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FBI Hunt For Child Porn Thwarted By Tor
v3rgEz writes "Documents released by the FBI provide an unusual inside look at how the agency is struggling to penetrate 'darknet' Onion sites routed through Tor, the online privacy tool funded in part by government grants to help global activists. In this case, agents were unable to pursue specific leads about an easily available child pornography site, while files withheld indicate that the FBI has ongoing investigations tied to the Silk Road marketplace, a popular, anonymous Tor site for buying and selling drugs and other illegal materials."
Sounds similar to the problems that plagued freenet.
FBI SMASH TOR!
Nothing is important enough that it takes priority over liberty and freedom of speech. Nothing.
I think theres an extra "FBI" in the title - "FBI Hunt For Child Porn FBI Thwarted By Tor"
Ken
Freedom of speech, or government monitoring of all communications.
Decide which one you want and accept the consequences of your decision.
Because innocence kids were raped to make it you sick fuck. You've got to be fucking trolling.
Now the great old U.S. Government is going to use this as fuel to show that privacy and anonymity needs to go away on the internet, instead of continuing to work to find these people and prosecute them.
Is it even possible? Once TOR gets a reputation for this crap, it's going to cast dispersion on all legitimate users of TOR, and further, on all who wish to have privacy for the sake of privacy, not merely for the nefarious purposes of trying to cloak illegal/immoral activity.
The Admin and the Engineer
Isn't it kind of the POINT of a darknet that nobody can trace who's who? Sounds to me like the system is working as designed.
Yes, it will be used to break laws. But that's when you break out the actual investigative skills instead of relying on tech work and unrestricted wiretaps.
This is why we can't have nice things. I would LOVE to support democracy locally and internationally by running a Tor node, but I would never run one as long as the risk existed that I'd be questioned about kiddie porn. I know I'm innocent, I could be PROVEN innocent, but anyone who ever heard would always think I was guilty. It's just not worth it to me. It's Kryptonite to free speech.
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
Seed "dark sites" with child porn.
Then, stop it "for the children".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
FBI: "There are secret anonymous corners of the internet, where people are trading illegally downloaded movies!"
Public: "So what?"
FBI: "That isn't all. They're ALSO buying and selling.... MARIJUANA!"
Public: "We don't care."
FBI: ".....AND CHILD PORNOGRAPHY"
Public: "Nooooooooooooo! Here's $50 million in extra funding and new broad new powers for your agency."
FBI: "We promise only to use them for your own good."
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
innocence kids were raped to make it
Not under some countries' definitions of child pornography, which include drawings produced entirely without the involvement of children.
Because it's Pure Evil, and I don't like it. Not to mention that it might encourage the creation of more (and we need to arrest people based on maybes and blame them for the actions of others even if they didn't pay them a single cent). Oh, and it's far easier to catch people who look at pictures than it is to stop those who are doing the molesting.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Both of these goals make it impossible for Tor as a system to prevent people from sharing child sex abuse images. Anything that could be done to prevent such sharing could just as easily be used by the Chinese to prevent dissidents from disseminating their information. Anything that could be done to track down people who share child sex abuse images could be used by China to track down dissidents and persecute them.
That is the trade-off: protecting free speech and dissidents who live under repressive governments necessarily thwarts the FBI's attempt to track down people who share child sex abuse imagery. This is a matter of priorities -- do we want to protect dissidents, or do we want to prevent child abuse images from being shared?
Palm trees and 8
We need to get the child rape off the internet and back in the church where it belongs.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
completely defeating the purpose of the entire system, as no one will use tor again.... who are you going to trust with the keys to that backdoor?
my sig pwns your sig
>I'm all for privacy
Yes you are.
Sincerely,
Queen Elizabeth.
That would defeat the purpose of the system. Just the existence of a backdoor makes the system vulnerable and devoid of purpose - anyone, with sufficient determination, can exploit it. Besides, anything even close to such action would utterly destroy Tor and spark another service that could be even more dangerous in wrong hands.
I think this is exactly what is happening right now. They got a backdoor in Tor and now want everyone to start using it, so they say they can not beak it.
I agree with OP. Assuming you didn't compensate the producer of the images, you in no way contributed to the market of child pornography. In saying this, I in no way condone the production of this material or in any way suggest that I like the stuff (I do not).
The problem I have is that mere possession of images should never be illegal in my opinion. The reason I say this is because it is extremely easy to accidentally download this material. I don't think people's lives should be ruined because they clicked on a bad link accidentally. The mere accusation can pretty much ruin your life, and there certainly have been cases where this has happened.
in the meanwhile in the vatican...
This guy has a point.
It's legal to share videos of someone torturing, killing, raping the corpse of someone else and feeding it to vultures.
As long as no one in there is a minor.
They're always going to for child abuse as a justification for taking away liberty.
It's a tried and true tactic, and it often works.
Any anonymous network is going to be used by all kinds of people. Either you're able to accept that and use the investigation techniques granted to you under the law, or you're going to attempt to change that, and disrupt the process of liberty in favor of more laws.
It is a choice and one that should be made consciously by a majority of the population rather than a chosen few.
It is the only situation where possession of evidence is criminal in itself. You will not be prosecuted for having a movie of a robbery. Nor of an assassination. And both required people to be harmed. Yet a manga cartoon somehow harms society more than a video of an assassination? According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a manga cartoon is worse than several violent crimes.
It's just bit. There is no difference to the network between an image of child porn and a manifesto to free Tibet.
If you can find the source of one you can find the source of the other.
So the "problem" is actually a case of "working as designed".
So if you look at crime scene photos, are you going to become an axe murderer? And since possession of crime scene photos is legal, is murder less bad than child abuse? (Last question is rhetorical. Because to me, yes, murder is less bad than child abuse.)
I'm all for privacy, but I think they should put a 'backdoor' in the Tor system to allow the FBI to catch pedophiles.
Do you think that the Chinese governments does not have spies in the FBI? Any backdoor would become a tool of the Chinese government, used to hunt down and persecute dissidents.
Palm trees and 8
the trouble with democracy is that it's so easy to game. All you have to do is get one big voting block to agree on an issue no matter way (say Child Porn, Social Security, or hating Commies) and you can more or less own. The rest of us get divided up and end up counting for nothing...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Whilst I am of course against child pornography, I get the feeling this isn't the real reason. Instead child-porn is now the catch-all excuse the FBI/NSA/CIA/whoever will use every time to try and legislate against any and all kinds of encryption, sharing or anonymising system that they can't get into.
No politician will stand up to defend our rights if it means they also risk being perceived as possibly defending child abuse.
I'm far more inclined to believe the real interest behind this is the RIAA/MPAA who want to make it impossible to anonymously share files at all and/or the gov itself who want to monitor every email, IM and keystroke we make online.
While the are both horrible, would you rather find out that your child was molested, or find their dead body on your front yard? No, murder is worse.
As horrible as child abuse is, it is utterly irrational grandstanding to say that child abuse is worse than murder. If I asked you if you would rather be raped or killed, do you really mean to tell me that you would answer "killed"? If not, then murder is worse than any form of abuse. The heinousness of a crime is directly proportional to its effect on the victim. There can be no crime more heinous, therefore, than any crime that deprives the victim of his or her existence unwillingly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Tor is open source; it wouldn't exactly be easy to hide a backdoor in it.
Stop being pedantic. That's very likely what he was referring to. Prosecuting people over pictures of imaginary children is just ridiculous.
Most child abuse or rapes probably do not rise to that level, but I'm sure there is a level of abuse where people would rather die than endure it.
It is the only situation where possession of evidence is criminal in itself. You will not be prosecuted for having a movie of a robbery. Nor of an assassination. And both required people to be harmed. Yet a manga cartoon somehow harms society more than a video of an assassination? According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a manga cartoon is worse than several violent crimes.
What's worse is that most of those poor schmucks who go to prison because they have video and photos of CP aren't ones abusing children. We could use these people to help find and arrest the slime who create this stuff.
You are correct in your first assessment: that this is not really about protecting children, it is about expanding police and intelligence powers. Yet it is not that they want to help people with copyrights; they want to ensure that their own authority goes unthreatened. We passed a lot of laws under the guise of protecting children, which have served the purpose of inflating arrest and conviction numbers and expanding the power of the police.
The FBI hates the fact that ordinary people have access to cryptography they could not crack even with all their best cryptanalysts working at it. That is why they keep asking for back doors. They bring up child abuse just to scare people into thinking that this is a pressing, urgent issue, one which will determine the safety of their children and grandchildren. The fact that, in practice, Tor is too low-bandwidth to satisfy the demands of many consumers and producers of child sex abuse imagery is irrelevant here -- the FBI is more concerned about monitoring people who do not require high bandwidth, people who may threaten the power of our current set of politicians and of course the power of the FBI itself.
Child sex abuse is just a bogeyman that conjures terror in the population and causes everyone to shut down the cognitive parts of their brains.
Palm trees and 8
And calling "manga" illegal is about as misleadingly stupid as calling "books" or "movies" illegal just because it's possible to create child pornography in the medium. These aren't subtle distinctions, if you can't tell the difference between a comic book and child porn you are a pretty twisted person.
Cartoon depictions of child sexual activity (commonly found in manga) is against the child porn statutes in many countries. So, yes, I can tell the difference, but the law can not.
The only reason why this was released to the public, was to drum up support to make programs like TOR illegal in the US.
You have been warned. Once the government uses the "For the children" excuse... or "Child pornography" excuse... it should immediately make you take notice that the government is trying to outlaw something.
In this case, its dark nets, because as we all know that is where piracy is heading, and they want to stop it.
The demand for pictures is not the same as the desire to rape. Consider that the availability of adult porn has exploded in the past ten years, but the occurrence of adult rape has not grown in the same way.
If it is a supply and demand issue, then maybe we should let the free market sort it out.
Are you really going to try to tell me that if nobody wanted to see CP, those that produce CP would stop making it?
CP is a behavioral issue. People would continue to make CP because _they_ enjoyed it, not because they thought someone else might enjoy it.
Anyone in the CP market to make a _profit_ would certainly suffer, but really I bet the number of CP producers turning a profit is quite small...
The only reason why this was released to the public, was to drum up support to make programs like TOR illegal in the US.
You have been warned. Once the government uses the "For the children" excuse... or "Child pornography" excuse... it should immediately make you take notice that the government is trying to outlaw something.
In this case, its dark nets, because as we all know that is where privacy is heading, and they want to stop it.
Fixed that for you.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
The vast majority of CP is free. This isn't an economic problem.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
The hard part is figuring out a way to generate a public-private key pair without any single computer or individual ever having the entire private key during the keygen process. I will leave that as an exercise for the crypto researchers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7_zMdNRAmo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8APlx9btTn8
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I was sexually abused as a child. I wish I had been killed instead. You don't know the hell abuse at that age can do to someone.
Is absolute tyrannical control over communications really the only alternative to pure unstoppable anonymity?
Maybe I'll take C), where the government obtains valid, reasonable, limited, warrants for the monitoring of communications, carries out those warrants, and finds the bad guys.
I can't believe this got modded "insightful"... methinks the mods (and the parent) need to read up on the logical fallacy called the False Dilemma.
Child abuse is special because it occurs when a child's personality and identity is developing. Severe mental disorders often occur due to child abuse, especially repeated child abuse. One example is borderline personality disorder which occurs more often among children who are repeatedly raped.
Severe mental disorders don't always occur, but the fact the the worst types of mental disorders occur to child abuse victims makes it a special type of crime. It elevates it above crimes like assault and rape (which also has severe mental health impacts). The psychological trauma involved in child abuse will often make a normal life and even transient moments of happiness impossible for the survivor. Some people consider this a fate worse than death (especially for the major disorders like BPD, CPTSD, and dissociative identity disorder). The suicide rates of child abuse survivors are astronomical--molestation will often lead to the death of the abused child, but only after years and years of a tortured existence and then by their own hands.
I agree with you completely
But why do you think your observations have any relevancy to the production and consumption of CHILD pornography?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Having known more than one abuse survivor that tried to kill themself as a result of the PTSD, and one that did succeed...
Yeah -- there are worse crimes. There's crimes that destroy the very fucking mind and sanity of the person leaving only the barest shell of a human being in their body.
There's things that happened to them that left at least two women lying awake at night, shrieking in raw terror for hours. That had them burst into panicked tears if they saw a man with his fly unzipped.
I know they /wanted/ death.
So fuck your analysis about grandstanding and irrational. For ten to fifteen years of their lives they would happily have chosen death. It might not always be worse -- but even if you asked them today, I'm pretty sure the wish they'd succeeded in ending their own lives just to escape the memories and issues they caused.
What!? You mean a technology exists that can be used for both good *and* evil? Too bad TOR doesn't have a clear-cut legal use with no potential for abuse. You know, like fertilizer. There's no possible way to use Ammonium Nitrate for anything but nourishing crops to feed people (or fill gas tanks).
More correctly, if there's no demand willing to hand over money, there's no supply. So follow the money!
"they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot."
Wow! I'm going to call the FBI right away and suggest they try and find out who and where those kids are so they can be rescued! I'm sure they haven't already thought of that one!
Yeah, I'm sure it's a piece of cake tracking down the precise identity of some random abused youth locked in a completely generic concrete basement. There are only millions upon millions of generic concrete basements out there in the world.
