts where people put it in to illustrate how stupid it is.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
Think about this, though: It is impossible for ISPs to police the entire Internet, and there will almost certainly be child porn sites they don't know about. Therefore, if this law is passed the government instantly gains the ability to shut down any ISP they want at will for failing to report it. Not to mention that they could even make just up a child porn site themselves instead of bothering to find a real one.
I could easily see them using this tactic against an ISP that did something as heinous as, say, hosting a site with information about DRM, or the site of an organization critical of the Bush Administration, or any number of other things that the Powers That Be don't like.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Insightful? By that logic, it means a higher up in your business/organization/whatever is a pedophile, then so are 50% of the others.
I thought the Supreme Court had already ruled that cartoons are not able to be consider child pornography. How the hell can the judge sit by and allow the case to go forward with that precedent already mandated?
What the hell is wrong with our country? Cartoons are not reality. Fire the guy and maybe give him one or two years for theft of services (using his work computer for non-work, and that depends specifically on his work contract). But the criminal charges based on his looking at, receiving, soliciting, possessing, or viewing cartoon depictions of anything are fucking bullshit.
Yeah, but to refute that, you'd have to do some kind of study. I mean, the fact is that if you're going to jump and say someone in authority is wrong, you need some sort of proof, even if they're equally empty handed (which isn't exactly fair, but that's how it is). Considering you can't confess to seeing child porn in the past or presently, you certainly can't draw a comparison. Neither can I (because I'm not a pedophile), and neither can anyone else, except a pedophile, who certainly can't be trusted to be non-biased.
Great thing to claim, something that no one can easily refute.
in my home country of thailand little girl is sent to do the sex act many times for rich fat white americano so that her parents can eat
is capitalism in purerest form. who are you to say this is wrong?!
I would say you gots BALLS, for even putting that shit on the net at all.
But it is more like stupid, let me know when the cops come knocking at the door.
Sometimes a judge takes the bait. Sometimes they can be talked out of it. In any case, the full cost of such a decision may be felt months, years or even decades later.
In any case, the real impediment to persecuting(sic) child pornsters is resource allocation, not a lack of civil liberties and privacy. Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
You don't want to. I've stumbled on some a few times (and updated my hosts file to make sure I never reach those sites again) and believe me, you really, really don't want to!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
People seem to be really, really interested in thinking of the children so long as the children are still, y'know, children. But almost nobody seems to be thinking about making sure that we are leaving behind an America such that by the time the children grow up, it will still be a place worth living...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Why won't you all stop beating your wives for crying out loud!
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
The thing though is, if child porn is indeed becoming more graphic, violent, and subversive (I'm not sure how it could involve younger kids... unless they really are talking about zygotes), shouldn't there have been significantly increased rates of child sexual abuse reported? Wouldn't everyone remember some kid on the news who was rescued after being in a pornographic video at the age of 6? Or do they censor the kids faces, so that they have some privacy after being abused in these videos? I call Shenanigans on "Mr" Gonzales as I'm sure almost everyone on here does.
The corner of a round room
Considering you can't confess to seeing child porn in the past or presently, you certainly can't draw a comparison. Neither can I (because I'm not a pedophile), and neither can anyone else, except a pedophile, who certainly can't be trusted to be non-biased.
Didn't the AG admit to seeing child porn? Does that make him a pedophile? What if a guy was employed by an ISP to look at every picture passing through their pipe and he saw child porn on a daily basis? Does that make him a pedophile?
"..., I have no problem with the first part, and neither should most rational people."
Does this mean that people who disagree with you are therefore irrational? Can't someone be rational and disagree with you?
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
This requires ISPs to LOOK at everything their customers do. They don't right now, otherwise what ISP would watch someone download child porn and say nothing about it?
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. You just demonstrated the fallacy of appeal to authority.
The fact is that it's not the authority itself, but the evidence, data, and conclusions which that authority brings to the table, that makes what an authority has to say important.
To draw an example: Say that your friend is a meteorologist. One day, he says to you that it's going to rain kumquats tomorrow. When you ask him why, he says that he doesn't have anything to bring to the table, but he's the Authority, so he knows. Does that mean that kumquats are going to start pouring out of the sky tomorrow?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Would you mind the government building a large database where they can track the movement of every piece of mail, and then retain the information as long as they see fit?
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. You just demonstrated the fallacy of appeal to authority.
The fact is that it's not the authority itself, but the evidence, data, and conclusions which that authority brings to the table, that makes what an authority has to say important.
No, I agree with you that that's how it should be, but that's not how it is with the US government. I wish they would have to back their statements up, but they have set everything up so it looks like they're talking fact and anyone who challenges them is a pedophile/communist/terrorist/pirate (depending on the issue), which is regrettable, but that's how it seems to be going right now. I hope it changes.
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.
What's needed is video surveillance of any place where a Catholic priest is alone with a child. There's a proven track record of molestation and coverups in that area. That might actually save some children.
Democrats cobble together support from a large collection of oddball fringe groups. Something is promised to each group. The party struggles to hold this together because the many fringe groups inevitably conflict with each other. Also, by trying to reward everybody with special treatment, none of the fringe groups are all that special. There are too many groups to please.
We aren't there yet. Hold your representatives accountable. If they are not doing their job find someone else. 1984 will only come when we allow it.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
This is the same administration that objects to creating a .xxx top level domain. Come on, make the tld so all the porn can be put into it's own niche and filtering software will actually prevent children from viewing it. And with all porn legally required to be tucked away in the .xxx it would make it that much easier to get action when someone tries to put it in a .com. Gonzales wants porn to carry an identifying mark - well a .xxx domain would be that and would work within the existing infrastructure of the Internet.
Shh.
Since we didn't elect Gore or Kerry, you don't get to see the evil things that they would have done.
The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.
Don't anybody look! Just think how the children in these images will feel when they grow up and see that they have been objectified in front of the entire world!
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.
Over the decades that "thinking of the children" has been so very important, there has been exactly ONE news report of investigators tracking down the location of abuse from images. Seems thinking is OK for the authorities, as long as it doesn't involve doing.
In the meantime, the UN is reporting intensifying levels of slave trading within the US, with some indications that it is with the knowledge of police in those areas. Escapees are often deported (to extremely uncertain fates) but slavers are somehow always missed. Witness protection (as now happens in the UK, in increasing numbers of cases) doesn't appear to be happening at all in the US.
