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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!
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.
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.
Never mind seems like they already have.
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?
The thing about this is, these figures are absolutely empty. The "1 in 5 children is solicited online" thing gets me particularly. I would really like to know what they count a solicited. Anyone who uses AIM or Yahoo chatrooms (can't speak for the MSN chatrooms, but I would assume it is common in those as well) and to a lesser extent, IRC has experienced bots that automatically solicit people- usually trying to trick people into pay porn sites or to the peronsons personal escort service. If they are counting this as solicitation (and it seems the most likely way that they would get the 1-in-5 figure) then it's really not nearly as much of a danger as they are making it seem. If a parent has properly configured their network connection, the vast majority of sites that spambots in chatrooms would send children to would be blocked anyway; and it's not as though there is an actual person on the other end who is actively trying to lure a child into meeting for a sexual encounter.
Furthermore, I wonder if they cound instances of flirtation where the adult ceases communication with the child if/when they become away that the person with whom they are talking is a child. Once again, this isn't a case of an adult actively conspiring to lure a child to them in order to commit sexual acts- but both instances could be used to support the 1-in-5 statistic.
One thing that gets me too is, they are talking about cracking down on child porn, but in my experience this isn't really the case. Last year someone on a newsgroup I was on (this wasn't a pornographic newsgroup, but the person who posted it was someone I had seen post before, I can only assume that they must have posted to the wrong newsgroup or something) posted bunch of child porn photos. When I saw it I got all of the relevant information I could gather and called the local FBI office, and the local police department. Neither group even seemed interested in my call. The FBI told me to contact my ISP, my ISP told me to contact the local police, local police told me to contact the FBI- and after a day on the phone getting the runaround I ended up just posting the information I had to a child abuse pervention website and hoping that they could find the right people to talk to catch the guy.
No, instead of taking information that someone was trying to give them to catch a child pornographer, they want to log everyone's online activity. The thing is, logging all of that activity will do nothing to help catch child pornography. The amount of data would be such that it would still require someone to find and report the activity- and if someone can find it and report it, then there should be enough information already to catch the person.
This leads me to believe that the interest in logging all of this is in no way related to catching child pornographers. Instead it seems like the neo-cons are doing what they do best- brewing up an invisible boogeyman and using the threat of this boogeyman in order abridge the rights and privacy of the citizens. After all, if anyone tries to stand up against it, then they "are just a prevert who doesn't care about exploited children being used for sex and porography"- the same as with the patriot act and anyone who opposed it being "a commie american hating terrorist".
Of course, most people on slashdot probably already realize this, and other people aren't going to bother signing onto slashdot to read this post- let alone rethink their position based on it.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I 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.
Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
The linked article said that there were no photographs of actual children. Just drawings.
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)
You don't want the protectors of your freedom to have access to your personal records? WHAT ARE YOU HIDING???
To finally end the production of child pornography, unlicensed private possession of photographic equipment is now to be banned. Requirements for a license to possess photographic equipment will include background checks, fingerprint and DNA collection, as well as locks on all photographic devices that require submitting a copy of every image taken with that device to law enforcement agencies before they may be viewed/developped by anyone. Not only will this prevent perverts from taking pictures of naked children, but it will also stop terrorists from photographing buildings and other illegal photographs to plan their attack on our freedom. Anyone found to be in possession of a photographic device without a license, or bypassing the mechanism to submit copies of all images taken to the government, will be imprisoned with tough mandatory minimum sentences regardless of the content of their photographs. Selling these devices illegally will result in a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence. This new prohibition will be just as effective as our prohibition on drugs; it will solve our nations child pornography problem by keeping cameras and camcorders out of the hands of child molestors.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of. Having all your photographs viewed by law enforcement a small price to pay to protect our children and protect our freedom! If you oppose this new policy, you're either a child pornographer or a terrorist, and will be arrested for treason.
You know what the saddest thing is, I had a conversation with a friend who actually believed that such overt invasions of privacy were completely justified to protect the country. Including warrantless interception of every single phone call, even completely domestic. She even said it would be fine if the government wanted to read her diary for no reason. A device in your car that automatically ticketed you for going 1mph over the limit? You're breaking the law, so you deserve punishment. Preventing people from breaking the law was much more important than privacy. She was dead serious, and of course a fanatical right wing republican. She was otherwise intelligent too, science major at my (tier 1) university. This was the last conversation I ever had with her. People like her show what's wrong with this country that allowed these kind of measures to pass.
