Department of Justice: FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

itwbennett writes "The Department of Justice has issued a scathing report (PDF) on the ineffectiveness of the FBI in investigating and countering cyber attacks. The shortcomings are partly attributed to lack of training and lack of communication, but the biggest issue is the allocation of effort. From the report: 'Overall, we determined that in FY 2009 the FBI used 19 percent of its cyber agents on national security intrusion investigations, 31 percent to address criminal-based intrusions, and 41 percent to investigate online child pornography matters."

Comments

PLEASE!!!

[ganjadude]

Won't someone think of the FBI agents!

Re:PLEASE!!!

[oliverthered]

Yeh, they need access to kiddie porn'o too. So they can think of the children of-course.

Re:PLEASE!!!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Go for what you know.

Re:PLEASE!!!

[couchslug]

"Won't someone think of the FBI agents!"

If they wanted to fap to cyber security and criminal intrusions they'd investigate those instead.

Re:PLEASE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So somehow you are linking the alleged mishandling of priorities at the FBI with that kook David Koresh burning down his own building rather than be demoted from his status as self professed mesiah? And then you are blaming it all on Reno?

I wish there were a way to mark you -1 "Kook". Have fun at the Creation Museum. Do I hear Dueling Banjos?

GP gave the wrong reason why Reno's largely responsible, but yes: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Janet_Reno#State_Attorney
Read from there through the Country Walk section.

Bureaucrats

[mr1911]

It's for the children, except when the children take up too much time and we need to do something else.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Sprouticus]

ORRRRRR

someone @ te DoJ realizes that 41% of the resources being used on theoretical pedobears was a waste of money compared to people who could actually hurt the underlying infrastructure and cause millions if not billions of dollars in damage.

I know its not popular, but pedophiles dont do much harm in the big picture.

Re:Bureaucrats

[betterunixthanunix]

Moreover, people who view or collect child pornography may do no harm whatsoever. The overwhelming majority of people who watch child pornography are not paying for it, and most of what gets "traded" are old pictures and videos. Some guy who is sitting in his home masturbating to images of child abuse may have some psychological problems, but that in and of itself does not cause harm and it is a waste of law enforcement time and resources to arrest such a person.

Of course, the FBI has released official statements in the past that promote the idea that, in fact, just by looking at images of child abuse, a person is harming children, even if the children have been rescued and their abusers have been put in prison (unless, one is looking at those images as part of their job as an FBI agent, in which case it is not harmful).

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the FBI has released official statements in the past that promote the idea that, in fact, just by looking at images of child abuse, a person is harming children, even if the children have been rescued and their abusers have been put in prison (unless, one is looking at those images as part of their job as an FBI agent, in which case it is not harmful).

In a sense, they're right.

If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand. If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

Any resources spent on hunting down people looking at porn is resources not spent on hunting down actual child molesters. If you hate the porn viewers so much that you don't care about children getting molested, perhaps your priorities are not very sane.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Dr Herbert West]

First, let me say I agree with you... but my understanding of the argument for prosecuting/persecuting the lone fapp'er goes something like this:

If you CONSUME child porn (no matter if it's images that are a hundred years old) you are by extension SUPPORTING the "industry" that manufactures it. Therefore... THOUGHT CRIME! MUST GO TO JAIL NOW!

Re:Bureaucrats

[hrvatska]

I know its not popular, but pedophiles dont do much harm in the big picture.

Poor parenting does a lot more harm than pedophiles.

Re:Bureaucrats

[nedlohs]

So I'm suporting the MPAA by downloading movies from a torrent and watching them?

Why do they seem to not like it then?

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

In a sense, they're right.

If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand. If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.

Except in this case the pornography is shared on the intartubes for free. No "content producer" (i.e. child abuser with a camera) would go and sue for copyright infringement - because if he did he would admit to a somewhat worse crime...

There may be a market for illegal goods, but there certainly is no real market for illegal information - it cannot be "used up", it can be reproduced for free and you cannot prevent reproduction using a legal construct like copyright.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cpu6502]

>>>If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.

Your logic is lacking. If it made sense, we should also outlaw:
- murder photos
- snuff videos (like animals set on fire)
- accident scenes
- and so on. Because the distribution of this material will cause an "industry" of murder to create new photos/films! The horror!!!

Or not.

Your logic is flawed. Just like most religious nutcases (think Jim Baker or Pat Robertson). Stop trying to suppress free people from exercising "thoughtcrimes" like pornography, smoking weed, chewing tobacco (sin tax), and so on. Victimless crimes are NOT crimes.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to crack down on pedophiles, crack down on the church for shielding them. I don't understand why the Government hasn't made arrests up in the hierarchy for that.

Re:Bureaucrats

[chemicaldave]

I wonder what percent of that 41% are qualified to handle information security jobs. It's a whole different ballgame that tracking down porn. InfoSec jobs are in high demand and the government can't fill them fast enough. Why do you think im getting a full ride + $18,000 /yr to get a masters for only a 1:1 education:work obligation.

They're desperate, and I doubt very much of those 41% could fill security roles.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

But there are victims: kids. Somebody makes these photos, domestically or internationally. The exploitation of children for sexual gratification is plainly evil. Some adults are addicted to it. They need help. By chasing them down, you reduce the harm to children; you may never be able to eliminate it.

The resources used, if the data is correct however, is way too high of a portion. Porn is otherwise largely a victimless crime, barring child porn, or those held in "white slavery". Not every porn actor did what they did of free will, altho many do.

Re:Bureaucrats

[jedidiah]

More importantly, there isn't a powerful lobbying group or a cabal of rich corporations to object to the sorts of things that these people are passing around amongst themselves. There's no one actively lobbying congress and handing out bribes to everyone to ensure that the penalties for these people become more severe or that more resources be aligned against them.

There's no megacorp to keep pressing the issue.

Re:Bureaucrats

[b4upoo]

Maybe we could give computers to the molesters already behind bars and give them bonuses for tracking down under age kids in porn sites. They would love it and research the area with great eagerness.

Re:Bureaucrats

[ae1294]

If you CONSUME child porn (no matter if it's images that are a hundred years old) you are by extension SUPPORTING the "industry" that manufactures it. Therefore... THOUGHT CRIME! MUST GO TO JAIL NOW!

Here are some sick illegal movies for you:

Pretty Baby
Rambling Rose
The Warzone
Kids

Have fun committing federally approved thought crimes. Just don't pirate them!

Re:Bureaucrats

[b4upoo]

Anytime you promote any activity by doing it it can cause harm by making it more acceptable to others. Foe example the occasional use of illegal drugs promotes drug use in others as well as supporting smuggling and violence. The yet to become addicted person looks and thinks that some others who play with dope don't become addicts and his path to self ruin is made easy.

Re:Bureaucrats

[vrmlguy]

If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand. If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting". The same survey also found that 75% of all American teens ages 12-17 own a cell phone. According to Wolfram Alpha, there are 22,410,000 teens between 15 and 19, which is likely close enough for these calculates. this means that roughly 672,000 images classifiable as CP are generated by teens during the 5 years that cell-owning teens are between the ages of 12-17. This works out to 134,000 images per year produced by teens for other teens.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

Somebody makes these photos, domestically or internationally.

And looking at a picture will change nothing. It won't somehow make the situation worse. If people are so afraid of them, for some reason, beginning to buy child porn, despite the fact that most people apparently don't (if that's true), then why don't they also ban murder photos and the like?

The exploitation of children for sexual gratification is plainly evil.

That depends on your definition of "evil."

Re:Bureaucrats

[betterunixthanunix]

If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand.

Not at no cost; were you not paying attention in your economics course? Most of the "consumers" of child pornography are paying nothing for it -- they are not paying for it with money, they are not paying for it with new images of child abuse, they are just leeching off the small minority who are fueling the production.

My understanding of the economics of child pornography is this: at the highest levels of production and distribution, pedophiles are trading new and unseen images and videos with each other. The market is based on barter, not money, to thwart efforts at tracing the participants.

Eventually this material is somehow leaked to lower level forums which are more easily accessible, and from there the images are reposted again and again. Below a certain level in the distribution chain, the incentive for the producers to keep producing is entirely lost; the material is reposted on various forums at no cost. The overwhelming majority of people who view child pornography are viewing it at a level that is far below this point, and are contributing nothing to its production.

In simpler terms, arrested the "low hanging fruit" is nothing more than showmanship; it has little affect on the people who are actually abusing children. Every few years we hear about some big deal arrest, where law enforcement agencies manage to gain access to a high level production network, and those are good things in terms of thwarting child abuse. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of child pornography arrests are not in that category.

Re:Bureaucrats

[O('_')O_Bush]

That is completely irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that exploiting children is right, they're arguing that the demand for it isn't causing supply. A pervert is going to do perverted things whether someone views it or not, since almost always, the pervert doesn't know who sees the material or how it it shared.

Big difference between someone abusing children and making material and someone who is viewing material.

Re:Bureaucrats

[BitterOak]

In a sense, they're right.

If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand. If there is a "healthy" "market" for child pornography then some people will go out and get fresh product for that market. This is how children are harmed by viewing it.

Which is why, I think, it is important to distinguish in law between purchasing child pornography and possessing child pornography. The former should be a crime, since you are providing the means and incentive for further child abuse and are in some sense an accessory to that crime, but the latter should not be, and yet people are arrested for mere possession of child pornography all the time.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

It's evil because children are exploited. There is a choice, exploit or not. Exploit is the wrong choice; children are vulnerable, where adults can make informed decision. That's why sex with a mentally incompetent person has the same evil: they can't make an informed decision that we would call adult or mature.

Looking at the picture gives vicarious gratification. The process of getting the picture was one of exploitation, see the above statement. A picture of a murder wasn't taken for the sexual gratification of the murder-- altho there are such things as snuff films-- also plainly evil.

Whether you share the porn or buy it, you're part of the chain that started with exploitation, brought on the ecosystems around porn. Somewhere, someone made money, or did it to share the exploitation. Either motivation exploits children.

Re:Bureaucrats

[hairyfeet]

Bullshit. Go to Wikileaks and type in child porn and you'll find a nice long article by a guy that actually used to make the Lolita model style crap and one read of that will let you know you can't stop it on the user side anymore than busting the junkie on the street has stopped the flow of Coke. If they actually cared about the children they'd be making more deals with the third world (where the majority of the stuff is produced) and be getting more boots on the ground there.

No instead what they and the states do is waste fricking wheelbarrows full of money chasing the socially retarded. I have a buddy that works in the state crime lab on this very subject and he says the ONLY ones they catch anymore on the net are social retards. For those that don't know a study was done awhile back (I'd try to find a link but I have NO idea how to type that into Google without the risk of finding CP) that showed that the social retards would follow the same pattern every time. First they would gorge on regular porn til it wouldn't get them off, then shemales/anal/gangbangs until that wouldn't work, then BDSM and animals, and finally torture porn and CP.

The problem is these guys are NOT THE PREDATORS and in fact if you were to lock them in the room with a kid they'd go hide in the corner. Most are to some degree agoraphobic and they have NO social skills so they sit in their little hole and watch porn all day.

Want to know what the REAL predators use? USPS. According to my friend they have a nice little darknet that NO cop can ever join (because the price of admission is you abuse a kid in the way they tell you with a prop they tell you to have in the shot and you have only X amount of time to deliver or forget it) that is only used to set up the initial meet and after that everything is encrypted DVDs sent to mail drops. He says the only way they catch one of these bastards is that one of their victims turn them in. Even he would prefer they spend their time chasing the actual predators instead of the retards but big busts make headlines and catching the actual rapists is hard so instead they chase social retards.

So sadly in the end what we have is another case of security theater, made to make it look like they are really making a difference when they are not. The ones having sex with kids would do so whether there was money involved or not so saying it would increase the amount of kids raped is bullshit, it would be like saying "Oh well, nobody wants my CP so I'll stop raping little Suzy and go back to having sex with adults". These guys trade amongst themselves, then one uploads it to some P2P or backroom server somewhere, and there you go. And the amount of time we stick on the social retards (many looking at 40 plus according to my friend) simply means we'll have to let more vicious criminals go to put up some guy who sits in his basement and jacks off. yep, smart plan we have there.

Re:Bureaucrats

[dbet]

By your logic, if you view pictures of murder victims, you are creating a demand for murder. Therefore, pictures of murder victims should be illegal, and you should receive the same punishment as someone who has actually murdered a person. Opening up rotten.com should get you 700 years in prison or more.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Sperbels]

someone @ te DoJ realizes that 41% of the resources being used on theoretical pedobears was a waste of money compared to people who could actually hurt the underlying infrastructure and cause millions if not billions of dollars in damage.

But arresting the guy who just has a few pictures on his computer makes it look like there's a huge problem, and causes people to look away when law enforcement demands greater power to bypass that pesky constitution. It's about maintaining a heightened state of fear to increase their power.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

We disagree; I believe it's entirely relevant. Child exploitation hurts children. Other porn is done (usually) with consenting adults, who make an informed choice. Children can't do that.

If you pay someone to do a contract murder, you'll never see it, but you're a murderer in the same way as someone pulling the trigger.

Yet one person's perversions are another's delight. It's the capacity to make an informed choice that's key. Children can't do that. View child porn, and you've placed yourself in the system as an end-user. View straight or gay porn of adults, and you're part of that system-- but with luck (barring slavery), you've hurt no one that could make an informed choice and consent.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

No. Have fun with Playboy. Have sex with an unconsenting adult or a child-- who can't really give consent, and I'll be happy to imprison you. It's called rape, or statutory rape.

Otherwise, thanks for the kind words.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

Not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or any branch. Rape is rape. You can give consent, and it's not rape. Children can't give consent. Ask any therapist-- any of them. You'll see that I'm not talking God and Satan and Hell.

I'm talking about the fact that children are exploited in child porn. Adults can do what they want-- you, too.

Re:Bureaucrats

[thetoadwarrior]

The FBI probably isn't good enough to beat cyber attacks so they go for the low hanging fruit and spend most of their resources on catching pedophiles.

Re:Bureaucrats

[vrmlguy]

But there are victims: kids. Somebody makes these photos, domestically or internationally.

You can see the math at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2115012&cid=35979298, but basically 134,000 images are produced per year by teens sexting each other. But don't worry, prosecutors are still protecting the kids in the photos by going after the producers of the photos, even when they're the same people: http://www.google.com/search?q=sexting+arrests+charges.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

Your estimation makes the dubious assumption that each one of these kids who produced such a photo, produced only one.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

No, not blindly following programming. I've thought this one thru. It's like buying Mexican pot. It might get you really nice and high. No problem, right? You paid for it and maybe it's kinda legal or you have a medical prescription or something.

Along the way,however, the Mexican drug cartels-- the people in the delivery chain-- have murdered in hideous ways almost 100,000 people, many of them guilty of only trying to resist being exploited. Some were just in the way.

Children can't give informed consent. Neither can animals. If you have sex with them, you're exploiting them. We call that exploitation statutory rape and child molestation. It's harmful to the child. Go on, ask any, I repeat ANY mental health professional about the subject. You believe I'm a nutter; I believe in living in a cogent and civilized society-- and one that doesn't exploit and rape children.

Re:Bureaucrats

[SuricouRaven]

It's even sillier than that, really. Most countries now seem to have banned even 'simulated' child porn - photoshop jobs, drawn artwork, even fiction. Why? Because it makes people feel squicky.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

It's evil because children are exploited.

Which isn't "evil" to all individuals. Whether something is "good" or "bad" is subjective, really. Personally, I think it's evil, but that does not make it a fact.

Looking at the picture gives vicarious gratification.

And? How does it logically do any further harm? Looking at the picture can't harm the child anymore than they have already been harmed.

Whether you share the porn or buy it, you're part of the chain that started with exploitation

The difference is that, more often than not, the people who made it won't even know that the people who didn't give them money, but still viewed it, even exist.

Either motivation exploits children.

Why does the same not apply to murder pictures and the like? People who like that type of stuff are supporting the behavior, according to you, right (even if they don't give anyone any money for the pictures)?

The people who hurt the children are the ones who actually hurt the children, anyway. Not random people who merely view images anonymously, I believe.

Re:Bureaucrats

[tnk1]

They don't like it because it is screwing with the business model that they are familiar with and are masters of. The MPAA is trying to defend the bottleneck that they used in the past to collect revenue: distribution. They're simply being resistant to change.

Despite the MPAA's lack of vision, every person who sees a movie could recommend that movie to a friend or even buy it themselves. They can also become interested and become customers of the licensed products and sequels. In short, the more people who see it, the bigger a fanbase it has. The bigger the fanbase, the bigger the market you have for something you control the license to. It is not always easy, nor obvious, on how to make money from that, but the money can definitely be there if you have imagination and are not too attached to doing business in only one way.

I imagine the same goes for the... other... sorts of movies we are talking about here. Just because the makers of widely passed around stuff do not profit directly from that production, it doesn't mean they or someone else won't indirectly.

The key difference in this case is the "product" itself is the problem. The child porn market requires child abuse to work. Therefore, it doesn't matter who makes the money to the FBI, it just matters if the amount of abuse increases because of a general increase in interest in these productions. Money itself isn't even a concern. The abuse may well happen for other motives than money, such as approval within their own little circle of deviants. I am sure we are all well aware that there are dark corners on the Internet where these people congregate to socialize and obtain acceptance.

It can be a very difficult thing to do to sit in a budget meeting and tell someone that there is not much bang for the buck in saving children, even if the money is spent very inefficiently. All they have to do is trundle out a montage of half a dozen kids they have saved and the case is made emotionally. It doesn't matter if they locked up 10,000 otherwise harmless people to save the half dozen kids, humans are programmed to be protective of children and that can be hard to overcome.

There's no way the FBI will ever stamp this out, and I think they know that. However, in this case, I think they may feel that even a partial victory is much better than not trying at all. After all, a partial victory may mean that children are saved from this abuse, and that means a lot to law enforcement on a personal level. As a cop, you probably want to feel that you are the good guy fighting evil. And there is nothing that presents the good/evil contrast as much as child abuse. Clarity of purpose in a world where cops are not universally liked is a very desirable thing to have. It's also really good PR.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Iamthecheese]

Victimless crimes should NOT be crimes. FTFY

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

And there are children, some as young as a year old and two years old being molested. I'll grant that sexting is a bit dubious and pretty stupid-- but not exploitation. Statutory rape and child molestation IS a problem, and the end result of it is common child *porn*. Naked images of anything don't bother me, but there are those images that are clearly sex acts and being a part of them is evil.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

If you pay someone to do a contract murder

But we're talking about people who only view it. In this instance, you actively instigated the act and even went so far as to determine someone's future actions with a cash payment. There is a big difference.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

Statutory rape and child molestation are a crime; viewing it makes you part of the production process as an end (ab)user.

Snuff films are plainly illegal, too. Pictures after-the-fact are reporting. Bad and strained analogy. There are those that believe violent games lead to violent acts. I don't stretch my beliefs to that degree at all here. But if you egg someone on to shoot somebody at a bar out of spite, you share the guilt for the murder.