OK, I'm no ubergeek, but explain to me how not using DNS is going to prevent your ISP from logging the IPs of sites you visit. Sure, if you use DNS then both your ISP and your DNS provider (if it is a 3d party DNS provider) know the IP you sought, but cutting out DNS only cuts out one log, not all of them.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Do you still wish to die? If so, do you think everyone else feels that way? I think the problem with murder is that the person is simply gone, and there is absolutely no way they can recover from that (as in, live anything like a normal life in any way).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Because people in general, and the US in particular cling to this whole "law and order" fantasy that states the stricter the punishment(and more people you arrest for it), the less the problem occurs. And have we seen with drugs, that simply doesn't work. And the paranoia and bloodlust surrounding child abuse/porn in the US probably results in MORE child rape, not less. In most places in the US psychiatrists are REQUIRED by law to report any people that come to them for help with pedophilia, regardless of whether they actually pose a real threat to anyone(and in fact may be going to the dr to help them avoid doing so, therapy has been shown effective for past offenders). So they have to essentially "go it alone" or else risk ruining their entire lives by being outed. And what often happens is that they cannot cope and end up hurting a child. And this is pretty much the only disorder that they are required to report, someone comes to them to try to avoid going on drugs or to help them with their violent tendencies nothing has to be reported unless there is a high probability the person is going to hurt themselves or others, but pedophiles are different, we somehow feel that they should be locked up for seeking help....
Monstar L
In the case of child abuse images, it is not necessarily true that anyone who possesses such images actually did pay for them. Like anything else that can be downloaded, child abuse imagery can be downloaded at no cost online, and people so exactly that. Arresting someone who was never willing to pay for child abuse images does absolutely nothing to the demand for those images.
If you want to combat the economics of child abuse imagery, you need to reserve prosecution for people who actually paid for the images in their possession. Otherwise, you are just going after the low-hanging fruit, while leaving the truly dangerous people -- the people who are abusing children -- untouched.
Palm trees and 8
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. Eventually these pedo's will screw up and get caught. Time to go do some real police work.
Surveillance thwarted? Sounds like TOR is functioning exactly as it should.
If there's any actual "problem" here, that problem is the FBI.
Liberty in your lifetime
Yeah, I'm sure it's a piece of cake tracking down the precise identity of some random abused youth locked in a completely generic concrete basement. There are only millions upon millions of generic concrete basements out there in the world.
Sounds like a hard task; we should be putting lots of agents on this one...
Oh wait, most of the arrests made for child sex abuse images are for possession, downloading, or sharing -- not producing -- and most of the police officers working on these cases are going after the low hanging fruit, parading around the occasional producer they manage to find. If the police were focused on catching child abusers, they would devote the bulk of their resources to catching such people, and not get distracted catching people who just like to look at images of child abuse.
Palm trees and 8
There was child porn and sexual exploitation of children way before the Internet came around. I'll be happy to see it removed from the Internet, just so my kids don't run into it, but not for a second do I believe that it does anything significant to reduce demand or actual harm to children. Unfortunately people with these needs will simply turn elsewhere. Directly to children if they must.
Cartoon depictions of child sexual activity (commonly found in manga) is against the child porn statutes in many countries. So, yes, I can tell the difference, but the law can not.
Of course it can. "The law" is not a computer program, it's interpreted by people. And the law and those people can't somehow infer that an entire medium is now illegal because someone used it to do something illegal. Movies, photos, and comics (Japanese or not) are entirely the same in this regard.
People want to pretend this is some slippery slope, but you know, it really isn't. Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
Reading the comments on this thread, I'm realizing that likely within our lifetimes, we'll be having the same debate about strong cryptography that we're now having about guns, likely spurred on by stories like this about pedophiles, terrorists, "hackers" and all those other scary people on the internets.
Some of the same talking points are already in use ("We'll need them when the government comes for us", "Only criminals need them", "If they're banned, only criminals will have them and we'll be defenseless", etc), and strong cryptography, much like guns, are something that the governments and law enforcement fear as they can make it possible for people to break the law (just or otherwise) without the government being able to stop them.
I hope I'm wrong, and of course, you can't quite ban code so easily, but still, a scary future and an unpleasant debate may well be ahead.
1. The FBI does not have the cash, tech, people or access to telco hardware to seamlessly track content from one exchange to the end point in the USA. .gov and .mil staff and contractors it might find
If you sent abc to your exchange, some trip, back into the USA, back to another exchange - the message is still abc.
Could a mid budget US federal agency log all US net traffic for a few days, weeks vs a large city?
2. The FBI has the tech in the form of sneak and peek, key loggers to get down to your home and collect all data in real time.
At this time it does not want people doing strange things to nice consumer operating systems to spoil the quality of tracking.
So they talk of Tor been hard work as aspects of VoIP tech once was suggested to be.
3. The FBI recalls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore and the reaction of the UK gov.
4. The FBI recalls the number of
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/pentagon-declined-investigate-hundreds-purchases-child-pornography.html
Budgets, laws and hardware will gift the US "net" as a simple network in real time soon.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Cartoon depictions of child sexual activity (commonly found in manga)
Bullshit. Your local Barnes & Noble is filled with manga volumes completely bereft of child porn.
It'd be just as (in)accurate to say, "Graphic depictions of sexual abuse (commonly found in Spanish literature)" or "Vivid roleplaying of homosexual violence (commonly found in sports)."
DATABASE WOW WOW
According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a manga cartoon is worse than several violent crimes.
which is equivalent to saying:
According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a Japanese comic books is worse than several violent crimes.
which is completely false. Only the possession of manga that explicitly depict sexual activity involving children could be considered illegal. Just like how movies aren't illegal, only movies that explicitly depict sexual activity involving children are illegal.
This is the exact same point Dahamma tried to bring up. His post was pretty clear, at least to me. Maybe you should read it again.
Victims of axe murdering do not have the tendancy to grow up to be axe murderer themselves.
Assuming you didn't compensate the producer of the images, you in no way contributed to the market of child pornography.
I don't disagree with most of your points except your first. The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers which probably is worth far more than money, and it also contributes to a sense of normalization of their behavior for all participants. Taking away money won't stop CP any more than taking away all CP will stop child sexual abuse but it does help discourage it.
Ooops... Your right. If I could correct my post I would. I meant "possession of some manga cartoons" and got it wrong. The point was that no one was harmed in the production of that type of cartoon.
http://www.japanator.com/post.phtml?pk=8753
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/06/27/u-s-citizen-arrested-in-canada-for-manga-on-laptop-faces-minim/
And this was a few seconds on Google. It happens.
...guess I thought Tor probably already had an FBI/CIA back door.
... and this article disproves that how? If the FBI had a back door to Tor, the first thing they'd be doing is running articles like this one. That way everybody who wants to do something outside of FBI purview starts logging in, and Tor becomes one big honeypot for them to skim.
I want Tor to exist and succeed for privacy and free speech, especially for people in less free countries than the US. I also know victims of childhood sexual abuse and the lasting effects it has. The FBI breaking or backdooring Tor means that kiddie porn producers get rounded up, but it also means that free speech loses one more haven. I have no idea who I'm cheering for here.
You're kidding right? Murder is less bad than child abuse?
So you're pretty much saying you'd be better off to kill anyone who was abused. I'm out of words..
Two things:
First, although this isn't an extremely rare reaction to abuse, it is by no means the norm. The sex abuse victims I've known (admittedly a small sample size) have not wished that they were dead. Such a reaction is not healthy, and can get worse with time. If you truly feel that way, please seek proper counseling from a trained medical professional. Help brings hope. You can recover from this.
Second, not to diminish your experience in any way, but what you're describing is a fairly well-understood psychological phenomenon. The problem with your argument is that the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even actual abuse). A certain subset of the population reacts in this way because of bullying, physical abuse, serious financial losses, relationship breakups, and any number of other crises in their lives.
Clearly a guy dumping his girlfriend isn't guilty of something as heinous as murder, or else we're all in trouble. Yet for some people, it is just as bad. For this reason, you cannot judge a crime's heinousness based on how a particular individual is affected by the crime, but rather based on the typical effect. Most people would rather live than die, including most victims, and calling abuse a worse crime than murder is essentially claiming that even the abuse victims who do not feel that they would rather have died would still have been better off dead.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
Yes, they're guilty by association! They must be part of that group!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
but it does help discourage it.
I don't believe the fact that it might help discourage it warrants prosecuting the people who didn't even rape anyone over maybes (maybe they encouraged more child porn to be made). I think it's just a waste of time.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
For example, maybe if people watch cp enough they will want to try it out with their own kids or other children.
I think that's about as valid as saying that someone who watches pornography will go off and rape someone simply because they don't have anyone to have sex with. I haven't seen any evidence (which I believe is incredibly important) to support such a thing.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
What ever happened to antiphorm? Noise, camouflage, false flags generated by a random search generator seems like an easier approach than Tor, and requires no second party server. I don't like getting ads based on my health care searches. I'd be fine if terms for child porn were omitted from the search.
Gently reply
I was sexually abused as a child. I wish I had been killed instead.
If you *ACTUALLY* wished for this then you would have offed yourself shortly after. The fact is that people throw the words "I wish I'd been killed instead" around so much that it actually has no meaning anymore. The only people who really wish this cease to live.
So why are you still alive?
I'm making some assumptions here. For one you're on the internet browsing slashdot, your spelling and grammar are good so it looks like you've gotten to be a functioning member of society. Why do that if you would rather have been killed?
My parents had a scrap book that had pictures of me butt naked in a kiddie pool in the back yard. By today's standards, they would be considered the most dangerous criminals in the world.
Pictures of kids used as sexual imagery is icky as hell, but let's not bullshit here: it's all an excuse to stop people from downloading movies. The entire child porn hysteria is ridiculous. And if a "child was raped" to make the porn, then the rapist needs to be arrested, for rape.
Pictures is pictures. Rape is rape. And until the FBI starts treating the ongoing sexual abuse by clergy and football coaches as seriously as child porn, it's pretty clear that the whole child porn mania is just a cover to control the Internet. There's a worldwide criminal enterprise that enables child rape and they are hiding behind "religious freedom". There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there are dozens if not hundreds of cardinals and one pope that should have done perp walks long ago. Child porn my ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course, I was 28 at the time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Bullshit. If you abuse and rape an adult repeatedly they end up with the same severe mental disorders. The human mind develops for its entire life. Disorders can form at an adult age, and they can also be treated.
Mind you child abuse really IS different in one respect. That is that in the GP's post you are replying to murdering a child deprives them of more life than murdering an adult.
From what we know, an ended life experiences no suffering past death. Child abuse potentially robs young people of mental well-being from the psychological trauma for the rest of their lives. You may consider continued existence to be above all else...but what of living the rest of your life condemned to post-traumatic misery? The numerous victims of such abuse that have committed suicide would - if they still walked this Earth - beg to differ.
It's just pictures. Better the creeps inside jacking off than outside doing it personally. Isn't it time to get the government out of the bedroom?
Most parents think otherwise and want to punish the creeps for thinking creepy thoughts.
And in other news, I'm very scared of spiders.
It's the truth, so I don't need to post about it as AC.
I can't sleep sometimes because of it. I often have horrible dreams about spiders. I remember spider encounters when I was young, particularly with some horrifically weird, big, leaf-crunching monsters of the arachnid family that were all pink and had long, tubular legs, and wouldn't die from just one well-placed blow from my mother's foot -- it took several before it stopped running, let alone stopped trying.
And the sad part is, I used to like spiders -- a long, long time ago.
It still makes me twitch uneasily, just now. Cry? No, not normally. But thanks, asshole: Now I'll be up all night wondering if my house is sufficiently poisoned, with my skin crawling in fear that something has made its way past my indoor chemical defenses and the fleet of toads that I keep around the foundation of my house as a first-tier defense.
What kind of life is that?
(And the point is that there's a lot of things that can result in recurring emotional trauma for a human being. Some of them are chemistry-related, some of them are environmental, and most are probably a combination of both.)
Kid-proof tablet..
You're posting links to videos (without including any description of what's in the video) in the comments to a child porn story???
As has been pointed out above, if one of them happens to be kiddie porn, everyone who clicks on it suddenly become a sex offender (at least in the US) through no fault of their own. Maybe that was your point, i don't know.
Your personality and identity do not develop your entire life. This is why psychologists don't diagnose personality disorders until you are an adult since the personality hasn't solidified. But once it has, it is called a personality disorder because the disordered parts will remain part of your personality until you die. Personality disorders can't be treated with drugs--only specific symptoms (like depression and anxiety) can be treated. Generally, only learning coping mechanisms will help a person. The same applies to identity disorders.
A woman who is raped at 30 years of age doesn't develop BPD. She may develop PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc. But her personality and identity remain intact. The same is not true for a child.
Sorry, but you are full of shit. This is an area of abnormal psychology that has been studied extensively. Feel free to look anywhere on the Internet for "personality disorder" and you will find the same information.
"Vivid roleplaying of homosexual violence (commonly found in sports)."
Don't complain.
At least playing rugby keeps them off our streets and out of our zoos.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So once a person rapes the child, there is no reason to even consider letting the child go. After all, the punishment for murder is the same, so why increase the risk of getting caught by letting the kid go?
You can make a valid case for murder as some people deserve to die. (capital punishment, assassination/execution of terrorists/dictators, war, etc.)
Do children ever deserve to be violently raped to be recorded for digital distribution for others to enjoy?
Murder can be more acceptable than CP in some circumstances, so it's not so irrational as one might easily conclude.
The Silk Road works like eBay or Craigslist. They don't sell the drugs themselves, they let users sell to other users. Even if a seller did get caught, which I'm sure has already happened, the seller doesn't work for the Silk Road and doesn't know who runs the Silk Road. There's no "boss" for them to roll over on. It's just a website.
