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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."
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
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).
In my day, we used Pirates to hunt for children.
Yarrr!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I don't think the main point is to find the Warez, but rather to "educate" the children by enlisting them in the battle.
Anti-Piracy Merit Badges!
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"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."
So, basically, what we have here is children fighting pirates on an island? Where have I heard that before?
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
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.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.