In the same way, child porn hurts a child. Being part of the process gives you guilt. That's why the laws are written the way they are.

Children are precious things. They deserve to live an unmolested childhood. Eventually, they learn about sex. Once they can make informed choices, and depending on the jurisdiction, come of age, then they make legally informed choices about their behavior, what ever that behavior is.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

If no one viewed it, no one would make it, would they? Child molestation is a crime, but it's also a sign of addiction to processes that exploit children. Children deserve lives that aren't challenged by molestation. It's a sickness that in many individuals, isn't curable. That's why the sex offender registries are important; many child porn viewers do actually act on their impulses. Do the research; find out how the correlations work. It happens far more often than you'd think; perhaps as much as one in nine children are molested in the US.

Re:Bureaucrats

[nschubach]

Going back to the prior argument: A person cannot (legally/mentally... just like a child) give consent to be shot either, but those photos are all over the web.

The logical course is not to hunt down the people viewing, but the people providing... if it really becomes a matter of national concern, that is. There are far too many money sinks as it is: Drug War, Pornography, et al.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet the vast majority of this stuff gets posted for free.

Under this analogy, picking a leaf from a plant growing on the side of the road which grew from a seed that was carried in from Mexico by a migratory bird is supporting the Mexican drug cartels.

Stop, think about what you are arguing, then try again.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

Both are guilty. The incidence of people acting on sex-with-children fantasies are very high. Child molestation, especially incest, statistics in the US are high-- and elsewhere, too.

The logical course is to prevent the spread of child porn as people do in fact act on it. If it were straight or gay porn and they're adults and act on it, fine. But children, who are largely defenseless, are the victims.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

I have. It exploits children. People who view child porn statistically act on it, thus causing harm to children. The correlation is very well known; ask your local mental health practitioner if you have any questions.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

Statutory rape and child molestation are a crime; viewing it makes you part of the production process as an end (ab)user.

How so? What if you don't pay for it and they don't even know you exist? Apparently, most of them share it on completely irrelevant websites.

Pictures after-the-fact

That's what child pornography is.

That's why the laws are written the way they are.

Or it could be that they're faulty.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Labcoat Samurai]

No, not blindly following programming. I've thought this one thru.

Evidently you haven't thought it through enough.

It's like buying Mexican pot. It might get you really nice and high. No problem, right? You paid for it and maybe it's kinda legal or you have a medical prescription or something.

Along the way,however, the Mexican drug cartels-- the people in the delivery chain-- have murdered in hideous ways almost 100,000 people, many of them guilty of only trying to resist being exploited. Some were just in the way.

Yes. And this is because there's an actual market for it. Presumably this would stop if everyone stopped buying it, yes? Well what if people stopped paying for it, but somehow managed to continue consuming it? Would have the same effect, yes? That's the point others are making.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

No, not faulty.

Child exploitation may have a long disconnection between the event and a viewer, but the photos weren't made to put in a family album.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Fjandr]

A more-correct analogy would be viewing a snuff film when you have no connection to the murderer, do not know them, and have no idea where the film actually came from originally. A less extreme one would be related to violent video games.

I'm not going to delve into the conclusions that can be drawn from that (will people who like those things eventually murder someone themselves, or pay to have someone murdered?), as this topic is too loaded with emotion and pseudo-psychology to actually have a rational discussion.

Pedophiles are bad, but the less extreme side in any argument over pedophilia and enforcement of laws against it results in the more extreme side using pejoratives to attempt to make those who do not follow in lockstep with them appear to be pedophile sympathizers. There are a couple cases of this immediately above, and probably dozens below.

Re:Bureaucrats

[owlstead]

And to show you an even more controversial issue: evidence points to the fact that being prone to be aroused by children may be a genetic brain condition (I am reading a book by Swaab on the brain, so don't just take my word on it). So you may be prosecuting people that try to remove the urge by watching child pornography - because the urge is just there and will stay with the person. Of course that does not mean that child abusers are *in any way* innocent. But the mere watching of child pornography?

People even get arrested for watching *drawn* child pornography. I can't see any reason for that at all, except trying to weed out everybody that is "different".

Re:Bureaucrats

[X0563511]

How does someone downloading it without paying further exploiting the subject? If anything, it -costs- the distributors money. Only when goods, services, or cash are exchanged for it is there any of that "trickle-back" that you speak of.

I say subject, because what I say is just as true for legal pornography... except I doubt the child porn fronts really make much from affiliates and other advertising revenue... nor do they have the large physical media market to help recoup either.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

You're sick of the sympathy, but you haven't stopped to wonder where the sympathy comes from. Sometimes I imagine you're talking about two different things when you think you're arguing with someone.

I have yet to meet someone who doesn't want to protect six year olds from adult sexual predators. But we're putting people in jail for looking at naked photos of sixteen, seventeen year olds. This is not a natural position; indeed, nature explicitly prepares people of both sexes at this age for procreation. So the law would seem to be far too strict. In addition, the penalties are too harsh. You shouldn't be in a national registry for a crime after you've done your time in prison. If you're a danger to society then you should not have been released; if it's okay to release you then the registry is pointless harassment.

So pedophiles get some sympathy because some of them aren't really pedophiles at all, and even the ones that are are being prosecuted under unjust laws.

I'm sick and tired of the endless series of hysterical fears that we're allowing to rule our society.

Re:Bureaucrats

[X0563511]

Don't forget that there is no "no cost" - someone, somewhere, is paying for that bandwidth.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Marful]

What about the 16 year old girl who sent a sexual nude pic of herself to her boyfriend who then went and shared the pic with the whole class getting the 16 year old girl arrested for creating and distributing child porn?

She is now a registered sex offender and can't go to school or college. Her life is destroyed because of some blind application of a law that was not intended to target her but because of overzealous DA's who want a notch on their political belt go after such easy crimes because of the emotional appeal to people like you.

http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/sexting-teens-makes-sex-offender-list-20110121-19zwu.html
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-04-07/justice/sexting.busts_1_phillip-alpert-offender-list-offender-registry?_s=PM:CRIME
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20001082-504083.html


Or how about the grandmother who took pictures of her naked grandchildren (under the age of 3) in a bathtub and then took the pics to walmart to get prints? Another overzealous DA went and prosecuted her. She was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/05/04/grandma-arrested-for-child-por


It is evil that children are getting exploited. The problem is, the ones getting punished by the application of the laws due to the political and emotional fervor such application engenders for those leading the crusade, are not the ones exploiting the children.

Both those who download decade old pictures, or pictures of jailbait teens who voluntarily post their own pics on the net, or of innocent grandmothers who take pictures of their infant children, these are not the people being exploited nor are they the one's exploiting others, yet they are the people being targeted by the current application of the law.


Because a DA with 10 "Child Porn convictions" under his belt has an emotional appeal to mindless cosmic space zombie followers and that emotional appeal will get him elected / re-elected.

Re:Bureaucrats

[AK Marc]

You are asserting that viewing a crime should be a crime, but if and only if the crime is child abuse, and no other crime.

That's so illogical that it makes you look stupid. If you aren't stupid, then explain, with logic, not "cause it makes me feel bad", why child abuse should be the one and only one crime that should be illegal to view a recording of.

Re:Bureaucrats

[katyngate]

You just go on and on, not replying to his argument. No one was arguing that exploiting children was good, yet in every post you repeat the mantra "Child molestation is a crime, yadda yadda".

Re:Bureaucrats

[C_L_Lk]

Correlation is NOT causation. If you are already a child molester, chances are you'll probably view some CP during your down time. So - does viewing that CP make them a child molester? No - it's just a correlation. Do you see hundreds of FBI agents running out becoming Chester the Molester? Nope... but they are plainly viewing hundreds or thousands of hours of CP. There are millions of porn viewers out there watch things they know they can't, or won't EVER get to do with a significant other as well (bondage, anal, rape fantasy, s&m, DP, menage, etc.) - You don't see them all running off to pay for an S&M prostitute - it's a chance to explore something they find curious or interesting. There are probably millions of actual CP viewers out there who have checked it out due to curiousity, perversion, or a side interest -- but they check it out there because they know it's wrong to act on it in reality. Child molestation existed LONG before CP - and will exist long after all these efforts to ban CP - just the way it is.

Re:Bureaucrats

[AK Marc]

So viewing a cartoon of Millhouse having sex with Lisa Simpson is the same as raping children personally? Because, from your statements and the current US definition of child porn, that's exactly what you are asserting. Every time someone mentions looking at child porn, you ignore the "looking at" statement and speak as if they personally raped the child.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

No, not faulty.

So you say.

but the photos weren't made to put in a family album.

And?

Re:Bureaucrats

[Grygus]

I have yet to see any evidence that child molestation is caused by child pornography, and you do need compelling evidence because on the face of it, the claim is nonsense. I like grown women. If you outlaw all porn featuring adult women tomorrow, and let's even say you are successful, this will have zero impact on my predilections. I wanted to have sex with girls my age before I had ever seen pornography, and I will want to have sex with women, and seek out ways to make this happen, regardless of porn availability. I see no reason a pedophile's mind should work any differently - they like what they like, and you can stamp and scream all you want, but it won't change that. I imagine many of them would change it themselves if all it took was to stop looking at pictures.

Censorship won't make people celibate. You're wasting your time.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Obfuscant]

If you pay someone to do a contract murder, you'll never see it, but you're a murderer in the same way as someone pulling the trigger.

And if you don't pay them to do a contract murder -- in fact, you never speak to the person or communicate anything to him in any way -- you'd have a very hard time convincing anyone that you committed a murder. Not even conspiracy.

Yes, if you buy kiddie pr0n from someone, you're a part of the chain. No question. Your money funds the system.

If you are just surfing free adult pr0n sites and come across a site with what looks like CP, you have not participated in any way in the creation of those images and should not be guilty of anything. Consent is not relevant because at no time did you do anything that required consent from someone who could not give it. You are not funding the system because you are paying nothing. If anything, whatever advertisers are on the site are, but you aren't.

Other porn is done (usually) with consenting adults, who make an informed choice. Children can't do that.

When you say "done", you mean "created". With that correction, yes, I agree fully. Children cannot consent to the creation of pr0n of themselves legally. (In actuality, yes, some of them probably have sufficient development to make a reasoned judgement, but the law assumes none of them do. I question the intelligence of a 14 year old who sexts a picture of herself to her boyfriend, but I wouldn't charge her with distribution of CP like some have.)

But going two steps further (from creation to distribution to simple posession) leaves the consent issue in the dust.

Re:Bureaucrats

[toriver]

But child porn laws get expanded to cover drawings and text; if someone has a picture of Bart Simpson doing his sister, which child gets exploited?

And in the case of actual abuse, it's not like not looking at a picture of the abuse undoes the act. Instead it documents it.

(There has been an observed correlation between TV coverage of car chases and the frequency of such chases - 15 minutes of fame and all that. Yet TV stations are not banned from showing the footage. We do not take the driver's license from people who watch America's Wildest Police Chases...)

Re:Bureaucrats

[dgatwood]

There are reasons aside from financial reasons for producing child pornography... accessing it WILL encourage these people to produce more child pornography.

Yes and no.

The type of people that produce this pornography are also the worst type of people; they are often violent in their production or are abusing the trust of relatives.

This largely invalidates your previous point. These people are the worst type of people. They abuse the trust of their relatives in sexually deviant ways. As such, they are likely to do so whether they are making pornography and sharing it with other people or not.

For that matter, one could legitimately argue that having a broader market for child pornography actually makes children safer by bringing it out in the open so that the sorts of people who make this stuff get caught. After all, if they're just doing it in the privacy of their own homes, most of them won't ever do jail time. If they put it out on the internet because other people are encouraging them to share, there's documented proof, and they might actually get what they deserve.

In fact, merely the IDEA of children as a valid sexually gratifying fantasy is highly unhealthy for society

Again, evidence needed. By this exact same standard, merely the idea of our government as a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats who are just in it for the money is highly unhealthy for society. Therefore, political thought, and particularly political thought that is negative towards the current administration must be stamped out. Not to mention every movie that ever showed the violent overthrow of a despotic regime.

People either can or can't separate fantasy from reality. Those who can are not encouraged to rape children after seeing kiddie porn any more than they are encouraged to mow down their coworkers after watching a violent movie or to beat their wives after watching the Honeymooners.

I'm sick and tired of hearing all of this pedophile sympathy being spouted. Especially on slashdot stories about the topic.

*shrugs* Statistically, the worst gay bashers have a high probability of coming out. I wonder if the same also applies for the worst pedo bashers. Just saying.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cjb658]

Ok, so then what about porn in which girls are portrayed as being underage, when in fact, they are not? This has happened and the courts have ruled that it is legal.

Not that I would know...

Re:Bureaucrats

[arth1]

And the amount of time we stick on the social retards (many looking at 40 plus according to my friend) simply means we'll have to let more vicious criminals go to put up some guy who sits in his basement and jacks off. yep, smart plan we have there.

Not only is it the cost of incarceration, and the loss of productivity going into society during the incarceration, but the cost of that person not working anymore for the rest of his life. Convicted sex offenders are pretty much unhirable.
If the idea was to get that person to stop looking at child porn, slap him a fine and use that fine to pay for a shrink that might help him move on. But no, it's not about that at all, it's about vengeance and "righteous" wrath.

And, I think, a need to distance oneself from ones own attraction to teenagers by violently and publicly opposing it.
Hint: Being attracted to teens is normal. Sleeping with teens (unless you're one) isn't.
We need to differentiate the two. Stop going after guys who wank off to teens, and stop going after pedophiles unless you intend to help them. Start going after child molesters, whether they wear uniforms or frocks.

Re:Bureaucrats

[toriver]

viewing it makes you part of the production process as an end (ab)user

How? Since when is observing an act, or in this case a record of it, comparable to committing it? If I watch news footage of a clash between protesters and police, am I a protester? Or am I part of the police force? Is the severity of a crime dependent on the number of observers?

Also, you seem not to understand how wide the child porn definition is. A 17-year old girl snapping a nude picture of herself with a cellphone camera and sending it to her boyfriend has committed the crime of manufacturing and distributing child porn (since the model is under 18 years) and her boyfriend can in turn be charged with possession of child porn. Do you want those two to end up on the sex offender register, or do you want the FBI to focus on stopping actual child abuse instead? Chasing after the fluttering images does not help the victims, it just creates more prisoners.

Re:Bureaucrats

[arth1]

People who view child porn statistically act on it, thus causing harm to children. The correlation is very well known; ask your local mental health practitioner if you have any questions.

It would do more good to arrest all fathers by that "logic"; statistically they are even more likely to abuse a child than someone watching porn is.

Re:Bureaucrats

[toriver]

Children were abused long before the first camera was invented. Going after child porn is perhaps easier for the Feds than actually trying to prevent the act in the first place? And, again: Child porn laws are so wide they cover way more than pictures of sexual child abuse, no matter how much you try to just focus on that part.

Re:Bureaucrats

[stonewallred]

A person I know was convicted of child porn.

He was found to have quite a few photographs of naked children, both just nudes and of sexual activity.

The ages of the kids in the pictures were from 3 to 15.

It might be possible to mistake a 15 year old with an 18 year old, especially by just looking at a picture.

There is no way you can mistake a 3 year old for a consenting adult.

The law is binary, and that works out as a bad thing.

30 year old banging a 17 year old the day before her 18th birthday should not be the same thing as a 20 year old raping a 3 year old.

But in the eyes of the law, the crime is the same.

I also am offended by the sexual offenders list. If the SOB is so dangerous he needs to be on a list, his ass needs to be in prison.

Re:Bureaucrats

[toriver]

No, child porn is NOT necessarily the result of child molestation.

1) It is perfectly possible to molest children without recording the act. Children were abused (especially back when they were in effect property) long before the first camera.
2) Child porn laws cover way more than recorded sexual abuse. You can get sent to jail for photographing your own, happy, bathing baby.

If child porn laws were as focused as you seem to naively believe, there would be no cases like teens getting branded as sex offenders for taking lewd self-portraits or grandmothers sent to prison for taking candid pictures of their grandchildren.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Obfuscant]

If no one viewed it, no one would make it, would they?

If no one PAID for it, nobody would make it. It's a business like any other. It costs money to run servers.

Well, ok, some would make it for the shear pleasure of making it -- those people would not care if you viewed it or not, they're going to make it. (If you are going to use that line of argument to support your claim that viewing is equivalent to producing, then you've just blown your first argument that "if nobody views it nobody would make it.") Some might make it for the fun of sharing. "You show me your's, I'll show you mine". That requires interaction between producers. But to claim that simply viewing something on a website provides that interaction and thus creates a demand, well, that's beyond reason.

Child molestation is a crime,

Let's see, an irrelevant part of an argument, is that a red herring or a straw man? Yes, child molestation is a crime. So is grand theft auto and murder. Looking at a picture of a child is not child molestation; looking at a picture of a car is not grand theft auto; looking at a picture of a dead body is not murder.

That's why the sex offender registries are important; many child porn viewers do actually act on their impulses.

And many of them do not. Many people like the feel of money, but many people do not rob banks to get it. Many people like the taste of caviar, but many people do not rob the upscale grocery store to steal it. Should every person who likes the feel of money be arrested for robbing a bank when they have never robbed a bank?

Do the research; find out how the correlations work.

Do the research and find out the difference between correlation and causation. Here's an important correlation: every child molester breathes through either his nose or mouth. (We'll dismiss the vanishingly small percentage of those who breath through a tracheotomy...) Do YOU breathe through your nose or mouth? AH HA! YOU are a child molester. I've proven it beyond any shadow of doubt because of the correlation! You can't argue against a correlation, can you?

Do you hear that knock on your door? It's the FBI. They're there to arrest you based on the correlation. Have a nice life, hope you make friends in the slammer.

Re:Bureaucrats

[realityimpaired]

If you are just surfing free adult pr0n sites and come across a site with what looks like CP, you have not participated in any way in the creation of those images and should not be guilty of anything.

Once you come across something you suspect to be child porn on the web, you have a moral and a legal obligation to report it to the authorities. You are not guilty if the visit is accidental, but the visit is presumed to be intentional if you do not report it to the authorities, and if it happens to be one of the honey traps they use to catch people who are deliberately surfing child porn, you're boned. There's actually some very good protections in place for people who accidentally stumble on illegal child porn and report it to the authorities, because these are the people who make it easier to catch the slime that's producing child porn.

Re:Bureaucrats

[scot4875]

Child molestation, especially incest, statistics in the US are high-- and elsewhere, too.

And nearly all of it is perpetrated by someone close to the family of the molested children. Throwing people in jail because they downloaded naked pictures of a 5 year old isn't going to prevent that.

Really, I feel sorry for pedophiles. They clearly have mental issues; if it were a matter of choice, how could *anyone* come to the rational decision that, "oh hey, despite the demonization of the behavior, and the fact that getting even *accused* of it will completely ruin my life, I'm going to go ahead and like children."

