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."

Comments

Search != Stumble Upon

[Lord Grey]

From the article summary:

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 ....

From the article:

Starting this summer the Hong Kong government plans to have 200,000 youths search Internet discussion sites for illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies, and report them to the authorities.

Asking someone to report a crime they've happened to see is very different from asking them to actively search for a crime and report it. I would be pretty concerned if the government asked my son to explore dark alleys at 3am, just to figure out if drug deals are going on in that part of town. Asking children to do something like that is a form of indoctrination, making the implication that "ratting" to the government is grand thing to do. If the government needs help like this, they should offer up a bounty on the illegal material let some idle adults collect the prize.

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[post-tech-guy]

Either communist or facist, either way it is a recipe for disaster. Remember the Hitler Youth, they were instructed to do similar actions with rating out people who didn't agree with the Third Reich

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[voice_of_all_reason]

You're confusing "illegal" with "wrong."

Substitute in a bunch of things for piracy in the above statement based on laws of different countries, like "homosexuality" or "democracy."

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[Sage Gaspar]

So you're saying that you'll teach your children to ignore any crimes they see and just bury their head in the sand? If they see a little old lady being beaten, they should just stay out of it and not "rat" to the government on the criminal? I'm sure your children will turn out to be fine citizens.

So you're saying you'll teach your children to report every crime they see? Old lady jaywalker is SOOOOO busted.

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[S.P.B.Wylie]

There is a difference between reporting a crime when you see it and hunting for it. You are making kids agents of the government to protect us. We are supposed to protect children, not the other way around. The big problem is that when you have children looking for crimes, they land in the environment of that crime, and from what I have heard about the sites that have piracy, that is not a safe place for children. So, in that manner, it is a lot like sending children down alleys to look for drug exchanges.

Will you have children looking for online molesters soon? They are the most qualified to do so, even if it does put them in a dangerous situation.
Think about it.

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[Sage Gaspar]

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.

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[ultranova]

Either communist or facist, either way it is a recipe for disaster. Remember the Hitler Youth, they were instructed to do similar actions with rating out people who didn't agree with the Third Reich

Yeah, and let's not forget the East Germany snitch network.

It's funny how copyright enforcement seems to create more and more such parallels, isn't it ? Kinda makes me wonder if we don't regard the Copyright Lobby in 50 years the same way we regard Nazi Party now.

Yeah, copyright Nazi. Nazi copyright. Copyright mass murder Hitler Stalin terrorism evil RIAA MPAA DMCA DRM. Eat it up, googlebot :).

they had better be prepared

[Anonymous Coward]

to see porn and all its flavors, casiono/poker scams, spyware, popups, circle jerks, top20 gateways and all the other scum that floats on the bottom of the warez scene

Bad idea

[frosty_tsm]

The first problem with this that comes to mind is that there are a lot of piracy websites that have images unappropriate for kids.

Yes, yes, I know that any kid can go online and find whatever they want to look at. I'm getting at that maybe this isn't a task for children (in the government-run sense).

Re:Bad idea

[pilgrim23]

In a first coup for the Hong Kong police, the kids found 1000 copies of pirated Microsoft Offce and dutifully reported the discovery. The culprits in question turn out to be....the Hong Kong Police...

Save the pirates!

[StikyPad]

In my day, we used Pirates to hunt for children.

Yarrr!

Re:Its not that hard

[timeOday]

I don't think the main point is to find the Warez, but rather to "educate" the children by enlisting them in the battle.

like 1940's vice squads

[smellsofbikes]

Sending oodles of kids out looking for music-sharing sites is kind of like sending angry, unattractive, middle-aged cops to "stop" prostitution. I imagine these kids sticking USB thumbdrives in their cop computers and bookmarking wildly for the evening's Internet Cafe feeding frenzy.

Oboy!

[ackthpt]

Anti-Piracy Merit Badges!

To earn one you must:

• Identify a pirated song
• Identify a pirated video or film
• Turn in a friend or family member
• Be able to recite from memory the RIAA & MPAA oaths of Allegiance to Lucre

Breaking news: Chairman Moa is doing 3,500 RPM in his grave.

I can see it now...

[RyoShin]

Hong Kong: Aha! You people are pirating software and video games!
Pirates: Aha! You are using child labor!
Joe Everyday: Oh no, who should I hate more?
RIAA/MPAA: The pirates, they're the worst kind of criminal!
American Government: Think of the children!
Joe Everyday: [glares] Not helping!

And then Canada just kind of laughs and goes back to whatever its doing.

Wow, what a bad idea

[grasshoppa]

First of all; Warez sites have porn. Not just a boob here and there either. Real live penetration. Often times, you have the weirdest fetish shit to deal with too.

So let's dump that on 200k kids. Lovely.

Second, kids are idiots. Truly, they are. I remember when I was a kid, I was an idiot. So now we are turning out 200k kids in to an enviroment ripe for molestation. And porn, lest we forget.

