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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."
a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money
> "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."
So it's the image that would be illegal as well as the act.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
So some bored kid using photoshop to cut a kid he hates head onto gay pron is going to be committing child porn crimes..... Damn revenge is getting harder every year
My initial reading of the title left off the "Fight" part - anyone else?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
As repugnant as child pornography is, this seems to be overstepping the realm of protecting children. Why should the alteration of an image, even to a repugnant end, be illegal? Possession of child porn is illegal, so it's in the interest of the "alterer" not to create fake child porn. I know we find it morally reprehensible, but there is no harm coming to anyone in and of the act of alteration itself. This seems a tad intrusive, and an undesirable precedent if nothing else.
Because, you know... rebuilding bridges and roads and stuff like that wouldn't be a better use of the money than on combating some fuzzy crime (17 year old makes a tape with her boyfriend and it gets shared? they just molested each other!!! kiddy pr0n!!!), the definition of which seems to keep shifting constantly.
back in the 80s its like all they talked about was satan worshipers and commies... now its kiddy diddlers and terrorists.
Meanwhile, the people who aren't doing anything wrong get no attention AT ALL, when we could actually use a thing or two to get done around here, but NOOOOOOOOOOOO... they'll just take our money to go fight Russian criminals through the inner-tubes.
...that something like this would be proposed during an election year?
This space available.
Whoa there. Photoshopping up child porn is going to be a crime, even if no child abuse occurs?
I could see if *distributing* such an image was a crime (because of the use of a kid's likeness), but producing it in the first place? If the law says what TFA says it does, this is constitutionally VERY shaky.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.
In other words, 17 year old highschool kids flashing their boobs on webcams or bored people modifying photos will now have their lives destroyed by these witchunts and blacklists even though they haven't abused anyone at all. Brilliant progress our society is making in the 21st century.
Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a billion dollars?
Senate: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: Online Child Porn Fight.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd have an online child porn fight?
Senate: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a billionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause child porn fighters dig a dude with money.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
is getting to be the cry of the modern fascist. Are out children really in more danger than they used to be? Is it worth throwing away our freedom and privacy to give them more protection? Does this "protection" actually serve our children's best interests?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
How many pedophiles and child porn addicts are there in the USA?
Okay, let's say there 10,000. We could simply off $100,000 and amnesty (only for viewing not creating or abusing children) for them to turn themselves in to receive help.
Okay, so maybe there are more than 10,000 in the USA. Let's say there are a 100,000. In which case we could offer them all $10,000.
Heck, even if there were 1,000,000 we could offer them a $1,000 each. Of course, realize if there are that many in the USA we have a problem because that means 1 in 250 of us are the targets of this.
***
War on Drugs
War on Terror
War on Transfats
War on Child Porn
Not saying child porn is not insidiously evil. But it seems to be an extremely high ticket price. I'd really like to know how thought out this is.
Now if this is supposed to be against global child porn. Are we ready to invade Thailand and the rest of Asia in order to stop the child porn industries over there?
"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."
Altering a picture digitally to show a crime being perpetrated on someone is protected under the first amendment - Ask Hollywood. Although some shoot-em-up movies are crimes against taste.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I don't see why this is so hard, all you have to do is take down 4chan.
That arguments ridiculous. There's nothing inherent in being black that makes them more likely to commit crimes, the root cause is in society and culture. Also, they don't actively seek out being black, whereas you're not born with a thumb drive full of kiddie porn. This is closer to speeding laws, where a certain behavior hasn't harmed someone else yet, but it's increasing the probability of you hurting someone in the future.
Besides, these people aren't just being put into prison because they might abuse children, they're actively supporting and distributing these acts to other people. Putting someone in jail for kiddie porn is completely reasonable to me, although I do think the process is emotionally charged to the point that it's hard for justice to be done in these cases. It ends up smelling like more of a witch hunt than anything, but, as CS Lewis said, witch hunts are completely reasonable if witches exist.
From the article:
Then they download files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines.
It doesn't seem like someone would name a file "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" if they were really trying to share child pornography on a P2P network, especially if they were planning on not getting caught. I mean, that file name tells you nothing about the file other than that it's illegal and involves children. It doesn't even actually mention sex, although I guess it kind of implies it. Although I definitely don't have any first hand experience, I would imagine that pedophiles, like other people, would have specific preferences in their pornography and would want to know at least a little bit about the content before they download a file. I mean, I'm not going to download a file that's simply called "hardcore adult.mpg" when I'm looking for porn. What if it's two dudes? What if it's 2 girls 1 cup? Anyway, the example file name they gave sounds more like a file shared by someone who is trying to catch pedophiles than an actual pedophile trying to share child pornography.