Even worse is the equating of underage sex with pedophilia: someone who thinks a fully-developed 17-year-old is attractive is *not* a pedophile; the definition of pedophilia is an attraction to undeveloped children. If she's got a rack, that definition doesn't apply.

--Jeremy

Re:Bureaucrats

[Kreigaffe]

These resources are not being used to track down the abusers. If everyone convicted of possessing child pornography themselves involved in abusing children, I could see getting behind such a massive expenditure of resources to stop them -- but that's not the case. Most of these people caught are simply looking at images of things other people have done. Some of these images were self-produced by foolish children themselves -- teenage girls with webcams, I'm talking to YOU.

I don't particularly want to debate that last point, because it's just a fucking landmind of opinion and non-fact, but do you think it would be a stretch to even say a quarter of "child porn" being passed around the internet is self-produced by teens through no outside coercion? Does the FBI really need to be expending ANY resources to track down people who see that video of that girl who set up her webcam and got naked and oh, shit, she's 16? That seems awful wasteful to me. I can empathize with the girl if it's a major embarrassment, but she'll get over it, and what's more she should have known better to begin with.

Personally, I would much, much rather they stop wasting resources on busting anyone for simply possessing child pornography, and instead focus their efforts only on finding those who are actually ABUSING children. That shit's not cool, and that shit needs ended, but all this tracking down of child porn.. I don't think very much of it at all actually gets to anyone who abuses children.

Of course, due to the extremely polarizing nature of the issue, any argument save "EVERYTHING AT ANY EXPENSE!" invites comments that you must be a sympathizer at best and insinuations that you simply want to get away with your sick crimes more easily.. nevermind that it IS an expenditure of time and money, and there IS a tradeoff to be made. In my mind the gains from arresting scores of people who have, intentionally or inadvertently, downloaded naked pictures of underage individuals, is less than the gains that could be made by reallocating those resources to more effectively tracking down those who are actually doing abuse to children.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Obfuscant]

Child exploitation may have a long disconnection between the event and a viewer, but the photos weren't made to put in a family album.

Yes, sir, in some cases, they were.

http://www.cfcamerica.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=358:woman-charged-with-possession-of-child-pornography-for-taking-photos-of-herself-breastfeeding&catid=3:news&Itemid=96

http://www.abc4.com/content/news/top%20stories/story/Innocent-family-pictures-or-child-porn-Parents/ARX1K8NqXk6yMGyVfAmueQ.cspx

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/09/22/family-vacay-pics-deemed-child-porn-by-wal-mart-at-center-of-lawsuit/

Re:Bureaucrats

[MaskedSlacker]

If no one viewed it, no one would make it, would they?

Wrong. Or rather, pedophiles will pursue children regardless of whether they're filming it. Or do you really think that if no one bought/viewed the pictures the creep wouldn't have raped the kid? No one makes child porn who doesn't want to, and wasn't going to, molest children anyway.

Re:Bureaucrats

[ae1294]

Person A rapes a 7 year old or an 18 year old or a 40 year old. Person B films this act. Person C watches and enjoys the violence in the film. Who gives a damn if it's a crime or not...Enjoying the rape is just plain sick. But I guess in someones demented thought process, it's just one of those freedoms we need to have and protect? It's a wonderful world we live in. Person A and B should be in jail. Person C? That sicko needs help...off a tall cliff. We have no need for "them kind" in this world.

I have no idea what you are talking about...

Re:Bureaucrats

[Obfuscant]

Person C? That sicko needs help...off a tall cliff. We have no need for "them kind" in this world.

And person C's day job just happens to be conducting highly advanced research in the use of adult stem cells to cure Alzheimer's and several other diseases.

Be very careful who you start labelling as "them kind", because once YOU get labelled as one of "them kind" for whatever reason you might find yourself on the way to the top of the hill.

Re:Bureaucrats

[djp928]

So wait, if you come across a picture of a half-naked pre-teen girl that was taken 20 years ago and hurt nobody, and you don't immediately turn into a stool pigeon tattle tale and rat out the website you saw it on, you give up your presumption of innocence and can now legally have your life ruined by the FBI?

Good system!

Re:Bureaucrats

[scot4875]

Children are precious things.

No, they really aren't. Children are precious to their parents and their families; to everyone else, they're just another one of the 7 billion people on the planet. Creating children isn't special either; we've got good evidence that that happens pretty much everywhere you have male and female people together, whether you want it to happen or not.

They deserve to live an unmolested childhood.

Certainly; but not because they're special. Adults deserve to live an unmolested adulthood, as well.

--Jeremy

Re:Bureaucrats

[djp928]

Frankly, I give a damn if it's a crime or not. In the same way that unpopular speech needs to be protected (because otherwise what's the point of freedom of speech? Popular speech doesn't *need* protecting) unpopular activities that harm no one need to be protected.

Re:Bureaucrats

[MechaStreisand]

Wow, you're in favor of the sex offender registries too? I think nobody deserves to have child porn planted on their computer more than you do.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Pikoro]

Well obviously if 41% of the FBI's resources are devoted to tracking down people looking at pictures of naked kids... then there is no incentive to catch the people making it. Prosecuting the producers would put 1/2 the FBI out of a job...

Re:Bureaucrats

[Pseudonym Authority]

Are you really suggesting that CP is becoming more socially acceptable because more people are fapping to it?

You, sir, are and idiot.

Re:Bureaucrats

[AmberBlackCat]

My bet is they would like the FBI to use less resources for "think of the children" so there would be more resources available to go after people who upload and download music. The summary does say the Department of Justice is behind this.

Re:Bureaucrats

[SumterLiving]

Giving a pass to "them kind" because they could cure a disease? This opens the door to many different scenarios. Why stop at people who like to watch rape films. Why not hand out passes for every perversion and/or crime. You gotta draw a line somewhere. I know where that line is for me.

Re:Bureaucrats

[SumterLiving]

Sorry about that.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Eivind Eklund]

Poor parenting does a lot more harm than pedophiles.

Define "poor parenting" in a way that is enforceable thru laws. Remember that laws can not force change in any behavior that is religious in nature.

Oh, so that's why I see so much ritual sacrifices these days.

Re:Bureaucrats

[ras]

A more-correct analogy would be viewing a snuff film ...I'm not going to delve into the conclusions that can be drawn from that ... as this topic is too loaded with emotion and pseudo-psychology to actually have a rational discussion.

Pity, because there is one interesting aspect to it. Despite violent films featuring death being hugely popular and profitable, there are bugger all snuff films. If that snopes article is to believed this isn't because fake violence satisfies demand, as cinematographically poor movies were nonetheless popular if the public were hood winked into thinking there were real snuff films.

So snuff films are a counter example to the oft repeated claims here that supply always follows demand. And guess what - we didn't need to delve into any pseudo-psychology to reason about it.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Zelucifer]

The grandmother in question had all charges dropped according to the link in question...?

Re:Bureaucrats

[Jaxoreth]

Person A rapes a 7 year old or an 18 year old or a 40 year old. Person B films this act. Person C watches and enjoys the violence in the film. Who gives a damn if it's a crime or not...Enjoying the rape is just plain sick. But I guess in someones demented thought process, it's just one of those freedoms we need to have and protect? It's a wonderful world we live in. Person A and B should be in jail. Person C? That sicko needs help...off a tall cliff. We have no need for "them kind" in this world.

I have no idea what you are talking about...

I think he's advocating the murder of those with certain non-mainstream tastes.

Re:Bureaucrats

[couchslug]

The BIG picture is reflected in the over one billion (that's with a "B") dollars paid out worldwide by the Catholic Church to victims in settlements, the Christian Brothers order filing for bankruptcy, the Father Geoghan follies in Boston, the endless list of perps in country after country...without the FBI raising a peep because of fear of bad publicity.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/04/29/uk-church-brothers-sexabuse-idUKTRE73S10I20110429

Re:Bureaucrats

[ae1294]

I have no idea what you are talking about...

I think he's advocating the murder of those with certain non-mainstream tastes.

Are you sure??? There are lots of variables in his argument and I'm not sure the math works...

Re:Bureaucrats

[jamstar7]

Plus, the average pedobear isn't likely to shoot back. J Random Terrorrorrorrorrist is usually depicted as packing an AK-47, which scares cops silly.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Jaxoreth]

I think he's advocating the murder of those with certain non-mainstream tastes.

Are you sure??? There are lots of variables in his argument and I'm not sure the math works...

Selectively quoted: "Person C watches and enjoys the violence in the film. Who gives a damn if it's a crime or not...Enjoying the rape is just plain sick. But I guess in someones demented thought process, it's just one of those freedoms we need to have and protect? It's a wonderful world we live in. Person C? That sicko needs help...off a tall cliff. We have no need for "them kind" in this world."

The GGGP is saying that people who enjoy violence (even in ways that are strictly legal) should be killed off. He favors thoughtcrime over freedom.

(In the future, please use the Quote Parent button or otherwise ensure that replies are properly quoted.)

Re:Bureaucrats

[1u3hr]

Both are guilty. The incidence of people acting on sex-with-children fantasies are very high. Child molestation, especially incest, statistics in the US are high-- and elsewhere, too. The logical course is to prevent the spread of child porn as people do in fact act on it.

Refreshingly free of any proof, citations to studies. Just THE FACTS. Because every right-thinking person knows this MUST be TRUE. And if you disagree, you're obviously a PEDOPHILE.

Re:Bureaucrats

[poptones]

Yeah! Just like watching Brokeback mountain will make straight men into fags, and playing Madden 2010 will make geeks into NFL linebackers!

Do you even hear the bullshit coming from your fingertips? Do you sound this insane in person?

Re:Bureaucrats

[DavidTC]

My understanding of the economics of child pornography is this: at the highest levels of production and distribution, pedophiles are trading new and unseen images and videos with each other. The market is based on barter, not money, to thwart efforts at tracing the participants.

Yup. The FBI has, in the past, when it actually cared more about child abuse than 'child porn' (aka, people passing around incriminating records of sexual abuse), has busted a few of those rings, usually by abuse being found out other ways, and a search of the abuser's stuff revealing other abusers.

Eventually this material is somehow leaked to lower level forums which are more easily accessible, and from there the images are reposted again and again. Below a certain level in the distribution chain, the incentive for the producers to keep producing is entirely lost; the material is reposted on various forums at no cost. The overwhelming majority of people who view child pornography are viewing it at a level that is far below this point, and are contributing nothing to its production.

And 'leaked' is exactly the right word, as the original producers of the material do not a record of their child abuse leaking out.

Running around closing those forums or prosecuting people who download or even upload to them is counterproductive. It helps child abuse. We want that stuff out in the open, so we can find the abused child and figure out who abused them.

Seriously, people need to step back and actually think about how child abuse works. 'Child porn' isn't the problem...go ask any prosecutor if he thinks trading videos of people committing crimes should be illegal. Ask him how he'd feel if there was an entire network of people trading videos of their car thefts or something, and if he thinks that should be outlawed and shut down. He will say 'Hell no' and start operating his own site like that instead, to see who will upload videos that incriminate other people.

The whole anonymous file sharing nature of the internet should be a godsend to people fighting child abuse, because apparently sexual abusers are so damn stupid they will enter into exchange deals with other sexual abusers and trade incriminating evidence and then, sometimes, upload evidence they were given to the goddamn internet!

The entire concept of outlawing child porn is fucking insanity, from top to bottom. I suspect that some child abuser who didn't want evidence of his crimes to get out invented that law, and has been laughing ever since. It's a law outlawing possession of evidence of a crime, which, um, makes it somewhat harder to, you know, actually find evidence of crime. Go figure.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

Here's one: http://www.camh.net/Research/Research_publications/Newsletter/child_pornography_pedophilia.html

Your binary logic otherwise suits no one.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Somebody is making all those photos ... and lately it's been the kids themselves, if you're familiar with "sexting".

Besides this, there are many places in the world where nudity is not a big issue. Do children in these countries suffer from the knowledge that people might have seen pictures of them naked?

Perhaps the problem is not with pedophiles, but with a society that attempts to control both children and sexuality, and which denies child sexuality. Does the harm really come from sex, or from an absurdly out-of-control response to child sexuality?

In any case, the idea that looking at a photo is equal to a crime shown in the photo is reminiscent of the religious belief of some Native Americans that photography steals people's souls. Are we sure we want to have laws based on that?

The only good news for national security is that in the event of a cyberwar, the U.S. can call on legions of technically sophisticated pedophiles to come to their aid - if they haven't pissed them off so much that they all decide to help America's enemies instead.

Maybe the FBI or the CIA needs to hire Jon Schillaci. He has experience keeping computer systems running under tremendous difficulties, and on a shoestring budget. And they know where he is.

Re:Bureaucrats

[DavidTC]

Actually, sleeping with mature teens probably is 'normal' in the sense of biology. And with maturity happening sooner thanks to better nutrition, 'mature teens' are getting younger and younger. People used to get married at 15...and now our 13 year-olds look like those people. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that for most of human history, almost no one was as well developed as a 18 year old teenager is today.)

And we're not talking 'a long time ago' either. You could grab some girl on her first day of 9th grade, send her back in time 150 years, and people would be amazed she wasn't married.

Anyway, sleeping with teenagers is 'normal' in the same way that punching someone in the face when you're angry is 'normal'.

But just like punching someone, society doesn't put up with it. It's against the rules we've set up.

Mostly because while people have been getting physical mature younger, they've been getting emotionally mature later.

Or, to put it anther way, it's silly argue that wanting to have sex with under-aged people is normal, but actually doing so is not. Unless you've defined normal to mean 'What society accepts' or 'What people do all the time', but that's really not what 'normal' means.

Re:Bureaucrats

[ian_from_brisbane]

Children can't give consent. Ask any therapist-- any of them.

The logical flaw in your argument is that all therapists are adults.

That's like saying "Women can't drive, just ask any man".

Re:Bureaucrats

[LBt1st]

If they get rid of all the child porn, there will be no more supply to meet demand.
Thus, people will make new child porn.

Re:Bureaucrats

[1u3hr]

Here's one: http://www.camh.net/Research/Research_publications/Newsletter/child_pornography_pedophilia.html

It says that people who had been convicted of child porn offences found it stimulating. Well, duh, that's why they look at it. That's pretty much a tautology. the question is whether they go on to COMMIT acts of paedophilia, not just fantasise about it. Fantasising about sex or violence isn't actually the same thing as doing it. Michael Bay, Bret Easton Ellis, et al. would be in deep shit if it was. No to mention 98%* of males who use the Internet. (*Totally made up figure, same as your "facts".)

Your binary logic otherwise suits no one.

Your logic of making a bald statement and declaring it a fact and being offended when asked for the basis doesn't suit me, sorry.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Fjandr]

I stand corrected. However, the further you get to the poles of extremism the less life and art imitate each other. The rest remains the same.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, number one, I am not advocating the abuse of children. Period. But...

We, humans males in particular, are genetically geared toward sex with fertile females, i.e. 12-35 year olds, with the younger ones being more attractive simply because more children could be produced, thus a higher percentage of surviving children. This is not up for debate in the moral sense, as this fact has nothing to do with morals.

Next, for society, the norm has changed over time. In the ancient Greek culture, arguably the progenitor of the great age before the middle ages, it was a common practice for young boys to become the lovers of influential male politicians, who acted the role of mentor. These boys became the next politicians. Their society has served to seed many of the great societal ideas we espouse today, such as democracy, and free thinking.

Finally, if you were to visit many of these child porn sites, you would find many people sharing pictures and videos that may be from as far back as the 50 and 60, when many of these things were legal. When something new comes along, the up-loader is praised, in a similar way to a hacker that posts the newest cracked version of Adobe products.

If we look to the animal kingdom, most animals do not have long growth periods, most are grown by 3yrs or so for monkeys such as chimps. We are not very far, genetically, from that situation ourselves. Our children become childbearing capable as early as 9 years, earlier in some rare cases, but we have artificially set limits on them to be 18(or whatever it is in your country). For the better part of a million years it was encouraged to have multiple 9-15 year old wives, but society has decided in this last century that his is somehow wrong.

And because society has declared it to be wrong, it now creates the very problems that society says it does. In remote places in the world that have not met modern man, where these things are still practiced, they do not have the psychosis that modern man has created around this subject, yet the effects are very evident in the world around us. The same problem has occurred to create our weight problem. Those that live on a more natural diet don't tend to get fat, those of us that live on processed foods tend to be over weight.

As I said at the beginning, I do not advocate sex with children, due to the problems caused by the societal views. I do wonder how long it will take before we kill ourselves out, though.

Re:Bureaucrats

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Somewhere, someone made money, or did it to share the exploitation. Either motivation exploits children.

Yes, particularly photo-shopped pictures and hand-drawn cartoons, all of which are now a criminal offense in most countries, a natural and logical consequence of the "thoughtcrime" "logic" you are so fond of. And then there is the "self-inflicted" "molestation" of kids with webcams and cell-phone cameras, who "exploit" themselves, for which, according to the likes of you, they need to be punished.

The actual damage, of course, has nothing whatsoever with any pictures but with actual physical assaults on actual children, ratio of which to all the pictures in circulation is well below 1%. You of course assume, like all demagogues, that all kids are innocent "angels" and not by any chance complete perverts by age 9, an idea which as anyone who's been a kid and who is not a total hypocrite can attest to having no connection to reality whatsoever. It is just that most "holier than thou" types work hard on their selective amnesia.

But then there are extra-judicial powers to be had, billions of dollars to be wasted and cushy government careers with 6-figure salaries to be enjoyed by thousands of "cyber-crime" "investigators". Not to mention that sexual gratification from destroying all the lives of all these "undesirables" whom they randomly finger and the contents of whose decrepit, virus-infected PCs provide such a gold mine of "evidence".

And that "evil" you speak of? That's people who think like you. And you. Evil.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Mashiki]

Your logic is flawed. Just like most religious nutcases (think Jim Baker or Pat Robertson). Stop trying to suppress free people from exercising "thoughtcrimes" like pornography, smoking weed, chewing tobacco (sin tax), and so on. Victimless crimes are NOT crimes.

You might want to go study up on a few things. In the west the majority of 'thought crime' style legislation has been started and pressed by democrats and liberals. Including the latest round of sin taxes on 'salt, transfats, and sugar'. This is quickly followed up by people on the right because the electorate by and far is dense as a post and see this as 'pressing issues' and 'important things to protect the children', and in turn continue with it.

Re:Bureaucrats

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Right. Poor wittlle innocent "angels" all and they just don't know what they are doing, the witless darlings! But when they cross that one second past midnight on their 14th birthday in this country, oh wait 16 in that country, no wait, 18 in that one over there, no wait 21 in ... anyhow, then they will become fully capable of "consent", just like that! From Age of Drooling Ignorance and Complete Dependence on Their Betters, to the Age of Wizened Wisdom! One second flat! I wonder if there are any special effects, like lightning or howling winds or something that surely must attend such a momentous occasion, no?

