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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
"Think of the Children" meets "Fighting Terrorism." Which one wins? News at 11.
The World is Yours.
Two ridiculous hot-button topics with opposing aims.
Wow, this is kind of like when the unstoppble force meets the immovable object.
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This is ridiculous. Child porn laws need to differentiate between nude images and obscene/exploitative images. Hopefully this security debate will fuel a rethink.
As much as I don't care for the losers working airport security, I'm more concerned about the trauma they will go through looking at average airline passengers sans clothing all day long.
Body scanners are optional, if you refuse, you get a pat-down search. :)
But some pat-dows may constitute sexual assault:
http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/inappropriate-pat-down-searches-during-an-airport-security-screening.html
This may be a catch-22 for TSA
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
"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.
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
We'll have to put kids in opaque balls and cast them out to sea so that nobody can look at them or touch them or think about them. It's the only way.
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.
Many day care centers have glass walls and no doors to the toilets these days.
I once made a comment to a day care center "Is it for the protection of the children". She replied "No, It is for the staffs protection".
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Fear of pedos vs. fear of terrorists.
The cage match we've all been waiting for.
Anyone taking bets?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Its odd someone gets all the way from the middle east, thru Europe, all the way to Detroit with JUST the sort of device these things are meant to detect at JUST the time their deployment is starting to ramp up.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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 ?
I propose we invoke the law of the school yard which clearly states that if they're going to see ours they're going to have to show us theirs. That should put an end to that.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Get the Queen to run the scanners. She is above the law (or ta least can pardon herself from anything)
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"