This is a bad bad idea, no mater how you slice it.

Nothing can go wrong!

[Gurp]

Ok, so we're going to:

1) Force children, who no doubt understand teh intarwebs better than those in charge of this, to swear that they will search out piracy
2) Encourage said children and young adults to spend time searching for movies and warez
3) Wait for the reports to roll in.

Whoever thought this up is brilliant. This plan has no flaws. Why didn't my government think of this?

The lesson....

[aiken_d]

So 1% of the kids will be all into it and be good citizens... and 99% of the kids will laugh at and mock that 1%.

Great way to make piracy seem even more cool, and to make reporting piracy something that only losers do.

-b

this reminds me of...

[56ker]

The massive attempts (and manpower) China require to keep their Great Firewall of China up to date. Who knows if these "Youth Ambassadors" won't just have their task expanded to include reporting on objectionable material? After all currently Hong Kong isn't covered by the GFC.

Sounds familiar.

[Jason9x19]

"With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police."

Re:Sounds familiar.

[whitehatlurker]

'Who denounced you?' said Winston.

'It was my little daughter,' said Jason9x19 with a sort of doleful pride. 'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.'

G Orwell

That's nothing

[SuperKendall]

Here in America, we have millions of youths scouring the internet for piracy!

However, we do outsource the collecton results in Sweden so I guess we can't take all the credit.

Re:Its not that hard

[cdrudge]

"Here you go kids, this is how you can find/download the latest app/song/video."

It's kind of like education kids about drugs by showing them where to buy all the ingredients to make meth...

Boy Scouts?

[k4_pacific]

Redmond WA (Hydraulic Press) - The Business Software Alliance announced today a settlement agreement in their long running trademark dispute with the Boy Scouts of America. According to the terms of the agreement, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) must use its swelling ranks to help the Business Software Alliance (BSA) sniff out piracy on the internet. Another controversial term of the settlement is the mandate that requirements for the Computing merit badge must be completed using only legitimately purchased Microsoft branded software.

The dispute started in 1998, when the Business Software Alliance noticed that the Boy Scouts of America, a quasi-military organization headquartered in Irving, Texas, had the same three letter initials as them. They promptly sued for damages and infringement. While many legal scholars believed that the Scouts would prevail as they have existed for nearly a century, the Business Software Alliance won the case by throwing wave after wave of lawyers at them until the Scouts relented.

"I cannot continue to sit back and allow the Boy Scouts to continue to sap and impurify all of our precious intellectual property," said a Business Software Alliance representative, "God willing, we will prevail, through the purity and essence of our trademarks and copyrights."

Bob Talbee, a scoutmaster in Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated that he would cancel the weekend campout to comply with the order, "Sorry kids, we've got to spend the weekend on the internet looking for something or someone called warez," he announced at a recent Scout meeting. Talbee, a bricklayer by trade, was not sure what a warez is, but thought it sounded thoroughly unwholesome and worthwhile for the scouts to work towards eliminating.

Children fighting pirates?

[zerblat]

So, basically, what we have here is children fighting pirates on an island? Where have I heard that before?

Reminds me of

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in a post-communistic country, i remember from my schoolyears how we were 'trained' to look for and report saboteurs, spies and evil western agents. Given the state paranoia, the agents were portrayed as almost mythical creatures, with ninja-like capabilities, evil to the bone. The result was that everyone i know wanted to be western agent, so cool, merciless, almost invulnerable, able to get anywhere ...

So .. way to go China! :)

Re:Do not be fooled!

[Unlikely_Hero]

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

The numbers don't add up!

[DJ_Perl]

200,000 youths?!?!! Depending on which source you believe, there are only about 1 million youths ( ages 9-25 ) in all of Hong Kong. Even the sources disagree on the exact demographics of Hong Kong. Total population estimates ballpark around 6.9million.

That would mean that 1 in every 5 youths would have to become part of this program. Sounds....unlikely.

Sources:

1. Wikipedia (Demographics of Hong Kong) - 6.9 million in 2003
2. Wikipedia (Hong Kong) - 6.86 million in 2005
3. CIA World Factbook - 6.94 million in July 2006

Re:The real reason

[Jeremi]

Now let me ask you, what would China want with some 200,000 script-kiddies? Considering that the US of A already has a computerized powergrid, huge internet backbone/banking systems/telephone/cellular networks/freaking traffic lights and building ACs?

Sorry, but that's really dumb, even for a conspiracy theory. If you were the Chinese government and wanted to hack in to American information infrastructure, you wouldn't hire 200,000 children, you'd hire 200 really bright graduate students, and have them write automated attack programs. Not hundreds of thousands of amateur volunteers who are (a) not going to be very effective, and (b) are going to be impossible to keep quiet about their activities.

There's also the minor detail of China having the USA as their largest customer -- attacking the USA is hardly in their economic interest.