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Senators OK $1 Billion for Online Child Porn Fight
A bill that could allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years to combat those who trade in child pornography has been unanimously approved by a Senate panel. "The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote. [...] An amendment adopted Thursday also adds new sections to the original bill that would rewrite existing child pornography laws. One section is designed to make it clear that live Webcam broadcasts of child abuse are illegal, which the bill's authors argue is an "open question." Another change is aimed at closing another perceived loophole, prohibiting digital alteration of an innocent image of a child so that sexually explicit activity is instead depicted."
No, not "one of", *the* highest in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States
Um, if I remember correctly, SCOTUS already shot down one law that dealt with 'pseudo' child porn - if it's not a real child doing real porn, it's not child-porn. Of course this is congress, passing good laws is so much harder than 'thinking of the children'.
The other problem is that they are budgeting $125M/year - but not, evidently, using it to put more FBI into cubicles. It looks like they are throwing the money at whoever promises to solve the problem without adding cops.
The Supreme Court has previously said (ie in Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition) that unless there is real child being used to create porn, it's a simple matter of free speech.
Certainly it would be easy to imagine a case where you could use the face of an underage public figure to make a clear political or social commentary (I'm not saying it would be tasteful, just very possible). I'm not so sure that you could make such a case for private individuals. One issue would be for the courts to decide if such a use would really be considered true child pornography rather than simply a case of defamation or something similar.
One major factor that jumps to mind is that in creating the fake child porn, you aren't directly causing any damage to the victim, it's only through distribution that the victim is harmed (or even aware something has happened!). But child porn is illegal to create or possess, which would mean people looking at major felonies for a victimless crime if they simply created images for their own use and never distributed them. I can't see the court endorsing that. Without distribution of the images, we seem to be close to the realm of thought crimes, but with distribution it would be a very interesting case to see argued.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
How do you define "child pornography"? The law doesn't just cover people who produce images of children being raped. A significant number of prosecutions are based solely upon images which don't depict any sexual activity at all.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Around 5% of adult males are paedophiles; around 33% of adult men have some attraction to pre-pubescent children. [1]
See my comment here.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
There were some precedent-setting cases prior to 2003 in which digital child porn, cartoon child porn, or any other kind of porn that did not involve real children in any way, was found to be legal (or rather, the laws that made it illegal were found to be unconstitutional).
The protect act of 2003 explicitly made cartoon images, sculptures, or fictitious written accounts, of children performing sexual activities illegal.
There was a case in 2004 (can't remember the details offhand) in which a person was convicted for owning cartoon child porn. That case did not go all the way up to the supreme court, however.
So, it seems to me that the issue is still kind of muddy. There are obviously strong opinions on both sides, and proponents of these opinions will continue to throw more legislation at it, so I expect that the door will swing back and forth, and the issue will remain muddy, indefinitely.
One thing is clear, however: this is a freedom vs security issue.
Infrequent? What rock have you been living under?
Today, just about all "computer forensic examiners" in the US spend 50-80% of their time on child porn cases. This is well over 10,000 people working for local, state and federal law enforcement. Child porn cases are the #1 workload item for Army CID.
Yes, this means there is enough work for 10,000 people to spend all day, every day doing nothing but digging out child porn from seized computers.
I do not know the number of convictions in the last year, but I'm sure there have been thousands of them. Just US Attorneys did 1700 cases in 2007, which is federal level alone.
It is not a trivial problem and is absolutely not "infrequent" in any regard.
I call bullshit.
You don't have *any* numbers for the first bit.
Your second bit is also weird. How many CP cases are NOT at the federal level? It's a federal felony, no?
So a base of 1700. Let's quadruple that and be conservative.
That's still under 8000 *a year*. Subtract out of that the healthy fraction that aren't really child porn but more 17yo on 17yo sharing between them (they abused each other!!!)
Also subtract a significant number of people who are parts of botnets... if a botnet is running on your computer, it's almost unprovable that you actually did anything
You're left with (liberal estimate) 5K cases a year... for $1B?????
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.