The inference would seem obvious enough. As happened in Belgium, where several senior politicians, judges and police officers were implicated in a massive multinational paedophile ring (though none were ever formally charged, if I recall the case clearly, despite damning evidence) it is very likely that there are enough rogue elements in senior positions in the US to make any real action extremely unlikely.
On the other hand, we definitely know from the openly hostile refusal of Government agencies to discuss Echelon or the current wiretap program with Congress that there are certainly elements within the US who desire surveillance powers that are essentially unconstrained and unsupervised, and who actively want to ensure that neither the courts nor any other authority interferes.
Since neither of these would trust the other an inch, cooperation is unlikely to impossible. However, I also doubt either would have any interest whatsoever in interfering with the other, either. As such, the campaign is clearly bogus and is intended to be more for electioneering purposes than any actual law-enforcement or child welfare. (The timing also indicates that votes are far more of interest than children's wellbeing, with voting underway in New Orleans and elections due in other States this spring and nationally this fall.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was thinking in terms of an ISP that is hosting the website. It would not be hard for them to log traffic to the website, once they know the website is a child-porn website. I do suspect that when a proposal comes out, it will not be as restrictive as what I am suggesting. But do think of the children.
Just more bullshit from our goverment to pull out more tax dollars. Seriously, I have 2 boys ages 16 and 12, so I must be beating the odds.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
I know where you can get images of children so young, that they haven't even been concieved yet! And it's all perfectly leagal too! A man and woman get it on with the potenial for a child between them! And who knows what the future will bring? This hot, nasty business could turn out to be an orgy of thousands of children!
Yes, we certainly do have to think of the children but there truly are enough ways that we can prosecute offenders under current laws. It's human nature to make excuses to give when we want to do something (or have done something) that is not going to be a popular thing. This is what the government is doing. Child porn is disgusting but the government is using child porn to accomplish their own disgusting goals. Something to think about is this.... Would you allow the government to put cameras in your computer room so that they could verify that you were not interested in child pronography? Any other legal activity that you did would be monitored.... even looking at what is legal pornography. The question is where do we draw the line and, more importantly, at what point do we hit the "point of no return" in which the government has too much power and we are powerless?
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.
Is a picture of a baby in a bathtub "obscenity"?
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?
Er... just because speech isn't protected, that doesn't mean that covering it up or otherwise silencing it isn't censorship. It may be legal, it may even be something that you agree with, but it's still censorship. The word does not take into account the legality or morality of the material being censored, although it could be argued that it does in fact imply that said material is being suppressed for either legal or moral reasons.
Maybe they want a log so they can find the best websites?
Hitler used the latest american technology of punchcards and crude databases to keep track
of all citizens to find out who was rich or poor or jew or gay.
Ironically, in the pre 30s days, it was the church who helped willingly to give the nazis all
the birthrecords for everyone. Bastards.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If its *truely* about child porn and nothing else, insert a provision into the law that any and all data requested as part of a child porn investigation cannot be used in any other investigation.
If information this broad and sweeping is available to anyone, it will get out to the public, no matter what provisions are included. There is always a loophole in any law. Maybe through the war on terror, maybe anonymously leaked for political reasons, or maybe someone in the oversight agency will have an argument with someone in their neighborhood and see what they've been browsing and/or buying on-line for blackmail.
The simple truth is no individual can be trusted with this information and, therefore, no government can be allowed to collect it.
I wish at least half the effort put into catching child porn scumbags were put into catching the much more common child neglecters and abusers. Or into better education and childcare. Most porn kids seem to be runaways. If they didn't run away, we wouldn't have as many vulnerable kids.
--
make install -not war
If they keep using younger and younger children for childporn, the kids would be at a negative number by this time.
The Justice Department does not know if they are cumming or going.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
How many people are online? How many of those are surfing for child porn? A depressingly larger number than we'd want
... Or that you could jail.
I personaly wish they'd go after the kiddy porn spammers harsh. I would very much like to be able to look for sci-fi and fantasy pics without having pictures of children being abused as a possible result.
You don't need to log web usage for that, just follow the damn advertised links in the spam. Arrest them, lock them away, and for gods' sakes, find those kids and get them safe already.
You can't take the sky from me...
Start another country, leave usa, or come to australia.
Or let the predictions of ww3 come about and let nuke war destroy the evil people, along with 90% casualties.
Start saving all material/knowhow/knowledge now!!!, Both to CDs, HDs, Paper copies.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It is nothing more than thought crime.
A nice wedge. Once there is a thought crime on the books as established jurisprudence, other thought crimes will be easy to add.
You can't take the sky from me...
What if he visited in a forum like 4 chan and somehow came accross Bridget pictures? From what I recall, Whorley's previous charges were possesion in 1999 but it is unknown on how did he receive the files in question at the time. For visitors who use the picture forums to look at material, what if somebody posts some random 'shonen ai/yaoi' pictures in a catagory that is clearly intended for 'of age' characters. I am concerned if somebody would goatse a random link and pop up 'pedobear approved' underage images and the FBI would be knocking down the door.
Hoover's ghost still haunts the FBI this very day
Step 1: send an email that autoloads in image from a banned website
Step 2: wait for the ISP to report that the recipient of the email obtained data from the banned website
Step 3: profit
The same could work with a pop-under, an URL forward, even a simple Javascript app that grabs a piece of data off such a site without ever using it for anything or even making it apparent it's done anything.
As the notion of detaining people for years or even decades without charging them with any crime starts to come under fire, it must be a great relief to the Department of Justice to have every ISP gathering mountains of prima facie evidence to initiate criminal proceedings against anybody who happens to use the internet.
In my opinion, if they're going down the road of a police state, the least they can do is give us an up-to-date list of the websites that are considered illegal to visit so that we can make a hosts file to avoid 'accidental' prosecutions. I guess it's too much to ask for a police state to play fair though.
I mean, the bastards are everywhere nowadays it seems. How hard is it to nail a child pornographer. Go hit some of the big newsgroups. It doesn't matter which one you hit, so long as it deals with porn. Any newgroup with volume, among the legitimate porn, will have assholes hawking their disgusting wares.
It's not hard for me to filter out the major ones (they tend to use repeat headers), which would lead me to believe that it's not hard for them to filter them "in" as it were. Setup a couple of their own newgroups somewhere, get a popular following of pr0n, and watch for some bastard to start emailing in the crap. Then your filter can bag it, check the IP on the connecting mailserver, and send it in for further inspection.