So what kind of riders will be on this bill? Adding them to a child porn bill is a slam dunk.
All that's important to them is a nice headline like this one during an election year. Beats doing any REAL work. Oversight? Investigations? Fuck that, that's hard work. Budgets? Infrastructure appropriations? Screw that, makes voters yawn.
It's just a BS game, happens every election year. Voter Exploitation. "Fighting Child Abuse" gets more votes than fighting executive abuse of power.
This space available.
One billion dollars to fight something we can't consistently or accurately define.
Assuming there's a thousand of these illegal acts performed this year, that's a million dollars per act. This is nearly 7000 houses that could be bought outright and then given away in my neighborhood.
What a waste of money. It's nearly $3.32 of every man, woman, and child in the U.S.A (from 2007 population estimates). Somehow I don't think child pornography is so widespread that it requires this kind of money.
Sure, there will be people saying it's worth $3.32 to know that no child is being molested, but that's not what we're buying here. At best we're buying that people will fight children being exploited; something that we've been paying for already.
God i hate that old CS Lewis line.
A witch hunt is generally defined, in it's normal emotive context, by the prosecution and identification of witches with a complete and utter lack of regard for any standards of evidence, justice, fairness or internal consistency.
It reminds me of the old monty python skit.
(I paraphrase from memory)
She's a witch!
how do you know?
Because she burns!
What else do we burn?
Wood!
So she is made of wood!
Yes, and wood floats!
aha! what else floats?
ducks!
Yes! Therefore witches are lighter than ducks!
(puts the witch on a broken scale which shows she is lighter than a duck)
Burn her!!!
What is child porn exactly?
Most attorneys will tell you that in most US states, that question is nonsensical when you approach the "border line".
It used to be defined (the first child porn laws came about in 1976, before which it was entirely legal in every way).... that child porn was a child "engaged in sexual contact". That was very shortly later amended to "or showing obvious arousal".
That's a pretty simple definition and the border-cases are rare.
But today, child porn in most states is defined as
"any image of a child, or someone appearing to be a child (or fictionally created to represent a child) which is viewed with the intent to cause arousal or sexual satisfaction"
There are a number of men in prison for things like.... owning a collection of boys underwear catalogs. Or taking photos of girls in bathing suits.
What it comes down to, and the issue that I have with these laws, is that it is impossible to know whether you are possessing child pornography BEFORE the jury reaches a verdict.
In fact, a given image can both be simultaneously porn and not-porn depending on who is looking at it.
In fact, the jury is instructed to divine the "intent" of the viewer of the image, often years after the actual "viewing" took place.
Obviously, there are plenty of cases with dudes downloading videos of 5 year olds being penetrated and I guess there's no argument in that case, but the cultural climate which allows laws that allow statements to enter a US court room such as "jury divined intent", "illegal fiction" and "simultaneous porn and not-porn" are the sort of things that lead us hand-in-hand toward the collapse of our fundamental structures of justice and freedom.
The fact that laws are allowed with these sorts of phrases are a travesty to our judicial and government systems and represent a black-eye to the framing of the constitution and modern law.
That's just my opinion, but I'm sticking to it.
The problem with child pornography is that it's too easy to frame someone for. Up to a quarter of all computers may be part of botnets (source). For every compromised computer, there exists a person who could be paid to frame the computer's owner for pedophilia. If we spend a billion dollars on hunting down people with child porn on their computers, we're going to find a lot of people who didn't put it there but can't prove that they didn't. In other words, we will falsely accuse a lot of people, and ruin their lives and reputations. That will be a travesty.
Just like the RICO act was used to prosecute pro-life protesters and the Patriot Act has primarily resulted in arrests unrelated to terrorism, this funding will be used to dig up any manner of crime, not just child porn.
The real title of this bill should be "$1bln to scour the internet for whatever we want and prosecute whatever turns up." Whenever the government says its "for the children," beware.
There is a concept trotted out by law enforcement now and then that when a child is viewed in a sexual content, that child is "victimized by proxy".
This is most frequently used when discussing "real" (obvious) child porn.
They state that the viewing of porn (even child porn made back when it was legal to make without distribution of any kind) constitutes a "re-victimization" of the person in the image.
This is so they can get around the shady and un-proven idea that porn somehow leads to rape (or child porn leads to child rape), which is the original justification behind the laws.... but that nobody can admit because it's a flawed, emotive argument.
In fact, the real reason for these laws is that most people find pedophiles iicky and it makes their skin crawl to think that someone get a boner while thinking about their kid. Frankly, it's that personal discomfort that causes people to applaud when our legislator seek out new and creative ways to ensure they aren't allowed to continue being creepy (by thinking those creepy thoughts).
That is the REAL basis of these laws.
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.
Shoudln't you be masturbating to The O'reilly Factor?
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
...and probably have to change my name afterwards.
I'm single, and I look at a lot of porn. A *lot*. Nothing too deranged, but let's just say I know my way around the net that you use when you're looking for binaries. In my experience, real child porn is damned hard to find. Jailbait / "lolita" porn that features girls who are post-pubescent and legal in their home countries gets spammed to damned near eve4ry binaries group in existence on a daily basis, but *real* child porn? The kind that really damages kids? I just don't see it. The people who produce it have gone way underground compared to just a few years ago. You used to be able to see some pretty horrifying stuff in every group on any day, but that seems to have been driven out. It seems to me that the billions of dollars that are "needed" to fight "child pornography" are really fear-mongering dollars that we have to spend in an effort to pretend that 16-year-olds are as tingly and curious as *we* were when we were 16. If anything, I think that this whole campaign is making our (US-ian) culture even more damaged and sex-phobic. Do we really need specific legislation to outlaw webcam broadcasts of baby rape? Seriously? How often does that happen, and how is it not covered by existing statutes?
Paedophiles aren't inherently driven to commit crimes, because most of us have restraint. I like the idea of having sex with young boys, but I don't go out and do that for the same reasons that you don't rape women.
As far as child pornography is concerned.. a few months ago, I was staying in a country where accessing child pornography is not a criminal offence. At the time, it was not illegal to act contrary to my home jurisdiction's laws abroad (unless the act also constituted an offence in the foreign jurisdiction). While I was in the foreign jurisdiction, I bought a hard drive to use only in said foreign jurisdiction. I was legally able to browse without restriction (although the cache etc had to be disabled due to the strange laws of the foreign jurisdiction). Although there was virtually no "pornographic child pornography" to be found on the internet, it was possible to find a lot of posed images which would be illegal if I'd viewed them in my home jurisdiction.
And I can still control myself around children....
The problem with applying the "supply and demand" theory to people who possess but don't purchase child pornography is that they are not contributing to demand, because the supplier is not interested in producing images for people who are effectively "stealing" them by viewing them for free, for the same reasons that artists don't record music for people downloading it from file sharing networks. Supply and demand is an economic theory - a buyer-seller relationship - which applies to commercial sale, not products being used for free. Producers of any material do not want their material to be used freely, so an increased interest in freely available pornography is going to harm them. People will be less likely to purchase child pornography if viewing freely available child pornography is legalised, as viewing freely available child pornography will become the safe and legal option. Production of child pornography will therefore fall because of a lack of demand, meaning that less children will be abused by child pornographers.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Why don't you have a seat right over there?
My company nitpicks about a few thousand in travel costs, because it knows its investors will act if money is spent unnecessarily.
Then there's the government. It is supposed to work the same way, as an organization that could have its ass handed to it at any moment by its "investors", so it had better do well. Especially since it has WAY more money, and WAY more "shareholders".
Instead, the government has no fear. It can write a check for a billion dollars, without anywhere near as much scrutiny as a company applies to a stupid plane ticket. You know the people in government haven't done the homework, a billion dollars is just a "nice round number" to make politicians look tough on crime. And if anyone were to stand up and protest this spending, they'd probably be labelled a pornographer themselves and bashed into oblivion. (That reminds me of the equal bull of committing "treason" for opposing any and all military spending.)
Companies like to encourage employees to help them save, to nickel and dime things, acting "like it's your own money". And ridiculously, I've seen people who put real effort into helping their stupid company, on a scale that is insignificant compared to government spending; while those same people have never lifted a finger to question the government. They give a huge percentage of their money away and don't care what happens to it. What's wrong here?
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