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Larry Sanger Tells FBI Wikipedia Distributes "Child Pornography"
Taco Cowboy writes with news that Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has reported to the FBI what he says is child pornography on Wikipedia, including links (redacted in the letter just linked) to entries about pedophilia and the genre of manga known as lolicon. The Register has up an article with some analysis, which mentions the opinion of at least one attorney whose "reading of the statute [requiring reporting of child porn images] is that it does apply to the Wikimedia Foundation." Update 20100414 5:00 GMT: Larry Sanger has posted a general reply in response to critics of his report to the FBI, in which he addresses the form, content, and motivation of his complaint, and offers some discussion of the relevant statute.
From the article:
I have also since founded a more responsible project, Citizendium.org, and a teacher-edited non-profit directory of preK-12 educational videos, WatchKnow.org. Given my position of influence on matters related to Wikipedia, though I'm no longer associated with it, I feel I have a moral obligation to make the following report.
And I have the moral obligation to call you an opportunist, a shill and accuse you of mudraking to further your goals, Mister Sanger.
IMHO, there are fair use cases, e.g. for educational purposes, for the depiction of under-age sexuality, and if wikipedia doesn't fall under the umbrella of educational websites, I want some suggestions which website does. Hey, here in Germany even our cabinet members can show hard child pornograghic pictures in press conferences.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
If the category hadn't been "pedophilia" would you still have assumed it was child pornography? The girl appears to me to be at least a teenager, but beyond that she could be 14 or 20 (or younger or older). Is it child pornography if the artist conceived of her as 13 or if I did? At what point does child pornography become a thought crime?
Yes, Wikipedia seems to indeed have a category for pedophilia-related articles, describing such things as the Catholic scandal, child grooming, various kidnapping cases and related stuff. I'm a bit unsure what makes this "child pornography" - does Mr. Sanger perhaps become turned on reading about the activities of less savory Catholic priests? Dunno what images he's referring to, either - the only ones I found were photographs of Greek vases. As for "lolicon", AFAIK it's legal in most countries due to it being cartoon not related to real people in any way.
Perhaps this case itself should be reported under pedophile hysteria, or, more cynically, barratry.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
First of all, it doesn't inspire any level of confidence or conviction when the first paragraph of a letter, presumably about bad bad child porn on Wikipedia, is prefaced with what reads like the preamble on a CV. Citizendiwhat? Sorry you ditched on WP and failed to replicate its success, but trying to get the website shut down by pandering to think-of-the-children reactionaries is hardly an act of good faith or legitimate citizen concern. Sanger, how come you know so much about the pedophilia content at Wikimedia anyway?
Secondly, if one does visit the categories of which Sanger speaks, (not hard to figure out btw, in spite of link removals) all you see are A) historic pornographic cartoons, and B) Japanese pornographic cartoons. Even if one were to take the charges of child porn seriously, they are strictly limited to works of art, as in, not real people. I suggest that federal law enforcement should find much more pressing cases to deal with. If they have the time to perform an investigation over cartoon tits, they are overbudgeted.
What happened when a drawing is being called child porn? Did any child get hurt? No. It may not be to my personal taste, but if noone is getting hurt, then why the hell is it being intefered with?
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
And why should it be the government responsibility to dictate morals? They should just provide a practical framework to make life in a community work.
Larry mentions his own, new, quote "more responsible" encyclopedia project in the first paragraph. How convenient.
This is an example of what I believe is wrong with government censorship. I don't know how people get the idea that the web should be a safe place where you can click on any link and go to any site and never have the chance to be offended. The internet and the web, IMHO, should be a place where all information can be exchanged freely between all parties. There are plenty of things on the internet that I find quite disturbing. If you don't want to be offended, don't go there. If you don't trust the sites, don't click on the link. Wikipedia is no exception. I personally don't find it acceptable for children to browse unsupervised, but it isn't mine or the government's decision to make. On the other hand, don't be surprised if the government uses that free information to track down people who commit crimes.
The big problem that I have here is that we are using the government to legislate morality. Not only is that not their job, but they are really bad at it even if it were. So, unless we are willing to stone people for adultery we should let them make their own moral choices.
Just to clarify, I'm in no way in favor of allowing people to harm children. In those cases where actual children are hurt I have no problem hunting down those people. I just don't want to see a service shut down because somebody didn't like a drawing they had.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
If the category hadn't been "pedophilia" would you still have assumed it was child pornography? The girl appears to me to be at least a teenager, but beyond that she could be 14 or 20 (or younger or older). Is it child pornography if the artist conceived of her as 13 or if I did? At what point does child pornography become a thought crime?