Unless the CP traders are like spammers, they're probably sending from some traceable IP's, so that that point you can start narrowing it down. You don't need to "log" everyone's data, just narrow it to an ISP, then have something that flags with that ISP next time the buggers send to the newgroup or whatever, and get a quick check on who's on at that time that place. It's targetted, it could probably get done with a warrant, and it doesn't allow other abuse like checking the logs of political dissidents under the guise of data retention for fighting illegal porn.
The proposals have been sent to Congress and include new laws that will require ISPs to report child pornography and bolster penalties for those companies that fail to do so.
Here's my concern with this kind of rule. Suppose someone is online viewing whatever vanilla porn they like and a malicious pop-up ad under false pretenses redirects them to something like really-horrible-k1ddi3-pr0n.xxx. They didn't want to go there, but now their ISP sends their information to the government. What happens to that person now?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
***And a Jamaican would tell you that homosexuality is illegal - and vile.***
Dude, all you need to do is walk two steps outside your front door and you'll probably see a homophobe. Is this why gay marriage etc is so opposed in the U.S.? The Jamaicans? Get a grip, man. Don't be so typical.
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.
People so callously and carelessly jump onto anything that sounds like, "oh noes! This is the next dragon that must be slain! Let's kill it! But in order to do that, I'll need to watch you, listen to your phone calls, examine your emails, etc!" Notice that they are in no way related.
Here's an interesting read on the statistics often used to cite the purported "seriousness" of the problem:
http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html
This guy starts calling people and asking questions, trying to nail down where this stuff comes from, and also uncovers an interesting relationship in the process. It's a good read.
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?
This has nothing to do with protecting children. The Big ISP's want to sell us out. To date, it has not been practical to bill for use due to the overhead and added expense involved. If all that infrastructure and overhead are already in place, in the name of protecting children, it would be trivial to start billing for usage and type of usage. The government gets what it wants, the Big ISP's make out like bandits, and, as usual, the average citizen gets it up the tail end.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
myRedbook is not a joke site. It is the real McCoy. If you believe that myRedbook verifies the ages of the prostitutes, then you must believe that Elvis is still alive.
The people who run myRedbook should be arrested.
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."
High-schoolers have been charged with distribution of child pornography for giving their signifigant others nudie pics. I dont know the outcome of any of these cases though.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
When Larry Niven first wrote "The Jigsaw Man" in the 1960's, he showed the idea of a loop driven entirely by positive feedback.
His story chronicled in sidebars the idea of the organ banks as a means to use execution to benefit society. "If the odds broke right, a convicted axe murderer could end up saving more lives than he took." The problem was that (1) there was a limited number of people eligible to put into the organ banks, and (2) an increasing number of people needing organs from the organ banks. As an organ bank would be like any other bank -- they can only put out what comes into them -- they needed additional means to fill them. Thus, the government (supported by the law-abiding voters who could never see themselves being in this position) proceeded to add criminal offenses whose punishment would help replenish the organ banks. Attempted murder, armed criminal action, burglary, and so on, were added to the list of offenses. Finally, when the protagonist of the story is brought to trial at the end of the story, we find that his capital crime was reckless driving (the fiend!).
In the afterword to the original story, Niven pointed out that his story depicted one of the better outcomes. The worst the one were the government adds "criticism of the government" to the list of capital crimes.
The same loop seems to be occurring here. "Stop child pornography" became "stop virtual child pornography", and is now heading towards "stop offensive images."
The goal is laudable and one worth achieving, but the means... well, I see them heading towards adding "(by the way, criticism of the government or its policies counts as offensive)."
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Prison sentences for rape are not uniform. A study made by the U.S. Department of Justice of prison releases in 1992, involving about 80 percent of the prison population, found that the average sentence for convicted rapists was 9.8 years, while the actual time served was 5.4 years. This follows the typical pattern for violent crimes in the US, where those convicted typically serve no more than half of their sentence [14]. Between 2002 and 2003, more than one in ten convicted rapists in Australia served a wholly suspended sentence, and the average total effective sentence for rape was seven years [15].
A much better way to catch the pedos is via honeypots. These are much more targeted and much more likely to catch the criminals.
No sig today...
The ones at the top can encrypt it, meaning the real criminals won't be caught by this law, only the lower ones.
No sig today...
Yes, stumbled, while looking for some ordinary, every-day, garden-variety pr0n. I clicked on a picture, and the site it lead to had kiddy porn instead of adult. What's wrong with that?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
America is still somewhat of a democracy with furthermore a legal recourse to armed rebellion. IF you truly believe that the current goverment is turning your country into a dictatorship then do something about. Form a new party, dare to vote for a guy who doesn't promise you lower taxes or just buy a gun and shoot the fuckers.
The sad fact is that freedom is only ever won by the sword and is always lost over time. Just look at any country that had a revolution by the citizens to gain their freedom. Like say. America itself for instance.
Hell the russians did it twice and look at them. They went from the slavery off the tsars(?) to the slavery of the so-called communists, to the slavery of extreme capatalism/mafia and now poetin is trying to enslave them again.
The price of freedom is shooting everyone trying to take it away from you.
The child porn argument is nothing new. It is very similar to the "communist" hunt. The drugs hunt. The original witch hunt. All a would be dictator has to do is find what small group of people is currently hated the most and claims his actions are to hunt them down.
It has worked everytime before, it will this time. Unless you right now declare freedom to be more important then childerens safety. Nope. Didn't think so.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The current administration must have some sort of Nazi handbook....
Godwin's Rules of Order?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Read the article and you get an image not so much of a pervert as an incredible idiot. Either the guy has a several mental handicap or it is a setup because no normal person would give away that much info online.
Hell, first rule of dating. Never give the bitch your phone number. Geez.
Oh well good to see the other rule still is true. The internet where the men are men, the women are men and all the girls are police agents.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Secondly, how are they going to track those people that use the various anonymizer networks/packages? Then there are all those child porn newsgroups that I see in various listings. Frankly, the genie is out of the bottle. Even blocking at the ISP level/connection level is out if the communications are encrypted. What they are seeking to do is technologically impossible except at the local machine level and despite what they want to achieve, even I won't allow that here despite the fact that I assume I have no privacy whatsoever anyway (that's another issue).
