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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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?!
If someone can be convicted for viewing ficticious criminal activity against a child why has the same not happened to those that produce and consume other fictional criminal activity, like The Godfather or even the movie Hostel, which I found stomach turning? It is nothing more than thought crime.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Where might one find voices or proposals which attempt to combat child pornography without encroaching on reasonable civil liberties or turning the internet into a police state? After all, I have no idea whether child pornography and predatory pedophilia is a problem which is getting better or worse with time-- but it surely is a real-world problem.
Perhaps it would be easier to protect civil liberties from false choice fallacies if we could say something like "I am opposed to the Bush Administration child pornography plan, because I support this other, superior strategy for fighting child pornography instead".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Correct title is "Bush Administration Intensifies War on Web Privacy, Uses Child Porn as Excuse."
Don't let the bastards frame the terms of debate. If the history of Bush's presidency has taught us anything, it's that they constantly lie about their motives. Look at the results, not the ever-shifting rationales.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Child pornography is illegal - and vile. Possession of child pornography is illegal - and vile.
And a Jamaican would tell you that homosexuality is illegal - and vile.
I think that laws making child pornography possession illegal are, at best, in line with laws making drug possession illegal to try to reduce the demand to squeeze out drug sellers. We want to step on sexual abuse of children, so we stomp on child pornography production. To stomp on that, we try stomping on child pornography consumers to reduce demand. You're talking about a pretty darn indirect benefit at a potentially steep privacy and civil rights cost.
Frankly, politicians are playing off the fears parents have for their kids when they invoke child pornography to squeeze something through. They're grabbing whatever generates the strongest emotional response. Right after 9/11, it was terrorism:
"Well...I don't know...that law seems to violate my civil rights."
"In this day and age of terror striking from the skies and from among us, we need to prevent a unified front. All Americans must work together. Vote in my law."
Terrorism may not be scaring enough people any more -- we may be back to "what about the children" in the form of child pornography.
Point is, if someone brings up child pornography while pushing a law, they're trying to make an emotional appeal as to why the law needs to pass. If they're stuck trying to make an emotional appeal, one has to ask why they just didn't make a good, reasoned argument. Is it because such an argument cannot stand on its own merits?
Pushing for increased government surveillance and control online particularly pisses me off, because in the past, government surveillance has been used to damage the mechanisms that are used to correct and limit the government -- free speech and the ability to promote political challenges to the government. There has to be an absolutely overwhelming benefit to granting a power that allows the administration to make life difficult for its detractors before I want to see it accepted.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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.
He may be generalizing beyond the point of usefullness, but that doesn't mean he doesnt have a point. When high level figures in the government are guilty of this themselves, then they can't claim "It's all for the children."
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
Before I was born, my parents lived in the San Fransisco area, and enjoying certain freedoms (nice jobs, good friends, etc). Upon my arrival, they moved away, as a rash of crimes had made SF a place where they didn't want me to be raised.
Today, I'm beginning to feel the same way. I enjoy certain liberties here right now. However, unless the next administration makes major changes in the interest of freedom, I do not feel that America will be the place I want my children to be raised.
Fear is the number one tool used to eliminate freedoms, no matter how small.
Hitler used very similar tactics to rise to power and advance his own power once he had risen. Fear and the 'Patriot' factor were his strongest tools in the manipulation of the German society. Freedoms were lost as well as untold lives, all for the 'homeland.' The rest of the world sat back and let it happen too, just like now. The current administration must have some sort of Nazi handbook....
I wonder how many more are going to die this time.
While extreme criminalization of even such a simple act as viewing/possessing images seems appropriate due to the repulsive nature of adulteration of innocence, it kind of scares me. I live in a dorm, a public place.Sometimes I leave my door open. So what if I step outside for a moment, and someone downloads some child porn on my machine? Or what if it gets compromised and begins downloading such things in the background? Then I'm completely screwed. I think people need to step back from the visceral response of terror and hatred that comes from sexually abusing children, and consider things rationally for a moment. I full-heartedly agree, child pornography is very morally damaging to both the author, viewer, and victim, and I agree we should do something about it. However, is it worth infiltrating the privacy of every single person (in the US at least, in thise case)?
Furthermore, this seems like a very dictatorial response. There is a new decriminalization philosophy dubbed restorative justice. In this model, the offender is encouraged to become acquainted with the victim (or their family). By learning about the damage that one has caused, and seeing it through one's own eyes, remorse is stimulated much more effectively. Sometimes, prison can be a reforming experiences. However, there are also the hard-ass idiots that want revenge, and continue, if not increase, their crime life after prison. Honestly, I don't know if this is the best approach. Not only does it violate the public's privacy, it isn't guaranteed to be very--or even at all--successful. It has been proven, starting back with Ivan Pavlov's research, that negative reinforcement is not as effective as positive reinforcement. Why should this be any different?
Once again, I don't mean to criticize my government (of course, many do), but who's with me?
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
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...
Well I wasn't really advocating that they do that. I was just pointing out how politicians always say "but the law will never be used in that manner" but won't agree to actually write exactly that into the law.
I think we can't trust politicians to safeguard our freedoms anymore. We need to assume they're going to try every last trick in the book to get as much information about our lives as possible. In that case, we're going to have to encrypt everything that goes over any unsecured network. It might not be tedious and time consuming, but we're going to have to push back against the Feds or else our right to privacy is going to go out with our right of habeas corpus.
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.
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."
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
No, when you are 40 and married, your need to look at porn will be infinitely greater than it is now.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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.
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
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'.
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
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."
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
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
"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!"