As to porn, you've apparently never attended a school with 10 year old boys .... and then people wonder why all the "laws" are so fucked up? I would venture to guess that reality not being a consideration in their crafting has something to do with it....

Re:Bureaucrats

[MoeDumb]

"Things like written stories about child abuse or cartoon images depicting fantasies of child abuse will essentially market child abuse to people who would otherwise be, sexually, well-adjusted individuals." Sexually well-adjusted individuals by definition, will be repelled, not marketed, by such material.

Re:Bureaucrats

[SuricouRaven]

I can't imagine any definition by which targeted taxes on salt, transfats and sugar could be considered a form of thoughtcrimes legislation. If you want a better example from the political left, you should have gone for something at least vaguely related. Regardless, your lack of thought suggests you are just looking for a chance to inject some political insults. I give you only one troll-point out of ten.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

I would say, due to the amount at stake and the current status quo, that evidence to the contrary would be necessary before we could justify legalizing the consumption of child pornography.

The person who states something as a fact is the one who needs to prove it. And since society is the one who banned it based on claims that they apparently never proved, the burden of proof is on them.

Re:Bureaucrats

[flyneye]

And yet they may. This is still a demographic who use children to make their cocks feel good. Hardly a week , let alone a month goes by that I read about some child molester getting caught, kid snitched, relative snitched, whatever, winds up with a hard drive fulla the shit.
      Your post sounds more like a personal rationalization, short eyes.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

While really stupid, I don't think sexting is probably a crime. Likewise, nudity is harmless. Sex with children is not.

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

No. Therapists have similar education and unless ill themselves, will be unwilling to deny the salient studies and evidence. And most therapists have a lot of child sex issues to deal with.... often in adult patients that experienced it as a child.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Omestes]

...they're arguing that the demand for it isn't causing supply.

So basically it is completely like any other market in existence?

If there is a large quantity of x, who want y then someone will make y. If there is a large quantity of x who wants, and is willing to pay for, y, then there will be a huge amount of people willing to do anything it takes to manufacture y.

I'm willing to give you $10 for a picture of your cat. Are you telling me this won't help give some incentive to produce and distribute kitty pictures that you otherwise wouldn't have taken?

Yes, I'm sure a lot of kitty porn was produced gratis, and consumed for free. But there are non-monetary rewards involved as well, such as esteem within your cat photography circles. Think of the piracy "scene", these people aren't making money, but are creating things for a non-monetary reward that roughly follows normal market logic. The higher demand for the free product, the more esteem and "cred" you get for creating it.

I'm not saying that things haven't gotten overboard on the enforcement end; but there is an argument for enforcement.

And when it all comes down to it, I have around zero sympathy for people who produce or consume kiddy porn. To me it is ONLY a rights and cost of enforcement issue. They really, for the most part, get exactly what they deserve. Hell, in the end, they know it is illegal and still consume it, so they really can't complain about the consequences of their actions. If somehow every person who knowingly views kiddy porn was magically castrated, I wouldn't shed a tear.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Omestes]

One problem is that some of the people who produce it aren't pedophiles, their just immoral capitalists exploiting a deranged market. Think people who pimp out children in third world countries (or even first world ones), they might not piddle children, but as long as someone is willing to pay for it they have no problem facilitating.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Omestes]

And yet the vast majority of this stuff gets posted for free.

I wouldn't know...

But, there is such a thing as non-monetary rewards, such as fame and respect within your community. Look at the various "warez" and piracy scenes for an analogue. Scenesters aren't being paid for their work, but they sure as hell are working under market incentives still.

Re:Bureaucrats

[cheekyjohnson]

It's great to be cautious in engineering our buildings

Who is giving up freedom in those circumstances? All that's doing is prolonging the existence of the building, not affecting the population at large.

rather than burdens/little people/useful objects.

Now they're just people who never have any responsibility and apparently can't make any decisions on their own. The arrogance of the past is still present now.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Omestes]

I rather doubt this. There would still be money involved, and there still would be a legal vacuum in certain countries that would produce cartels and violence. Sure, even if you could get homegrown, or local, pot for $x, there will be a market for cartel pot being sold for $x-1.

There will be less violence, perhaps, but there will always be violence. Even with alcohol being legal, I'm sure some moonshiner got shot in the face by another moonshiner lately.

Another thing, if the US completely legalized all drugs, the cartels have proper supply chains, proper ways of mass production, etc... Meaning for a long period of time they will still be more efficient than locally grown products. This means they will be competitive with U.S. grown and produced product for a long time. Think of it as narcotic outsourcing.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Schadrach]

So, the argument is that someone posting pictures/a video online in some form (likely freenet, a TOR hidden service, or P2P of some flavor) who has no idea who might actually see it if anyone is making it because of the size of their audience?

That makes no sense.

You're talking about a scenario where the producer gains no economic benefit for having any number of viewers and has no way to know how many such viewers exist so there's limited fame incentive. That there exist people who view it doesn't create an incentive to create it. That you are already performing the actions that are needed to create it to do another psychologically damaged need (except for filming it) creates an incentive to create it.

Let me put it this way: Given that there's practically no commercial incentive to produce kiddy porn (thanks to our good friend the internet), do you think (assuming for the purpose of this question that viewing child pornography does not count as additional child abuse beyond that used to create it) that removing child pornography from the internet would reduce the number of children that get abused, or would it merely reduce the evidence that they had been?

Put simply: Do you think that there are people abusing children who are only doing it to put pictures/videos online, and if so, what is their motivation?

Re:Bureaucrats

[postbigbang]

That's not the picture I painted with my words. I'll answer the question in your last paragraph:

Yes, it's a fact, and it makes money.

To answer the question before that:

Yes, pedophiles act on porn, as do other adults. Child molestation is often enough the result of being aroused about sex with children. Porn is one of the arousal routes; incest is another.

Re:Bureaucrats

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that we do not arrest people who "might" commit crimes, nor do we arrest people who are predisposed to committing crimes, at least not in theory. As an Internet user, you might have viewed child pornography and you might have it on your hard drive, but nobody is going to bust down your door and arrest you for that. Yes, there are child molesters in the world, although I do not hear about it with the same frequency that you apparently do (perhaps you are seeking out news of such things?), and it may be the case that many of those child molesters are also people who enjoy watching child pornography, but none of that implies that the right course of action is to seek down and arrest people who merely viewed such material. It certainly does not justify the FBI spending so many tax dollars hunting down people who are viewing child pornography.

Now, on the other hand, it may be the case that a person who possesses child pornography is also a child abuser; there is some evidence of this, although it is difficult to pin down an exact number. In that case, the crime is abusing children, and the possession of child pornography is nothing more than an indication of the possibility of a crime being committed. That means that child pornography possession should be grounds for a search warrant to be issued, not an arrest warrant. The goal is to protect children, not to police what people masturbate to, and so the investigation should be limited to looking for child abuse.

Your post sounds more like a personal rationalization, short eyes.

Is that supposed to be some sort of argument, or are you just trying to shut down the critical thinking areas of everyone's brains by hinting at the possibility that the only reason I might hold these views is because I want to look at child pornography? This is the problem with the current policy on child pornography: rational, calm discussion on whether or not we are taking the right approach can instantly be stopped by simply suggesting that anyone who does not agree with the current policy is some sort of a child abuser or child pornography consumer, or even that they are just sympathizers.

The party line is that there are sick perverts around every corner and in every Internet chat room, and that we need a strong police force with more surveillance and arrest powers than ever before to keep us and our children safe. Have you taken a moment to question why, in a country that arrests and imprisons more people than any other nation in the entire world, we are still talking about increasing the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and arrest people? The war on drugs created paramilitary police units and an entire paramilitary law enforcement agency; that has not gone away, and now child pornography is being used as an excuse to give law enforcement agencies greater surveillance powers, to the point where some police forces have begun to deploy vans loaded with signals intelligence equipment. Responsible citizens should be questioning these things, and questioning whether it is really worth it for law enforcement agencies at every level of government to have their power and authority so vastly increased.

Re:Bureaucrats

[dryeo]

The line should probably be drawn with people who advocate murdering other people, especially by throwing them off a cliff.
We have no need for "them kind" in this world.

Re:Bureaucrats

[flyneye]

Nope we don't put 'em down, but we do watch them, they cost more money than they're worth both in cash and output. We do keep them around for your amusement I guess at peril to posterity. You seem to have some STRONG personal interest in their defense.
No critical thinking is needed when deciding to rid your house of cockroaches. Splitting hairs over German cockroaches or waterbugs is irrelevant . One consumes a product that is manufactured from harm to children. So their crime is no different, only their level of participation. Level of participation is irrelevant to the crime. The other have a more hands on approach . Between lie the crud screwing children without porn.

          Their value to mankind is overshadowed by their harm.

          We have more than decades of rational calm discussion. How's that working.

        Yes , your pretended critical 'rationalization" is pretty phony sounding, not my fault.

Re:Bureaucrats

[betterunixthanunix]

So, in your view of the world, a person who is viewing an image of child abuse is a child abuser, even if the person who actually produced the image is in prison, the child who was abused has been rescued, and the person viewing the image neither paid for it nor encouraged someone to produce it? Do you even listen to your own argument, or are you so filled with hatred for people who have a particular psychological problem (enjoying images of child abuse) that you no longer bother to think about what you say? Your argument sounds more like the argument of someone who is blinded by hatred, and who is no longer able to distinguish the people who are harming children from those who are not.

I am interested in the defense of people who are found to possess child pornography because of the broader impacts that the current policy has on my country. As another example, beyond what I wrote earlier, the Department of Justice is continuing to push for cryptography products to include back doors -- and pressuring the vendors of those products to do so voluntarily. Child pornography is being used as one of the reasons why these things are "necessary" -- why it is necessary to sneak back doors into cryptographic software and devices while broadening police surveillance powers.

Get past your hatred and open your eyes: law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels are going after people who are not harming children, and using them as an excuse to increase their power.

Re:Bureaucrats

[flyneye]

Without a demand there is no motivation for supply. duh.
I am interested in protecting the better interest of humans rather than cultivate the disease.
My hatred was branded into me by these pseudohumans, I expect as part of natures way of eradicating the problem.
Law enforcement is not the problem. The system is broken at the public level. Some have values that preserve variables undesireable to humans thriving. Others who seem to have better instincts have values that preserve and protect life. Then of course it is broken in political ways we are all familiar with and some known mostly to those involved.
          To rely on a broken system is foolish. To fix the system, well LOL! Now can you find a workable solution ,less the usual regurgitation you bring to the table?

Re:Bureaucrats

[betterunixthanunix]

Without a demand there is no motivation for supply. duh.

No, the motivation for the supplier is not just demand -- it is demand coupled with a willingness on the part of the consumer to actually pay for a product. This point has been made over and over again, but you do not seem to be listening: the overwhelming majority of child pornography consumers are not paying for it, neither with money or through a system of barter. The point at which the economic argument applies is only at the very highest levels of the distribution chain, and those are the levels law enforcement agencies should be focusing their efforts on -- it is at the highest levels that the dangerous people who actually abuse children are. The lower levels are just people with a psychological issue, who should be encouraged to seek help rather than being imprisoned.

Most of the people who are arrested for possession or downloading of child pornography are not paying for it, and are far removed from the source of the material. They are not producing the material nor are they encouraging others to produce it.

Law enforcement is not the problem.

When we have police forces that have deployed signals intelligence vans and are sending in SWAT teams to arrest someone who is merely suspected of downloading child pornography, yes, law enforcement has become a problem. You keep talking about a broken system; yet you are encouraging the problem by encouraging the police to arrest even more people, at a time when our courts are clogged and our prisons are overflowing, and when the only nations in the history of the world that ever imprisoned more people than the United States are Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Sorry, but despite your complete lack of respect for a constitution designed to protect you from tyranny, that is precisely the constitution that we have, and we are straying further and further from it. You might think it is a good idea for the police to become a paramilitary force, but that is how societies degenerate into tyranny. Already, law enforcement agencies are pressuring legislators to give them shortcuts and enable them to avoid the very judicial processes that are intended to prevent abuse and protect people from an overreaching government.

You want a workable solution? How about the police subpoena a person known to be in possession of child pornography, and determine the source of the material? You know, so they can actually track down the people who produce it, instead of wasting time prosecuting some guy who happened to download it? While they are at it, perhaps the police can keep an eye out on forums for users who post new and unseen material, then subpoena the forums for the IP addresses of those people, so they can track the flow of the images and videos? Again, why spend law enforcement resources going after people who are not actually abusing children, when instead the police could track down those who are?

No, it is not easy to find them. I have heard them described as "ghosts" and as being some of the most technologically sophisticated criminals out there. These are the dangerous people that need to be in prison for the safety and benefit of the public, and the police should be spending their time finding them.

Not that you seem to be in favor of legal approaches that fall within the bounds of the constitution.

Re:Bureaucrats

[flyneye]

No one said anything about money.
You still have a product.
You still have those whose "pay" is trade or social status amongst peers.
Don't even begin to lecture me on the misuse of the constitution. It's been misinterpreted for convenience for so many years it is just so much asswipe paper now, Now all that is left is every man for themselves.
        Well kids don't fend for themselves very well. Your system, your constitution, your tried,retried and tired methods have been tried for decades, When is it supposed to work? When it's too late, like it already does?
      The broken piece of the puzzle is to eliminate the disease. Too bad it is an offensive thing. I don't like it either, but you provide no solution, just fantasy crap like you see on T.V.
      You know the cops wanna execute them on the spot too. It is what nature provided us as a solution. We are already in a decline, you are only helping.
          Take your regurgitated, tired old ideas on down the road. Like I said in the first post, I'm tired of thinking about Cops. I could be thinking about something USEFUL like oatmeal.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Maritz]

Bad analogy detected. Alcohol and tobacco are demonstrably more harmful and addictive than some illegal drugs. I don't necessarily disagree with what you're trying to say, but it's not a great analogy other than highlighting how idiotic and hypocritical current drug policies are.

Re:Bureaucrats

[betterunixthanunix]

Try rereading my post; I agree, there are some people who trade images of child pornography in exchange for other images. Such people exist at the highest levels of the distribution chain, and those are the people who need to be tracked down, since they are either abusing children or encouraging others to do so. You seem to be unable to perceive the disconnect between the lower levels of distribution, which are nothing by free riders (to couch things in economic terms) with the higher levels.

I am sorry to hear that you think the world is "every man for himself" or that a society built on laws is a tired old idea, but I doubt that you really want to see what society would look like without the rule of law and without legal processes. A society that solves its problems through a legal system rather than gangs of armed men is not a fantasy, it is the reason we managed to escape the dark ages. You claim society is in decline, and then turn around and attack the very concept of having a civilized society, yet you claim I am the one helping society's decline.

Slow yourself down, take a moment to think about what you are saying and perhaps (I know this is asking a lot) take the time to read more than the first three words of my posts, and perhaps this conversation will become worthwhile.

Re:Bureaucrats

[Mashiki]

You mean the inability to eat what you want based upon what you think isn't a thought crime? Oh who knew. Maybe I could just say their jurisdictional fiefdom's instead?

I give you 0/10 for not understanding what's wrong with your post.

FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[SockPuppetOfTheWeek]

...instead of focusing on child pornographers.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[hedwards]

I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate, at which point they've typically got the goods to send people to prison for just trading in the stuff.

I've got several other issues with it, they don't seem to care much about getting it correct, there isn't a mens rea requirement covering possession and 41% is unlikely to be justifiable given the other things which FBI is supposed to be dealing with.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[jkauzlar]

or, more likely, instead of protecting the copyrights of our corporate overlords or spying on government watchdog organizations.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[mr_mischief]

I think the counterpoint is that at the point it's being traded the harm to the child is done.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Mashiki]

Meh it's just like the war on drugs for you guys. You go after the people smoking it, or selling it to a few buddies instead of going after the major growers/sellers. Yeah it's harder, but it has much larger results. That's the general way we deal with both problems in Canada. Much better results.

Sadly this type of prosecution is the result of crowns and DA's wanting to get their name in lights for 'doing something'.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Exactly how many kiddie pornographers do you think there are in this country? Also, 41 percent?! Don't we have actual murders to solve?

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[hedwards]

And your point is? By trading it your encouraging it. From what I gather there are definitely places where one would go that operate like the old ratio servers for MP3s.

Even if it is true that no further harm is being done at that point, the person that's been sexually abused is still being used for such purposes, I wouldn't personally want footage or pics of something like that happening to me or a close relation being distributed. There should be consequences of some sort, and I'm not sure that this is really an appropriate area to make civil rather than criminal.

The main issue is why they're spending that much time on that rather than other serious crimes and why we still don't have any mens rea requirements for conviction. Convicting the innocent is hardly something that's going to help the survivors of such abuse.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[MimeticLie]

I know this is Slashdot, but at least read the goddamn summary. 41% of their agents working to solve "cyber" crimes are working against child pornography.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[betterunixthanunix]

I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate

Somehow, I doubt this -- the FBI has agents who search for and patrol pedophile forums, and has a large database of known child pornography images. Someone who is producing or is higher in the distribution chain would stand out like a sore thumb when they start posting new material. What is the point in going after someone who is just collecting the images?

The real problem the FBI faces, as far as I understand it, is that people involved in the production of child pornography are paranoid and technically sophisticated. Unlike the drug trade, which people generally become involved with out of desperation, being a pedophile is a psychological problem that can affect people at various levels of society. Pedophiles actively exchange information on remaining anonymous and avoiding police attention, encrypting evidence, etc. At the higher levels of production and distribution, the paranoia and the operational security measures increase drastically, and it can take many years of work for law enforcement agents to gain access to groups that operate at the highest levels.

In the end, though, someone still has to post new material on pedophile boards. The FBI should not waste time with people who are reposting the same old images, they should go after the new material. The person who has new material is the person who is connected to sources higher in the distribution chain. I doubt that it would take 41% of the FBI's Internet crime resources to track those people down.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Okay, 41% chasing neckbeards on 4chan. Is ID theft and CC fraud a cyber crime?

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[NFN_NLN]

I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate

The real problem the FBI faces, as far as I understand it, is that people involved in the production of child pornography are paranoid and technically sophisticated.

Attention whoring teens who take pictures of themselves and upload them to the internet are "technically sophisticated"?

I think there is a disconnect between the popular idea of the criminal charge and what it actually is:

Assault - can be touching someone, spitting on someone Vs. the common idea of beating the snot out of someone
Sex offender - can be pissing on side of road Vs. rapist
Child porn - can child abused by captor Vs. 17 year olds sexting

"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."

- http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Teens-and-Sexting.aspx

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[vrmlguy]

Possession of nude photos of kids or teens is not a crime ignorant. If it were, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon executives would now be in prison (they sell nude photo books of minors). It's called free speech, free expression, and freedom of lifestyle (nudism). Read Amendments 1, 9, 10, and 14 of the Union Constitution, as well as your local Member State's constitution, which provides additional liberties.