Sorry Alberto, baby, but the best you can do is wail in a corner 'cause that is all you'll achieve.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
I've seen that on billboards in my town. Do "1 in 5 children" have Internet (or AOL) access? Of the ones that do regularly use the Internet, do "1 in 5" use instant messaging or chatroom software? If not, how, exactly, do they get "solicited"? Or does that phrase mean, "Of the children who use the Internet, and who also go in chatrooms, 1 in 5 have been solicited"? And how the hell would you know? Pass out a certain number of surveys to third-graders, then extrapolate?
Sounds bogus to me. And if not bogus, totally without context.
To be serious the parent reminds me a bit off criminals offended by other criminals. Rapist saying they despise child rapists. WTF?
/b/ a channel filled with the worst of the net and then complains about japan. Right. Take a look at yourselve first kiddo.
/b/ board than yours did. If you're going to accuse him of being a perverted sicko on the basis of his post along, then you're just as guilty.
This guy vists
Er...when did he say he visits it? His post contained less information about the contents of the 4chan
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It's worse than that, friend ... there are perverts out there who are getting off, even before these children are conceived! In some particularly deviant cases, even many hours or days before!
It's sick, I tell you; just sick.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As for a slightly more serious answer to your question. The bush goverment is also fighting a war on general porn. Just wait a few more years and then just seeing a nudie picture will get you jail time.
Can't wait personally. I wonder how much time an american will get for opening a link I sent them to tubgirl.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
At least I do not know about not4chan and renchan. Oops. (Lolicon boards)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Actually, /b/ is for random.
Just so that 4chan wouldn't be considered a pro-shit imageboard, I might point out that there are many other boards, such as music, news, auto and sports to name a few, on 4chan, though /b/ is indeed the most famous of them.
I liked Google's approach to this. That is, to say no to a full search with unqualified data.
One of the interesting points that was bought up, was that the gov. had the same ability to run data through the search engines for words/phrases, and then ask for all the hits on those; But that is not what they did. They asked for full access to unqualified data.
I am amazed that at this time, many in the press are not pointing this out and making hay on DOJ's approachs. It should be obvious that this is not about child porn.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
will drive us into the stone age. Actually, I think every succeeding one will too. We're royally shoved.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
In the case of the Iranian efforts to procure their own enrichment facilities for nuclear fuel, the 'dual use' interpretation is that once you have the facilities for civil purposes, you're 'a long way' or even 'almost there' to having nuclear bombs. (better debate that elsewhere)
So if you have the complete setup for tracking child pornography, then how close are you to tracking liberals and other terrorist sympathisers?
The debating trick is to pick an example that is extreme enough so everyone is on the same side, and then to make it a prototype for your case. The last step is the ugly one.
You can't prove a negitive. If there is a statement that child porn is increasingly using younger children, and you are using this as a basis for a new law, you *better* come prepared with some evidence to back up your position. Even then you better make sure the new bill is also targetting the crime at issue.
The problem here is that keeping these records is only incedentally useful, and may not even be admissible in a court of law, since you can't prove that they user of the account is also the computer operator. There may also be more than one user of a computer, and it may have been hijacked.
From the article:
"Mr Gonzales also said that he is also investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders."
My questions about this are:
1) What safeguards are put in place, so the system isn't abused? If John Doe is accused of browsing for kiddie porn, what proof is considered sufficient to let someone browse his internet usage? It *should* be the normal burden of proof as required for a normal search warrant, but as we've seen, the government has already shown it is willing to work around that limitation.
2) What limitations are put in place? If we've obtained a search warrant for John Doe's internet records, how detailed are the records going to be? A list of IP addresses? Site names, and the time spent at each site? Data amount transferred? Specific lists of webpages requested? In any case, it's a lot of data that the ISP will need to retain. Granted, storage space is relatively cheap, but if they ask for all packets a person sends/receives, that's a LOT of data.
3) Will the ISPs inform their customers of any changes that occur? Though I haven't seen a contract that they use, I would hope that it contains a clause about protection from fine detail tracking. (If you think someone's filesharing, you can get a rough guess by the quantity of traffic going through specific ports. You don't need to reassemble the entire file to make a rough guess)
I guess in an ideal world, it's treated much the same as phone records - you accessed IP foo, with 25MB transferred - with the same burden of proof required to get access to both. The primary difference between the two, though, is that phone companies charge you on whom you call and connect to, while ISPs don't have site-specific rates. (Yet, at least.) To get phone records, the phone company merely needs to query their existing database of records. To get internet usage records, the ISP needs to implement new technology that they probably don't already have.
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.
"investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders"
So lets say, I provide wireless access to general public in my neighborhood for free, am I considered "ISP"? A blanket termed statement in laws like this makes me nervous time to time.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Ciao
nope because stalin wasn't a puppet of big business.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
"Putti are those plump little naked boys with wings that one often sees in Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo art. Typically, a putto (the singular form) depicts an angel or cherub in a religious scene, but he may also come in the form of Cupid. In either case, a putto's presence symbolizes love, whether Divine or of a more earthly nature. Incidentally, you never run across ugly putti in art; they're so cute you could just pinch them." - Art History Glossary
Images (illegal?)
Is this is a class issue? Naked kids in anime "comics" are disgusting and illegal. Naked kids in statues are artistic and legal?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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.
While I applaud any efford to crack down on child pornography, I can't help feeling worried.
The EU Data Retention Law was meant to "aid in the fight against Terrorism" and now look what is happening.
Lobby groups managed to push e.g. Germany into considering allowing the Industry to tap into this datapool, simply by demanding it from the ISP and without the consent of a judge, to pursue software/music/movie piracy.
Ironically, if German law-enforcment agencies do wish to do the very same thing, they can do it only for "serious" crimes and only with the consent of the judge (as it should be).
I think I gonna file a suggestion that the German government asserts copyright over all child pornography and then they could take the online logs of the offenders (and anyone else they accuse) without judge-consent, claiming its protecting their copyright...
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Pedophiles have the highest recidivism(sue me I don't spell it everyday)rate of any other crime.They just do it again.They can't help it.They've dropped out of the human race and have become predators,rapists and murderers.The cheapest prisons still cost the taxpayer $60,000 per prisoner per year.
People,a bullet only costs a few cents,hunting license bring revenue to the tax base.Lets turn this into a fun sport and generate revenue rather than losing it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I've been waiting for this story for a good few months. There are definite plans afoot to control the content of the net by the Whitehouse and it's going to work using the arguments of 1)kiddie pr0n, 2) terrorism.