With a lot of effort, they can take down individual sellers who are basically no more than street dealers. Infiltrating the Silk Road itself is evidently proving to be much harder.
It's a biological reality that children reach puberty and become fertile and their hormones want them to have sex.
So we are way down the slipper slope already. It's already like intelligent design where religion has taken a regular idea and distorted it into a good vs evil extreme idea. Now to even suggest that CP shouldn't be illegal because the damage it causes to free speech are too great, is to invite an FBI raid.
Yet to bring you back to reality, its biologically programmed into every everyone, and the definition (18 in the US?, 16 in most places) of the legal age bears no relation to the level of hormones that drive this.
It's unbelievable to me that the FBI would attack free anonymous speech in order to prosecute some tangential crime, that isn't even the crime they want to prosecute!
You're posting links to videos (without including any description of what's in the video) in the comments to a child porn story???
As has been pointed out above, if one of them happens to be kiddie porn, everyone who clicks on it suddenly become a sex offender (at least in the US) through no fault of their own. Maybe that was your point, i don't know.
A healthy dose of paranoia is good and all, but you're far more likely to run into risque material on Channel 4 than youtube.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I guess since the thinkofthechildren crowd became worse.
Simple egoism. NAMBLA won't affect me, the thinkofthechildren crowd might. We're at the point where you could go to jail if some pervert judge gets a boner over your kid's pics that you thought were innocent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, since it worked so well for drugs, it will do wonders here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm not the AC, but here's one scenario....You don't kill yourself because you hope you'll recover and have a happy life. Then when you're older you find you never healed, but its too late to kill yourself because doing that would harm other people, such as your own children who depend on you.
I'm not implying that sexual abuse is worse than death for all people, or even for most people. I'd guess that it isn't, and in some cases its probably not even that big of a deal. It depends on the abuse, how the person responds to it, and a lot of other factors. But for some people, yes, definitely, being killed would be better.
Cartoon depictions of child sexual activity (commonly found in manga)
Bullshit. Your local Barnes & Noble is filled with manga volumes completely bereft of child porn.
It'd be just as (in)accurate to say, "Graphic depictions of sexual abuse (commonly found in Spanish literature)" or "Vivid roleplaying of homosexual violence (commonly found in sports)."
Unless a manga volume involved inappropriate sexual contact with a minor, then all manga volumes are bereft of child porn.
The End.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
What's worst is that we reach the point where raping a child and killing the child comes up with almost the same jail time. So what's the logical thing to do if you're a rapist?
Hint: A dead witness cannot testify.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes. So? If it makes them happy and only keeps ONE single child from being molested when they can beat off to comic pictures, drown them in their drawn jack off material.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The producers are not the consumers. You are rooting for free speech, because the alternative does not actually address the actual issue you're concerned about.
You're effectively asking the question of whether you want real safety or the perception of safety (and whatever amount of real safety that might come with it). Personally, I'd go for real safety. And in this case, it means doing real detective work and catching the perps taking the pictures and videos, instead of nabbing the low-hanging fruit (and consequently making a big stink about it, despite not having prevented anything or saved anyone).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Only low-budget movies, of course. If it comes from hollywood, it's exempt somehow. For example, Britain has a law against 'extreme pornography' which prohibits depictions of genital torture. Yet when genital torture was used to interrogate James Bond in Casino Royale, no police agency seemed particually concerned. I suspect that if exactly the same scene had been shot, word-for-word and action-for-action by a minimal-budget independant studio they'd have at least been forced to cut it to avoid a risk of prosecution.
A good friend of mine is serving 180 months for child pornography. Did he produce it? Sell it? Rape children? No. He ran an IRC fileserver and it was uploaded by a user. His upload directory was accessible, which is admittedly an idiotic thing to do. Some FBI agent across the country found it on his server and started the ball rolling. Eventually his house was stormed by agents and all computer equipment seized. He had deleted the files long before this point, but of course they were easily recovered.
He was charged with four (or five? Been a few years) offenses, all of which carried a sentencing recommendation of five years. All but one that is -- advertising. This charge was included as the behavior of an IRC file server (i.e. "Type !hotxxxpics to access my server") is considered by the law as advertising. The majority of the charges violate 18 USC 2252A which deals with possession. The advertisement charge violates 18 USC 2251 which deals mostly with creating and selling. Everything would've been covered with a five year sentence, but the advertisement pushed it to fifteen. The feds have been tossing this advertisement charge in wherever they can get away with it to raise the mandatory sentence. Google it. Or don't, as you'll likely be red flagged by some FBI drone.
All court proceedings occurred in the state where the FBI office is located despite the fact that there is a federal courthouse in a town less than an hour from here. A request for change of venue was denied. Your tax dollars paid to buy him bus tickets across the country, food and lodging while he was there, and bus tickets back. Upon the urging of his federal public defender, he eventually plead guilty. As noted by his PD, the 180 month sentence is higher than the sentence recommendation for voluntary manslaughter or conspiracy to commit murder.
This friend is a decent person, father of three, whose life has been functionally ruined. He left his children in elementary school, and will be released as they finish college. He did something ridiculously stupid and will pay for it for the rest of his life as he is subject to "lifetime supervised release." He's met murderers and rapists who are serving shorter sentences. My suggestion was to plead to possession, as, well, he was possessing it, but to fight this advertisement shit tooth and nail. His PD made it clear that he was absolutely not interested in doing so as it was not likely to work and he'd end up with a longer sentence than he would by pleading guilty to all of it. Your tax dollars will be paying for his incarceration for fifteen years because some jackass uploaded CP to his file server and some FBI agent noticed it. Apparently others have already tried (and failed) claiming an eighth amendment violation. This is widespread and completely out of control.
Veered somewhat off topic ... sorry ... someone mentions how CP is prosecuted and I get a little pissed. Thanks for letting me vent.
That's not even remotely a valid interpretation of what I said. What I said was that the fundamental problem with the argument that death is preferable to child molestation is that in the vast majority of cases it isn't. When it is, it is caused by either the circumstances being particularly heinous or the victim being particularly susceptible.
The heinousness of a crime in the general sense should not be gauged based upon unusually extreme examples of that crime. It is a crime to rob a bank. It is a crime to rob a bank by dropping an atomic bomb on it and sucking up the molten gold using a giant vacuum cleaner. Robbing a bank is not (typically) tantamount in heinousness to nuking a city.
The victim being particularly susceptible/vulnerable, as a rule, means that the victim needs more/better counseling, not that the crime was more heinous (unless the reason for choosing that victim was because the victim was particularly susceptible/vulnerable).
At no point did I suggest that anyone "suck it up". Quite the opposite. The only acceptable response to a post like that is to recommend professional counseling. Suicidal thoughts are nothing to screw around with.
You parsed that sentence wrong, though I'll admit that my elision of two implied words could cause someone to read it that way. Reinsert the implied words "limited to" and you'll understand the intended meaning:
...the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even limited to actual abuse).
In other words, not only is it not limited to the sexual abuse (a narrow category), but it is further not even limited to actual abuse (a broader category that includes the former). Many people experience those symptoms even in some situations where they merely perceive abuse, but no actual abuse has taken place. The key point was that until the person (whether an actual victim or not) chooses to stop acting like a victim, no healing can take place, and the fact that some people react in this way to any one particular crime is irrelevant in determining its heinousness because some people react that way to every crime to some extent (and to many, many things that are not crimes).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Move to bloody Somalia then, you won't pay any taxes or will be forced to do so, literally at gun point. Win-win situation for the likes of you that love to whine about taxes in free societies.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Because the demand is a mental condition that is not caused by CP.
If you're not a pedo, you don't want to look at pictures of children being raped. If you are, you do.
The pictures don't cause the condition, so reducing the availability of the pictures is not going to reduce the demand for them.
However, reducing availability of the pictures could cause people with the condition to go and rape children because they can't get their jollies from the pictures.
So clamping down on CP will have no impact on the numbers of pedos, and could conceivably increase the occurrence of child rape. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Careful what you wish for, it might lead to a lot more dead kids. Hint: Dead rape victims can't talk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I call bullshit. I've worked with several child abuse victims and this sort of behaviour just isn't accurate. They usually have problems with sex, they're confused about it all, they have nightmares, same as a lot of other people for different reasons.
But it's not this kind of sensationalist posturing that needs to stop if we're going to have a rational debate about this.
FUCK Barnes & Noble. All men are child predators?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/omar-amin-grandfather-barnes-noble-childrens-books_n_1571412.html
There is some of that, but hobbyist music carries no risk of jail (no matter how bad it is :-).
Following the money might not wipe it out completely, but I'll bet it puts a huge dent in it.
Don't hold back... say what you really think!
Chance of getting caught after committing child abuse when there's a witness: X
Chance of getting caught after committing child abuse when there's no witness: X
Easiest way to ensure your abuse has no witness: kill the child afterwards.
If the penalty for each act is the same there's no reason to leave the child alive.
I'm not aware that there's a law against showing videos where you physically harm a minor? Well, as long as it's not sexually, that is. But just recently I've seen a father spank his son on daytime TV in one of those "reality shows" (to my defense, I misplaced the remote).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's just pictures. Better the creeps inside jacking off than outside doing it personally. Isn't it time to get the government out of the bedroom?
If you've ever stumbled onto CP through any of the random image polling scripts from the image sites, what you see can be soul crushing. The looks on the children's faces are that of absolute depression and mental anguish. These children never had the option to say 'no' or reject what was happening to them... they were forced into their situation and what is happening to them will destroy their entire futures. They didn't start doing drugs and have to resort to porn to pay for their addictions, they were kidnapped and didn't know what was happening until their childhoods were irrevocably destroyed.
I support tracking down anyone who is sharing these images, since it leads to either one single person not sharing them with others, or (hopefully) maybe to the source. Yes, some people who are deprived of images will proceed to attempting abductions in real life; BUT these same people have a fairly high chance of doing the same thing with or without pictures. The larger idea of stopping these pictures from going out is to stop the BUSINESSES of child porn. There are people that kidnap and rape children just because they get paid for it. That is one of the things the government is trying to stop. Take away the subscribers and even if you can never find the source, at least the businesses stop getting paid and hopefully do less abuse to children.
TOR is awesome... it allows people in countries that are locked down to communicate freely and see beyond the propaganda that their governments are forcing on them; unfortunately though, in a system with absolute anonymity there will be those sick individuals that post and share images that society as a whole knows are horrible. Some of those will never be traceable, and that is sad but also the entire point of the TOR project. I would like to be able to trace them and shut them down, but that same ability would allow oppressive governments to shut down whatever they didn't like when they see dissenting opinions.
One other point: I have read the thread so far and it seems that a large portion of the people are complaining that Japanese hentai are what people get busted for. While that may be true in rare occurrences like someone sharing gigabytes of CP manga... I've worked with law enforcement on CP cases, and they really don't care that much about comics. Yes it's part of the law, but at least in the US, the FBI normally goes after the people with REAL CP and not cartoons. And even then, they go after the people with true collections and not 1-2 images in their cache that they stumbled into while searching random sites. Please link me to a news article that proves me wrong if people are getting busted for single images, since I am only an individual person and could have missed something. And before someone says "they don't report on small time CP busts," yes they do. Every time I've been involved with a CP case, the media is all over it as soon as they find out. They love to put the 'bad guy gets busted' stories in the news.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Drugs are also illegal. And unlike CP, the demand for which is (at least to my knowledge) driven by the sex drive, the most powerful drive in humans aside of survival (and maybe even surpassing that), the demand for drugs is artificially created, by druggies craving it due to trying it and later getting hooked on it. I kinda doubt that pedos grow up as completely "normal" people, then decide to take a look at CP and suddenly turn into pedos. Knowing my own sex life I can say that I knew pretty early in my development where I'm heading. It's nothing I found out over night when looking at porn for the first time and going "hey, I should try that, it looks cool".
So we have a "war on drugs", substances that people have to choose to want, and we fail miserably at winning on that front. Drugs are everywhere. Even in the most tightly regulated and surveyed of places, namely prisons, drugs are easy to get.
Now, if we even fail at that where people have to willfully go out and start with the crap, how does anyone think we're going to be able to control stuff that is probably innate in the people who want it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Freedom isn't free!
This is the cost of protecting our free speech rights, and protecting free speech worldwide. As soon as we make a system that really gives us all a chance to exercise free speech there will be some abuse of that system. It's inevitable.
We must then use other methods to catch these offenders because the encryption of the free speech mechanism will always be evolved to stay one step ahead of those who wish to break it. And I hope that anyone distributing CP gets caught, but not at the cost of sacrificing anyone else's freedom; that would punish the innocent.
You parsed that sentence wrong
isn't limited to football (or even sports)
isn't limited to football (or even actual sports)
Not a native speaker, but I think it's the "actual" word that's the problem. It's what implies that football isn't a sport in this case. So adding "limited to" doesn't really fix that.
The first thing they would do is leak it sixteen different ways due to somebody using it in a high profile situation to leverage a promotion.
You are talking about a group that still uses "lie detectors" FFS because they still don't want to admit they were scammed by the writer of a comic book and Hoover taking kickbacks. They are all about appearance and politics with law enforcement as a very distant second.
Repeated behavior rewires the brain. It strengthens the impulses, potentially turning slight interest in to an uncontrollable obsession.
