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Hong Kong Using Children to Hunt for Piracy
westcoaster004 writes to tell us that according to The New York Times the Hong Kong government will be using some 200,000 youths to scour the internet for piracy. Members of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and nine other youth organizations will be drawn from with the first 1,600 being "sworn in" this Wednesday. From the article: "Tam Yiu-keung, the Hong Kong Excise and Customs Department's senior superintendent of customs for intellectual property investigations, said the program should not raise any concerns about privacy or the role of children in law enforcement. The youths will be visiting Internet discussion sites that are open to all, so the government program is no different than asking young people to tell the police if they see a crime while walking down the street, he said."
Considering the adult (as well as illegal) content openly displayed on such sites, this isn't an unreasonable metaphor.
I've said for ages that all this confuscian crap (yes crap) is the basic root of authoritarianism in asian cultures. And I'm always branded some sort of bigot.
LOOK AT THE MAN'S WRITING. IT'S TRUE
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
That would mean that 1 in every 5 youths would have to become part of this program. Sounds....unlikely.
Sources:
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Indeed, instead of watching porn, it would be better let them watch people kill each other on daily television.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
How do you discriminate against some crimes but not others?
The same way I discriminate between anything else, common sense and my personal system of ethics. I obey laws when they're not too unreasonable. I agree with most of the regularly enforced laws in the U.S., hence me and a lot of other people in the same boat live here under a government that will enforce these laws and prevent other people from committing acts like rape, murder, theft, et al. Plus give us a fair shake if we're accused of any of that nasty stuff.
We also have a police force to investigate these crimes. If we were to start telling little Johnny to keep on the lookout for nasty copyright infringers, we've just given him the go ahead for a witch hunt and breached another hole in the healthy distrust he should have for his government.
Hell, the legal system already assigns different penalties to different crimes, ranking them by their severity. It's not really an astonishing idea.
As for old lady jaywalker, there's some old ladies that shouldn't be crossing some streets. The laws exist so the police officers can stop them. The appropriate action for a strapping young lad that sees an elderly lady having trouble crossing the street, however, is to assist her, not to call the feds on her.