I'm sure that these people are reassured by your arguments.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Over 9000 penis and they are all raping children.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[cpu6502]

>>>I'm sure that these people are reassured by your arguments.

Last I heard they were freed, and all charges dropped, since sharing nude photos of your own body (which you own) is not a crime. Unless you live in Iraq, Iran, Arabia, or some other Church-dominated state. Is the US tumbling backwards from a free, liberal country to an ass-backwards shithole like the Middle Ages Europe (with catholic inquisitions and such)? I sincerely hope not.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[cdrguru]

Credit card fraud isn't a crime. It is an annoyance but only very, very few people are prosecuted. The credit card companies refuse to prosecute in most cases and without their assistance there is nothing law enforcement can do.

Why do you think you can sell a collection of 100 skimmed card numbers for $50? Because nobody is going to jail over it, ever. How do you think underpaid waiters in restaurants are making ends meet, anyway?

If you are a merchant, you better have insurance for credit card fraud because the credit card companies push it all back on the merchants. The card companies lose nothing. And if you have insurance then you don't care either. Hence it is really a crime anymore.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[vrmlguy]

>>>I'm sure that these people are reassured by your arguments.

Last I heard they were freed, and all charges dropped, since sharing nude photos of your own body (which you own) is not a crime.

The prosecutors didn't think that when they charged these kids with the production and possession of CP. And if sharing nude photos of your own body is not a crime, why are states now amending their laws to make sexting a misdemeanor instead of the felony that so many prosecutors were willing to treat it as.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[networkBoy]

Five bucks gets you that the FBI hasn't even thought of it from that angle...
Profiling the existing content they have in the DB against unknown/new content and tracking the new content to find the source.

On a related note, with CGI getting so damn close to reality now (even though render times are long as hell) how much longer till we get wholly digital (no victim) versions of CP content? What happens if a person consumes that exclusively? Are they still guilty? The mental issue is still there (in the consumer only) but where does/should the law fall?
-nB

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]I wouldn't personally want footage or pics of something like that happening to me or a close relation being distributed.[/quote]

I wouldn't want it either, yet even if my own children had been sexually abused I wouldn't want someone who had received this material 20 links away to lose everything they value and be forced to sleep under a bridge for the remainder of their existence.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[greenreaper]

I don't think "paranoid" is quite the right term. People really are out to get them.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously only because my kids know my Slashdot name/ID. One is old enough that we've discussed this issue but the other isn't quite there yet. I am not the poster you are responding to, but believe your comments are hyperbolic and an unfair characterization of the point the poster is trying to make.

I was a victim of sexual abuse as a kid. From the age of seven until I hit puberty. Then, they were done with me. I never told anyone until I was nearly 21, out of fear, shame, and embarrassment. While I don't believe there was any photography, I am fairly sure there were audio recordings. I was forced to make a telephone call after every event and describe it to a man on the other end of the line. I never dialed the number -- it was dialed for me and then the telephone receiver was handed over. If that stuff showed up on the 'net, I know I would want it gone. I certainly wouldn't want someone deriving pleasure from it to continue to do so.

This has nothing to do with fear of the human body or belief in sex being evil. I don't adhere to either of those conceptions. I do believe that perpetuating the distribution of a recording of an evil act, and deriving pleasure either by providing or consuming it as "entertainment", is most definitely an evil act in and of itself, and a violation of the civil rights of the victim, unless they choose to allow such use. Otherwise, its only legitimate purpose for continued existence is as evidence. Whether or not it encourages more production of the same sort of material is completely irrelevant.

From this and other postings, you appear to have little problem with the raping of children for someone else's pleasure. Having been on the receiving end, I can say it does much more harm than you appear to believe. Psychotherapy doesn't erase the past, and it isn't 100% effective. I still have strong psychological issues with picking up a telephone, and I gave up on ever being anything but depressed more than 20 years ago. I am satisfied just to be (mostly) functional.

It is nice to know there are individuals here on Slashdot that enjoy watching such damage being done, find no harm in it, and consider it "unhealthy" to believe otherwise.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[AK Marc]

By trading it your encouraging it.

By trading it, you are discouraging it.

See, anyone can make illogical and unsupported assertions. Seriously, when some pervs are illegally trading copyrighted (yes, even if the material is illegal, the copies are still copyrighted) material you are asserting that it encourages the production of more. But the media organizations claim that when you illegally copy copyrighted material, you are actively discouraging the producers from making more.

After listening to the MPAA and RIAA, pirating and trading child porn will decrease the number of children harmed. Please, trade child porn for the children. Won't you think of the children?



Seriously, if pirating hurts media, then child porn pirates aren't encouraging anything. If pirating doesn't hurt media (as you asserted), then the regular media sharing should be legal. But no, it's always inconsistently applied because people don't actually care about fixing problems. People only "hate" whatever they hate, and then make up whatever lies they can to justify their personal opinion.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[sjames]

If the RIAA is correct, technically the people swapping it for free are destroying the market and severely damaging the producers.

I'm not in favor of it by any means, but I think it's clear that we're better off if whatever resources they devote to child porn are concentrated on getting the producers and those who provide their income.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[praxis]

Credit card fraud is most certainly a crime, or when someone skimmed my card number the FBI wouldn't have gotten involved, the bank wouldn't have willingly and quickly handed over all their evidence and paper trail, and the perpetrators would not have been caught.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[katyngate]

If that stuff showed up on the 'net, I know I would want it gone. I certainly wouldn't want someone deriving pleasure from it to continue to do so. Why do you care? Even if the people listening couldn't tell your real name?

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[mr_mischief]

My point is that trading it is awful, but preventing further production of it is more important to stop. If the recording doesn't exist, it can't be traded.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[AK Marc]

The MITM attacks on their own customers by Comcast and whoever was doing the 404 redirects that made it to an article this week are hacking felonies. But no, paying agents to surf child porn all day long is much more attractive than pursuing valid crimes committed by our corporate overlords.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[toriver]

Possession of nude photos of kids or teens is not a crime ignorant.

Then explain the multiple actual cases where that has landed people in jail. Reality wants to kick your theory in the butt.

Child porn is porn where the person depicted is (or in some cases merely looks like being) under the age of 18. And porn does not merely limit itself to depictions of sexual acts. Apparently there are exceptions made for "artistic" purposes (thus you will not go to jail for possessing movies like Pretty Baby) which could cover the books you talk about.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Labcoat Samurai]

The person who had their card stolen was still heavily inconvenienced by the whole thing. I had my card stolen once and I felt violated. I tried to social engineer the mailing address of the purchased CDs out of an operator, but I failed. Seriously, though, I wanted to show up with a baseball bat and break some kneecaps. I only wish I had had a recourse other than letting the card company take care of it and issue a new card. They may not have wanted to press charges, but I did.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[quickgold192]

Does every law need a logical moral basis? Does every crime need a victim?

If we "legalized" sexting, or maybe taking pictures of yourself at a young age, waiting until you turn 18 and releasing them (which I believe is also illegal), we've opened up a loophole for child pornographers: you can take pictures of a girl and pressure/bribe her to release them herself.

Of course, you might say "punish the criminal, not society as a whole," but maybe the risk of abuse is simply too great to make something that *should* be legal, legal.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[cpu6502]

>>>at the point it's being traded the harm to the child is done.

Exactly. Just like my downloading (or trading) of Lizzie Borden's murder photos harms nobody. The act is already complete and the killer already punished. No additional harm is caused by my viewing of these photos, and I should not be arrested.

What's next? We outlaw photos of marijuana or cocaine? ("Clearly the existence of these photos will cause more drug usage amongst kids. They must be confiscated!" - current DOJ head)

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Credit card fraud isn't a crime.

Nice, now I know not to take you seriously.

Why do you think you can sell a collection of 100 skimmed card numbers for $50?

Low value, high supply.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight. In your mind, if someone who has actually been sexually abused, who had the experience filmed/photographed, did not want evidence of that act spread all across the internet, then they must also simultaneously desire fictional works such as Pretty Baby be removed from existence? You are incapable of seeing how it is perfectly logical to be ok with one, but not the other?

You have truly hit a new level of stupidity, Troll64.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[hedwards]

This is more or less precisely the sort of situation that I was thinking of. Sexual abuse is hard enough to cope with and recover from without the possibility of recordings and evidence sitting there for years past any hope of prosecuting the individuals, for other perverts to enjoy and take pleasure in.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Pseudonym Authority]

the person that's been sexually abused is still being used for such purposes

No they aren't a record of the event is being fapped to. If they masterbate the the thought of some random brat they saw on the street without any further action, are they raping the kid?

I wouldn't personally want footage or pics of something like that happening to me or a close relation being distributed.

Get over it, victims don't have special rights.

There should be consequences of some sort

No, there shouldn't. And since you didn't provide your reasoning, I don't have to either. Good day to you.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Pseudonym Authority]

Your statement quite frankly disgusts me and leads me to question what kind of interest you have in child pornography exactly.

This is the argument of the defeated moralist.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Pseudonym Authority]

Does every law need a logical moral basis?

Logic and morality are almost always mutually exclusive; laws should be logical before they are moral. No law should be based exclusively on morality, if at all.

Does every crime need a victim?

Yes, yes it does.

If we "legalized" sexting, or maybe taking pictures of yourself at a young age, waiting until you turn 18 and releasing them (which I believe is also illegal), we've opened up a loophole for child pornographers: you can take pictures of a girl and pressure/bribe her to release them herself.

That is a huge stretch of the imagination. Maybe we should criminalize air fresheners because a some one might use it to mask the smell of a corpse and do all sorts of mischievous before being caught. Ridiculous.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[LrdDimwit]

That's all very well and true, but it has nothing to do with the OP's point. There exist adult pedophiles who engage in the type of behavior described by the parent. They not only enjoy personally engaging in the behavior, but swapping stories and media (in the same way jocks in locker rooms trade stories about cheerleaders).

The ones that aren't engaging in the sort of sophisticated countersurveillance described are being picked off by law enforcement. This leaves the ones who are, and this is a big problem because they are usually not just collectors, but producers - that is to say, serial rapists.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[LrdDimwit]

No criminal law should ever be passed that is unrelated to morality. The problem is that "morality" has had its meaning twisted, so that when the legal system refers to laws about "morality" they mean laws enforcing lifestyle choices that society would like to make mandatory.

This is ass-backwards to me. All laws fundamentally derive their authority from either the societal need for order, or from morality. What are laws banning murder, but a moral judgement that murder is wrong? What is the Thirteenth Amendment, if not a statement that enslaving others is immoral?

What are commonly called morality-based laws are really laws lacking any connection to morality. Laws telling consenting adults what sex acts they aren't allowed to perform in private have no possible moral justification (other than unconstitutionally religious-based ones); no immoral act has been commited and nobody has been harmed.

To me, the state can make something a crime only because the act unrightfully has a detrimental effect on another entity. This seems to be to be equivalent to giving the state the power to criminalize immorality. (Just not the sort most people think of when they hear the word.)

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Hadlock]

The second "your" in your post should be "you are" or "you're". The rest of your contrations look good though.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

I can assure you that most pedophiles sympathize with you. Pedophilia is a sexual orientation, not a crime - and like most people, most pedophiles sympathize with the victims of crime.

There have been a number of studies that have shown that the majority of child pornography that is traded is not imagery of children being abused by any reasonable definition. Most are simple nudes, with a minority that are sex acts among children, or sex acts with a child and an adult that the child does not appear to object to. There is an even smaller minority that might be unquestionably considered images of abuse, but just as the famous image of a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm was not a turn-on for most viewers, images of actual abuse is not a turn-on for most pedophiles. If there were any recordings made of your abuse, and if they were ever released on the net, you can be assured that most of the reactions they would garner would be thoughts of sympathy.

There are a number of problems with the present witch hunt. Children have been excluded from society and forced into roles they do not want, and pedophiles have been deliberately confused with child molesters; while the child abuse industry - therapists, politicians, and law enforcement - makes good money from feeding the frenzy. Children and the pedophiles who love them are both victims of this state of affairs, as is society as whole. We have established a sort of intergenerational apartheid in the English-speaking world, and ask the natives in South Africa how well apartheid protected them.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

"Possession of nude photos of kids or teens is not a crime"

You don't understand how it works in reality.

Possession of nude photos of kids or teens is not a crime for teleiophiles.

Possession of photos of kids - whether nude or clothed - is considered a crime if the possessor is considered by law enforcement to be attracted to children. I am familiar with too many cases to believe otherwise, including men who were convicted of possessing photos in which the children were wearing clothing, and men who were convicted for possession of photos of adults who looked young for their age. If you look into the facts, some of these cases will not be difficult to find.

Apparently it is the magic pedo eye which makes the difference, and causes the harm to children when the photographs are viewed.

In one case, a man in Florida got a sentence of over 100 years in prison for possessing a photo of a boy's 14 year old butt that he didn't even know he had, because his 14 year old friend had thought it would be funny to moon his camera and leave it to be discovered as a joke - not knowing that the police - upset by this man's publicly held beliefs - would raid his house. He is still in jail, and served over 6 years in solitary confinement. What were this man's publicly held beliefs? That being attracted to children was not a crime, of course. As a pedophile, the law is different for him. In fact, the law is whatever it has to be to assure that child lovers are punished severely.

But don't worry - simple nudes are legal for you possess, as long as the police never come to believe that you might be attracted to kids.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[vuffi_raa]

...instead of focusing on child pornographers.

Actually, no. At least if you believe what you see on the news every other day, there has been a far larger focus on consumers than pornographers. Pornorgraphers seem to have more of a free pass, you hear about some high school teacher getting busted for viewing kiddie porn every other day but as far as those making the stuff - I think I remember a story of a ring going down a little while ago but it was an international ring and most of the people were overseas so I don't know how much the FBI was really responsible for.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[manwargi]

This is what happens.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[SuricouRaven]

It's just part of the long police tradition: If they strongly suspect someone of a crime, they'll set out to find evidence of a crime. Not always that crime, but anything will do that they can convict for. Given that almost everyone has done something illegal, it works. I think the most famous example is Al Capone: The police were confident he was involved with organised crime, but they could never prove it in court. Capone was too good, too cautious. So a new plan was found - investigate him for something, anything, that could be used to convict him. That turned out to be tax evasion.

It's much the same situation with pedophiles now. Police suspect someone, but can't prove it? Then search. Raid their house, search their computer, audit their bank account. Maybe the investigation will find hidden drugs, or some Rule 34 art, or suggestive photos that would be fine for anyone else, or a tiny violation of a probation order, or involvement in online piracy, or financial irregularity.

People who go for a career in law enforcement don't just do it for the chance to abuse power. They want to bring justice to the world, protect society from evildoers - and that is just what they'll do. It's easy for them to start regarding things like legal rights or fair trials as a hinderence - just inconveniences that let criminal scum walk free. So it's not surprising that they'll often stoop to very low measures to secure a conviction.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[mr_mischief]

Well, as others have said, there can still be indirect harm from the images being traded. These kids are usually still alive, unlike Lizzie Borden. Catching the people doing the direct harm, though, and preventing more of it are more important to me than the recordings.

BTW, yes, I was molested by neighbor when I was little. So anyone who hasn't been really needs to not tell me I don't understand.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[radaghast]

While I agree with the sentiment. The MPAA and RIAA are claiming that by pirating copyrighted media you are hurting the profits of the media producers, not necessarily hurting the production of those materials. I guess they sometimes go on to appeal to public opinion by saying this will cause an end to the production of their media, but this isn't the legal basis of the infringement punishments.

Still, I agree that the GP's statement "By trading it your encouraging it." is unsupported.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[AK Marc]

Piracy either encourages or discourages production of more material. Piracy wouldn't promote dramas and harm action movies. It is absurd that one genre would be helped by piracy and another would be harmed by it. But that is exactly what must be happening for for both groups to be correct. I'm not arguing that either is correct, but that it seems absurd that one group argues that piracy increases production and another argues that it harms production at the same time.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[radaghast]

Yes, but the MPAA are arguing that piracy is hurting their profits. And the FBI is arguing that piracy is encouraging production. Apples and oranges kind of.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[AK Marc]

MPAA is arguing that piracy is hurting the industry (ever see the ones where they argue that piracy causes starving carpenters). MPAA is arguing that increased piracy is decreasing the creation of content. Whether they are or are not also arguing about the loss of profits is irrelevant to their assertions regarding piracy damaging production.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Zencyde]

But you haven't mentioned at all how far apart the contractions are. Should we be going to the hospital yet!?

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Zencyde]

Laws exist to protect the liberties of others as defined by basic doctrine. It's not an issue of morality. It's an issue of defining where the lines of property and person are drawn. It is an issue of liberty, first and foremost.

Re:FBI Too Focused On Child Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the topic at hand is clearly that of child pornography and pedophilia, and by virtue of being child pornography and pedophilia, children's rights are being trampled through its creation or peoples actions, no, freedom of these particular lifestyles are not in fact constitutionally protected, even if you think they are.

I will, however, grant you that the current legal definitions of child pornography and pedophilia are way too brood, and cover some things that are constitutionally protected.

Someone's math is wrong

[PCM2]

The subhead of TFA: "Cyberattacks are at an all time high; FBI spends twice as much effort fighting porn."

According to the report, though, 41 percent of its effort was spent on child pornography, leaving 59 percent for cyber-attacks. "Twice as much"?

Also, would you prefer the FBI not go after child porn? I personally think it's a pretty odious thing, and the Internet is making it easier for pedophiles to indulge (where, for example, in the past they might have had to order magazines or videos from shady overseas sources or something). 41 percent of the FBI's effort sounds like a lot -- I'm not sure there's that much child porn out there -- but it's definitely within the FBI's bailiwick.

TFA seems to argue that the FBI should be doing more to conduct "cyber-warfare" and combat attacks by the Chinese military. But last I heard, the FBI was a law enforcement organization, not a military one. If the CIA wants to run a cyber-war, let it. I'd rather my federal police do what it was created to do: Lock up criminals.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[countertrolling]

I'd rather my federal police do what it was created to do: Lock up criminals.

Shit.. There goes at least half of your politicians and CEOs.. and police officers

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Hatta]

The FBI should go after producers of child porn. The ones actually harming the children, not the spectators. Sure, bust the spectators if you happen to catch one anyway. But actively setting up stings to catch people who aren't actively going out and harming children is a bit of a waste.