Billy is jerking it on the internet, going through image boards. He enlarges a thumbnail to discover it's child pornography. Despite having no history with pedophilia, his aroused state tells him the image is sexual in nature and therefore ok. It happens again and again. Eventually, Billy is turned on only by children. The dangers involved only make him more excited. Eventually, Billy feels he has the opportunity to live those fantasies while watching his 9yr old niece for the weekend. He starts while she's asleep, she can't tell anyone and the risk of her waking drives him crazy. Then, the next day, when he's built up the courage, he asks her in to the bedroom for a secret game. Just as he's about to take his clothes off, Samuel L. Jackson busts in to the room and shoots him in the motherf*cking face with a motherf*cking shotgun. He looks at the little girl and says "I pity the fool who don't stay in school!"
Don't be a Billy. Be Samuel L. Jackson.
In short, he would have probably served a shorter time if he actually was a pedo who raped and killed his own kids without taking pictures of it.
This would be ridiculous if it wasn't so sick.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What is this "letting the kid go" thing you are talking about? The vast majority of child abuse happens in the home, by the parents.. Kids getting abducted and raped is pretty much the exception as far as I know. People don't abuse kids because they want to hurt them, they do it because they [think they] love them.. and killing is rarely going to be a part of that
Not to mention, that letting the kid live has other advantages.. firstly, you told them not to tell and you might get away with it (vs a dead kid is pretty obvious) and secondly, you might get to do them again (you can do that with dead kids but not for long I guess).
There’re also those folks that think they'll be punished in the afterlife if they kill themselves.
However, if you really prefer to die, it's _always_ an option, but if you're dead, you're dead. Saying that it would harm your children and loved ones falls into "grasping at straws" territory, as said children wouldn't exist if you died as a child, and other loved ones would still be hurt by your death either way.
Then why not ban all violent art? Why not ban the Bible while we're at it. It describes a guy being nailed to a cross after all. Let's not give people ideas.
There are multiple places to find this information, but I'll link to one with pretty graphs and that isn't too overburdened with scientific-ese.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study
I'm not directly linking to the PDFs, but I'd recommend reviewing "The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Medical Disease, Psychiatric Disorders, and Sexual Behavior: Implications for Healthcareï".
The ACE study has a questionnaire listing some general child abuse questions (10 categories). Some items to note:
(from the findings on depression and suicide PDF--note that 7 is an extremely high score which indicates very severe abuse)
An analysis of population attributable risk (that portion of a problem in the overall population whose prevalence can be attributed to specific risk factors) shows that 54% of current depression and 58% of suicide attempts in women can be attributed to adverse childhood experiences.
In general, you might say that if you were not abused as a child your suicide attempt rate would be ~1%, if you were moderately abused it would be about 10%, and if you were severely abused it would be 20% or higher. Completed suicide rates aren't listed, but other studies have shown the correlation between attempts and completed suicides.
These are some of the results of one study. Other studies come to the same conclusion. Child abuse is strongly linked to suicide, both as children and adults.
> when a warrant has been issued by a judge
Seriously? We live in a world where even "after the fact" FISA warrants are not enough for some. Hell, there is currently legislation mooted in various countries that would allow corporations the same kind of powers just because you MIGHT be sharing a movie.
And you think I'm deluded...
No, my left.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
you do know, that you fell for a particular lazy troll?
Stop being pedantic. That's very likely what he was referring to. Prosecuting people over pictures of imaginary children is just ridiculous.
Yet many western countries do this. They also prosecute people over picutres of adults that the court decides might look like a child, and they can also prosecute a husband who has a picture of his wife's tits if his wife is, or looks, under 18.
Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
I'm a big fan of Marlon Brando
So, just for argument's sake... when I was 14 I video-taped myself masturbating on camera. 12 years later, tools came out that let me convert the video to an MPG. 12 years after THAT, is today. I'm an adult, who may or may not possess images of a sexual nature involving a minor (me). Tell me who is harmed if I decide to share them.
I think it is time to distinguish between fiction and reality. In some states (Germany e.g.) even fictional stories without any pictures can be considered child porn, drawings without any actual minor involved are considered that way as well.
I think it is also time to remember that the transition between "child" and "adult" does not happen in the magic of the 18th birthday, but is a process. An 19 year old having a 17 year old girlfriend is perfectly normal, and if they fancy to take nude pictures of each other I find it ridiculous to consider this child porn.
However, for actual photos of actually abused children (or even really raped adults) I will strongly oppose you. What do you think, how will these wounds heal with the child still knowing that perverts all over the world are jerking off watching the evidence of their abuse? How does a traumatized adult feel, when he goes to lets say a job interview, or even just to the bank, knowing that the person he's talking to might also have seen these pictures? As long as the pictures are used and distributed freely on the internet, in my opinion the abuse and the humiliation is still ongoing. I think if we are talking of actual photos of actual rapes it makes perfect sense to ban these and to make their possession punishable by law.
Trolling is a art!
In most places in the US psychiatrists are REQUIRED by law to report any people that come to them for help with pedophilia,
It is really sad to hear that.
In case of a psychiatrist, they should have a confidentiality requirement like e.g. medical staff and clergymen have too: whatever you say to those people (when in function at least) they must keep confidential, even a judge can not overrule that. For that is what allows them to fulfil their duties, the person seeking help must be sure that what he says in the psychiatrist's clinic stays in the clinic.
Of course there is always the ethical issue that when you learn about a crime someone committed, should you report it or not. And I'm glad that there is still the confidentiality, which tells these people that they can not, and are not expected to, reveal criminals.
I was sexually abused as a kid. It did fuck me up a bit, but not too badly, and I got over it. I'm now a relatively happy, well adjusted person - currently single, but have had numerous normal, healthy relationships.
If you're seriously suggesting that I'd be better off dead, you can go fuck yourself.
Careful what you wish for, it might lead to a lot more dead kids. Hint: Dead rape victims can't talk.
Any good forensic examiner would like to disagree with you.
True, you should probably visit a psychiatrist if you think you hear the dead speak, but that does not mean that they can't talk.
Three guesses why the Mafia and certain other organized criminals give you concrete shoes -- or even directly cut out the watery middle-man and simply embed you completely in concrete.
Remember: In the family, the Omertà and oath of silence extends even beyond death.
You are confused. Your confusion is obvious in the last sentence of your post. "It does help discourage it" indicates not just poor expression but also a lack of clarity of thought behind the expression.
Stopping human discourse where people discover what others may think is a completely different action than limiting a market. Stopping discourse is offensive to the very notion of human freedom. This is true even when disagreeable subject matter is involved. We recognize the freedom of the KKK to rant and rave but we arrest if the KKK conspires to injure anyone. That is the line between what is free speech and what is crime. Advocating action to criminalize discourse in order to keep people from dicovering what others think is more dangerous than child pornography.
The fact that child porn can find its way into a computer's cache without any intention to view child porn on the part of the user is completely ignored in your statements. A law that only requires possession without having to prove intent is repugnant and more dangerous than child porn. We know that dishonest and abusive actors have held governmental power in the past. It is resonable to believe that such actors can hold government positions in the future or at this time. The current child porn laws make it possible for abusive officials to damage our lives to the point that child porn would seem frivolous in comparison.
This is really a fill-in-the-blank story. You could easily drop in "malware" or "criminals" or the "evil" empire of your choice and that would easily reboot this conversation. Tor is going to protect whoever uses it.
His PD made it clear that he was absolutely not interested in doing so as it was not likely to work and he'd end up with a longer sentence than he would by pleading guilty to all of it.
Never trust a public defender who says you should plead guilty. They're constantly overworked and will recommend that in 99.99% of the cases regardless of the actual merits. He turned down a fighting chance to save 10 years of his life for what? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
Your tax dollars will be paying for his incarceration for fifteen years because some jackass uploaded CP to his file server and some FBI agent noticed it.
And that jackass created, with practically no effort at all, cannon fodder that would clog the justice and prison system for years. Probably even longer if your friend had tried to fight the charges, as most people getting so extremely fucked over would. Then again this is not exactly new, I remember way back I heard of AOL banning people trying to access chat rooms that had been banned. The new sport was of course to rickroll people into going there and getting innocents banned. If you create enough noise, the signal is lost...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe they angry !
I really love club dresses ,
Because to me, yes, murder is less bad than child abuse.
Even if the child survives?
As noted by his PD, the 180 month sentence is higher than the sentence recommendation for voluntary manslaughter or conspiracy to commit murder.
So, why then didn't he just off the asshole pig from accross the country that got him into trouble? And the expert witness too, who "recovered" the incriminating pictures from his PC. He would have gotten a lesser sentence, and made the internet safer for the rest of us.
Stop being pedantic.
Stop calling innocent people pedantic. You might get them into more trouble than you bargained for...
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
Most countries struggle very hard to get an 80% attendance rate in national elections, you think you can get that for any random piece of traffic? I'm guessing that system would either be stuffed with "can't be arsed" nodes that'll lead to an automatic rejection and if you could only actual votes then "information wants to be free" idealists that'll reject anything or "think of the children" moralists that'll approve anything. Besides in a P2P system who's going to guarantee the backdoor information has been properly added and could be decrypted? You obviously can't trust the peer itself, and you won't know until you actually try...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They go out of their way to rifle to people's books and possessions.
It's astonishing that the convention organizers haven't yet moved it to a safer location. Canadian tourism industry doesn't deserve the convention visitors' dollars, if they can't convince their customs to be more reasonable.
You must realize that half of Slashdot's readership is into kiddie porn, hence the vitriol.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The computer experts at FBI Headquarters are not the same ones that go smashing down doors trying to find abused children.. In fact, the local "smashing down doors" bit is usually done largely by local law enforcement personnel. That means that anything useful the computer experts contribute is a bonus to what local law enforcement (or those in FBI field offices) were doing already.
And cracking open distributors is a very good way to find those that created the images... they had to be uploaded from somewhere. If the authorities are busting a drug dealer, they use that information to go after the bigger fish upstream. In addition, many articles about this topic have pointed out that admission to the most complete networks often requires the uploading of unique images. I'll leave it as a chilling exercise for the reader as to where those images might come from.
...everyone walk instead?
Attaching TOR to child porn or any other unethical or illegal activity is no different than doing the same with cars. So how come the FBI isn't claiming FORD is a vehicle of illegal drugs? Why don;t they attach the internet to lying politicians?
Yes, we all agree it's bullshit to be prosecuted for owning a nude Bart Simpson, but I'm guessing not a lot of people jack off to cartoons, even less are arrested for it, and one or two may have actually been convicted for it. I for one seriously doubt the voracity of some of these stories simply because a more rational explaination is sensationalisim by a journalist eager to attract eyeballs, for example I tried to find court details for the Bart Simpson case when it was reported here in Oz but came up empty handed? Was he really prosecuted for the nude Bart, or was it just one image in a vast collection?
A common tactic used by pedophiles is to trivialise the offense by broadening the definition until it becomes meaningless, for example the congressman who was caught sending sexually explicit texts to 14yo boys engaged in work experience was also instrumental in broadening the scope of sexual offenders list to include things like public urniation and nudity. The tactic is not new or confined to peopdophiles, the Bard wrote about "protesting too much", now I'm not claiming that this is what the journalist is doing but if you assume for a moment that the story is sensationalisim then it certainly becomes a possibility.
Bottom line is I think the nude Bart Simpson case is tabloid bullshit that belongs on snopes, but if you (or anyone else) have a link to some primary sources for it I would be both gratefull and humbled.
Personally I used to think that the right to free speech trumped the victims right to privacy. However that was when I was younger, since that time I have learned ideologies are supposed to be guidelines for wise choices, not a rule book for a dogmatic life. Having 'flip flopped' on the issue over several decades I now firmly believe it should be a offence to knowingly posses what the GP described (images of pre-pubecent child rape, or for that matter any rape). Yes that opinion puts a limit on free speech but it does not have to limit the visual and theatrical arts. Yes it's debatable if jacking off to CP is harmful/helpful to society, but contrary to popular opinion around here we do in fact live in a democracy and the vast majority of the population (including me) think prosecuting these people who jack off to rape videos is The RightThingToDo(TM), like me they are not going to change their minds just because someone, somewhere, (allegedly) abuses the justice system once in a blue moon*.
* - Unlike the (alleged) abusive prosecution above, I know "blue moons" exist because I've seen them first hand on several occasions. Prosecuting the prosecuters who knowingly abuse the justice system is also The RightThingToDo(TM).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So we'll soon see a lot of dead and burned kids?
Being the statistician and cold hearted bastard that I am, I'd guess the logical thing to do when you rape a child is to kill and burn it if, and only if, the sentence is the same for rape and murder. The chance of the kid yelling "that's the guy" is still much higher than you finding anything useful in a heap of cremated bones.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So why not create two crimes. Abuse of a child from a position of authority and a rape/kidnapping? That way you can have different punishments, which might persuade the kidnapper to let the child go.
Sure, letting a child you know and have intimidated is probably less risky then killing him/her, but I doubt a randomly abducted child will keep quiet about the bad man who hurt him/her. So why let the child go and give the police your description, when the punishment will be life in jail either way.
Having all crimes carry extreme penalties removes the inhibition from performing them, once you've done one of them. What are they going to do? Execute you multiple times?
Just imagine if robbing a store meant life in prison. Who in their right mind would give the clerk a chance to get away? They'd walk in, shoot the clerk, then start robbing the place. Less risk of him fighting back AND less chance of getting caught then if you let him live to serve as a witness.
Unless a manga volume involved inappropriate sexual contact with a minor
Some graphic novels originating in Japan do depict inappropriate sexual contact with a fictional minor. The problem comes when child porn laws are written to redefine "involved" to include any depiction of abuse, even if no abuse was actually performed during production.