The next strand of this attack will be something along the lines of 'terrorists used the internet to plan 9/11' - watch out for it. (This has already been mentioned but will now be reinforced).
In reality, the govt hate the fact that people are getting information from the net and not swallowing officially sanctioned news to the same degree. I believe that we will look back at this time and see it as the golden age of the internet and it's going to be the threat of pronists and the terrorists that lead us away from it.
AFAIK, child abuse begets more child abuse. People are not corrupted by kiddiepr0n, they seek it out if they are already corrupted by their own life experience (ie, they themselves were abused as children). Most abuse is within the family, not from strangers and has presumably existed for as long as there were people.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
If the government would stop trying to equate legal porn with child porn and stop focusing so much energy on "obcenity" and actually put some resources into actually stopping child porn.. maybe they would actually get somewhere. And it wouldn't need to be done by tracking people.
Sad world on so many levels.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
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.
Saying that pedophilia stems from somewhere is like saying gay people chose to be gay, or that black people all shoot up melanin. It's simply not true. Most pedophiles don't even think about touching child porn, because it's massively illegal, and because most of it involves abuse of the child, and they don't want that.
Sir, please separate the affliction from those whom act upon it in a way that harms others.
General society out there basically tolerates a lot of weird shit...
Yes, it does. Because most of this weird shit doesn't hurt anyone, and the only problems with it are from these bullshit religious nutbags who need to have their genitals set on fire. In fact, we need more "weird shit" in this world. It would get rid of this stupid mainstream shit that everyone "cool" follows, and get some actual diversity in the world. Yes, diversity. Not the rainbow gay pride type, but real diversity.
I seem to be babbling now, so I'll shut up.
.. of those who refuse to allow the government to cover up its own evil Child Pornography ring ... ?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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?
The difference is that those are produced by the big movie industry which is in bed with governments all over the western world. The government couldn't really be expected to send their bedfellows to jail, could they?
at the actual point of connection
(that means how YOU get to your ISP)
they can track pretty much anything you do..
try this..
traceroute to your 20 or 30 most common websites..
see the first hop?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Sometimes I open up my wireless network when friends and family come over. They don't always want the bother of connecting and password... blah blah blah. Its easier on me and them, plus I have really good log system on router. With crap like this, makes me double worried about opening it up even once in a while. I usually shut it down almost immediately after they(friend/family) leave, but sometimes I forget. Oh, and for those out there that say XP or whatever will remember the passphrase, sure untill I change it every 90 days. I don't open up the network very often, but things are very limited access wise and I have a very good log system....
Stupid government. ugg.
The problem with lying to people for so long is no one believes you if you're telling the truth. But this doesn't pass the smell test.
If the Justice Dept. wanted to something really useful with their time they'd start an investigation of the Federalist Society.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
You are absolutely fucking brilliant, my anonymous friend. That'd follow the Bush doctrine for the eradication of terrorism in America:
The terrorists hate us for our freedom, so let's just get rid of the freedom and they'll no longer hate us.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
An acquaintance of mine (let's call him Jim) has recently gone through a fairly harrowing ordeal. He and his family sued the Catholic church because Jim was molested as a child by a priest. Part of the original agreement was that this priest would never be around children again.
Yeah. The church merely shuffled the priest around, to various places with children. The church doesn't even bother to take these things seriously.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
..this fella. The Paedo Finder General, a cartoon character moulded out of the ignorance and spite surrounding such a sensitive issue. I cannot speak highly enough of the creators of Monkey Dust, the only truly entertaining spectacle that I have seen in quite a while. And series 2 has been released on Bittorrent, legit, as the BBC chickened out of releasing it on DVD in this current hysterical climate.
"..and by the power vested in by {prurient wishful thinking/mawkish documentries made by martin bashir/a bloke in the pub who knew for sure/The Daily Mail} I pronounce you Guilty of Paedophilia."
"The rape putic applications"...
FRA: STFU GTFO
Four sounds pretty low. What about all those missing-children posters that don't say "abducted by non-custodial parent", but rather, "may have gone to meet with an adult male in such-and-such a city". Does it count if some fourteen year old runs away from home to get molested?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm almost afraid to ask, and I have a weird feeling that it would be bad to google for that string.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Who translated 'tovarisch' as 'comrade'? It sounds just weird enough for people to go around calling each other 'comrade' that we'll think of them as weird and otherish. Why isn't it translated as 'buddy'? Does it really sound as strange and alien to the Russian ear to call each other 'tovarisch' as it does to American ears to call each other 'comrade'?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is the general public really this stupid and gullible?
Its not like we can change what they are going to do to us anyway, so they might as well be honest about it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In 1984 everyone jumped at a chance to write articles drawing comparisons between America and the novel. Now, more than 20 years later, people are still invoking the title. In 20 more years will we still be screaming 'It's 1984!' ?
It is nothing more than thought crime.
but thought crime is wrong!! Thinking something is just as bad as doing it. Why are you objecting to obligatory mind probes. If you hvae nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. You're not thinking bad thoughts are you?
May the Maths Be with you!
And anyone who defends their actions should be ashamed.
But the geeks here aren't defending thire actions. They're trying to defend everyone else from the reactions to those actions. Unsuccessfully.
May the Maths Be with you!
I think you're describing something very different, though it may apply to the same situation.
do you wish to be tried by your 12 of your fellow men? or an "expert"
an "expert" might know more about DNA analysis than a lyaman, but we have wisely chosen to have neutral uninvolved parties judge us, as "experts" are often not only educated on technical matters, but indoctrinated intoan agenda, so that they find your guilt innocence according to factors other than the case before you
this instinc tis democratic, we trust our fellow man to elect our president, as we should
do you trust your fellow man?
do you really consider them so irrational?
and then, in the same breath, to rail against elitists controlling your freedoms?
which is it?
trust the population and hate the aristocrats?
or fear the general public like an aristocratic asshole?
make up your mind, i have: i trust the wisdom of the american people implicitly, all the way, 100%
i am a populist, i hope you ar eone too, and not an elitist asshole indoctrinated into some evil stupid agenda, whether form the right or the left
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i would also like to add that the majority of the /b/tards i have talked to weren't actually serious about all the racism, sexism, pedophilia, zoophilia, and whatever else is popular that day. they're just playing along hoping for a laugh.
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'.
I think they already do this: a cop goes to a chat room pretending to be a child, a meeting is arranged, and the cops pick up the offender.