You can count the children molested and killed by strangers in the past few years on the fingers of one hand (there were 4). That's in the entire USA. The average is about 1.5 per year, contrast to the 9 kids hit by lightning and the 3 children killed by baseballs.
Citation, please. And "molested and killed" is unquestionably a poor metric, since I personally know two people who were molested, and not killed, by strangers. And I don't know very many people.
And on top of that we can add in the figures for child sex trafficking, for which the US has allegedly become one of the largest markets.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
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.
http://outcampaign.org/
How about this: more programs in elementary school about what a "wrong touch" is, and that sometimes not even your parents / teacher / church members / doctors should do certain kinds of touches, even if parents or doctors might have to touch certain areas. We should be educating children about the rights they have over their own bodies.
Unfortunately, bring up the idea of telling 2nd-graders about sex organs (even if you aren't talking about sex in any way), and some parents are going to freak the hell out.
It's been hard enough this century to get decent education about safe sex into high schools.
Some of the reason we have so many problems in this country is that it's "socially inapproriate" to talk about some sexual topics, in fact, most of them. If it wasn't such a big deal if kids said things like "my penis itches" in public, then maybe kids wouldn't be afraid to say things like "daddy touched my penis funny" to their teacher, even if daddy threatens them.
Education should almost always be the first step in trying to fix any social problem. You can't just turn the country into a police state or throw everybody in jail in order to "fix" a social problem. Social problems are things that are wrong with society; they're things wrong with people's minds. Supervision and lock-up aren't the most effective tools for repairing damaged psychologies.
And don't doubt children's abilities to protect themselves (but don't DEPEND on those abilities.. it's still the adults' job to fulfill some sort of guardian role, even if we teach kids how to take better care of themselves, too).
I dated a girl shortly after high school who had been molested by a family member. She was a really sweet girl, and I adored her, but she was just too emotionally broken for me to heal, so in the end, I had to walk away. That experience broke my heart in ways I never imagined possible. I've seen first-hand what child molestation can do, and I do think that it should be addressed. However, even after that experience, I am STILL against you, and I'm quite certain she would be, too. Don't you DARE try to twist that sort of horror into an excuse to force people to give up their freedoms.
I simply cannot agree that I, someone who would never even consider doing something like that, should have to lose some of my freedoms because some total nut case somewhere might use the internet to prey on kids. I don't agree that everyone in the United States should have to subject themselves to constant surveillance in the name of so-called "safety". That is a line that simply cannot be crossed, or else we have no right to call ourselves a free nation.
Somebody mentioned that on average, 50 kids were molested by a typical child molester prior to being caught. If that is true, then we have a real problem, and it isn't that the child molester should have been watched more carefully. It is that A. parents should have watched their kids more carefully, and B. those kids should have been taught how to handle that sort of situation at a younger age. There is really nothing practical that you can do to save that first short of considering everyone a suspect and devolving into a police state, which is unacceptable. However, if you catch them after the first one, at least that's 49 other kids that won't eventually be abused by the same sicko.
Indeed, this isn't about a police state. It's about a nanny state. It's about the government trying to save parents from actually having to take responsibility for their kids. If we're worried about kids being molested by strangers, the way to solve that is to spend money on education campaigns to inform parents about the problem, to spend money on protective technologies so that parents can protect their kids, and education campaigns to teach kids what inappropriate touching is. They taught us that back in nursery school (pre-K). If that isn't still happening, then you've found the real problem.
According to child protective services, only one tenth of one percent of children in the U.S. population are actually molested each year with any degree of plausibility. If only 1% of those are non-familial, then this law would only have the potential to help 730 kids a year or so. Why should 300 million people have to give up essential civil liberties to MAYBE help 730 kdis? Also, the number of verifiable child molestation cases has been plummeting since the advent of the internet, not increasing. The way I look at it, what we're doing already is doing a great job at solving this problem already. What's the point of doing something fascist like what is proposed?
Finally, I'll close with this: the best thing parents can do to protect their kids is to give them a cellular phone. Teach them how to call 911 in an emergency. If the kid gets kidnapped, the police immediately know where to find him/her. Of course, if the predator is a parent or family member, education is the only method that will be in any way helpful at combatting it, and no amount of internet surveillance will help.
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