One other point: I have read the thread so far and it seems that a large portion of the people are complaining that Japanese hentai are what people get busted for. While that may be true in rare occurrences like someone sharing gigabytes of CP manga... I've worked with law enforcement on CP cases, and they really don't care that much about comics. Yes it's part of the law, but at least in the US, the FBI normally goes after the people with REAL CP and not cartoons. And even then, they go after the people with true collections and not 1-2 images in their cache that they stumbled into while searching random sites. Please link me to a news article that proves me wrong if people are getting busted for single images, since I am only an individual person and could have missed something. And before someone says "they don't report on small time CP busts," yes they do. Every time I've been involved with a CP case, the media is all over it as soon as they find out. They love to put the 'bad guy gets busted' stories in the news.
If they don't care about comics, why are the comics illegal. There is no harm in sharing even gigabytes of hentai images and the law that allows busting people for possesing/sharing virtual child porn is clearly bad. And yes, there are people who had problems just for small amount of hentai images, see here: http://www.animenation.net/blog/2010/08/02/sweden-fines-translator-for-having-hentai-images/ (arrested for one scanlation) or here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.175488-Hentai-Collector-Sentenced-to-Jail-Over-Obscene-Material?page=1 (arrested for six books)
It's history repeating itself again. We saw similar nonsense when Lolita from Nabokov or Howl from Gingsberg were initialy published. How many people will need to be busted for lawmakers to get the the idea that the illegality of something must be based on it's level of social dangerousness and not on some false and ever-changing morality? The proponents of those bans often say that hentai/Howl/Lolita/whatever has no artistic value and is obscene, so it should be illegal, but who are they to judge the artistic value of something? And even if something realy has no artistic value, is it enough to justify its ilegality if it is otherwise harmless? I don't think so.
I agree with the rest of your post (creation and sharing of child porn involving real children should be prosecuted, maybe with some exceptions to cover cases like 17 years old partners e-mailing nude images of themself to each other).
My guess is its not Tor that is preventing them from finding the distributors and downloaders of CP. I would hazard its other priorities. There are well know vulnerabilities in Tor's secrecy all you need to do is run enough exit nodes.
Tor does two things with regard to finding pedophiles.
1. It makes it a little more complex than just setting up a honey pot collecting IP address and then phoning up the ISP. So not just any agent can do it, it has to be folks with real technical skills, and supply is no doubt limited.
2. It creates a little chilling effect on actions against perps. If they can't make it look more likely they were discovered through other means, it exposes to what degree the three letter agencies actually monitor and have compromised Tor. That might lead to a loss of intelligence access about higher priority targets. Frankly if I were running a terror network or large organized crime ring I'd be very tempted to have some low level (expendable) gang members send each other CP. Knowing just obsessed our government is with finding anyone who has gone anywhere near it. Seeing if the expendables get picked up our not would be a good way to know if the, secrecy and to a lesser extent the integrity of my communications channel was solid.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I tried to find court details for the Bart Simpson case when it was reported here in Oz but came up empty handed
According to this Wikipedia article, the case is McEwen v. Simmons & Anor [2008] NSWSC 1292: "In my view, the Magistrate was correct in determining that, in respect of both the Commonwealth and the New South Wales offences, the word 'person' included fictional or imaginary characters".
Censorship regulations are always selectively enforced. That movie probably would have got noticed if it were a female being tortured, since the point of the law is intended to "protect" women and lock up men. Doesn't apply to Barbie Broccoli abusing Daniel.
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/scjudgments/2008nswsc.nsf/6ccf7431c546464bca2570e6001a45d2/ef4625a9db3003f1ca25751500066d48?OpenDocument
TLDR-
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Dear pervert,
You are going to jail for looking at Child porn, and you are going to jail for creating a program (aka polling script) to help you find more Child porn quicker.
Watching child porn is punishable by jail (and in some jurisdictions decapitation) so you better be really careful about where you go on vacation.
I would also like to point out that manga pictures are classified as child porn in Europe. (google simon lundstrom sweden manga child)
Enjoy your new bunk mate.
If there's no demand, there's no supply
therefore it is valid to go after demand
Worked great for pot. We started imprisoning potheads in Federal pens, and no one grew weed anymore! *dusts hands* Mission accomplished.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
"Obscene" depictions of children, even if drawn, is wrong and has no place in a civilized country.
Bollocks. In a civilized country people should not interfere in other people business unless they actually did something that hurts other people freedom. In some countries, the obscene depiction of Muhammed is forbidden and yet we don't agree on persecution of caricaturist on this one. There are plenty of movies, books, paintings where children are abused, not just sexually, but eaten alive. Slippery slope my friend...
I agree with you completely
But why do you think your observations have any relevancy to the production and consumption of CHILD pornography?
Increased availability of porn is positively correlated with a reduction in sexual violence. Why exactly would his observation NOT have relevance?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sunny-side-of-smut
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
I bet the number of CP producers turning a profit is quite small...
You're dead wrong there, I'm sorry to say. For-profit CP producers are often human traffickers, who enslave children as part of their predation - and human trafficking is a booming industry. There's no question that sexual abuse is a behavioral issue, and I'm very unhappy with the current solution of prosecuting owners of Very Large Numbers as though they were rapists, but there's a lot of money changing hands, within the US, on the backs of abused children.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Well yeah, because fuck zombies.
Of course it can. "The law" is not a computer program, it's interpreted by people. And the law and those people can't somehow infer that an entire medium is now illegal because someone used it to do something illegal. Movies, photos, and comics (Japanese or not) are entirely the same in this regard.
People want to pretend this is some slippery slope, but you know, it really isn't. Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
How can bet parent rated +4 informative? Comics or drawings of virtual (nonexistent) minors in indecent poses are clearly illegal in many western countries including USA, Sweden or Britain. Many people are prosecuted for its possesion even if no real children were harmed in its creation. See http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.175488-Hentai-Collector-Sentenced-to-Jail-Over-Obscene-Material?page=1 or http://www.animenation.net/blog/2010/08/02/sweden-fines-translator-for-having-hentai-images/ for examples.
You can make a porn movie about rape without actually commit a rape. A lot of people have fantasies about rape so jerking off on such a material make them happy. And no one get hurt. Would you arrest the people for watching it?
Same goes for any graphical depiction including child pornography. As long as nobody gets hurt, nobody approach any child sexually, or any other way abusively, there's no case for persecuting and harassing people about their fantasies.
If you do, you basically violate one of the most basic freedom: the freedom of thought, the freedom of imagination. Police people thoughts and you will soon find that you don't want to live in such a society.
So your fetish of ax murder photos spreads and scumbags start axe murdering people to make new videos for you. You are supporting the murder of innocent people.
DUH, again, you think the meterial is made out of magical fairy dust? Look up "Snuff Films" for your murder fetish, You dont have people lining up to be willfully murdered for your films.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
and we need to arrest people based on maybes
While I generally agree with your point I do think there are times when punishing people who have not actually harmed anyone else yet is right. The most obvious example is drink driving. Even if that person doesn't hit someone it is so irresponsible and dangerous we choose not to allow it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That argument falls flat on its face once you consider drawn CP. Porn involving fictional minors is just as illegal as real CP in many jurisdictions. In which way does attempting to reduce the demand for drawn CP stem the supply for real CP?
I'm all for stopping real CP. The laws tend to be on the rabid side (cf. teenagers getting arrested because their girlfriends sent them pictures of their breasts) but actual CP involves sex with people who can't give informed consent and who will probably take lasting psychological damage from the ordeal. We should be more careful when prosecuting it so as not to create victims where there are none (such as in the teenager case) but the basic idea of prosecuting it is valid.
Drawn CP, however, is another thing. Yes, there probably is CP that was drawn using real sexual intercourse as a template but I'd estimate that that's the exception, not the rule. After all, any semi-talented artist with a basic understanding of human anatomy can crank out smut with any given fictitious character without any template at all. And there are plenty mostly anatomically accurate smut drawings that obviously have no counterpart in real life so if you really want to and are capable of drawing realistic-looking CP you don't need a template other than perhaps a few perfectly legal art reference books.
The "treat fictitious characters as real persons" type of prosecution seems more driven by outrage (or, as others have noted, a desire for power) than by actual reason. It looks good to the "think of the children" crowd and thus it's done, whether it makes sense or not. The question is whether this blind moralism might actually harm society more than it helps.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I disagree. By your argument you have "free speech" as long as your expression itself isn't impaired. That's hardly possible, even for the most repressive regimes. Sew your mouth shut and cut off your fingers?
The whole point of the principle of free speech is that you can express yourself without fear of consequences (or as you say, "responsibility") or reprisal, especially from government. To the extent that one needs to fear reprisal above and beyond logical counter-argument, they should have anonymous speech.
The viewer/reader/listener should weigh any unattributed speech with skepticism, but banning it through the power of the state? No way.
[Unlike child pornography,] hobbyist music carries no risk of jail
No risk of jail per se, but there's still a risk of financial ruin if some major music publisher sues you on grounds that your song is too similar to an existing song that you might have heard ten years ago on the radio. Compare Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music
I simply can not believe that this has to be explained, but apparently it does...
The mechanism by which crime scene photos are created is entirely different than that of CP. The photos of, say a murder scene, are created after the fact. There creation is utterly independent of the act or acts that caused the death. It should be obvious that the same can not be said of CP images.
I guess he really meant piracy, even though privacy is correct as well. Because let's face it: in the eyes of the US government, there ain't not crime more heinous as sharing a couple of files with your friends. They'll abolish all basic freedoms in the blink of an eye to stop piracy... if they could get away with it.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
For looking at freenet portal pages and noticing most of the links were for child porn pages?
You don't think I actually visited the pages or viewed any images do you? Christ no, I've no interest in that.
Once a mechanism is in place to penetrate Tor, every asshole in law enforcement will manufacture a reason that they, too, should be allowed in. This is a place to defend our civil liberties in the US. There has long been an adversarial relationship between the police and the public. My parents taught me that the police were our friends; boy was that illusion shattered when my ex-wife had me arrested for some made-up b.s. to get me thrown out of the house when she decided she wanted a divorce.
It is true that slimeballs will take advantage of Tor; but they tend to cluster among themselves. Why let the slimeballs with badges in? I say "No".
One word - "Child"
If Child Porn could exist without actual children being sexually abused I could see your point of view (for the sake of argument), but when actual children are in the child porn, it is evidence of sexual abuse of a child.
Cartoon Child Porn is obviously different since no actual children are involved in the production of the porn.
I'm sure we can both agree that is wrong.
Ken
You are ignoring the fact that sexual abuse of a child is illegal and child porn is evidence of that crime being comitted.
I'd like to hear more about your allegation that "It's legal to share videos of someone torturing, killing, raping the corpse of someone else and feeding it to vultures."
Ken
Child Pornography is Illegal, and yet, at the same time, the mass media wants us to oogle at young girls dressed in skimpy outfits, singing some songs produced by five different hit song makers and oozing of sexual innuendos. Think about Britney Spears.
But oh yeah, as long as they are 18, its all rightyo! No wonder people are lusting over underaged girls, we are being forcefed this crap ALL THE TIME. This is stupid bullshit that big companies with enough money can advertise with SEX all the time, and Porn can be found everywhere with adults in it, and then at the same time we are prosecuting child porn distributors like they are murderers, while these advertisers and big media companies get paid big bucks.
We are being fed the image of "young and sexy is good, buy this!" and then we wonder why we have so much people interested in child pornography.. it's sad really that our lust for money overcomes everything in our modern world. Good thing it's crumbling to pieces as we speak!
GeoKone.NET
Possession of your own videos of you yourself masterbating as a child hurts no one, but when you decide to share that video of a masterbating child you are feeding into the child porn website is fueling the desires of child abusers that could lead to abuse of a child down the road.
Child abusers have "something wrong" in their heads, they don't handle things the way other people do (I do not claim this as a clinical certainty based on studying child porn sharers, it is something I've read from reliable sources)... Feeding their desires could cause them to want to "up the stakes" and try to return the favor by taping actual child abuse to share.
The real concern is how are you going to prove it's your 12 year-old penis in the video?
Ken
Oh, and it's far easier to catch people who look at pictures than it is to stop those who are doing the molesting.
Right...You have to update your passport, and the Vatican is so far away. Airfare is just too expensive.
by the parents?
I think you've collapsed the fact that most children that are molested are molested by relatives, that includes parents, siblings, relatives (aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.) into "parents". Child abuse by strangers IS rare by comparison.
Ken
You forgot the most important part of this equation:
If he hadn't had a wide-open fileshare the jackass couldn't upload the CP for the FBI agent to notice it... Not defending the sentence of 180 months, but he created the environment that led to his arrest/conviction (as you noted, he did "posess" the images).
Ken
where do you deluded naive people come from?
you really think it's that simple?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's just pictures.
Are you nuts? How is this just pictures? Are you telling me the children being exploited in those pictures are actually fake? Are they computer generated imaging?
- OF COURSE NOT! They are very real and some of them are actually kidnapped and abused. Even those children that are actually paid to do that on their will, should be prevented from doing that because they are (probably) not mature enough to make those decisions on their own.
Repeat after me: ALL UNDERAGE CHILDREN SHOULD BE PROTECTED
Bugs. Unpublished algorithm vulnerabilities. Compromised compilers and libraries. Compromised binary packages.
So most parents think it's better that these creeps go out in the park and take pictures of their kids to wank to instead of looking at drawn pictures?