In Germany we recently got an "appearance pornography" law that says, if the depicted woman LOOKS younger than 18, it's illegal.
Hilarious what those moral morons come up with.
He's been trying to get his pet project going for years, and people demonstrated repeatedly that nobody really cares about his vision.
Nupedia went nowhere and died after having produced 24 approved articles after 3 years. Then in 2006 he started Citizendium with great fanfare, and in those 4 years it managed to produce 121 approved articles.
So it seems that if he can't compete, he'll try killing Wikipedia the legal way. Maybe then some of the contributors will switch to Citizendium. On my part, I don't see how would that work for him, because I'd just really hate his guts and never touch anything related to him after that.
You should be ashamed, mr. Sanger.
At what point does child pornography become a thought crime?
When we began apply it to cartoons instead of live "models" it became a thought crime.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Actually I think it's better they used something away from the "Playboy" look since some women think they are abnormal when they have genitals different to a pencil mark on a barbie doll. In some places women even get reconstructive plastic surgery done or just bits snipped off to fit that body image.
victimless and harmless to real people
This is just it, it's not harmless.
Or more accurately, even if viewing child porn causes not additional harm to the child depicted if people in a position to create child porn are aware there is a demand for it - which they are if people are downloading material from web sites they control - then it's much more likely that they will invest the time and resources to set up a camera and get a child to act in front of it. In many cases, the child is far from a willing participant.
So, yes, it is possible to view child pornography and not hurt anyone. However, in aggregate, the viewing of child pornography creates a demand for new images, and the filling of this demand results in child abuse.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
By that logic, asking people for money should be illegal because you create a demand for them to mug someone for it.
<sig> </sig>
Child pornography (that is, pictures of actual children engaging in sexual acts) is illegal not because the content is objectionable, but rather because its very existence requires a crime to be committed.
A child porn cartoon does not.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I really don't get this obsession about sex. Everyone[1] does it, everyone has the appropriate organs, and it's definitely a prerequisite of you being alive. Most people have even seen naked children. What's the problem?
I don't know about you guys, but I'd rather have pedophiles jerking off to Wikipedia than rape some kid. Ditto for child porn[2]. Give them all the animations and drawings they want, so they don't get stupid ideas every time they drive past a playground.
[1] statistically speaking. Cue the Slashdot jokes.
[2] actual children being molested is out of the question, of course
How is a woman having her genitals mutilated "fixing up bits" exactly? We aren't talking about women that, for example, have a labia so long as it is causing her pain, we are talking about women thinking they have to get chopped on, and risk all kinds of complications and possible infection, all so they can look like a 12 year old girl.
Personally I'm sick of this "all women should look like Barbie dolls" crap. I'm lucky enough to have a woman with a full beautiful labia, yet it took me ages to convince her to make love with the lights on because all this Barbie doll crap had drilled into her head that having a normal labia made her somehow ugly. Nothing could be further from the truth yet it is one more thing that makes nice normal women feel inferior, just like we have women getting balloons strapped to their chests if it isn't what the media considers a "good size" or starving/making themselves sick if they dare to gain a pound. Unless the labia is causing her real physical problems it is just so much horseshit.
As for TFA, Good Lord, can we pleeease stop the "eek! There's pedo!" bogeyman bullshit? All this crap ends up doing is throwing sanity right out the window and turning our laws into sick jokes. As it is now it is becoming another Red Scare, with kids being labeled child pornographers for taking a video of themselves or guys getting thrown into prison for fricking cartoons. Get real! Instead of looking for bogeymen on every webpage, why not...ohh I don't know...actually go after those molesting kids! How about that? The fact that anyone can seriously say Wikipedia might be distributing child porn for something like 70s album covers (BTW anybody with the Blind Faith album should just turn themselves in right now) or stupid Loli cartoons shows how far down the wrong path we've gone already.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
but by allowing lolicon and similar images to become acceptable I feel as if an important social barrier may have been breeched.
So you support that all images of distasteful things be banned - whether newsworthy (e.g., people being killed in war, to use a recent example), to fictional (violence and rape scenes in films) to unrealistic (cartoons that often show unrealistic violence)? Or is there something special about something that appears to unrealistically depict a 17 year old?
On that note, I'm curious what these images are supposed to be. The image on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon is surely not anything that would be considered "child" pornography, even in countries that have batshit laws against fictional images? Even if that was a real image with, you know, actual children, it wouldn't be child porn - unless you're going to say that nappy adverts be illegal...
Is there a stack of explicit sexual images of cartoon characters depicted as under 18? I'm scared to go looking myself, since as of April 2010 in the UK I'd now be a sex offender facing three years in prison if I stumbled across one.
And that may be a good thing. Right now pedophilia is anathema. Anything related to the topic is considered so vile that even thinking about the topic itself is dirty. You don't get sensible approaches with that kind of atmosphere.
What would happen if some politician came up with the idea of pedophile support networks and state-funded counseling? An instant career end, that's what would happen. Because pedophilia and everything remotely associated with it is EVIL EVIL EVIL any nuanced approach to the topic is seen as insufficiently anti-pedophile which is the same as pro-pedophile, thus you're unfit for any office anywhere if you don't demonize pedophiles enough.
Progress can't be made if zealotry is the norm.
Now what if drawn child pornography does get some mindshare? People might start to wonder whether victimless* CP is really just as bad as regular CP**. And then they wonder whether the current laws are actually to the benefit of the people. And when we have people wondering whether a picture of Bart Simpson naked really warrants a prison term and an entry in the sexual offender database we're a big step closer to them actually bothering to question other aspects of current policy.
* Yes, we can't prove that a certain artist doesn't use actual children/CP as source material. Yet. We regularly catch companies doing bad things, though, so spot checks etc. can help. Requiring drawn CP creators to submit to random inspections (otherwise not getting admitted into the market) should keep the incidence of abusive drawn CP hitting the market low. And I do expect that the black market would take a large hit if a perfectly legal white market existed.
** The usual argument is that "all child porn turns people into pedophiles". So far I haven't seen any solid scientific support for that hypothesis. There are other hypotheses like "drawn CP allows pedophiles to let off steam without a child getting involved" which are equally unsubstantiated, seem equally sensible to a layman and make it seem a good idea to actually try and find out what is true.
Right now we can't even tell whether drawn CP is good or bad beyond resorting to truthiness.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Child pornography (that is, pictures of actual children engaging in sexual acts) is illegal not because the content is objectionable, but rather because its very existence requires a crime to be committed.
That was true, until children started taking pictures of themselves engaging in sexual acts. Now the act itself is not a crime, but taking pictures is.
In some places women even get reconstructive plastic surgery done or just bits snipped off to fit that body image.
And then they have bits snipped off their baby boys' privates, because it "looks better" too. Some people just think the best thing they can do to sex organs is to take a knife to 'em.
You can't take the sky from me...
Let's say you take a picture of your 5 yo daughter, in your backyard pool. She's wearing a swimsuit. You publish the photo on a public site, say Flickr, with a license that allows non-commercial use of the photo.
Some weeks later, a policeman bursts in a suspected pedophile home. He finds that picture of your daughter printed, which the suspect has jerked off to (I really hope you don't really have a daughter at this point), along with others pictures of girls about the same age he obtained in a similar manner. Was there any crime commited?
Let's try something harder. Your 16 yo daughter take her own picture doing a sensual pose, perhaps showing her breasts, using her own cellphone. She passes this picture to a friend of hers using SMS/text messages, which passes to another friend, which then passes it to the same supected pedophile of the above case. Was there any crime commited? If so, by whom? What if the picture was taken by your daughter's 18 yo friend, with you daughter knowledge and consent?
Laws can be a mess.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Some people equate circumcision with "mutilation", which is
Factually correct.
Foot binding, neck elongation, excision, circumcision, stretching out your earlobes, those are all mutilations. And when all your peers have been mutilated in the same way, you're very happy to fit in.
You can't take the sky from me...
Many of the pedophiles arrested had collections of child porn or erotica.
And 100% of them had, at some point in their life, taken dihydrogen monoxide. The more relevant question is how many of those who have erotica collections (or have drunk H2O, or whatever) have done something arrest-worthy? (Other than having the collection itself.)
Do you have any idea how many people read murder mysteries? Are there really that many potential murderers out there? (Of course there's a broad spectrum between reading Agatha Christie and watching snuff films, just as there is between reading Nabokov and collecting porn photos, but the point remains.)
-- Alastair