I suppose they would need to keep the online records of the cops, and the offender, but that's it.
Of course they wouldn't actually catch somebody molesting a child, so it would be much lesser offense. But, at least they would identify some predators.
They'll take a little bit at a time. That's why it's called *erosion*. We won't notice that they're about a mile away from the original target because they moved an inch at a time until they're targeting us instead of the paedos with "thought crime" laws and the power to enforce them.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Child porn was mentioned in this week's Savage Love. Point was made that, whereas there used to be a clear distinction between children who were in such porn and the adults who made it, those lines has become blurred, what with the recent myspace arrests and such. I can't come up with a good way to disentangle that. Our current system of laws leads to some ridiculous outcomes (take naked pictures of yourself when you're underage, grow older, be arrested for exploiting... yourself?), but anything I can think of isn't much better.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Naw, I just have lots of wapanese friends who liked to link weird shit to me off of /b/, and in turn I got hooked onto its chaos.
So yeah, I'm a bit of a /b/tard. That doesn't make me into a rapist, though. To say that is to say that anyone connected to the orly owl is a rapist. To say that is to say that anyone who likes anime, weird fun, stupid memes, or a combonation of all of the above is a dirty pedophile. To say that is kind of ignorant.
All Adult male Americans must have a webcam superglued to their dick. Then we can catch them in the act!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
... the Bush administration announces a proposed law to prohibit the use of encrypted web access. "There will be little or no impact by this law, since the Constitution does not provied any right of privacy." stated attorney general Aberto Gonzales.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
nope because stalin wasn't a puppet of big business.
and Hitler was?
Personally, if I was a power mad and corrupt president, I think I'd rather follow the Stalin model. The Hitler model doesn't end well (deep in a bunker, with one's country crumbling around them and the meth-amphetamine stash running low).
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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."
The DOJ has a vested interest in saying that child pornography is on the rise. Don't trust them.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The only reason the government hasn't done such things is because it is technically difficult to do.
Believe me, if they could do it with the ease you can monitor electronic traffic they would have been doing it from day one.
I still would not be surprised in the least if there are giant mail sorting machines at the major processing places that use ultrasound, MRI, or radar of some kind to scan letters in envelopes and be able to "read" them layer by layer through OCR.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Some how i doubt spying on citzens would satisfy any citizen base?
Plenty of people support wiretapping. I don't, and I doubt most Slashdotters do, but the Slashdot crowd isn't even remotely representative of the overall American electorate. It's hard to believe, but about half the country believes that giving the government more police powers will lead to a more secure nation.
You can say what you like about these people being duped, but at some point you have to concede that the importance of privacy is not a universal constant throughout America. To some people, flag burning, for example, is a much more important issue.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
yes, he was. he was funded by the big business - thyssen (fritz thyssen even wrote a book "i paid hitler"), krupp (the krupp family even got their own special law for that, lex krupp), henry ford, friedrich flick (the richest german in 1944), ig farben (an enormous conglomerate of chemical concerns, producer of zyklon b) and many more.
;-)
and if you are going to be a power mad and corrupt at some time of your life, rather try to copy brezhnev, just for the sake of your people
he was ok for a corrupt dictator
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
You just did the same thing with "dataveilance". If anyone thinks the gov's goal isn't dataveilance, then "but come on", "its obvious" (ie: you're crazy or stupid and therefore on their side). You were a bit more subtle, but it's there, nonetheless.
Wouldn't it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it?
Of course it would. All I am saying is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Many people presuppose that the Bush Administration's end goal is a police state. I would argue that the Administration doesn't have the imagination necessary to fight terrorism (or pornography) through more effective means. It sees signal interception of all kinds as a panacea, so it attempts to use this capability whenever it can, even if the tool doesn't even remotely solve the problem.
I think the Bushies believe they are truly doing something that will put a dent in child porn. I also think we give them too much credit when we assume that every move they make is based on shrewd Machiavellian politics. If the record shows anything, it is that this White House has been as effectively managed as the Texas Rangers were managed during Dubya's reign there.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Someone quick go out and patent the camera/cell phone that instantly transmits every image taken to the government. It might optionally prevent the picture-taker from making any use of the images until the government had cleared them for civillian use. A software skin-tone filter can send any pictures which may contain nakedness onward to special government offices, where employees with hands down their pants can judge if those images arouse their "purient interest." Integrated GPS will allow immediate apprehension of the photographers and their subjects. Subjects deemed to have been "willing" can be drafted for national service, either in the baby factories, or building the morale of our troops, or both.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
No -- it's just that Jamaica was recently in the news related to the fact that homosexuality is illegal there.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"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."
More widespread sure, but how the hell does the Internet empower the other three?
On one side people will say "they're turning us into a police state!" and on the other people will say "we have to combat this serious problem!", but I think every single one of us can agree that saying "the Internet has somehow made the porn more graphic/sadistic/young" is illogical.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
and that would be the troops in afghanistan and iraq, right?
or by defenders are you talking about fat geeks on their keypads in their mother's basement?
pffffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"there is no slippery slope" do you not understand?
the slippery slope you talk about requires a force motivated to completely move you to slavery
that force exists in your hysterical twitlike imagination
we don't live in the matrix or v is for vendetta or star wars episode iii
we live in REALITY
there is no agent smith, there is no senator palpatine
what there is, is some dorky govt wonks
they aren't cartoon demons, they are just people, like you and me
and in in REALITY these people are motivated to... get this... i know, it's way out there... FIGHT CHILD PORN
and ONLY that!
i know, really radical concepts here
now you may go back to the "treuth" and safely ignore me: the illuminati is out to getcha! it's gonna turn you in to a slave in a fascist state! better get goose stepping! because we live in a cartoon universe, right?
paranoid schizophrenic wackjob
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
like timothy mcveigh
or osama bin laden
or anyone else who shouts shrilly and loudly about the paranoid schizophrenic fantasies in their heads
really, they are so helpful to maintaining a balance
silly me, i think level headed people, who are already balanced, need to divest themselves of the wackjobs, from both the right and the left
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the govt exists, and solely for them and from the people
there is no intellgentsia, no aristocracy, no "learned" elite (where "learned" != educated, but indoctrinated) that deserves any consideration
it is the people and only the people, 100%
why am i certain of this?