Most parents are sick fucks.
A lot of parents want to give the death penalty for anyone who thinks like a sick fuck.
I don't think that makes children any safer and until there are some actual scholarly studies on the subject there is no real evidence that sick thoughts correlate with sick behavior.
Completely failed at reading comprehension.
Did you read the part where I don't click links to child porn?
There's no reason why it should be tied to drinking, and someone who is just a bad driver can be as dangerous as a good driver who is drunk.
So if we take that back to sexuality, we should also arrest people who look at rape and incest porn? How about people who take it past pictures and actually engage in bondage, rape role playing, etc? Adult women don't like to be raped any more than children, why isn't "harmful" porn about that considered illegal?
taking away all CP...does help discourage it.
How do you know this is true? Is there evidence for this assertion? Availability of adult porn is associated with decreases in sexual assaults. I don't see any reason to assume that this would be different for child porn and sexual assaults of children. Do you have any data to support your assertion?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers which probably is worth far more than money
I think you are seriously overestimating how valuable it is for a child abuser to know that there are people who like watching what he is doing. Producing and distributing child sex abuse imagery is one of the riskiest things a person can do -- almost no countries would hesitate to imprison people for it, and the jail sentences are often long or indefinite. Emotional validation is nowhere near sufficient to justify taking such risks; money or some other form of trade (e.g. one abuser trading new pictures with another) is basically a necessity.
Sure, there is the occasional idiot who produces child abuse images for the reason you stated; such people are sometimes caught when the police are going after low-hanging fruit i.e. people whose only crime is possession of child abuse images. The really dangerous people are the ones who are not so stupid, the ones who take real precautions and who demand some form of payment for their images/videos. My understanding is that most of the child abuse imagery out there today was produced by that second category, by the people who are turning it into an enterprise of sorts. Those were the sort of people involved with Dreamboard (for those who do not remember, this was a truly depraved website for trading images of child abuse that was recently taken down), the sort involved with Yardbird (a group that used anonymous remailers and Usenet, which had escaped notice by the police until one of their members was inadvertently arrested), the sort who run "modeling" agencies in Eastern Europe, and so forth.
The problem, of course, is that the sort of people I described above are not doing the sort of stupid things that allows the police to catch "low hanging fruit." These are not people who share their images on Kazaa (the FBI has an ongoing program to catch people who do), they are the sort of people who know how to mitigate and manage risk and how to use opsec to protect themselves. Catching them is a challenge, which is why it only happens rarely and only after years of investigative work.
Of course, law enforcement agencies need to keep up their arrest numbers and need to remind people that they are catching "pedophiles." Thus you see efforts to catch low-hanging fruit, e.g. honeypot websites, efforts to catch people who download sex abuse images from peer-to-peer networks, arrests for possession of such images. These efforts do little to combat the production of child abuse imagery, and only catch idiots and people who were either curious or who just wanted to satisfy some bizarre urge. People who produce child abuse imagery have no way to count how many people are sharing those images on peer to peer networks, so even if your point were valid, such efforts are pointless.
The original reason for making the possession of child abuse imagery illegal was the assumption (which at the time was valid) that anyone who possesses such imagery must have purchased it. That assumption is not valid in this century; I would be willing to be that the majority of people who possess child abuse imagery did not pay for it or in any way contribute to its production. We may find the images disturbing (and I would be suspicious of someone who does not), we may have difficulty understanding why anyone would want to masturbate to such imagery, we may not understand why people who collect and create detailed categories of such imagery, but we should not allow our disgust or our poor understanding of psychology lead us to assume that the low-hanging fruit represents a serious threat to children. There is a difference between someone with perverse fantasies and someone who is actually harming children.
Palm trees and 8
That logic didn't work very well during Prohibition, and it isn't working in the War on Drugs either. Granted, my examples have a lot more moral ambiguity than child pornography, but historically, chasing the recipients of an illicit good isn't as effective as hunting down the source. Its just easier.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
If it is pictures of real kids being molested, real harm has been done to the kids. If you let consumer pay for watching kids being molested, you can bet that more kids will be molested to feed that "market".
After all, not so long ago, it was pretty standard in fiction to talk about rape as "a fate worse than death".
I'm pretty sure quite a lot of people still feel the same, although they mostly won't admit it openly.
Naval Intelligence. But? Same smell, different orifice,
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
As horrible as child abuse is, it is utterly irrational grandstanding to say that child abuse is worse than murder. If I asked you if you would rather be raped or killed, do you really mean to tell me that you would answer "killed"? If not, then murder is worse than any form of abuse. The heinousness of a crime is directly proportional to its effect on the victim. There can be no crime more heinous, therefore, than any crime that deprives the victim of his or her existence unwillingly.
I can't speak for the GP, but I would answer "killed". It is a grave misjudgement to take for granted that your experience of the world is universal. Consider the suicide rate among victims of childhood sexual abuse.
"The lifetime prevalence of having at least 1 suicide attempt was 3.8%. Adverse childhood experiences in any category increased the risk of attempted suicide 2- to 5-fold."
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?volume=286&issue=24&page=3089
Is it worse to take away a life, or risk leaving a survivor who wants to die? Some people might consider a lifetime sentence like that a fate worse than death.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Unfortunately, this is one of the problems we've got today, with politicians realizing the popularity in taking an anti sex crime hard-line stance. There are few things more universally accepted than the idea a child molester deserves harsh punishment. The problem, of course, is that true child molesters really aren't very common. Certainly not common enough to sustain a division of the FBI devoted to nothing but capturing them. They need better "performance metrics" than that! So what you wind up with is all of this vast over-reaching....
Child porn is one of those convenient "value added" crimes easily attached to the pursuit of child molesters... After all, the producer of it is clearly abusing the kids involved, and it's not hard to get the public to buy into the fact that anyone obtaining that sort of material is just as guilty, right? Except no, they're very OFTEN not!
Many years ago, I ran a computer bulletin board system, and on at least 2 or 3 occasions, people uploaded child porn photo collections, zipped up into archives and incorrectly described as completely different types of files. (I recall catching one, one time, that simply said "Great OS/2 screen saver collection!") As soon as I discovered such things, I immediately deleted them -- but what if I hadn't caught it before someone else did who reported it to authorities? Yep, you can bet I would have been arrested and charged with possession and intent to redistribute, or at least something along those lines!
And perhaps some would say, "Well, you ARE guilty if you found the stuff and didn't report the person who uploaded it to you!" But again, I'm afraid I don't agree. MANY times, people using the BBS's used to download a file from source A and immediately re-upload it to destination B, without ever looking at it first. Most people just assumed the descriptions stated were accurate and they wanted to earn upload credits, so they could download something else they wanted. There's a good probability the uploader of those files had no clue what was in them, and maybe the site THEY got them from wasn't aware either.
Is this a real article? Or is it just an attempt to make pedophiles feel safe using Tor so they can be swept up?
Surely if investigation efforts weren't progressing they wouldn't be publicizing them.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I know I'm wondering and I think it'd be beneficial for everyone if someone could perhaps explain how a website can be hosted completely within the Tor network. It just sounds impossible but obviously they're doing it. Does it bypass DNS and go straight to an IP? How would people find it in the first place if it's not in a Google search because it's not on the open and indexed internet? How does anyone's web browser navigate to a page on a server without knowing the end point? You can't just send a request down the Tor network that says "I want to get to a page called this, go find it." That seems to violate every rule of how the internet works on a basic level. It seems like someone attempting to host a website like this would have to expose themselves at some sort of level that would make them as easy to catch as any other website. Anyone know how this is possible?
Actually I don't know of any western country that prosecutes people for pictures of adults who simply look young. You're lying.
It is the only situation where possession of evidence is criminal in itself.
Possession of state secrets is evidence that someone leaked them. Never mind "innocent until proven guilty," the burden of proof is on you that you didn't knowingly possess or acquire them.
To a lesser degree and depending on the attitude of the police and prosecutors, the same frequently goes for possession of marked bills that the cops know were used in a crime, possession of counterfeit currency, possession of stolen goods, etc.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
i thought it was pretty clear(though probably a logical fallacy). widespread availability of depictions of one particular activity have not lead to an increase in related activity. therefore widespread depictions of another activity should not lead to the same.
yelling out child porn in the middle of your arguments doesn't change facts. you would make a better point by correlating 'illegality, social acceptance, & instances' of other activities.
better yet, point out that 'adult porn' is generally always not rape, whereas CP always is. if this was the point you were trying to make, you should have been clearer about it. English is not the first language of everyone reading this, nuances in language differ between English speaking cultures (even in the same countries) and to me that read kind of like 'no rational discussion is required on the matter because it's CHILD PORN'. which is essentially a worthless non-argument.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Supply and demand indicates that it would actually increase the price of such materials to the point from free to something much higher than free, creating an economic incentive to harm children. You know, sort of like drugs.
In at least one US state, penetratively-raping a preschooler will just about guarantee a multi-decade-before-parole or possibly even life-with-the-possibility-of-parole sentence unless you plea down.
Killing the same child will just about guarantee life in prison without parole or death unless you plead down.
If the case is high-profile, the prosecutor is unlikely to offer a plea unless he has a weak case, you've got something very valuable to offer, or there are extenuating circumstances demanding compassion, such as a mental defect.
In that same state, mere possession of small amounts of child porn that is prosecuted at the state level will probably get you 5-10 with parole likely after about half of that, and possibly deferred-adjudication-probation on a non-sex-offender charge if you have something to offer as part of a plea bargain or if circumstances such as "I'm 19, she's my 17 year old girlfriend" make you look very sympathetic.
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I love it when people make shit up on the internet.
You might as well claim that alcohol should be illegal because the mob was a major seller of alcohol during Prohibition and they also participated in sex trafficking, therefore alcohol==child rape.
In short, he would have probably served a shorter time if he actually was a pedo who raped and killed his own kids without taking pictures of it.
The person in question got a 15 year federal sentence for "advertising" child porn. If he gets 15% off for good behavior, that's 12.75 years of time.
If he murdered his children, he'd probably get 25+ years, life, or death in state court. At best, he wouldn't get parole for well over a decade and likely would serve much longer.
If he raped them with penetration, he would probably get a nominal 10-20 year sentence if they were teenagers and much longer if they were younger, but would likely be eligible for release after 50-75% of the sentence. If he merely fondled them the sentence would be much lower.
Bear in mind that if the feds charge you with ONLY a handful of counts of child porn and there are no aggravating circumstances, you'll probably get a sentence of 5-10 years, not the 15 years this guy got.
I do agree, this guy got screwed. He's not innocent but the charge should be something like "through gross negligence and without taking reasonable and customary steps to prevent or report it, allowing others to use a computer under your control to transmit, receive, and/or advertise child pornography" with a sentence of no more than a few years in prison and confiscation of the computer equipment. The key phrases being "gross negligence" and "not taking reasonable and customary steps to prevent or report it" - we don't want to turn computer operators who make reasonable good faith efforts to keep this stuff off of their servers and/or report it into criminals.
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I'm a vegan bridge troll. I only eat corpses that wished to die. Yum!
The courts tossed it. Since that court ruling, if the person in the picture is over 18 and is not a minor in the eyes of the law, that's pretty much an absolute defense to CP charges.
Ditto if the picture is not of a person.
However, if the person in the photo looks real and looks under well under 18, the burden of proof is on the defense to prove otherwise. I expect this to change once computer-generated imagery becomes so good that a court will say "it used to be that 99.999% of pornographic pictures that looked convincingly like a kid well under 18 were of a kid under 18, but now that is no longer the case, so the burden mush shift to the prosecution."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think where things go a bit astray is that authorities view child pornography almost exactly like they do the drug trade. You have producers, dealers, and users.
Producers of drugs and child pornography fill the same basic role: they create a product for which there is a demand.
Dealers are a little different. Drug dealers, of course, take money in exchange for the drugs. Child porn "dealers," on the other hand, would be those running websites, most of which are free. I think very few people are making any actual money from it.
Then you have the users/consumers. When it comes to drugs, users consume the drugs themselves (usually.) Since child porn has gone almost 100% digital, though, there is no "consumption" in the sense that a person uses up a finite product. People who view child porn can also share it (read: make copies) so they can also be "dealers."
Authorities try to go after all three tiers in the child porn market, just like they do with drugs, seemingly failing to realize that money is not a key factor in child porn the way it is with drugs. It makes the most sense to focus on the producers of child porn, and those who operate websites distributing it, rather than people who may have downloaded it. In other words: attack it the way copyright infringement is generally attacked, by going after those who make the infringement possible rather than trying to hunt down large numbers of individual infringers. (This is not meant to draw any kind of moral parallel between copyright infringement and child porn, nor between drug use and child porn, it's just about enforcement strategy.)
On the other hand, I can kind of see why they go after individual users: publicly embarrassing people either due to their drug use or taste for child porn could be seen as a significant deterrent. But then that's really nothing to do with any kind of justice, it's just a cynical use of the system to make people behave a certain way.
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If you were a small fan of Marlon Brando, then I would recommend that you steer clear of the other NAMBLA.
But since you are a big fan, I'll still recommend you steer clear of them unless you are carrying a badge and watching them to make sure they stay legal.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some products simply should not be allowed to be produced.
Products that require molesting children for others' entertainment are high on this list.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I can't speak for child porn, but I have given photographs that I have taken to others simply because I know it brings them pleasure and in giving them pleasure, I get pleasure.
I imagine the same motivation drives many teenage "sexters" sharing images of their own bodies.