I'd really rather have the FBI collecting evidence against Goldman Sachs.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[v1]

Tho I agree, playing devil's advocate I'd have to point out they are trying to remove the market for the kiddie porn. Remove the market and the producers will dramatically drop off. Only a minor percentage are paying for it, but there are also a lot more that are funding the producers/distributors indirectly with banner impressions and clicks, and with zip files of KP with botnet/spyware sprinkled in.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I think that the identify theft and other breakins as well at the botting of innocent peoples computers for illegal or just monitary purposes is a far larger area of crime. If you look at the statistics of how many child pornographers there are vs, say the theft from Sony of tens of thousands of credit cards. It is not a size nor a severity issue but someones decision that this crime is worse than say stealing all of someones money, or killing them, or kidnapping them. I think this is an ideological aberation from those in the FBI. Methinks they protest too much.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Samedi1971]

Tho I agree, playing devil's advocate I'd have to point out they are trying to remove the market for the kiddie porn. Remove the market and the producers will dramatically drop off. Only a minor percentage are paying for it, but there are also a lot more that are funding the producers/distributors indirectly with banner impressions and clicks, and with zip files of KP with botnet/spyware sprinkled in.

Why not? It's been working so well to shut down the drug trade.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[gstoddart]

I'm not sure there's that much child porn out there

I'm sure you'd be horribly wrong.

When you see some of these news stories about some of these people having hundreds of thousands of images, if not millions, it really must be on a rather large scale.

About a 15+ years or so ago, back when we all used the alt.binaries.pictures* tree in usenet I stumbled on some. This was before people were largely aware of it, so it was less known and publicized. I reported it, and then felt the need to rinse my brain out with bleach ... I really wish I could get that fully out of my head. It's not something you can 'unsee'. It skeeves me out to think of it, really. If one or two images are seared into my head forever, then I can only pity the poor bastards who have to do this as part of law enforcement. I shudder at having to look through vast quantities of it to try to identify victims or perpetrators.

I agree that 41% of all of the FBI work done for "cyber" crime for child porn is a huge percentage. But, I don't think I'd want to downplay the scope of it or the damage it does. I guess if people want it to be pursued in that proportion, fine. But, I guess it's like breast cancer vs the other cancers -- everybody focuses on breast cancer, and it proportionally gets a lot more funding.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[medv4380]

No their math isn't wrong you're just not picking up on what they are calling cyber-attacks. They are clearly considering the 19% national security intrusion as cyber attacks. The other part is cyber crime which some people may consider cyber-attacks but they aren't when they are saying they are spending twice as much on child porn.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

And prostitution. I think they've just about gotten that one all wrapped up.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Also, would you prefer the FBI not go after child porn?

No, we'd prefer they not spend nearly half their time going after it.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the following is true: People surfing the net looking for regular porn find a lot of very diverse stuff. There's a huge supply of teen and 'barely legal' stuff and sometimes the difference with real kiddie porn stuff is very small (in the Max Hardcore films, young looking actresses behave like childish school girls, these films are popular). It's unlikely that (many) men's preferences for young girls suddenly stop at 18. They may continue looking for even younger stuff in the illegal channels. There the preference for even younger girls is reaffirmed by masturbating to young girls, and presto you have a pedophile where before there was just a guy interested in teen movies. My point is, the availability of teen and kiddie porn is probably *creating* pedophiles.

And that, gentlemen, if true, would be a very good reason to try to get kiddie porn off the internet and to make possession and trading illegal.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove the market and the producers will dramatically drop off.

That's not going to work for one simple reason: this commercial "market" is actually so tiny that it doesn't matter in reality.

The whole "CP is million dollar industry" argument has been shown again and again to be bogus, circle-quoting of censorship proponents or outright fraudulent lies. We had to endure all those arguments in Germany and Europe in the course of various law initiatives for more censorship infrastructures. Quite a few organisations have proven all those fancy numbers politicians love to quote to be total and utter bullshit.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[MarcQuadra]

the Internet is making it easier for potential pedophiles to indulge their deranged fantasies... in the past they might have left the house to actually molest children.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[vrmlguy]

When you see some of these news stories about some of these people having hundreds of thousands of images, if not millions, it really must be on a rather large scale.

You can see the math at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2115012&cid=35979298, but basicly 134,000 images are produced per year by teens sexting each other. True, not all of them get posted to the internet, but it's quite possible for some people to have hundreds of thousands of images produced by underage teens of themselves.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

And what were you under the influence of when you invented this reality?

- Child porn networks funding themselves through banner impressions and clicks is beyond any probability. Just no, for too many extremely obvious reasons to mention. "I'll have the last 12 months advert revenue paid into my checking account please, alternative my Swiss numbered bank account". You could generate ten times the legitimate visitor numbers simply by filming dogs with funny hats.

- Why would someone offering up zip files with KP and botnet/spyware not focus on doing this through something far less risky? Like.. Game patches? Or funny video clips? Or Pokemon catelogue utilities? Not only would anyone searching for KP in illicit places be far less inclined to run .exe files willy nilly than your average kid on the internet, any group of botnet builders should rather focus on exhausting every other download-in-demand before settling on the highly risky child porn packaging.

Seriously, stop making things up that you know nothing about.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[MarcQuadra]

So tell me, what's the value to the producer of a file that's copied freely via a private tracker? I suspect the people who produce child porn would be doing it regardless of profit.

Also, what does the 'market' look like? I suspect it's tiered like this:

1. Producers who are doing the actual hands-on harm to children.
2. First-tier buyers. They pay a premium to get the 'original' content.
or
2b. First-tier traders who communicate directly with the producers to acquire content.
--everything below this line doesn't matter to 'the market'--
3. People who trade or download child porn pictures with no exchange of value.
4. People who accidentally stumble on child porn images, and silly teenagers.

It's pretty clear that you can't 'remove the market' and still retain values like the ones we uphold in the western world. We've seen this problem with drugs, we've seen it with alcohol, we've seen it with media piracy, and with prostitution. You can't really change how people act when they have basic rights like the fourth amendment.

If anything, they should make 'simple' child porn possession a civil offense with a $2,500 fine that goes to a good cause, then have -creation- or -purchasing- child porn be first and second degree offenses of the criminal code. That way, the law will be incentivized to actually hunt down the evil people, they won't get much credit for busting casual traders.

(note: I find the issue rather repulsive, but I'm trying to be rational. It's easy to just blurt out a visceral response to things as vile as this.)

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Rockoon]

The problem with your "younger and younger" argument is that the slope is slippery in every direction, and not just the direction that you cherry picked. Older and older.. Fatter and fatter.. Thinner and thinner.. Whiter and whiter.. Blacker and blacker.. Hairier and Hairier.. Uglier and uglier.. Shorter and shorter.. taller and taller.. Flatter and flatter.. Overbites.. Underbites.. we could go on and on..

So, do pictures of shirt girls turn people into midget fetishists?

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[cdrguru]

Well, there are hebephiles and pedophiles. What you are describing is hebephilia - teens. Pedophila is more oriented in the 2-10 age range.

I'm sorry, but I completely understand hebephilia. I do not get anyone that gets off on pictures of 3 year old little boys. I try to be open minded about a lot of things but I just don't get it with very small children as sex objects.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[cdrguru]

The problem is that the FBI is lumping in credit card fraud with identity theft which makes it seem like a very large problem. Only thing is, credit card fraud isn't prosecuted. Some guy buys 50 credit card numbers and tries them one at a time to sign up for World of Warcraft - this happened to me. What happens is simple - I got a new credit card, his subscription got cancelled and that was the end of it. Period. No prosecution.

I had a credit card stolen by someone. They sent it to a relative who used in at a KMart store. We know the thief and knew it was her brother that used the card. The police could do nothing because the credit card companies refuse to prosecute.

Credit card fraud is not treated as a crime, so forget about it. It is at most an annoyance.

Real identity theft, where someone gets a new car loan in your name, is incredibly rare. But what everyone hears about are the FBI identity theft statistics which include credit card fraud. Only problem is, there are no prosecutions.

The guy that ripped off millions of credit card numbers from Sony might have a problem. Sony might want to prosecute, but it is unlikely to go anywhere. Want to know how hard it is to get a conviction in Russia with a Russian jury when the prosecution is for a US or Japanese company? Think about if it is Romania or Bulgaria. No, the only way anyone goes down for Sony is if Sony's own private army goes in an kidnaps them. I'll bet Sony has a room somewhere done up with all the gadgets they used to use for captured Chinese prisoners in the 1600s.

I'll bet Sony could recoup all their losses just by selling pictures of that guy's last couple of hours.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[tnk1]

TFA seems to argue that the FBI should be doing more to conduct "cyber-warfare" and combat attacks by the Chinese military. But last I heard, the FBI was a law enforcement organization, not a military one. If the CIA wants to run a cyber-war, let it. I'd rather my federal police do what it was created to do: Lock up criminals.

The thing is, the FBI has been traditionally been assigned counter-intelligence as one of their major tasks. The reasons for this are that counter-intel will often require the prosecuting organization to operate domestically and frequently with citizens and residents. That requires operatives and agents who know domestic law and who have legal authority to carry out investigations. Also, citizens will want an organization that is more open and accountable making arrests of other citizens. The FBI fills that role much better than the CIA.

The CIA needs to remain less publicly accountable in order to keep secrets and methods used against foreign countries off the record and out of the hands of the enemy. If the CIA did counter-intel on US soil, there is a much higher chance that they would be forced to decide between national security and some judge's court order. As it stands, they already have to deal with that sometimes, but not as much as they would if they did domestic counter-intelligence.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[gumpish]

If you execute all the Drug Makers/Kiddie Porn producers and put that on TV for all to HAVE to watch. You will see that shit drop off faster.

Right, because public executions and dismemberment have stopped crime in Saudi Arabia. Oh wait...

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[SuricouRaven]

I would imaging the producers wouldn't be the ones profiting. That would be the very small number of pay sites (I know they must exist, as viewers have been caught before via financial records). The usual rule of data being worthless because it's easily coppied don't apply here, because it's just so hot - it's not like you can just throw it on a p2p network. If you want it, you need to know where to get it, and pay-sites could make a bit of money as brokers. Still, the market must be absolutly tiny, and profits accordingly tiny.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[tnk1]

As someone else in this thread pointed out, you often find the traffickers by working from the bottom of the pile to the top. If the FBI finds a small-time viewer of child porn while looking for distributors, they can't just ignore that person. With that in mind, you will always find a lot more viewers than creators and distributors.

And since no one is really willing to start a major campaign for the rights of small-time possessors of child porn, there is no one pressuring legislators to soften the law or add protections. In relation to child porn viewing, use of drugs is seen as both harmless and not very deviant which is why even though there are tough laws on the books about drug possession, they are still nothing compared to what you will face if you have those images or movies in your possession. People don't view drug users as monsters, so even though they might never use drugs themselves, when the police go too far, non-users of drugs can get over their prejudices and work against extreme punishments.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[jandrese]

Honestly, when I see a police statement that says they got the guy's machine and it had 300,000 child porn images on it, my first thought is always "They caught a guy who trades in the stuff, then added up all of the jpegs they found on his system to have a number for the press". They didn't actually look to see what the images were. The general hysteria you get around this subject only amplifies the effect and there are a lot of bogus statistics made up by people with an agenda.

It's a problem, but I don't think it's nearly as large as some people might lead you to believe. This is true of a lot of other crimes as well by the way.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[SuricouRaven]

By which it probably means about ten actual images of child abuse, and 100,000 images from clothing catalogs and whatever they can find on flickr. When you're collecting something so rare as child porn, standards are going to have to be quite low. Remember that the law enforcement has a very strong motivation to exagerate (Public admiration, increased funding, personal promotion and bonuses) and the media just as much (More fear = more viewers = more money), and that there is no possibility of verifying any claims because the siezed collection is obviously not going to be released for independant inspection.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[praxis]

I imagine that if this country devolved into such a society I'd be living in one more civilised.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[nedlohs]

You managed not to read the bit (that is in the damn summary even) that says: 19 percent of its cyber agents on national security intrusion investigations.

Given the heading says "counterintelligence" it seems pretty clear that the cyberattacks refer to those against the national security on not those against businesses that happen to be in the US.

if it shouldn't be the domain of the FBI that's another issue, though apparently it currently is in their domain.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[PitaBred]

Your totally unfounded and unsupported suspicion is a very good reason to try to get kiddie porn off the internet and a specious "if x then y" train of thought? Really? No wonder our country is in the toilet.

You don't "create" a pedophile with pornography. You create one by having someone subjected to an abnormal childhood and distorted understanding of sexuality and growth *cough*childpageants*cough*, or various other developmental issues. Just as you can't make a straight man gay by having him look at pictures of naked men, you cannot make a non-pedophile a pedophile.

Young porn is arousing to most men because that's the age the girls were when they started having sexual feelings, and attach those feelings to women around that age. Almost all of the young porn I've seen has still been of sexually mature girls who just look young. Pedophilia is not just liking young models that are sexually mature (regardless of the law), pedophilia is being sexually attracted to the pre-pubescent.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[AK Marc]

Child porn isn't being made as much as it was before. It's almost all gone, and most of what's out there is recycling of old material and a trickle of stuff coming in from foreign countries. There used to essentially be child porn production companies, and they don't exist. Killing every child pornographer in the US will not take long. Which is another reason why it's insane that there's so much effort against it. It almost doesn't exist. When's the last time someone who produced porn for profit was arrested in the US? I searched and couldn't find anything.

As for drug makers, I'm all for that, as long as the rules are consistent. There is no sanity when caffeine is legal and cocaine isn't. They are the same, the only difference being how much it takes to get you high or kill you, not what the effects are. So anyone that makes or drinks coffee or beer should be treated the same as someone that makes meth or PCP. But we get even more hypocrisy in that, where the drugs people like are all legal, and the others are illegal, for no real logical reason.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[c]

> playing devil's advocate I'd have to point out they are
> trying to remove the market for the kiddie porn.

There's probably a bit of truth to this, but I strongly doubt the vast majority of child porn producers/abusers are in it for the money.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Sir_Eptishous]

The best post in this whole thread.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

And prostitution. I think they've just about gotten that one all wrapped up.

Yeah, the prostitutes are fucked.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

"If the CIA wants to run a cyber-war, let it. I'd rather my federal police do what it was created to do: Lock up criminals."

Actually, the CIA is only allowed to address foreign threats. The FBI has long been responsible for counterintelligence within the US, and has taken the lead on domestic operations.

In the case of cyberwar, it becomes difficult to determine which responsibility belongs to whom, but securing domestic infrastructure would appear to be the FBI's bailiwick.

In any case, it would seem that securing domestic infrastructure should be a higher priority than prosecuting a victimless crime.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

At 30 frames per second, 1 million images is about 10 hours of video.

Don't believe the hype.

Come to think of it, I don't believe your hype - especially after reading about cops eating donuts and joking about the child pornography they were viewing as part of their "job".

The Trojan Horse of Child Protection

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

There was a wikileaks document that was released last year. One site in Eastern Europe got hits from something like 15 million unique IP addresses. Now, that included other places than the U.S. - mostly the U.S. and Europe, probably, but that was just ONE site.

Actual numbers are probably in the tens of millions.

Actual crimes against children have fallen dramatically in the same period that child pornography has flourished.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[SuricouRaven]

Also, how would you get customers? You can't advertise openly, and those customers don't want to be found. For that matter, how do pedophiles find each other? Anything that could be found on google would be watched by the law already, and you can't go by word of mouth when it's not safe to even express an interest.

Re:Someone's math is wrong

[davolfman]

Removing a market is blatantly impossible. The market is always the larger target. For example: prohibition, the war on drugs, filesharing, knockoff merchandise. You can't even always take out the producers but you'll never get more than an endless stream of arrests out of targeting the market.

Conclusion?

[Frosty Piss]

This shows a very unhealthy obsession at the FBI for prurient titillation... Seek therapy, guys!

Jello Biafra said it best

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to see child porn, join the vice squad!

Re:Jello Biafra said it best

[tmosley]

The ONLY appropriately named police organization in our Orwellian society.

'kiddie' porn is a political crime

[countertrolling]

Very easy to falsify, prosecute, and get convictions. People count conviction rates. They don't care what 'crime' it is. It's like the cops spending time issuing speeding tickets, while just up the street somebody's being shot. These people don't serve justice, they serve their department or boss.

Too much money involved?

[stopacop]

Can they seize an accused pornographer's house and property like they do a drug dealer? If so, I can see the focus. My local police department doesn't go after street level dealers, only mid and top level ones who have cars, electronics and property for the State to seize.

Re:Too much money involved?

[smelch]

Well to be honest, I would rather go for the guy making enough money to have nice shit, he's clearly moving more product. It could be things other than just seizing stuff for money.

Re:Too much money involved?

[Deagol]

Yes. The Man's greed knows no bounds.

http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/05/child-pornography-and-criminal.html

Low hanging fruit

[Hatta]

Why do all the hard work tracking down serious fraud when you can link a honeypot image on some pervy website, do a reverse DNS lookup, call the ISP, get a warrant, and bust the perp? Easy way to boost your conviction rate, with very little man power, and the people will love you for protecting the children. Plus, you get all the kiddie porn you want... you know, for the investigation.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[blueg3]

The reverse DNS lookup is unnecessary; you can identify the ISP just by IP address.

Also, this isn't nearly as efficient as the preferred method. Fire up a modified copy of LimeWire, search for CP, find people that have CP files, download and verify that it's illicit, log IP addresses, call up the ISPs, get some warrants, make some arrests. The whole first couple of steps can be almost entirely automated so that your system churns out a list of IPs that are sharing CP every day.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[Animats]

Easy way to boost your conviction rate, with very little man power, and the people will love you for protecting the children.

That's the real reason. Real online fraud investigations are hard. The trail may lead through multiple countries, and serious investigative work is required. Even then, the investigation may dead-end.

Still, devoting 41% of FBI computer resources to kiddie porn, compared to 4% on online fraud, is way out of line. That's probably contributed to the growth in online fraud.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[tmosley]

Because no-one, and I mean NO-ONE can spoof an IP address.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[jewelises]

It's easy to spoof, but it's hard to establish a TCP connection by only sending outgoing packets. (Spoofing is the most useful for attacks on UDP protocols.)

Re:Low hanging fruit

[PwnzerDragoon]

Unless you "spoof" it with a proxy server, e.g. Tor.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[blueg3]

That only works if the person you're trying to imitate is running a Tor exit node and you've come up with a way of reliably getting a stable exit node. It's also terrible for P2P applications, where you generally announce to the world what your IP address is an expect to be able to receive incoming connections.

Now, hiding your IP address, for some applications, is pretty easy (though still uncommon) through Tor, but investigators are already fully aware of Tor and what it does.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[PwnzerDragoon]

True enough, if you're trying to match a specific IP address. But unless you're trying to frame someone you probably don't care. Any old address will do, as long as it isn't yours and can't be traced back to you.

That's why I place "spoof" in quotation marks - you're not truly spoofing your address, you're just borrowing someone else's. which is good enough for government work. Or avoiding government's work, in this case.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[blueg3]

That's a big difference. Spoofing usually refers to using a specific IP or MAC address. (Not necessarily because you want to frame that person, but it is necessary if you wanted to frame someone.) Spoofing an IP address is difficult under these circumstances (although not so if, for example, you can connect to the person's WiFi network). Hiding, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. It doesn't necessarily work well with P2P networks unless you're careful (otherwise the P2P application will give out your non-anonymized IP address), though some P2P applications have been modified to use Tor properly. Among CP traders, at least, anonymizing really isn't as popular as you might think.