because it is they who are ruled
it is they who suffer the drawbacks, and the rewards of their govt's policies, and them alone
if some butthole has some "good idea" that they want to enact on the people, say mao's "great leap forward", it is the people who suffer when that "good idea" turns out to be utter crap
so frankly, you're wrong: only the people are entitled to ask for their own suffering for a cause
because we all know, the elite are always asking them to suffer for a cause that they themselves will not lose one ounce of blood for
fuck the elites, populism all the way
it isn't mob rule, but even if it was, it would be superior than anything else. mainly because there is no "check or balance" on the will of the people that is valid- what check or balance do you refer to that somehow benefits who else besides the people? we need a check or balance to take in consideration the will and desire of someone out side the people? who? why? what is this concern that benefits the rich/ privledged/ smugly superior?
the govt exists ONLY for the people, not the elites
the govt is there's, and there's alone
you're utterly wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is a shame that the political strata is always focusing on Internet related child abuse, while the programs programs in the physical world are in such poor condition. As a friend of a social worker, I have heard that molestation happens a lot more often than is publicly shown and offenders are more often than not getting away out of sheer incompetence within the system, as the overworked child protection agencies focus mainly on covering their own asses than protecting children. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, because I hope I am.
We should just outlaw children. They are an eternal source of trouble. When they're not downloading mp3's, they're out getting molested.
Government can just produce them in artificial wombs and factories if they need them.
Maybe sex should be outlawed too and permitted only with a licence in a government sanctioned institution.
My source is a Dutch journalistic research show called Zembla. You can watch the show (in Dutch) at http://omroep.vara.nl/tvradiointernet_detail.jsp?m aintopic=424&subtopic=4177&detail=282916
I also had a power point presentation with the results downloaded from their website but i cannot find it at this moment. I add this later.
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Found it, it is available in Dutch at http://download.ludden.nl/20060119_zembla_verslaaf daankinderporno.pdf
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Whatever! a Politician will say anything to grab the headlines to further his or her own career, doesn't matter whether what they are proposing is right or makes sense.
I mean, wtf do we know what he's looking at behind closed curtain's? You think the Feds will ever be knocking on Gonzales front door? No way...
'Oh yes, officer, my twelve year old son was curious about girls his own age, that's how the thousands of photographs and movies got there on my hard-drive.'
'That's just fine, Mr D.A., sir. We didn't know you actually lived here. Please tell your son to be more careful in the future. By the way, please burn down your computer and scatter its ashes into the wind. Have a nice day now.'
Pur-Lease. Don't sensationalise the issue. Just find the pedo's and take them out / down quietly, so they won't know what's hit 'em. (Apart from repeated kicks between the legs with steel toe-capped boots!) 'Nuff said!
Australia is a continent, thank you!
extemist positions are used by demagogues
but in relaity, these things you fear the people would do, the people don't really want
your normal average joe is quite tolerant
do you believe that the american people are a seething cauldron of racism and censorship desires that, if uncorked by some magical check system, would overrun all of the rights they believe in?
i don't believe that
what strange circa 1850 world do you live in?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The operant word is puppet. While big business might have supported Hitler, he wasn't controlled by them.
I agree that facism is the closer of the two to the neocon vision, but my bringing up Stalin was because of the OP's use of the word GULAG. If you've never read Gulag Archipelago, I highly recommend it.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
But old buddy Tom DeLay and former lobbyist and soon to be prison convict, Jack (Abram)off stopped that....
Anyone... repeat... anyone who would view pics or even cartoons of child porn have the inherent tendencies to go out and molest a child. It is so pervasive in our society today, from priests to boy scout leaders to teachers to coaches... its time we start executing these preverts. And anyone who defends their actions should be ashamed.
Anyone... repeat... anyone who would view movies or even cartoons that depict bank robberies have the inherit tendencies to go out and rob banks. So, to protect our economy, we should subpoena Blockbuster for a list of people who rented The Italian Job, and lock them up.
I don't defend the actions of people who support the exploitation of children. But I do support the right of an artist to DRAW PICTURES of whatever they want, I don't care if it's a cartoon of children having sex with Mohammed. Don't show it to me, I'm not interested... but so what if somebody else wants to see it? Why should I get to decide whether that's OK or not? Why should the government get to decide?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Ok, for all of those who haven't worked this out yet, the Gonzales pronouncement has nothing to do with child pornography, and everything to do with creating a pretext for extending governmental power. Ok?
What he has done is to create what is called a "straw man" argument. You create a straw man, a boogey man, and you point to it and you shout and you scare people with hypothetical threats of dire consequences if something isn't done about this "creature". The fact is, the creature is exactly that, a creation of the speaker, with the vaguest "shape" of truth. Yes, child porn exists, but it is *already* being vigorously prosecuted by our fine local and federal police, thank you very much.
So, what is the counter to a "straw man" argument? If you challenge the straw man itself, you actually fall into that very old and obvious trap of seeming complicit in the thing. Don't bother.
There is only one counter to the straw man argument, and that is to make a *bigger* straw man of exactly the same variety! One so huge and so hideous that it becomes apparent to even the dumbest person that this is completely ridiculous, and that anyone that thinks along these lines must be mad.
So, for example, Gonzales has trotted out this straw man of child pornography as a pretext. So what you would do is create a very public one-person media crusade on this issue, *backing the AG to the hilt!*
It goes like this; "Yes, this is a serious problem! What the police are already doing is not enough! What the AG is recommending is too tame! We need to start a government department dedicated to reading the emails of every citizen, scanning them for suggestive remarks about children, and possibly other indications of moral terpitude while we are at it. We need to turn the Internet against people who might use it for nefarious ends by regulating it to the hilt - we need to put an Internet camera in every home! We need to register and license men before they can become fathers! A penis is as dangerous as a handgun, and much more common! Everyone is suspect! Your children could be in danger even as we speak! We are all in danger from these anonymous monsters walking the streets. I would round up anyone who has ever accessed a porn site and create a national database of suspects immediately... I would..."
You see? When people do or suggest crazy scary things, as the AG has done, we need to *immunize people* against the kind of thinking that the AG is exhibiting, by taking that line of reasoning to its logical extreme. This extreme is clearly *more frightening* than the original threat.
At first when you do this, you will actually begin to attract the crazies. This is an indication you are succeeding. You need to press on however, to ever more extreme positions until you have no followers at all - until even the crazies think you're crazy, just short of being arrested.