I also imagine that this same motivation drives many adults whose risk-assessment skills are so lacking that they don't appreciate the risk they are taking by 1) making child-porn pictures, and 2) letting them out of their own hands / out of their control.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This has happened at a minimum in England, New Zealand, and the United States. There are still easily findable references to a U.S. pornstar named Melissa Bertsch having to testify in court several times (once in England involving a military officer) about how old she was in a set of pictures.
(The English military officer in question was found not guilty, IIRC, though I can't find the outcome online. In another case in the U.S. the prosecutor wanted to keep prosecuting even after it was disclosed that the images were of a 20-year-old woman because the defendant thought it was child porn.)
In New Zealand, there was a recent (within the last few years) case of someone convicted for having had a collection of pictures of a model who was over 18, but looked younger. I can't find the reference. It was of interest because it was clearly presented that the model was over 18, and the court decided that it didn't matter. I don't remember the sentence, I'm afraid, though the Wikipedia page on the general laws implies that it may have just been a fine in that situation -- but note the relatively large number of countries on the list.
It's not something I like in this case, but freedom for everyone means freedom for some criminals too. It's delusional to pretend that there's any way to actually stop this kind of thing. The technological cat is out of the bag. If they get TOR, the criminals will move to whatever other technology, and they'll have to go for that, and we get stuck in and endless loop of cat and mouse.
A video of a murder is not illegal, but a snuff film is. The distinction is that the first would be a recording of something that was happening anyway, while the action in the second was performed for the purpose of recording it.
As you say, increased availability "could conceivably increase the occurrence of child rape" among those who would be satisfied by "mere" imagery.
But you are ignoring the other side:
Many people - perhaps more than 5-10% of adult males - have a small part of them that finds such imagery sexually stimulating, but their moral code, social conditioning, fear of damage to their marriage or reputation, and perceived difficulty in getting such images without getting caught prevent them from even trying. If such images were widely available or available with less of a stigma, more of these people would seek out such images. A good percentage of them would wind up hurting their marriages and ability to be a full-time father. A few of them might find that the images are "not enough" and they might go on to rape their own kids.
There are a lot of "mights" here, both in your statement and in mine. Obviously, no controlled, reliable, large-scale studies have been done on this.
The bottom line:
We can't say definitively whether making child porn more widely available and less socially unacceptable will increase or decrease the overall number of children who are raped or otherwise sexually exploited. We CAN reasonably say that if it is increased, SOME children who would otherwise become victims will be spared harm and that SOME children will be harmed who would otherwise not be.
Oh, and this completely ignores the psychological harm to those whose images are circulating: By far most victims of child pornography would rather that the images be seen by only a relatively small number of people vs. them being seen by a relatively large number of people.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Even moreso, let's say I'm browsing porn and I come across a huge archive of CP. What would my reaction be in the current legal climate? Back up all of my documents and license keys (specifically excluding any browser caches), buy a new hard drive *IMMEDIATELY*, and, while reinstalling my OS and all of my software onto the new drive, remove the platters from the old drive and: If glass, shatter then and put them in the blender until reduced to dust; if metal, place in a bucket of thermite and ignite. From there, simply hope and pray that my IP is purged from the site's logs before they're raided (if ever, since... who's going to report that they foind such a thing in the current legal climate?).
If simply having a thumbnail in my browser cache wasn't enough to land me in prison for years and get me branded as a sex offender and pedophile for the rest of my life, my reaction would be to simply report the site to the proper authorities, clear my browser cache, and get on with my life.
That is the problem with posession laws. If you find it by accident you're just as screwed as the guy seeking it out. If you report finding it, you're admitting that you have it (in your cache at the very least) and you're just as screwed as the guy who ignored it and was simply unlucky enough to have his IP in the logs when the site got raided. You should be able to report finding it, where you foud it, and how you found it, without fear of prosecution for posession (which is a foregone conclusion if you found it on the internet). Until this becomes a reality, the FBI is going to have one hell of a time tracking the stuff down; once it becomes possible to report it without landing yourself in prison, many people who come across it will do their part to make the FBI's job easier.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Seed "dark sites" with filenames that imply child porn videos.
Then LMAO when the horny old men get rick-rolled.
OK, that's just a thought experiment. I would advise against visiting such sites for any reason. If the feds ever do figure out how to monitor who is visiting those sites, you don't want to be on their suspected-pervert list.
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the biggest problem is the abuse of kids that is a part of the production of the porn.
we have Kidnapping
physical abuse of the kids
Drugging the kids
selling people
and thats not even getting into the whole thing of an adult having sex with a kid half his size.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Are you male (in an era of same-sex weddings I have to ask)?
If you are you need to cover your legal butt by immediately reporting this film, along with the point in the movie the offending image can be found, to the FBI, your local police, your local sensationalist news outlet (or a one in a nearby city or state if your local news outlets are reasonably rational).
Failure to do so can get you branded as a kiddie-porn-lover and no amount of hiding behind an "AC" nick will protect you.
---
I exaggerate only slightly, for effect. Seriously, you make some very good points.
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"depicting or apparently depicting a minor" to paraphrase the current US law (I'm not going to Google it, but if you want to find yourself on that particular watchlist, you're more than welcome to look it up).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Piracy is killing the for-profit music industry and that part of the non-money-oriented industry that requires money to exist (e.g. artists who sell album and videos for just enough to cover the costs of producing their art).
It is not hurting artists who give away their stuff for free because 1) they don't need the cash and 2) the cost of production is small enough to eat. Just look at all the free stuff by non-professionals out there on YouTube and elsewhere.
Child Porn production can roughly be divided along similar lines:
* The stuff that is made for profit
* The stuff that is made for barter, or given away with the understanding that those receiving it will eventually "return the favor" as part of an implied social contract
* The stuff that is given away because the "artist"/producer gets to feel good knowing others are seeing his work.
Piracy (distributing copyrighted material without permission of the copyright owner) will encourage, not discourage, the last group.
Interestingly, since it's considered evidence of a crime, I doubt most child porn is copyrightable. That doesn't mean it is in the public domain, only that the creator has no right to control its distribution. The exceptions might be images that were created either at a time or in a country where they were legally produced, or images such as medical images which, while it can be used as porn, was created lawfully and can still be used for a lawful purpose. In such cases the producer or his successor-of-interest likely has an enforceable copyright. Yes, folks, a medical doctor or forensic photographer can probably use the DMCA to force CP sites to take down pirated copies of his legitimate medical photographs of children's up-close-and-personal private parts.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There's no reason why it should be tied to drinking, and someone who is just a bad driver can be as dangerous as a good driver who is drunk.
That's why there is a driving test.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
But without that word, it misses the key point of the sentence, which is that it is not limited to actual abuse (i.e. that it can also be caused by the mere perception of abuse where none exists). It's an awkward concept to get across in one sentence. Perhaps I should have worded it as:
...isn't limited to actual instances of sexual abuse (or even actual instances of abuse in general).
*shrugs*
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The definition of obscenity is a very high and somewhat flexible bar, but yes, some sexual images involving consenting adults are nominally illegal in the United States. They are hard to prosecute but there have been successful prosecutions in the United States even in the last couple of decades.
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The military rules aren't always the same as civilian rules.
If he had been an American who was over there on vacation, and was charged, AND if he had enough money for a good lawyer, he could probably beat the rap PROVIDED the camera angle was "normal" for photographing a similar child in a bathing suit - e.g. not aimed at or zoomed in on the privates.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Of course, the problem is, in the original message there was no mention of chess, that angle was only brought up in his reply...
Minors should be allowed to film themselves for documentary purposes, and parents should be allowed to film their children for documentary purposes if the films are held closely to those involved until all actors are and age when most adults are emotionally mature (typically low-20s), financially-independent (typically living on their own without parental support for several months), AND legal adults (typically 18, unless mentally retarded) and at that time the actors are given control / veto power over further use of the images.
I recognize that, like adult pornography, the existence of pornography or of non-pornographic photos which are commonly used as pornography taken of people when they were children is harmful to society. However, this must be balanced against the rights of people to document their own lives and the rights of adults to disseminate such documentary photographs or videos even if they were taken before the now-adult was of legal age.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In the decaying remains of Soviet Russia...
Zombies f*ck YOU!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think we often miss the point of why relatives are so often the perpetrators of child abuse. It's a proximity and trust thing. If "strangers" could get that level of trust easily (say, with candy, videogames, music, fancy vans with no windows, or anything else you might warn your kids about) I think child abuse by people the victims don't know would be far more common.
Another key point is we often lump all child abuse into one grouping. A whopping 84% of all child abuse is done by a child's biological parents, but 60% of child *sexual* abuse is done by people known to the child but who are not family members (babysitters, teachers, family friends, neighbors etc). People completely unknown to the child only comprise about 10% of sexual abuses, most of the rest are family. You were close; family members are FAR more common perpetrators than strangers, but that third category of abusers - non-family members in authority positions - make up the majority of sexual abusers.
Sources:
http://faq.acf.hhs.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/70/~/who-typically-abuses-children%3F
http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/child-sexual-abuse.aspx
Of course, all of this explains why child abuse in any form is such a violation of the kids in question; these are the people who are supposed to be teaching kids about and protecting kids from the world, but instead these people are harming them. These children tend to learn there IS no safe place or person, and that's a tough lesson to learn that young.
As a brief anecdote (feel free to skip if it's TL;DR. It only serves as a personal example proving no statistics, just how it sometimes happens):
My "inappropriate touching" guy was my piano teacher when I was 9. He had all sorts of "games" to play when I did well on the lessons. I knew the guy; he was from our church ward, and he was always sort of antisocially creepy, like the house the kids don't want to trick or treat at kind of thing. Shit started to get WAY creepy though. That's a difficult spot to be in as a kid; my folks PAY this guy to teach me piano one hour a week, and I really was learning the piano, and he was a nice enough guy when he wasn't being creepy and pushy as fuck, so what was I supposed to do? I mean, some of the stuff was sorta... oogily nice at the time, I guess, but when I thought about it after the fact it was just half guilt (shame? shrug) and half gross. I didn't want to see the guy in jail forever, or whatever; just to get him to knock it off and not feel... responsible for any of it, I guess. I just ended up quitting piano, instead of dealing with it directly. Looking back, I wouldn't say it damaged me permanently or anything, but it was an odd and emotionally complicated way to learn how to "make the white stuff come out" (admittedly, certain specifics got burned permanently into memory). Last I heard, some 25 years ago, a different kid DID tell his folks, and the guy ended up getting arrested. Not sure what happened after that. To this day, I don't have any hate for the guy; it wouldn't serve any purpose. OTOH, I do sure as *hell* keep tabs on who watches my little girls a lot more closely because of it.
While I generally agree with your point I do think there are times when punishing people who have not actually harmed anyone else yet is right.
I realize you replied to a part of my comment that mentioned "maybes," but I don't think that applies. In one situation, someone is putting others' lives in danger (which has been proven), and in the other, they're not (or, at least, it certainly hasn't been proven in this specific case). Not only that, but I view it as a complete waste of time to go after someone looking at pictures, and believe that the ones doing the raping (the ones hurting the children) should be the ones punished. Actually, in this case, the rapist is indeed the one doing the damage (like a drunk driver might), not the person looking at images.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Interesting or insightful perhaps, but definitely NOT funny.
I say this on behalf of everyone who was raped in a church or by someone acting under the church's authority or color of authority.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They should do what China is probably already doing:
Set up enough TOR nodes that look like they are run by average-joe volunteers that heavy TOR users will, sooner or later, wind up sending at least some incriminating traffic "end to end" through government-controlled TOR servers.
Once the government knows that Joe American with a specific IP address is using TOR to visit site xyz that carries mostly kiddie porn, they should have no problem getting a warrant to not only wiretap the guy but install other surveillance as well, including video cameras so they can see WHO is accessing the site and WHAT is showing up on the computer screen.
Once China knows or suspects that one of their citizens with a specific IP address is using TOR to visit site abc that carries mostly dissident material, they can do what they like with him and those around him. After all, they are the government of China, they don't need warrants.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because alcohol is to sex traffickers as porn of sex slaves is to sex traffickers? Did you mean to reply to someone else, because this post makes no sense in relation to what I said.
Or, at all.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
That's kind of the point. It should have to be an extraordinary situation for such an escape hatch to be used. If you can't get 80% of those people who don't care about anything to agree, then your prosecution probably isn't important enough to use the feature in the first place.
Require that each host compute that back-door version of the request at each step along the way (rather than including a back-door version within every layer of the onion). When you receive data from a peer, decrypt your copy of the data, and encrypt it with the back-door public key. If it does not match what you got in the request, then this means that the sending peer tried to lie to you. Shun it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The manga section at Barnes and Noble isn't exactly a great representation of manga as a whole. And I'm not sure how much mature manga is actually at Barnes & Noble, but let's not pretend here. America (and other countries) has stretched "child" to mean anyone under 18, or anyone that looks under 18 and doesn't show 2 forms of ID. America has stretched "sexual activity" to mean something as innocent as showing a boob when getting into a bath. Manga characters frequently look young, and usually don't have pubes (though there is probably not much nudity in the books at Barnes and Noble, I would guess). Since saying "she just LOOKS like a child, she's actually 30" usually doesn't fly in America (and other pedo-witch-hunt countries), by many Americans' definition of the words, yes; there's a fuckton of "child" "porn" in manga.
Canada does.