Not in the article

[Anonymous Coward]

The RIAA is outraged with the FBI's priorities of spending 10% more of their time on child pornography than on anti-piracy investigations.

Re:Not in the article

[mr_mischief]

It's the RIAA. They're probably upset that there's not more investigation into the copyrighted backing tracks used in the child porn.

Emotional Impact

[Baby Duck]

By safeguarding children, one may indirectly feel they are safeguarding their own children. When taking down these offenders, the officers involved can easily sense a direct impact they've had in rescuing someone from emotionally intense and distressing situations.

Let's look at the other two categories. National Security Intrusions. OK, some Chinese hackers got through and stole some anti-missle plans. The ramifications won't be felt for years, if ever, even though it has the potential to deliver much more devastating harm to many more people.

Criminal Intrusions. They stole your identity. Ruined your credit. Racked up some bills. But hey, you want to know what, you're children are probably for the most part still OK. Sure, there might be financial struggle for a few years, but nothing that will require years of psychological therapy and cause all your kids' interpersonal relationships to suffer.

Re:Emotional Impact

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I think this is a red herring, The child pornography industry, while heinous is relatively small, say compared to the forgein woman transported here for prostitution, or identity theft or bank robbery or White Collar crime. It pains me to see people being sold this fear which is way out of proportion to the problem. Case in point, the way Halloween used to be vs what it is today. Parents have to escort their kids and only during daylight, and all because of urban ledgends and maybe one or two incedents in the country. Again an over reaction. Trying to live in a riskless world. It ain't goina happen.

Now I wonder what the effect on your kids are going to be if your identity is stolen and all your money taken and you loose your home and maybe your job and have to live homeless. That would have an sever impact on your children as well, and probably long term and far reaching.

Re:Emotional Impact

[tnk1]

I think people view risks to adults and risks to children very differently for the same reason that we allow parents and guardians to be both responsible for children and to have very significant control over their children. Children are generally innocent and are much less capable of identifying and defending themselves against threats.

Although I will say that these numbers do indicate a big imbalance in the way that the FBI budget is used, an imbalance is not necessarily a bad thing if you rate the favored spending as being highly important. The article comes from the angle of someone who knows more about "cybercrime" and Chinese intrusions than most. Most people do not necessarily have that interest.

I wonder what would be the outcome if there was a referendum on how the FBI's money was spent. I would not be surprised if there was a lot of support for maintaining high funding for child porn investigations. The statistics in the article I feel are more working at offending our sense of some sort of "balance" than they represent any concern with what people actually want investigated.

Re:Emotional Impact

[Baby Duck]

I'm not saying it's right or wrong to divvy up the FBI's priorities the way they do. I'm saying the reason why it IS so skewed is because it's far easier to get emotionally involved in what you are crusading against. Identity thieves -- maybe you prevented a few DVD players from being charged to a single family. Maybe it's mutliple families entire savings. Who knows? With the smut peddlers, maybe you are arresting the actual content producers. But more likely you are busting someone in a long chain of distribution, which does little to rescue the victims. But these officers are able to more proudly believe (whether in a particular case it's true or not) that "I'm actively doing something to keep the street safe." I wonder how many "successful" identify theft investigations are merely legal confirmations that, yes, your identity really was stolen, so you can repair your name. Versus detaining the actual criminals.

Re:Emotional Impact

[Jaxoreth]

It pains me to see people being sold this fear which is way out of proportion to the problem. Case in point, the way Halloween used to be vs what it is today. Parents have to escort their kids and only during daylight, and all because of urban ledgends and maybe one or two incedents in the country.

When I was young, before I was allowed any candy my parents would search the bag for harmful items, which is to say, fundamentalist Christian tracts.

Re:Emotional Impact

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

"Children are generally innocent and are much less capable of identifying and defending themselves against threats"
I have read several articles suggesting that actually not innocent but un-socialized and that the importance of imparting social and moral values in children is important because there may be less hard wired specific patterns than general tendencies. We only need to look to other cultures to see how the social values are taught and accepted, say the desirablility, nay necessity of honor killings for sexual transgressions or the hint of sexual transgressions in some parts of the world. So it may be important to control the message and the training for children for a very different reason than they are innocent. But regardless decisions that we make as adults on behaviors are and should be individual rights. We recognize that children do not have enough experience nor moral ethical training that is locked in to make those judgements. Once they do, then we judge them on their actions and if those actions are too outside of the current norms then we arrest and imprison them. But I think that in the U.S. that the priorities are out of whack. The FBI should be looking at the overall crime scene and making a judgement about impact on the country and its citizens, all of them. It seems that organized crime, the illicit drug trade, white collar crime that steals the end of life quality of life for so many seniors (the grandparents of those children), counterfeiting of currency, bank robbery, terrorism, all represent much bigger impacts on society. I think we have some in charge that are anal retentive and ideologically prudish and feel that this is one of the most important things that needs to be addressed. I for one think they are hung up on the little toe of the body politic at the expense of the boils and sores and festering wounds all over. I don't think they are doing their job.

Indeed, spend time hunting down real criminals

[makubesu]

like people who smoke weed or download metallica music.

I'm okay with that

[bigsexyjoe]

Businesses can take care of themselves. Money protecting children is well spent. If we need more money, we can cut defense spending and subsidies to oil companies

Re:I'm okay with that

[iamhassi]

"we can cut defense spending "

I love this argument, "just cut defense spending!" You do realize we're the World Police, right? All the other countries come to us for help when shit goes down, we keep the entire world in line, without us their would be a constant world war. And do we buy tanks or fighter jets from other countries? No, but the entire world turns to us to buy our jets and tanks.

It's easy to say cut defense when we haven't had a war on our soil in 150 years, and even that was us fighting ourselves. What do you think would happen if we cut our defense to, say, the level of Canada's defense budget? Think we'd be fine? Think other countries wouldn't try something? Who would come to help us when we need it?

Re:I'm okay with that

[MimeticLie]

What do you think would happen if we cut our defense to, say, the level of Canada's defense budget?

Seems like it's been working out well enough for Canada.

Re:I'm okay with that

[toadlife]

Think other countries wouldn't try something? Who would come to help us when we need it?

No one. We'd build our defense up using our vast industrial resources and go kick some ass. Just like WWII.

Re:I'm okay with that

[Pulzar]

As a Canadian, I still have to say that it's working well only because US is next door with their big army. Nobody will touch us because US will obviously step in immediately.

Re:I'm okay with that

[bigsexyjoe]

World Police? The other countries would say we are the world's thug. They would like us to cut our budget. If we are the "police" our work is not appreciated. Of course, we are not. We use our military might for imperialist purposes.

Re:I'm okay with that

[SuricouRaven]

You don't need help. You've got enough nuclear weapons to purge whole countries of anything larger than an insect. Even if the US were to lose every tank, fighter, soldier and surface warship, they'd be safe from invasion - no country is so stupid as to try it, and if any do they'll be glass in a week. On the downside, without the US's massive army to offer protection, many allied countries would be in a far weaker position. Israel in particular.

Re:I'm okay with that

[sjames]

It's easy to say cut defense when we haven't had a war on our soil in 150 years, and even that was us fighting ourselves. What do you think would happen if we cut our defense to, say, the level of Canada's defense budget? Think we'd be fine? Think other countries wouldn't try something? Who would come to help us when we need it?

We could make HUGE cuts in defense and be just fine. For one, we still have nukes. For another, we have a rather large militia due to the 2nd amendment. The only land routes would be through Canada or Mexico. We can't afford to just shut the DoD down, but we could scale back a LOT if we confined it's mission to defense of the homeland.

Even if we continue with intervention in world affairs, there are huge cuts we can make. It may look cool on CNN when a multi-million dollar bomb flies through a window to destroy a building, but honestly a multi thousand dollar bomb landing near the building will leave it just as flat and leaves ground forces just as disabled. We could drop a LOT of blockbusters for the cost of just one laser guided smart bomb.

Re:I'm okay with that

[careysub]

"we can cut defense spending " I love this argument, "just cut defense spending!" You do realize we're the World Police, right? ...

I'm checking my sarcasm meter, but something's wrong, it's not going off. This poster can't possibly be serious... can he?

Currently we spend nearly half of the entire world's defense spending, and the majority of the remainder is spent by our allies, this is not even counting our extra war and homeland security spending which aren't counted as defense. Ya don't think we can cut this back maybe a little?

But, heavens, what if we - as world policemen - hadn't invaded Iraq? What then? Well, we would have 4500 soldiers still alive (call that one and half 9-11s), between 50,000 and 100,000 soldiers who aren't maimed, and a trillion extra dollars to do good stuff with, and another trillion in war-related commitments we wouldn't have to spend. We would also have a weaker Iran - a more serious threat than the emasculated Saddam Hussein regime was.

Re:I'm okay with that

[Issarlk]

America, the land where people don't want to pay for social security or fire departments because it's communism. But where they happilly want to provide free "world police" to the entire planet, at an astronomical cost. Yup, nothing wrong about that.

Re:I'm okay with that

[MimeticLie]

Is Canada really making that many enemies?

It seems like the US is locked in a vicious cycle with our current defense situation. Radicals wanted us out of the middle east, so they attacked us. So what do we do? Topple two regimes and commit ourselves to a long stay in the region.

The US has the ability to project power (and thus influence) anywhere in the world. But does that really help our domestic security? The current threats we face are not from invasion but from terrorism. The only way we can combat terrorism with our military is by invading every country where terrorists hide, and all that does is trade civilian casualties for military casualties (in greater numbers) as the terrorists kill our soldiers.

Defense spending is the problem, not the solution.

Re:I'm okay with that

[Maritz]

All the other countries come to us for help when shit goes down, we keep the entire world in line, without us their would be a constant world war.

Grammar issues aside, this sentence doesn't do your credibility any good. The US has had a highly questionable foreign policy for a long time now. What wars have 'you' prevented exactly? Preventing war by installing dictators (e.g. Saddam, Pinochet) is not something you can describe as beneficial for wider human society.

Re:I'm okay with that

[SockPuppetOfTheWeek]

Funny - I imagine Canada would be one of the first people to complain if the US slashed its defense budget to the level of Canada's.

Re:I'm okay with that

[iamhassi]

People hate the police... until someone's breaking into their house and who do they call? The US is the same, everyone hates us until another country is threatening invasion or a dictator is slaughtering tens of thousands, and who do they run to? France? China? Mexico? No, good ol'USA

Re:I'm okay with that

[iamhassi]

Nukes will never work. Soon as someone launches nukes every government on the planet will turn against them and it'll be WWIII. Even if the US launched nukes we'd be wiped off the planet by every other country's nukes.

The reason we use laser guided everything is because we have to show the world we're not trying to kill everyone, we're trying to kill only the bad guys, and we you can't kill just the bad guys if you level the entire city with a crap ton of multi-thousand dollar dumb bombs. Laser guided isn't perfect and sometimes a school full of children still gets leveled, but at least it shows we're trying our best to get as close as possible with the latest and greatest in technology.

Re:I'm okay with that

[iamhassi]

because it keeps Americans safe

Re:I'm okay with that

[iamhassi]

"But, heavens, what if we - as world policemen - hadn't invaded Iraq?"

Saddam would still be slaughtering people, the middle east would be one huge terrorist training camp, and Bin Laden would still be alive.

Want to save money? Cut welfare so we don't have people who have never worked in 60 years complaining about their free house and their 60-inch HD TV. The US spent $622 billion on the entire Iraq war while welfare costs $888 billion EVERY YEAR

Re:I'm okay with that

[sjames]

If we're invaded, our government (about to stop existing) if not going to be deterred by a retaliation and the world knows it. Whatever country invaded us would be a crater and they know that as well.

Suppose nutzistan decides to invade the U.S. We blast them off the planet. Now, who is going to lob a nuke our way so we crater them as well and who will just say "we wish you'd stop doing that" in the U.N.?

As for the laser guided bombs, we just need to stop bombing so many places and it'll all be fine. The bombs (like the nukes) should be primarily against countries that actually attack us or our allies (and so nobody will look twice if we flatten a whole city with dumb bombs).

Of course, in general I've noticed that when countries go to war, it's the leaders rather than the people who can't get along, so I would favor just sending them to Thunderdome to work it out.

Re:I'm okay with that

[Issarlk]

Except when people fly planes into towers to get the USA to retract troops from some foreign place.

Screw the DoJ

[TexVex]

Screw the DoJ. They're busy laying the smack down on online poker. How about they stop with calling the kettle black and instead work on busting some real criminals of their own. Fuckers.

Corrupted PDF

[earls]

Does anyone have the MD5 hash for this PDF? It seems to be corrupt with large chunks of text missing.

Target the REAL criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

>would you prefer the FBI not go after child porn?

I'm responding as a parent with two young children of my own...

That depends. if a load of tax payers' dollars are going to be wasted on someone who looks at a picture of child porn - then no, don't waste tax payers' money on it. If you're talking about targeting perpetrators or sellers of child porn, then go your hardest.

AC

Re:Target the REAL criminals

[sabs]

Part of the goal of going after the people who watch it, is to get them to turn over on the places where they got their CP from.

Re:Target the REAL criminals

[hedwards]

The problem there is that you can't typically locate the provider without finding the people possessing. At that point, you've got the goods to prosecute people for possession and trading the materials, ignoring it at that point would be silly.

Now, if you've got some way of just getting straight to the source, I'm sure the FBI is open to suggestions.

The only issue I have with possession charges in all this is that there is no legal distinction between those that knowingly possess the stuff and those that accidentally download it, or who have it loaded onto their computer in some obscure directory by a cracker or somebody else.

Re:Target the REAL criminals

[toriver]

Probably just some web site in Russia. Trail ENDS.

Yes, there appear to be some more organized trading networks of pedophiles out there, and there is the occasional news report about such networks getting busted by international police. However, they seem to be the exceptions, and the big numbers are the "casual", curious loners out there. Maybe some people just need to get out more and interact with actual people?

And the child porn laws need to be reined in to actually cover what the public actually think is child porn, i.e. recorded sexual abuse of children. Or are we going to fill jails and the sex offender registry with people who had a picture of Bart Simpson nailing Lisa on their computer?

Re:Target the REAL criminals

[PPH]

AC - Would you feel different if that sexually explicit picture was a picture of your young child?

Why isn't your kid going to you to tell on the nasty man with the camera? OK, maybe they are too young to realize what was going on.

remember that once an image hits the internet, it can never be removed completely

True. But my folks have pics of me sitting in the bathtub (pre Internet). But if they did get posted, I'd challenge anyone out there to link a photo of 2 year old with his rubber ducky to a balding, grizzled old guy who screams at kids to get off his lawn.

Once a kid is old enough to be identified and traumatized by an on-line photo, he/she should be old enough to rat out the neighborhood perv.

The math is right.

[NeutronCowboy]

41% devoted to online child porn, 59% for EVERYTHING else. Cyber attacks are not the primary mission of the FBI. As a matter of fact, they are supposed to be the counter-intelligence arm of the US security apparatus, which would mean that I would expect that to be the largest part of their effort. Instead, it is a mediocre 19%.

Also, would you prefer the FBI not go after child porn? I personally think it's a pretty odious thing, and the Internet is making it easier for pedophiles to indulge (where, for example, in the past they might have had to order magazines or videos from shady overseas sources or something).

Bullshit. Sorry, but you drank the Koolaid that online pervs are the biggest risk to kids. Never mind that the biggest risk of plain old abuse comes from parents and family members, the biggest risk of abduction comes from parents and the biggest risk of abuse comes from family members and friends of the family. Online pervs are a drop in the bucket in that list. Online posting of child porn is a) just proof of a crime that has happened in the past, and b) catching the posters or downloaders does little to nothing to help solve that particular crime. So yes, it is part of their mission, but it's not 41% of their mission. If anything, I'd peg it at about 1%-2%.

Re:The math is right.

[PCM2]

41% devoted to online child porn, 59% for EVERYTHING else.

Correction: 59 percent for everything else online. How many murders do you think take place over TCP/IP? Just how many categories of online crimes are there?

I'm not saying 41 percent sounds like a good number -- in fact I said it didn't. But you're making it sound like the entire FBI isn't doing its job, when really it seems as if a relatively new, poorly funded, and poorly governed sub-branch of the FBI is aiming for the low-hanging fruit. Big surprise there.

Re:The math is right.

[nuckfuts]

... You drank the Koolaid that online pervs are the biggest risk to kids... The biggest risk of abuse comes from family members... Online pervs are a drop in the bucket...

Why do you assume there is a distinction between "online pervs" and family members? One pedophile with fulltime access to a child (such as a parent or caregiver) could produce (and distribute) a lot of child porn.

Re:The math is right.

[steve.howard]

You said abuse twice.

D/Ling CP should be legal imo (not perv or insane)

[Anonymous Coward]

To the people I talked to who are in the field as volunteers, even d/l child porn accidentally is highly illegal and can land you in jail. It reminds me of British law (at least during WW2) where you were not allowed to listen to radio signals "not meant for you".

I don't like the idea that people can be thrown in jail and the rest of their lives on mere possession of HIGHLY repugnant items. Especially as a computer can a) be so complex that malware/viruses/bots/etcetera can control them without people knowing and b) even when surfing yourself, the truth is you don't know what you are always downloading until after the fact.

Now in certain countries they are going after mere drawings, no longer do they feel bound by the argument that consuming child porn creates victims by increasing demand of creation.

Here is what should be illegal: child abuse and producing said content, intentional distribution of said content, intentional paying for said content, and displaying said content publicly. I think that will cover it.

I would treat intentional viewing and collecting like decriminalized drugs, send them into rehab, put them on a watch list, etcetera.

We have gotten to a point in this country where we often punish the ones we seek to protect. Stories of children on sex offender lists themselves are not uncommon - from acts such as peeing in bushes and sending their classmates pictures of themselves. As a society, we have gone completely insane and lost all common sense.

To catch a predator

[LostAlaska]

I blame "To Catch a Predator" for glamorizing the pedophile lifestyle. That's why the FBI now has to spend so much time on kiddie porn. /sarcasm

Do what you love

[ShogunTux]

You know what they say: If you're going to work, make it something which you enjoy. In this case, we have many agents investigating child pornography. Dunno what to think about that. ;)

Re:Do what you love

[ShogunTux]

Er, sorry, I mean "Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life", which is even more applicable than what I said originally. :P

child porn...or sexting?

[geekmux]

"...and 41 percent to investigate online child pornography matters."

Something tells me with all the bullshit hype in the media with underage teenagers sending dirty pics to their 18-year old boyfriend/girlfriend, sexting is what is getting the main focus right now, and not going after true pedophiles.

Re:child porn...or sexting?

[Gallomimia]

The best source for child pornography out there is the FBI's confiscation archives. Why do you think all the agents are so interested in working those kinds of cases?