If one were to do this with all seriousness, without even the tiniest hint of irony or sarcasm, one could cause even the most rabid supporter of the original proposition to distance himself from it and from every suggestion of it.
To my knowledge there is in fact *no known counter* to this counter of the straw man argument, other than the use of force or constraint to stop you.
This is in a strange way what happened with the creationism debate - it was started by Bush expressly to deflect public attention from the administrations most recent bunglings. In short order, it was shown to be the thin edge of the wedge of Christian Fundamentalism, which is actually quite scary in itself to the majority of Americans. Especially when it touches on their children's educations. So it was made to look ridiculous by the very fact of having been seriously followed to its logical conclusion. Now no one in their right mind would be caught dead suggesting it again - we have been immunized against it as a society.
When someone like the AG does what they have just done, suggesting something so obviously Orwe
Oddly enough, these numbers appear to have changed significantly since 1994. In later work by the same author, the rates of sexual assault per 1,000 juveniles have dropped by 56% (p.9), but all of that change has come from lesser victimization by persons known to the victim. In other words, the number of random pervs has stayed a more-or-less constant fraction of the population, but the number of abusive parents/clergy has dropped drastically.
In particular, though, that means anyone braying about how the Internet has made child abuse more common or made the world more dangerous for children is either completely ignorant or is out-and-out lying. "Think of the children" should not mean "ignore the truth".
hey moderators just because someone offers an opposing view, does not make it flamebait
This makes you an even sicker fuck than the OP.
oh he was a puppet, because part of these big businesses wanted a war. hitler provided that war to them.
btw you probably will laugh now, but i was born in the ussr. and solzhenicyn has written lot of shit in his books.
anyway, replace "gulag" with "concentration camp" and there you are.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
The first step to "fix" any problem is usually to get the government out of it. While education is always beneficial, governmental education is a large part (and even cause) of the US's "social problems".
Libertas in infinitum
Maybe we can't do anything about what they are going to do to us - but we can always try. And we should try now, before it's too late. From our position at this moment, time-travelling to 1984 might be described as one small step for man ... But of course that one is taken already - might have a copyright problem.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/04/20/AR2006042001786.html/
(Sorry, free registration required)
Gonzales speaking at the National Center for Missing/Exploited Children:
"I have seen pictures of older men forcing naked young girls to have anal sex. There are videos on the Internet of very young daughters forced to have intercourse and oral sex with their fathers. Viewing this was shocking, and it makes my stomach turn," said Gonzales, who was accompanied by his wife, Rebecca.
Either AG Gonzales believes everything he reads or he's even more cynical than I thought. But, of course, since he is in charge of the FBI, he no doubt had the individuals in the pictures investigated as to thei family relationships. Sheesh.
Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. (JJ)
That is a flawed analogy. Child pornography involves the exploitation of someone too young to consent in any legal or psychologically valid manner - they simply aren't equipped to evaluate what's being asked of them and say no if Uncle John asks.
Homosexuality between consenting adults, on the other hand, involves... consent. This means it is not merely a shift along the same morally relative spectrum, it's a step over to the next spectrum - the spectrum where you are also allowed to vote, drive, buy alcohol, and get into a nudey bar.
Now, if Jamaica allows 6-year-olds to vote, maybe we've got an analogy, but right now this just looks like a strawman argument.
I mean, c'mon, this is an administration that consistently promotes torture and slavery. And you are suprised that these people want to find all the kiddie porn in the world, look at it, and keep copies? People, this is totally in character.
If everyone is Soooo into the whole 'get tough on child porn' thing why do i never hear of any arrests? With all the action one would expect nightly reports of all the people they have rounded up.......
:(
Bah , i wouldn't trust these people as far as i could throw em
The legal recourse to armed rebellion is the 2nd Amendment of the United States - that is why it is there. 8 of the states refused to sign the Constitution unless the Bill of Rights was added - the 2nd Amendment among them.
That is WHY the 2nd Amendment was added - to protect the ability of the populace to rise up against the government should it ever become unworthy of power - what philosophers of the time called the responsibility of the citizen to overthrow a corrupt government.
The British attempted to outlaw weapon ownership in the Colonies, too. It got them a revolution.
I wonder what it will get us.
Ironically, in legalese, only a country can levy war. So I'm not entirely sure why that clause is in the Constitution; I would have to re-read that commentary in the Federalist Papers.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
>> In all seriousness, is it time for a changing of the guard?
/. story today:
I have asked myself this same question many times in the past couple of years.
There was a time I believed civil discussion was possible; when, if people merely understood what was at stake, the question would become moot and people would act in their own self interest.
But there are two problems here, and I was foolish to believe they were ever not problems:
1. The corrupt have spent the past 100 years telling people what is good for them - and "freedom" isn't included in that list. People now care far more about their video iPod and their sewage line and their electricity and their American Idol, than they do about freedom. Freedom, to most, is only a means to an end.. and they have been given their ends, without the need for freedom.
2. The gradual erosion of our freedoms is a much more effective tool than the sudden enslavement of a people. I will ask this question I asked on another
Is a person still a slave, if they do not know they are a slave?
The answer is unhesitatingly YES. However, few are capable of making that distinction anymore, because they no longer are able to draw the line. If told you were a slave in a world that appears free, would you believe it?
Would you want to?
Would you care?
By gradually changing what people expect as a standard of freedom, freedom loses meaning.
Welcome to the 21st century.
I fully intend to overthrow the world, and I am patient enough to wait 50 years to do it. The world is beyond saving; only its destruction can save it now.
Go ahead, FBI, come after me. And I'll make you wish you were never born.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Strike five: In January 2003, after serving that sentence and while on supervised release for his earlier conviction, Whorley was re-arrested for violating the conditions of his probation. Whorley subsequently pled guilty to violating the conditions of his release and was sentenced to an additional 12 months of incarceration to be followed by 12 months of supervision by the United States Probation Office.
Strike six: He was arrested on the present charges on April 5, 2005-just three months after being released from incarceration-when United States Probation Officers learned that Whorley had received child pornography by using a computer at the VEC.
The 20 year (harsh) sentence was based on the fact that this was his third conviction, and his second violation of his supervised release agreements. I think we can understand the VA jury losing patience with the man.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
here. This was the guy's third conviction and second supervised release violation in 6 years. Also, the 2005 conviction (and 20 year sentence) included 14 images of real (not cartoon) child porn. Saying this guy got 20 years for cartoon child porn is wildly inaccurate.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent