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German Member of Parliament Joins Pirate Party
Political Observer writes "Jörg Tauss, a member of the German Parliament (Bundestag), left the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is part of the coalition government, and announced that he is joining the German Pirate Party (Google translation; original German article). Tauss resigned from the SPD after all but four of the party's members voted for a new censorship law, which passed the parliament on Thursday. The law, which aims at reducing child pornography, introduces an infrastructure for DNS-based content blocking and is the subject of major criticism from Internet users. In March 2009 Tauss became the subject of investigations by the German police for possession of child pornographic material. He said he had this material only for research as part of his role as a member of parliament. Investigations are still continuing."
I agree with the Pirate Party but I'm still holding out for a Ninja party since Ninjas > Pirates.
If this kind of thing happens more often, the general public might actually get to hear about it.
Whenever I ask them, most of the people I know have heard about the Pirate Bay guys being found guilty and
very little else. Most news stories we get here (in the UK) are very biased whenever these kinds of stories even appear.
ID Cards are barely mentioned, censorship & privacy stories are generally ignored unless its got the usual terrorists/paedophile
angle.
You don't need to DL a bunch of kiddie pr0n to study it nor do you do it without informing any police organisation before doing so, if only to prevent any mistaken ideas, much less prevent duplication of work and chasing down useless paths.
Tauss has very good representation who know how to take advantage of a few laws here in Germany which more or less allow public figures to buy their way out of a courtroom.
Well, although it does seem far fetched it legitimately could be used for research in the fact that he could either use it to convince people that certain parts of the law as unreasonable (such as, this counts as child porn, however as you can plainly see it is not).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You've never downloaded 'questionable' material just to see what was the problem with it? BDSM, bukkake, bestiality, snuff films, coprophagia and yes, even child porn have passed through my hard-drives, even though I find all of them disgusting.
I'd post anonymously but frankly, I don't give a fsck, it's been years since I've had any of that stuff and if some cop decided to tap my internet connection they'd only see download of various patches and traffic from the odd online game. Perhaps he's lying, perhaps he's not, but his statement doesn't sound too far-fetched so I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Yes, how absurd. Obviously if he looked at these images he is a sadistic pedophile and was about to attack children any second. He also apparently texted the word "geil" so we know exactly what he was thinking.
Of course law enforcement can look at these images for several hours a day and no one is harmed, and we also know they never have any improper thoughts while doing so.
The guy might actually be a pedophile, given the frequency of occurrence within the population, it'd be shocking if some members of parliament weren't pedophiles; but his story isn't necessarily as absurd as you claim.
Say, for instance, you want to know how likely it is that somebody just on the internet, or somebody looking for ordinary porn, will be exposed to kiddie porn. Or, you want to know how prevalent kiddie porn actually is. Either question seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder about, if you are a legislator with a kiddie porn related bill presented for your consideration. Attempting to answer either question could easily leave you with some illegal images in your browser cache.
In related news, the RIAA and MPAA released a joint statement calling the Pirate Party "A degenerate den of pedophiles that threaten our children and, indeed, our very society"...
I'd just like to add people are curious, plus if anyone wants to get a taste of what people wish they could do if they could get away with it read some books by nancy friday.
Human beings are animals, and they are curious. Put the two together and it's not surprising.
It was invented here. We invented it 2 millenia before *your* country existed. I'm not claiming europe is more democratic that 'you', but suggesting democracy is something europe is 'starting to get good at' as if it's something we learned from you kinda shows your ignorance. A lot.
I'm assuming you're american since only an american could have such a completely wrong image of their own country as some kind of beacon of democracy to the rest of the world.
Hello flaimbait moderations.
Well, I wouldn't say that. Have you ever googled, etc. for child porn just to see how easily you can actually find it in the Internet? I am turned on by older women than I am but I have still done that. It wouldn't even be very far fetched claim to say that you could save some of the stuff as example even if you aren't turned on by it. Unless we know exact details of the material on his computer, how it got there and most importantly, if anyone profited from that and if anyone got hurt... We know nothing.
Besides, I always wonder... Why do people act as if pedophiles were horrible people. It is sexual preference that they might not be able to change themselves. What matters is if they let anyone get hurt because of that. Child molesters should be hunted down, as should people who acquire child porn in a way that it causes more injuries to children (IE: Buys it and people who produce it will gain more motivation to produce more). But people who just download it from peer to peer networks without anyone profitting or getting hurt more because of that download? Hell, it might even prevent some child abusement cases.
And yeah.. If you really think that public figure could tell police "I'll download some child porn but I'll just tell you beforehand" without massive scandals...
Quite frankly, unless he's actually paying for it, or otherwise actually contributing to child abuse, I really don't care. Simple possession, if not a completely victimless crime, is certainly very close to being one.
The whole thing is a joke. It was his job to handle child pornography cases. He left, because he was disgusted with the way it is handled now.
And another group of politicians made his special rights vanish in the blink of an eye, so that he could not react, and they had a window for suing him. It was all staged.
Interestingly, that very group is known from the "Sachsen-Affäre". A large-scale scandal, where it is proven that they took private advantages, bribes (while in office), did illegal spying, human trafficking, child prostitution and drug dealing. And guess what happened to them. Exactly. Nothing.
So the wolf is the shepherd here, and I guess you can pretty much bet, that the point of this law (at least partially) is to protect them.
UPDATE: Good news: The Pirate Party accepted his membership. So now we have a Pirate in parliament!. Yay!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
His membership got accepted by the Pirate Party!
We now have an active Pirate in the parliament.
I wonder how the next Bundestag elections will end. I have the feeling, that this is the start of something big!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Whatever his reasons, I'm not sure that it helps to have somebody being investigated for such material as a supporter of change. If he gets convicted then it becomes a case of "see, only pedophiles and perverts would oppose this law!"
Not to mention the fact that it's nearly impossible to browse certain high-visibility sites (4chan) without some dumb-witted idiot posting a 8 year old child getting molested.
Yeah, I accidentally stumbled upon the R@yG0ld keyword on WinMX many years ago. I found what I thought was a completely legal set of images(if she was under 18, I definitely couldn't tell) so I selected *everything* the user had. Within a few minutes I realized that the keyword didn't mean "barely 18" and damn near vomited when I saw the first image that was clearly not legal; didn't take long for me to wipe it all since I had no way(or determination) to sift through all of them to determine if any of them might be legal. Now I hear that's all that's left on the WinMX network.
Though what's worse is the naming convention on Usenet where the uploaders think it'll be chic of them to name a pic of an obviously legal girl "15 yrs old.jpg" cause I also used to batch download images from there and about shit myself when I saw filenames like that. Now, I just stick to the obviously legal sites AND if they show a "cougar" then I'm usually sure I'm quite safe..heh
so if i'm a scientist, and i'm doing pharmaceutical research, can i use that as my excuse for a small mountain of cocaine on my coffee table?
What it means is, if cocaine is "bad" but the law outlaws all white powders, then yes having a non-cocaine white powder which is illegal as it violates the cocaine law, would be perfectly fine. (Yes, for you too!)
Throwing everyone in jail who has white powder, under cocaine laws, is BAD (and exactly what happens)
Using the USA as an example, as I don't know the legal age over there, here it is 18 years old. Adjust the numbers accordingly for your country...
If I have pictures of a 17 year 11 month 28 day old girl, and/or next to it a 23 year old girl who looks 17, both of which are illegal under the law and will get me sent to prison as a child porn distributer, that should be fine. (Just like in your example)
I'm not saying anything about what he does or does not have. I don't know. I wasn't there.
But when the government claims he had child porn, I have proof that in 99.(high number) percent of the time it is NOT child porn and just a smear campaign, I will firmly side with the idea that "The government just told a horrible life ruining lie" instead of think they have anything to do with child porn. I have decades and tens of thousands of court cases to back up my default assumption, out of 4-5 that turned out to be real child porn possessors of prepubescent children.
(This also might be a USA thing too) Just as when a police officer claims they tasered that 7 year old boy because it was their "last option", i instantly do not believe them. Under such rare cases would that be the case, that I now dismiss all of them as bullshit, even on that one in a hundred years time it WAS the last option.
Here, tasering for no cause happens so many times a day, that there is no possible way for a sane rational human being to believe it.
As much as I hate people that abuse children, at that ratio, everyone ever arrested for it needs released.
That will not do, as real pedophiles need to be in jail. Thus, to keep tens of thousands of innocent people out of jail, AND to keep real pedophiles in jail, the only solution is to fix the broken laws. THAT is what needs done.
The odds are in favor of this man doing nothing wrong, and the government using their ole staple lie to ruin the life of someone they don't like. The odds they actually managed to catch a real pedophile are too low.
Unlike you, I will wait for proof to be found.
It's not like the Pirate Party is the only german party that is against these laws. In fact, only the 2 largest parties voted for it.
I would assume he hopes to get rid of these new laws and that he would stand better chances at it by joining a larger party.
So why would he join exactly the Pirate Party?
Maybe the cops just called him and told him that they did not only find CP on his computer but also an illegally downloaded Britney Spears album!
Right. I don't look at the stuff either, but most people assume that people who do view it are ruthless predators - who are one step away from snatching a kid from the park - without taking into account that it's possible that some people child porn imagining themselves to be the kid and not the adult.
MILF and schoolteacher fantasies anyone? Schoolgirl fantasies? Maybe schoolgirl costumes should be banned because every guy who buys one for his wife or halloween date is a sadistic pedophile.
While we're at it, let's assume that every chick who wears a schoolgirl outfit, or every horny boy who imagines banging his hawt teacher are not indulging fantasies known to be normal since antiquity. Let's assume that they are disturbed and confused and should seek counseling along with heavy doses of behavior modification and the stigma associated with victimhood! [/sarcasm]
As an aside, I find it disturbing that many folks are afraid to post the words "child pornography" on slashdot without obfuscating it to CP or ch*ld pr0n even while anonymous.
Why don't you have a seat over here and tell me what you are doing with 9 year-old ballerinas in your thumbnail cache?
Quite frankly, unless he's actually paying for it, or otherwise actually contributing to child abuse, I really don't care. Simple possession, if not a completely victimless crime, is certainly very close to being one.
Also, what exactly does "child pornography" mean? Does a 17 year old girl qualify? How about a 14 year old boy? I wish I made porn when I was 14...
How do you arrive at this conclusion? By there being one guy changing parties?
You're lauding the Germans for their Democracy in response to an article about how most of the government there just voted to put in place internet censorship and a framework for DNS redirection to enforce it?
Sounds like they are experiencing many of the same problems with the principles of Democracy that many other countries are having.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Child molesters should be hunted down, as should people who acquire child porn in a way that it causes more injuries to children (IE: Buys it and people who produce it will gain more motivation to produce more). But people who just download it from peer to peer networks without anyone profitting or getting hurt more because of that download? Hell, it might even prevent some child abusement cases.
Exactly! If you believe RIAA's theory, then by downloading CP for free you are discouraging the production of CP!
Think of the number of children that can be saved if everyone spreads CP everywhere so no one will pay for it! Wouldn't that cause billions of damages to CP producers? To save children from abuse, the law should mandate the spread of CP instead of making it illegal!
By making CP illegal and thus creating a monopoly for illegal CP producers, the law could be hurting more children than it presumably saves.
In Australia it means 20 year old cartoon characters... link
There is a very simple test: has he categorised it into different folders?
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
It is not the piracy party for heavens sake... It is the "Pirate party" and one of their various objectives happens to be the protection of the civil liberties. I don't think at all that a guy that fights against the implementation of state censorship of the internet with the intention to stop what's basically a thoughtcrimes all under the anthem of 'saving the children', even though all the money, resources and freedom spent on battling child porn is not justified when you find out that actual child prostitution is a much , much worse problem that for some reason gets almost no attention or resources, perhaps because battling it would actually mean messing with mafias and organized crime without giving the governments a chance to remove internet censorship...
Though to be fair, perhaps states just want to avoid to get themselves into situations like Iran's government's in which forbidding internation coverage does not help you in your efforts to prevent the world from knowing what's going on all thanks to that evil, open, decentralized beast the internet is.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I'm as big a fan of Germany and European democracy as the next man. But Roman democracy was hardly the same thing as modern democracy.
*cough* Greek democracy came first...
And the Romans weren't that different, really. You were a citizen, you got a vote. And their tribus system for voting (you vote in your district, then the district gives one collective vote) is no different from the current US system. The only real difference I can see is that voting rights weren't universal, but when you think that Switzerland didn't allow women to vote until well into the 1970s, that's not that "unmodern" either. Personal wealth as a factor of how much your vote counts for was still around in the 1900s too.
The constitution worked as well for them. They had the mos maiorum, and enough of a legal system that laws were well published, could be changed and abolished. In the late republic, legal representation was available too, and while bribes were involved, it also worked along the principles of proof. There's a reason why Roman Law is the basis of European legal systems. They had the senate to function as a parliament, the consuls, praetors etc. as the elected government, and the tribunes of the plebs as the checks and balance system who could even call all citizens in to vote for major issues.
The Romans actually had a very modern approach to elections, too. You could buy votes, bribe other candidates, lobby your way into getting the support of parts of the elite, spread rumours, marry a woman of an influential family... and if it all didn't help, you claimed a god told you it was okay. You tell me where that's different from what happens in modern democracies.
Mere possession is a problem in that it propagates the victimization whether or not money changes hands. A childhood friend of mine who was as much my sibling as my own flesh and blood (and a very early Slashdot member) was recently convicted of trafficking in child pornography. He was somewhat peripheral in terms of content but was actively contributory in establishing the distribution.
This rocked me to my core.
There is no case of possession of child pornography that does not merit thorough investigation and very few that do not merit prosecution.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Bullshit.
Bust the sick fuck who made the content and bust the next layer of people who paid for or profited from the content.
After that, we hit the slippery-slope type arguments like "people who experiment with marijuana will go on to use cocaine" or "people who download child porn for free via p2p will go on to be molesters".
If they pay for the shit? Okay, fair game, but you forget that the vast majority of molestations are committed by family members and other trusted associates and not creepy guys in trenchcoats sitting on the park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent (with apologies to Jethro Tull).
You are experiencing an emotional knee-jerk reaction. Respectfully, please quit watching Chris Hansen and other manufactured mass media, read a few psych books and come back after you comprehend the post you responded to.
Actually part of his contribution involved his own family members. This experience totally reshaped my view about those involved in kiddie porn so fuck you and your ignorant generalizations and FUCK YOU to your claim of bullshit.
Neither me nor my family was directly involved but this was such a close friend we might as well have been.
Learn something about the subject before you respond in your kneejerk quasi-libertarian fashion. This is real life with real consequences, not philosophical masturbation.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
In other words his involvement was, from what I gather, potentially: possession, distribution, production, and from the sound of it trading this produced content with others.
Can you honestly not tell why someone might refer to downloading child pornography from where ever, as a completely one sided exchange, as in no way furthering the victimization of youth, given that the images already exist and no incentive is being provided for the production of more? In contrast I think it's very easy to say exactly where the victimization in your example is, and the fact that he would (my gathering) be involved in bartering of the fruits of the victimization rather than straight purchasing is irrelevant to the argument and provides a very clear incentive for continued violence.
In other words, your friend doesn't fit the definition. Leave him out of it.
By the fact that a party with 7% popular support is getting anywhere close to 7% representation in parliament.
Quite... I still remember a few teachers and friend's mothers who could have molested me all day and the only side effect would have been my perma-grin.
Though, to be fair, I assume that the "mature woman, pubescent boy" kind of child porn is not significant in proportion to the rest.
There is an interview with him shortly after his decision to join the Pirate Party. In this interview he also explains why the liberal party (FDP) is not a choice for him. For everyone who understands German: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn2At6NAg3w
Even a fool has a talent.
The biggest problem with witch hunts for child pornographers is that it's not the cold eyed brutal child rapists who tend to get caught up and prosecuted as child pornographers, it's teachers investigating student misconduct, 13 year olds and high school students.
That the alleged pornagraphy was produced by its subject, was voluntarily distributed to the "child pornographer" or that tarring the accused with the term "child pornographer" is ludicrous seems to be no barrier to prosecution and sometimes conviction.
And what is a "child"? Is a 17yro a child? You know, you come to the point where teenagers take pictures and are charged of childporn.
Where is the good old German nudism gone?
JÃrg Tauss was a specialist in his party, the SPD for internet. He is from the left wing, former trade union secretary, was mostly isolated in his party and had to play according to the rules.
Just before a bill is passed in the German Parliament about child porn and content fuiltering on the internet the most vocal person in the relevant committee, JÃrg Tauss an MP is searched in his Berlin office. Even the press communicates about the search before the police does. He is taken before the committee meeting which dealt with - oh surprise - child porn. They find a package with child porn images on CD. Surprise, surprise.
I personally don't care if Tauss viewed child porn images, whatever "child porn" means. What I care about is that it is very fishy when the specialist of the party is taken out. MPs should be sacrosanct from prosecution, in particular when it overlaps with a political agenda.
How can you professionally deal with say "nazi hate literature" when you don't have tried yourself to get access to it or are in possession of the works, so you know what you are talking about. What Tauss did was a bit stupid. That is all.
"In a democracy EVERYBODY gets to vote, not just those that are playing by the current laws."
Not true. In a democracy every *citizen* gets to vote. And then the political definition of "citizen" is not a fixed one and changes from place to place and from time to time. Some places, some times, women are not considered "citizen", or black men, or resident foreigners, or below 18 year-old, or below 21 year-old, or in jail, or...
While the Pirate Party in Sweden got 7.1% of the votes at the European election, the German Pirate Party only gained 0.9%. It was the first European election where the German Pirate Party participated.
I've translated a German transcript of his speech.
In his investigation he tried to show that child porn is frequently distributed by mail order, telephone hotlines, and mobile phones again. However dealers of child porn usually require potential customers to break the law by providing illegal material themselves before trusting them.
In his hearing he admitted mistakes and he assured his innocence. He said that he had acted in the belief that he was permitted to perform such investigations as the responsible political authority.