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Full Body Scanners Violate Child Porn Laws
gandhi_2 writes "The Guardian has a story about an ongoing legal battle over the use of full body scanners in the UK. The Protection of Children Act 1978, includes provisions in which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a 'pseudo-image' of a child... which a full body scanner does."
It's not illegal if the government does it. Right?
-Kinsey
"But back to those privacy concerns. Some lawyers believe having a young traveller pass through the full-body scanners could violate child pornography laws. As a result, Canada is exempting passengers under-18 from the new measures."
from http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/01/06/f-rfa-common.html
Personally, if I were asked to go through one I would opt for the pat-down instead. Want to get your rocks off feeling my rocks? Go for it, but I won't have my naked image stored in a computer that politicians claim is hack proof and will get deleted right after.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Security debates don't fuel anything to do with think
If we continue to allow such invasion to our personal dignity as full body scans, scatter ray etc in public places WITHOUT DUE REASON OR WARRANT we are only one step away from having cameras and microphones in all of our houses. For anti-terrorism measures, instead of investing far more in either more labour intensive approaches such as metal detectors or explosive/chemical sniffers, governments have chosen far more invasive options with dubious increase in safety for the innocent.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
...I would go a bit further: I don't want my naked image to be seen by anyone. Unless I was a porn star, which I'm not (and not intending to be one through this technology).
It's indecent, and I am principally against it. It's attacking the integrity of the human body, and a number of other basic human rights.
In The Netherlands, some person from the PvdA political party called it totally acceptable to introduce body scanners as flying is "voluntarily", and thus you would not be able to refuse it once you bought a ticket and boarding the plane. That person probably has no idea that a significant number of flying-hours is made by business travelers who are not doing that voluntarily, and cannot refuse (lest be fired).
A lot of stupid arguments are floating around in these days why the body scanners are OK, but every one of them can be refuted by a simple - but basic (like human rights) - counter argument...
Let's hope the political process works and we can indeed always opt for a pat down (or more, if suspicion arises *after* the pat down and normal security screening - that failed for Schiphol), or we have hundreds of thousands of people added to a virtual "no-fly list" as per arguments above...
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Broadly, speaking, those are the options.
They could rewrite the laws that define nude pictures of those under 18 as automatically pornography.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Perfect. There have been suicide bombers younger than that. I feel much safer now...if perhaps a tad undignified.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This is a good example of a world gone mad. Since when is every individual a suspected pedophile? Pedophiles are an absolute, absolute minority. Most adults actually have a natural instinct to be protective of children, this is known psychology. Somehow, the assumption seems to be that the norm is to abuse children and the exception is to care for them.
I find it even more amusing that there is no worry about the privacy of adults. Isn't their privacy being abused by these full-body scanners? Won't 99.99% of cases be that guards screening this would get a kick out of seeing an adult nude and not give two hoots about naked children? Does anyone have statistics on what percentage of the population are pedophiles? I'm willing to bet that it's a pretty low number.
Of course, your work in prisons may lead you down that path to some extent, but I would hate to think of the conclusions of a sociologist who was only ever allowed to study the prison population of the culture he was trying to understand. :-)
This sounds an awful lot like how people who spend all day working with drug addicts in rehab tend to have this image of all illegal drugs as horrible and talk about how the majority of drug users are broken worn-down people, they just see that all day and never see the girl smoking a joint at a party, or the friends who take some ecstacy at a rave and then go home to sleep it off, they just see the guy who smokes 5g of weed per day, the habitual coke-head and the heroin addict who's ruined his life and base their image of drug users on these people while not realising that the average drug user is a fairly normal person with a regular life...
(This was not meant to be in the defense of child molesters but rather as an example of a similar situation in which it is easy to get a warped view of reality based on a poorly chosen sample group)
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
As an adult male, I know that when I go out in public I act coldly and hatefully towards children.
It's the only way to keep people from calling me a pedophile! Being nice to them just makes people scared of me!
Presume guilty except in explicit evidence of innocent. And even then, question exactly why an innocent person would need evidence of innocence.
Wait, no damn! That means I should stop hating kids because it looks like I have something to hide! Is there any way to prove the absence of something? Science gave up trying to do that with God years ago!
Actually, it could very well get worse.
The exact same image (or rather, one even more accurate) could be recreated just by turning down the surface-transparency on a medical scan (such as a CT scan). Once all those subcutaneous organs are properly filtered out of the scan, what's left is a high-resolution, extremely-accurate naked image of your child.
Moreover, it's in 3D!
When the for-the-children lobby figure that one out, perhaps we ought to expect most hospitals (already terrified of lawsuits) to start delaying or refusing potentially life-saving diagnostic scans on the grounds that they may constitute illegal child pornography.
Anyone taking bets?
I'll make one on "we lose".
No, it isn't.
First of all, an animal won't care, as it grows older, that there is a picture of its genitalia, or it being involved in a sex act to which it did not consent, extant in the public space. Or even just lying there, exposed. People -- they generally will care. That even applies to baby pictures. Parents think they're cute. The subjects, not so much.
Secondly, the real issue here is that the problem law is one that outlaws not images of real people, but any rendering, artistic or otherwise, of a real or imaginary young person.
As far as the airport scanners go, (1) inform the public what they face, and (2) they can choose whether to submit. This is very harsh, but it still allows for privacy and most liberty, excepting that travel using someone else's privately owned conveyance has preconditions no sensible person would put up with (and hopefully, that will kill the air travel industry, finally teaching the idiots in government a lesson.)
It is much more disturbing that art and less-than-art expression, harming no individual, utterly victimless, is being cast as criminal activity. That's straight up repression, censorship, and foolish to boot.
Here, it would be straight up unconstitutional. Which is not to say, of course, that they wouldn't make laws against it anyway, they've stepped on eight of ten of the bill of rights amendments as it is, not to mention other parts of the constitution. But at least you'd have a leg to stand on to object.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In agreement with the parent, there are plenty of examples of governments making laws to sanction immoral actions; consider the apartheid regime in South Africa, where as the government 'needed' to do something illegal, e.g. force mass evictions based on race to provide new land for development of suburbs for whites, new laws sprang into place. A more recent example example would be the US and the patriot act. Granted, the introduction of laws that curtail civil liberties or are immoral had to be sneaked in, often on unrelated bills, but it is another case of a government making laws to suit it's own purpose.
Which brings me to my actual point. It's not only developed countries that have a proper separation of powers. Many developing countries have the same legal principles enshrined in their constitutions. It's just that those principles are often ignored (including in developed countries) by the corrupt. Corruption is a part of human nature, not a part of just 3rd world human nature.
But even drawn pictures can have a sexual or erotic intention. A full body scan isn't in any way sexual. I find it odd if people define (child) pornography by the amount of visible nudity (and come on, a full body scan shows a real abstract image of your body). Pictures of genitalia in biology books or information booklets on STD's aren't considered to be pornographic either are they? I find the whole discussion to be really over the top and really strange that people even come to a conclusion like this. Over-sensitive idiots if you ask me.
Do note that I'm not saying that there is no privacy issue with a full body scan. It's just that jumping to the child pornography conclusion is absurd.
More people die on Britain's roads each YEAR than have died as a result of terrorism in TOTAL.
Each and every day we take far greater risks with our lives that that posed by terrorism.
Yes things changed on 9/11...
We all became wimps as our leaders showed fear...
Where's the spirit of Winston when we need him ?
Nothing could be more true. The damage the 'terrorists' have done is damn near zero. A few busted trains, a few blown up airplanes, and and few buildings? Pfft. It doesn't even rate as pocket change next to one hurricane in terms of costs. In terms of lives lost it doesn't even exist on the same scale as mundane boring shit like cold or warm weather, car accidents, the common cold, and other stupid shit no one gives two shits about. The "terrorist" have done so little damage as to not even register as a cost in terms of lives or cash compared to the normal boring dangers that we face without blinking every single day.
Well, that is true if you don't take into account violent government overreaction. The countless TRILLIONS we have spent in over reacting done VASTLY more damage than any terrorist can even begin to contemplate. We take a mosquito bite and respond by chopping off our own limb. Who to blame? Well, I blame two groups. First, I blame the brain dead masses who can't get it through their thick fucking skulls that they are more likely to be struck dead by a lightening bolt than a terrorist, and who squeal to be striped of liberty and dignity to prevent an absurdly rare way to die. Second, I blame the utterly spineless politicians who play into this fear. I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging and suggesting that the best course of action is to invest in lightening rods, because they are a shit ton cheaper than this mindless security theater and will save more lives with a billionth the cost. Even better, spend one millionth of the cost we were going to spend on stripping every single citizen naked who gets on an airplane and dump it into fighting a real threat, like the common cold, the flu, and choking on medium sized objects.
Anyone who would rather see their wife or daughter get stripped naked in front of machine rather than endure the nearly incalculably small risk of a terrorist attack is a spineless piece of shit. I can't decide who pisses me off more, the wretched spineless cows who whimper to politicians to strip them of their money, liberty, and now their fucking clothes, or the bottom feeding piece of shit politicians who agree to do it.
Bah. This whole 'debate' (if you can call such inarticulate babbling from politicians "debate") pisses me off to no end.
Which is absolutely not the point.
The real point of the legal definition of CP should be: Something that hurts children, and therefore must be prevented.
But of course, right now, the real point is: Something that a politician thinks, the most extreme conservative groups might objet to, and therefore cost him votes, or will be picked up by the media, and so in the end costs him power.
They don’t fuckin’ care about children getting hurt. All they care about are their own asses. The whole idea of just forbidding to talk/see/hear anything about CP, instead of preventing the actual action that hurts children, is just sick. Because it protects CP. If accidentally stumbling upon a CP site and then call the cops to put them in jail, means that you will be put in jail, then CP is safer than it ever was!
And that is what ever people who got themselves raped as children say.
Besides: About full nudity of children:
I remember that when I was a child, we were at nude beaches in France, where parents and their small children run around completely naked. So what? They are children. If you see them, that caring instinct instantly kicks in. And if not, then still what’s so special about nudity?? I just don’t get it. It’s the freakin default. Being clothed is the weird thing.
You’re not a perv when you let them run around naked. That’s just natural.
But, you’re a perv, if your thoughts when you see them, circles around sex.
Also here in Germany, it’s nothing special to let small children run around naked at swimming pools (especially open air ones) in the summer. I think: How weird is it, that we aren’t naked too.
We did it for centuries. Millenia. Hundrets of ’em. Until that sick disgusting religious mind-twisting came around.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I think you hit the nail right on the head.
Though, that is the whole issue. Why do we even have this debate? Why do we need these scanners in the first place. Simple answer: we don't.
All they will do is inconvinience and hassle anyone with some minor indiscretion to hide (like a few pills or a bag of pot), which will be essentially as close to 100% of the people going through as it gets. All to catch... well... who exactly?
We see one of these bomb incidents maybe once a year? Twice? Throughout most of the world? Then on top of it, a significant number of those, fail to even work, or are stopped on the plane by the now alarmed passengers. All this, without said scanners in place.
Seems to me all this is.... a huge waste of time and money.... all justified by dramatic images of families and children dieing in tragic plane crashes. Even though, its a farce. Those same children are WAY more likely to die in random car crashes, or from the flu than some terrorist act.
I keep seeing a room full of bearded turbin headed men exclaiming how wonderful it is that they don't even have to succeed in blowing anything up and the whole western world cowers in fear and runs around like a bunch of ninnies over it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"