Re:child porn...or sexting?

[rrohbeck]

Exactly. Throwing teenager sexting pics in the child porn bin inflates the numbers and dilutes the attention to the really bad stuff.

Re:child porn...or sexting?

[SuricouRaven]

Whenever I read about someone being caught with 100,000 child porn images, I always imagine it's about ten actual child porn images... and 99,990-ish pics they got by putting 'children' into google image search and spending weeks saving anything they like.

Re:United Nations International Children's Educati

[Kemanorel]

Do you mean the National Association of Marlon Brando Look-Alikes?

Count down: 5...4...3...2...1...

[toadlife]

...until Republicans politicize this.

Re:D/Ling CP should be legal imo (not perv or insa

[BitterOak]

To the people I talked to who are in the field as volunteers, even d/l child porn accidentally is highly illegal and can land you in jail.

In what field as volunteers? The rest of that sentence makes me very curious to know precisely which field you are talking about.

FBI not know yet the internet has more than porn

[Gallomimia]

It's understandable really. I'm sure if we had some 13 year old kids hack in and search the history/bookmarks of the FBI's top directors we would find no shopping or news links, but only sites about big breasts and so forth. It would be interesting to run the exact flavors of porn they look up through their own psychological profiler and see what it spits out! Hey someone mail these guys some links about online banking or cybershopping. Maybe a few news sites from non-censor-approved organizations.
No wait. On second thought don't. They'll just shut them down.

Real or virtual children?

[Mitreya]

And how much of those resources is spent hunting down people who produce or keep simulated child pornography? People who have child porn comic books, animated/virtual versions or have porn movies with adult actresses that look like they are 12?
I can be convinced on possession, although they should really go for producers and not the users (as sick as those users might be). But it amazes me that a child porn comic books could be illegal

Re:Real or virtual children?

[SuricouRaven]

A lot of that art is collected for novelty value - rule 34 is funny. There is just something entertaining in seeing the contrast of character and situation. Espicially when tentacles are involved.

I know why.

[wcrowe]

The FBI likes to investigate child porn because that usually means they get to dress up in their G.I. Joe costumes and play soldier, kicking in doors, etc. National security intrusion is just boring.

lousy lazy postman are union, aren't they?!!!

[Thud457]

I'm still waiting for my peace dividend check!

Re:D/Ling CP should be legal imo (not perv or insa

[Gallomimia]

Let's not forget the story posted on slashdot last week about a guy who was arrested and all his computers searched because someone used his wifi to download CP.
"M'Lord.... M'Lord. We've found a witch!...
May we burn her?"

This is an improvement

[assertation]

This is an improvement upon the FBI harassing vegans and environmentalists by infiltrating potlucks. At least now they are focusing on crimes.

Easy kills

[Aphoxema]

The FBI found something they can easily win, inexpensively, and remain extremely relevant. Thanks to the witch hunt, they've been given the role of thought police and it is a very easy thing for the fearful public to back up. I look back at that and think for a moment I'm being ridiculous, but am I really?

As a father

[gatkinso]

I honestly don't mind this focus.

However I will admit that additional resources are needed for other areas.

Full disclosure: I worked on the FBI Innocent Images program. It is easy to minimize this problem if you have never seen how horrible child pornography is.

Re:As a father

[LordLucless]

As a father, you probably should be more worried. If you, your wife and your immediate friends aren't abusing your children, then their chances of being abused are infinitesimal. Meanwhile, their chances of going to jail and being registered as a sex offender for taking a photo of their own body has probably skyrocketed.

"Common Sense" vs. actual information...

[Tetsujin]

(This is also common sense for most reasonable people.)

I'd be careful of "common sense" - "common sense" is that information which we take for granted and assume is true, whether it is or isn't.

Not having conducted any studies myself I'd say your arguments do make sense to me - but I think it's important to be clear about what's truly reliable information and what merely seems right.

Re:"Common Sense" vs. actual information...

[guybrush3pwood]

The reason for this is because violent video games are fun for a large number of well-adjusted people,

That line of reasoning holds water until someone comes along and says that the definition of "not well-adjusted" includes "people who enjoy games in which the goal is to kill people and rewards useless violence" (yes, GTA, I'm looking at you!).

I don't think anyone could really be OK with having a consumer of child pornography around, the proof being that no one would hire such nice folks to babysit their children. But the line of reasoning is perfectly valid for those not afraid of following it to its limits: "today they come for four child-pron collection, tomorrow they'll come for your videogames, the day after they'll come for your rock-and-roll music..." and so on.

Re:"Common Sense" vs. actual information...

[Tetsujin]

Society cannot work on ideologues; we need practicality.

That's fine, I agree. Perfect justice is unattainable, the best you can do is establish rules, try to make them clear-cut and reasonably consistent and at least somewhat fair - and these rules will step on someone's toes for sure but that's the price you pay for an ordered society.

I'm just saying, don't prop up an argument like that with "common sense". It's unreliable, highly-subjective rubbish.

Re:"Common Sense" vs. actual information...

[poptones]

But, in the case of child abuse, the potential harm greatly outweighs the small amount of freedom granted.

PROVE IT.

I know lots of people who were abused. I know many who were abused and quite successful, and I know others who were never abused and turned out 8 ways of lunacy.

Don't forget that "abuse" is often only abuse when someone else says it is. I've had friends who were "abused" by having sex with older partners at a young age who would laugh in your face if you tried to call them victim. But oif course, when you KNOW YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT that just makes them "poor souls who don't know any better."

Fuck you arrogant PC pricks.

LAN party

[Thraxy]

The remaining 9% were playing CS

Boy, they sure are interested in child porn.

[Maxo-Texas]

I wonder why they are so interested in it.

Especially those evil pictures of naked cartoon characters, computer renderings, and people who are now dead of old age.

However, I read somewhere the largest source of new stuff is the kids themselves producing it on cell phones and then someone intercepts it.

Re:Boy, they sure are interested in child porn.

[SuricouRaven]

Intercepts? No. Kids spread it around themselves. Sometimes just for a joke. Sometimes for the dramaz. Sometimes a relationship goes sour, and one partner decides to send all those pics of their ex to friends.

Not sure if it has been mentioned...

[Da_Reapa]

But why doesn't the FBI go after the source instead of the receiving end, unless they ARE the source......

Re:Obligatory

[Tetsujin]

Mmmmm... BOP?

Re:D/Ling CP should be legal imo (not perv or insa

[SuricouRaven]

I'm guessing organisations like Perverted Justice. Do-gooders who decided it is their duty to rid the world of child porn and those who distribute it. Perhaps well-intentioned, but like most vigilantee organisations there is a tendency for them to get carried away at times - their over-eagerness to use flimsy evidence and lack of legal knowledge often make it impossible to convict those suspects they accuse, and they have been known to dish out 'justice' themselves without trial by DDoSing websites or publicly identifying suspects when they judge the police to have failed.

RE: PSN

[iamvim]

So, the DoJ won't track down who stole my credit card number off of the Playstation Network, but if someone uses my stolen credit card number to buy some kiddie porn, then they might get caught?

The Internet!

[poormanjoe]

Where men are MEN! Women are MEN! and the children are the FBI!

Re:Improptu Poll

[tantaliz3]

3) Online child pornography matters

Don't think of the children

[Opportunist]

If you think of the children constantly, chances are you're a pedo.

At least ...

[PPH]

... that's what the 41% claimed when the logs showed them searching for "Barely Legal".

close

[poptones]

Not just that. Reno pushed cases to the supreme court to establsh precedent, then the white house started lobbying for more crackdowns on "the coming plague of online child pornography."

There were lots of articles about it at the time, including warnings of the toxic effects this increased focus on child porn would have on our society.

I argue that these laws, intended to protect children from sexual exploitation, threaten to reinforce the very problem they attack. The legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse threatens to enslave us all, by constructing a world in which we are enthralled - anguished, enticed, bombarded - by the spectacle of the sexual child.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Speech/Adler_full.html

Of course, those articles were dismissed. Still are today, and yet....

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5516511.ece

The Therapeutic Inquisition

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Therapists are a religion of their own, and their beliefs are just as nutty as those of any other religion - and nuttier than most. Their regime is one of torture and intimidation, and anyone who questions their findings they treat as a damned heretic.

If you really want to look at exploitation, follow the money. The big bucks are made by the child abuse industry - the psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, politicians and cops that prey on the public's concern for children by pretending to protect or help children - for considerable financial gain.

Consider this recent case in which a 12 year old girl flew from New Mexico to Idaho to be with an 18 year old she liked. The girl's mother complained, and the police in Idaho interfered in the girl's affairs.

http://www.idahopress.com/news/article_b577b760-7153-11e0-b128-001cc4c03286.html

"The Nampa Police Department developed the Child Abduction Response Team (CART) plan a few months ago for cases like this, said Chief Bill Augsburger."

Apparently when they called it a Child Abduction Response Team they weren't kidding, because their Response was to Abduct a Child from the locale which she had freely chosen.

There are a multitude of examples where children's rights were not merely not honored but utterly ignored - but we seldom hear of the girls and boys who are driven to guilt and even to suicide at the thought that their older friend is in prison because of them, nor do we hear of the forced examinations to find out whether a child had consensual sex with an adult: essentially, our law enforcement agencies routinely rape children to determine whether there has been a crime.

So I have to ask, who is really exploiting children here? Who is really treating children like chattel? Who is really acting without regard to the harm they do to children?

'Cause it ain't the guys downloading pictures of children enjoying themselves.

CAUTION! DO NOT DO THIS!

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

If you accidentally stumble across child pornography, do not report it to the authorities. You can be and likely will be prosecuted if you do so.

Possession is considered a serious crime, and criminal intent is not considered relevant.

If you stumble across child pornography, immediately clear out your browser history, do whatever you can to clean up your hard drive - and hope to ghod that the site wasn't an FBI honey pot that just got your IP address.

There is no defense.

Re:CAUTION! DO NOT DO THIS!

[VortexCortex]

If you accidentally stumble across child pornography, do not report it to the authorities. You can be and likely will be prosecuted if you do so.

Possession is considered a serious crime, and criminal intent is not considered relevant.

If you stumble across child pornography, immediately clear out your browser history, do whatever you can to clean up your hard drive - and hope to ghod that the site wasn't an FBI honey pot that just got your IP address.

There is no defense.

However, if you are malicious and have access to HTML display of a website (your own or via SQL-injection, etc.), please DO document the URL, and use the following HTML in all of the pages you can post to in order to ensure that unsuspecting web visitors download the child porn without even being alerted to its presence:

<img style="position:absolute;top:-99999px;left:-99999px" src="URL_goes_here" />

Thus allowing you to, if prosecuted, claim that the download happened without your control -- Point to the thousands of others that have downloaded the image without realizing it, and claim you are one of them.

You see: There is no way to even know that you accidentally downloaded child porn just by looking at the web site. You must check your web browser's image cache...

Note: If a browser disallows negative positioning, simply work around it by changing the above "img" to a "script" tag -- the file will still be downloaded. ; - P

You could already be in possession of child porn without ever actually seeing it... and, yes there is no defense...

Re:CAUTION! DO NOT DO THIS!

[CodeBuster]

This principle extends even more broadly to any dealings with the authorities. Generally speaking, reporting a crime is usually not in your best interest. The police are looking to arrest a suspect (any suspect, including you) and the DA is looking to secure a conviction. There is little or nothing to be gained from exposure to these risks so why take them? If you aren't involved, keep your mouth shut, forget about it and walk away. Secrecy is the winning strategy.

Re:D/Ling CP should be legal imo (not perv or insa

[Jaxoreth]

I'm guessing organisations like Perverted Justice. Do-gooders who decided it is their duty to rid the world of child porn and those who distribute it. Perhaps well-intentioned, but like most vigilantee organisations there is a tendency for them to get carried away at times - their over-eagerness to use flimsy evidence and lack of legal knowledge often make it impossible to convict those suspects they accuse, and they have been known to dish out 'justice' themselves without trial by DDoSing websites or publicly identifying suspects when they judge the police to have failed.

So it's not just a clever name...

yes, he's an idiot, but he has lots of company

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Seriously - this is standard dogma among therapists and progressive feminists. They seriously claim that looking at a photo is equivalent to doing what is in that photo - so you remember that photo of a little Vietnamese girl that was burned with napalm? Everyone who saw that picture - regardless of whether they were moved to sympathy with her by seeing it - is guilty of spraying napalm on a little girl - and probably guilty of a sex crime as well, seeing as the famous photograph showed her naked.

Re:yes, he's an idiot, but he has lots of company

[Omestes]

this is standard dogma among therapists...

Are you a scientologist?

Also, how do you know its "common" dogma, how many therapists do you know? Have you conducted a fair and accurate poll of them? I've known a fair share, and many of them haven't claimed this. Though there is some interesting brain studies that do show looking at a picture of an act does stimulate the same bits of the brain that are stimulated while conducting an act. That isn't therapy though, that neuroscience... Damn neuroscientists and their progressive agenda.

and progressive feminists.

All things considered I could probably be classified as a "feminist", and probably "progressive" to boot (as opposed to being a regressive feminist, I suppose). Seeing a picture isn't the same as the act. But that doesn't mean that wanting to see the picture is inductive of a healthy person. Or that seeking out the picture my not constitute demand for the production of more picture.

In other words I will whole-heartedly dismiss your point as a strawman.

where can the FBI find computer savvy help?

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Perhaps they should start posting Help Wanted ads in the pedophile forums.

backlash

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Um, there's already been some talk of a few pedophiles joining forces with Al Qaeda.

And the current attempts at genocide may yet have some serious backlash.

Are you sure you want to escalate this war with an unseen enemy in your own backyard?

Just saying.

FBI responsible for counter-intelligence

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Really. The FBI has had the responsibility for counter-intelligence work for a long time. The CiA (CENTRAL Intelligence Agency) only does foreign stuff - counter-intelligence is domestic.

secret evidence is an oxymoron

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

Of course, we'll never be able to see it to judge for ourselves. We'll just have to take your word for it, and the word of everyone else who profits from the system.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re: PSN

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

"but if someone uses my stolen credit card number to buy some kiddie porn, then they might get caught?"

No, if someone uses your stolen credit card number to buy some kiddie porn, YOU'LL get caught!

Fortunately, there's no actual market for kiddie porn, but unfortunately that doesn't matter.

I have said this once already

[NSN A392-99-964-5927]

Certain people in the FBI are very ill equipped and some who are fucking excellent. This is not the best story and is biased only one way.

Re:If they are working like that...

[hairyfeet]

The FBI set up honeypots before, look it up and see how NOT to run a honeypot as they didn't even bother capturing referrers so any asshole could Goatse the link and send you to prison! The judges also ruled that it didn't matter that their "CP Links" weren't actual CP (they were garbage files) because simply by clicking the link you were guilty of attempting to procure CP and that was enough. Oh and they also ruled a single thumbs.db that has a picture they rule to be CP is is enough to put you away so you might want to clear your cache regularly as any nude pic could probably be a lolita in the eyes of a pervert hunting judge, whether it is one or not.

As for your other ideas? they can't get informants in that ring because the ones that are in it are all actual child molesters and no prosecutor is gonna let a child rapist get a deal, so they are still looking at an average of 60 years plus, and they know NO parole board will ever let them out early, so no dice there. Second they don't give you time to pull any CGI crap, at least not that would in anyway be believable. They also don't accept virtual shit, it has to be a real kid.

The only reason we know as much as we do is one of them got busted by the cops when one of the kids he raped turned him in and they found some of the discs. But they have timers set up so if they don't hear from X in Y amount of days they consider him "burned" and abandon the site and mail drops to go to the next predesignated site they know about. According to my friend the feds fear that terrorists will start simply learning from the rapists because running a terror cell like this would make them damned near uncatchable.

But it the end as I said its theater, nothing more. The busts as of right now according to my bud are something like 95% social retards and 5% actual child rapists. Catching the actual rapists is hard, time and money consuming, and doesn't generate the headlines that "400 netted in CP bust" does so the PTBs simply don't bother. In the end it is just another case of "we're doing something about it!" while ignoring the fact that the "something about it" is pointless, a waste, and in the end is like pissing in the wind for all the good it does.

Ridiculous

[sixsixtysix]

Gotta love spending money on the only crime [can't think of another] that is having video/photo of a crime. I do not support cp, but i find that to be ridiculous. I can have thousands of hours of beheading videos, which, in theory, creates just as much demand for more of them, like is argued regarding cp. I imagine that getting your head sawed off is worse than your uncle touching your wiener, but apparently, that is not the case. Either all criminal/police/etc photo/video should be illegal or none of it. No exceptions. Maybe I am missing something?

Low Hanging Fruits

[tchall]

This is merely the entirely human failing of "reaching for low hanging fruit" Child porn laws are so badly written that things NEVER having to do with any actual child, or images of adults that APPEAR to be underaged can get a conviction in the courts... They would have to work to find spys, track down phishing exploiters, and/or actually make a difference in the cyber security of the average Citizen... How would THAT get them noticed and promoted???

Re:If they are working like that...

[hairyfeet]

You know, I actually had a discussion with my friend over that very idea, and he said there is a simple reason why they haven't (and probably never will) make a deal with one of them. As he put it "The mob guy you can set up with a little business and you have about a 50/50 chance to get him to go straight (especially if there is a contract out on him) but with the pedo he will fuck little kids no matter what you do."

So I can see his point on why making a deal to get in the ring won't work, as the one that signs the deal will have committed political suicide. Because once the pedo rapes another kid the headlines will read "this person made a deal with a kiddie fiddler!" and it will be even worse if the guy kills the kid afterward (which according to my friend often happens to a pedo after he gets out of jail, the pedos are treated so badly in the joint they'd rather risk the death penalty than go back) so you can see why nobody would want to sign those papers.

In the end there is NO excuse though for arresting that guy that wrote a pedo book (thoughtcrime) or the one they busted for writing his fantasies on paper (thoughtcrime) or for looking at Jap anime books. Personally I don't think they should even be able to bust someone for the images, as it is too big of a risk of a slippery slope. After all if you can't find the person, how do you decide what age they are? does some judge get to decide if they "look Lolita" or not? And as I said wasting millions jailing social retards certainly isn't cutting down abused kids, and saying pedos will rape more kids if they have someone to show the pic to is just insane. if that were true we'd have to ban Saw and all the "torture porn" movies as we'd have mass murders on every block. it is ridiculous.

If we would just get the social retards help they could learn to interact with other people and solve the problem (the study, which IIRC was paid for by Bush Sr and buried since it didn't go with his "burn the witch!" views, said that given treatment the social retards could quickly and cheaply be taught how to have normal relationships, thus negating their need for porn) but in the end we'll just keep the "burn the witch!" attitude since it keeps the peasants from noticing how bad their money is being blown. Just another stupid waste, or as my friend put it a classic SNAFU...Situation normal, all fucked up.