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/06/27/u-s-citizen-arrested-in-canada-for-manga-on-laptop-faces-minim/
Relevant quote from the link:
"Presumably based on Canadian statutes that treat any sexual images of characters that appear to be under 18 as actual child pornography, the images they discovered were deemed child porn and the man was charged accordingly."
In this case, the pictures weren't even of actual people. So you can even be prosecuted for possession of images of cartoon adults that appear to be under 18.
And what if you were browsing porn and didn't realize one of the images was actually a 17-year-old who looked like she was over 20? I don't approve of child porn, but there's a VAST difference between a sexy nude photo of an older teen (and good luck actually telling if she's 17, 18, or 19...) and an 8-year-old being raped.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
you really think it's that simple?
Yet you seem to think that it's as simple as "eliminate child porn, kiddie diddlers will disappear".
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Aside from drugs, stolen property, freshly dead bodies in shallow graves, cash in excess of a certain amount ($10,000 I think) without an easily obtained license, lock picks (unless you are a registered locksmith), yeah. Oh, and a movie of a robbery or assassination if you are on film as a participant. And probably a few other cases that I can think of, if given more time.
just one Pope?
> they can also prosecute a husband who has a picture of his wife's tits if his wife is, or looks, under 18.
Citation needed.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers
Bullshit. By your logic, people who downloaded and viewed Collateral Damage provided validation and acceptance of the producers: the armed forces, and so endorsed targeted killing of civilians and of people who came to aid the wounded.
Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, mothers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbours; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases. In over one-third of cases, the perpetrator is also a minor. ~wikipedia
Stop equating visual representation of child abuse with child abuse: you are helping the actual child abusers by keeping them out of sights. Thanks to people like you, the public thinks that sexual child abuse is a fringe activity of ultra-perverts in child-porn rings. But this is nuts. Most child abusers do not give two shits about child porn, and they certainly don't make it. Most children are abused by people who know them personally and have unrestricted access, and that is true everywhere in the world, including places like rural Mongolia, where pornography is non-existent. Why would a child abuser need pornography when there is a naked kid running right if front of him all day?
I am firmly against commercializing child porn, and I don't want to look at it either. But I believe just as firmly that the images themselves need to me made legal to possess and to share in a non-commercial setting. May be then the public will realize that child abuse is not a Grimm fairy tale, but something really ugly and commonplace.
Sure, I'm not arguing about this specific example (child pornography), just making a general point.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you didn't notice, the post was a bitter commentary on the very double-standard which you speak of.
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The 17-year-old was in the paragraph about child pornography.
In the eyes of the feds, porn involving a 17 year old minor is a felony.
As to your original question:
Only a few states have an age of consent of 18. Many of these have close-in-age exceptions that would make the 19/17 situation legal.
Here are a few that don't:
In California, it's a misdemeanor for for someone to have sex with someone under 18 if the age difference is less than 3 years. It's a misdemeanor for both minors if both minors are under 18 and within 3 years in age.
In North Dakota, an adult having sex with a close-in-age minor commits a misdemeanor.
Virginia is similar.
In Wisconsin this could be prosecuted as a felony or misdemeanor.
Source. Caveat reader - I didn't fact-check this information, but the odds of ALL of these examples being wrong is very low.
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Studies show that the opposite is true. Denmark and another European country (I think it was Czechoslovakia) both accidentally legalized possession of child pornography, and in both cases, the rate of child sexual abuse plummeted. Japan had a boom in the market for cartoon child pornography in the 1980s, and again, the rate of child sexual abuse plummeted.
(In case you're wondering how you can accidentally legalize child pornography, it's simple: First you have a law that outlaws all pornography. Then, you repeal it.)
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
That's the way I would expect any FBI honeypot to be run. It would eliminate almost anybody who didn't hurt an actual child. From there, you wait, gather information, and eventually begin providing files that require a custom tool to extract them—a tool that surreptitiously phones home. You've now caught thousands of actual sexual predators.
Are you seriously suggesting the FBI solicit unique child pornography?
Think about that for a minute and get back to me if you don't realize why that is a pretty bad idea.
On the other hand, I can kind of see why they go after individual users: publicly embarrassing people either due to their drug use or taste for child porn could be seen as a significant deterrent. But then that's really nothing to do with any kind of justice, it's just a cynical use of the system to make people behave a certain way.
The system exists ONLY to make people behave a certain way. If you have any other delusions please share, but let me make one thing for clear - you are not free. You are a person that system tries to behave in a certain way (not always sane, btw).
Except it isn't. From talking to someone whose job is to investigate suspected CP, the vast majority of the stuff that crosses his desk is either "clothed children posing sexually" or "non-sexual nudity" -- in short, stuff that wouldn't even be considered pornographic if the subject were an adult.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Sadly, I imagine you are stuck until science has progressed enough to either let you alter your sexual preferences or let other adults modify their bodies into a form you find attractive. So hold out for the singularity, I suppose. Good luck.
You said it yourself just now. The human survival trait is a strong one. People wish they were dead but don't actually take their life.
This further strengthens the GPs argument that murder is worse than rape.
Encryption is more like a bullet resistant vest than a gun. Body armor and armored vehicles are illegal for civilians to posses in many jurisdictions.
Have gnu, will travel.
LOL
Ya really.... you expect me to click links in this thread?
a) You are fucking paranoid
b) You give your government too much credit. They can't get their act together on such simple issues, you think they are actually monitoring you specifically 24/7?
c) If you are convinced that you can get in troubles for clicking on a random link, move somewhere that doesn't suck.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The problem is not that the patient may have already committed a crime. Psychiatrist have to report a there mere fact that a patient has pedophile tendencies, no matter if they are acted on or not.
Even worse.
Anyway afaik a psychiatrist is normally not allowed to report on anything a patient tells him. Even if that is about crime committed.
Although not a severe as your example, it's crazy witch hunt era we live in. A friend's son downloaded something that was likely a CP sting file (as in they were watching for the file to be downloaded.) He was 14 and didn't know what it was. The police stormed the house and broke the door down with guns drawn to a shocked and scared single mom and three kids. This is was in a low crime suburban Canadian city (this is not just a US problem.) Total over reaction and abuse of power. Luckily she has been able to get her son cleared of charges and is looking at pursuing excessive force. There is no excuse for this nor can it be justified.
How To Get Around the Constitution of the USA 1. Say it is Terrorism 2. Say it is Copyright Infringment 3. Say it is Child Porn
Hmm, yeah, I see where you're coming from... but Dude! NO!
A young teenage girl may well be making all the come-ons, noises, faces, etc. That doesn't mean fucking her is the right thing to do. Kids going through puberty are unsure of their sexuality and will act out situations that they're actually not at all ready for. In other words, they're incapable of deciding on 'informed consent' because they're dealing with a completely new, strange hormonal territory and don't have the experience with those emotions to be informed about them yet.
I don't really understand the problem here. I understand you like young girls, and want them to be loved and cherished, and so that includes fucking them how? Surely some kind of non-selfish, adult, empathic understanding kicks in here to say 'woah, she's just a kid, let's not go there'?
The points about CP being always there, and 99% of abuse not being filmed are well made.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
While I agree with your points, actually in my post I was using the term 'pedo' in the same sense that you mean (someone who is sexually attracted to children).
I wasn't drawing a distinction between someone who is sexually attracted to kids but who doesn't consume CP, and someone who does. Maybe there should be a distinction there (non-practising pedophile? that almost sounds worse)
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
is wrong
Why? Serious question.
IMHO there is a good argument that through conditioning, the use of this material could increase the likelihood of a person offending.
Sort of how increased availability of porn via the internet increased the number of rapes occurring? Except that, inconveniently, that isn't what actually happened?
Assuming you didn't compensate the producer of the images, you in no way contributed to the market of child pornography.
If I create a product, any product--let's say a new toothpaste, and no one buys it, I don't make it anymore. I don't pour my money into a fruitless venture.
To make child porn, you need money. Even just a little. To distribute/sell it, you need money. You make up for what you spent in how many people buy it. If no one bought it, you couldn't continue making it. You might still sexually molest kids, but perhaps not as many, and in private. Therefore, if someone go to a website and pay them to download child porn material they produced, they're not just contributing to that market, they ARE that market. They're the reason it's being made. In the end, it is the people who are there to have it sold to that hold a shitton of responsibility.
But yea, I'd hope that someone's history is looked up before assuming that *one picture* means they're a pedo. I'd think that investigators look into the entire person, and would be able to tell that it was an accident.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Why not? From a legal perspective, the police solicit prostitutes, and that's on the right side of the law when it comes to entrapment; there's really no difference. And from an ethical perspective, the people who do these things are going to do them anyway. At least if the FBI is doing the solicitation, it puts the child abusers one step closer to getting caught.
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Your comparison of Prostitutes vs. Pedophiles are not the same at all! Not on a legal or ethical perspective.
When a cop hints to a prostitute that he would like to take advantage of his/her services, he/she offers, and he/she gets arrested. Nobody gets hurt, and the offered services do not take place. Note that the cop cannot actually explicitly request illegal services, as that would be entrapment. (This works in real life because many actual johns are shy enough that they don't directly ask for what they want, so hookers can't use "not directly requesting illegal services" as a cop filter.)
If you request that pedophiles submit unique content to a honeypot, and they don't happen to have any on hand at the moment, an actual violent crime must take place before the criminal dutifully submits the incriminating evidence. And what do you do if you can't trace the evidence? Ask for more? When do you give up? How much crime do you actively solicit from a single perpetrator?
And no investigator in his/her right mind is going play the "would this have happened anyway?" game. That's a question that's impossible to answer.
Many years ago I had a conversation with a lady in her mid 20's who had been the "victim" of incest by her father. This young woman was 9 years old when the "abuse" began, and it persisted up until she was 12 or 13.
At the time of our conversation, she'd only recently come to terms with the whole situation, after having spent probably 10 years receiving various forms of counselling and psychotherapy.
What she told me about her experiences was unexpected, until I really thought about it. She said that nothing was forced on her, and that the whole thing was a very loving and positive sexual experience, until she happened to let slip to one of her friends that it was going on.
The friend said something, the police were callled, her father arrested, and she was inundated by a veritable army of child advocates, social service people, counselors, school officials, police, etc..all *insisting* that something absolutely horrific had happened to her and that she needed all kinds of services to "recover from the trauma."
So imagine this, if you can.. You're a 12-13 year old girl.. you're enjoying (her words) an admittedly non-standard sexual relationship with your father.. everything is as fine as the life of a 12-13 year old can be.. and all of a sudden, one of your "friends" causes your father to be arrested, your family broken up, you dragged through "the system", confronted by dozens upon dozens of people all insisting that something horrible and evil has happened to you, and that you're all f**ked up, you just don't know it...
Your previously happy life has been turned on its head, your father, whom you love and respect, has been imprisoned and turned into some kind of of evil monster at the insistance of a bunch of "child welfare" advocates, your family life and the stability of your environment has been totally shot to hell during a time in your life where you're facing all sorts of uncertainty about your own identity, place in the world, etc, and you are painted to be the victim of this horrible evil man by everybody you come into contact with.
To sum it up, the young lady in question said that she was horribly traumatized by her incest experience and it took her 10 years to recover, because of the actions of *society* in relation to it, not because of the actual sexual conduct itself. To quote her..
"They made me feel like some kind of a freak, because they insisted that this thing I had experienced was so horrible and awful and evil, but I had enjoyed it."
Admittedly, I cannot assert that this is anywhere near a "standard" sort of view.. but it did make me pause and ask the question "Where is the real "abuse" happening here?" While I do not condone incest or the like, I certainly have to wonder about the wisdom of painting with as broad a brush as society does when it comes to sexuality.
I have to disagree.
I do not think that someone who is interested in children will overstep a social norm because of the lack of pictures/movies. I am sure there is room for outliers who may, but there are likely outliers in the other direction who would have but without pictures never went down that road. The numbers are likely to be close enough to be a wash.
My point is that either a person is willing to cross that line or they are not.
-nB
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there is a revenue stream, it is not free.
It is either paid for by swapping (barter), or by advertising/data mining.
-nB
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As we've seen earlier, the courts often interpret laws in ways which boggle the mind. The court system and government in general is operated by people who are willfully ignorant of technology and are their granted positions by politicians who behave like children. Most people understand that if the law has a potential to be abused, it will, to the maximum extent possible. Did I mention that 99.99% of all judges are ex-lawyers? Do you trust this group of entitled scum to be in the slightest bit fair?
Of course the best part of this knee-jerk lynch mob mentality is that everyone who is even slightly opposed or even so much as hesitant of competing to take the position to its most logical "extreme", is a traitor to the cause and sympathizer to the enemy.
While I certainly argue that molesting children is vile, I fail to see how the extreme sentencing, draconian statues(offender registry list, and lifetime of harassment, intimidation, and disenfranchisement that comes with it), for the sole crime of possessing image files on a computer will stop child molesters, or is in any shape or form the sort of justice a free society seeks. None of them actually touched a child.
your argument is everyone not in the lynch mob supports child molesting. That argument is just as insane as the laws themselves. How many good men rot in prison for this madness? There is a post a few back that describes the all too common debacle of "clicking on a wrong ling somewhere" and winding up with serious amounts of jail time you won't get for raping someone in real life.
If you've ever stumbled onto CP through any of the random image polling scripts from the image sites, what you see can be soul crushing.
I agree. If the FBI ever searches your computer the 10 years of prison you will get for having such images in your browser's cache will be just as soul crushing. The laws are very explicit in there is no "accidental circumstances" with child porn laws. Your just as guilty in the eyes of the law as a hardcore pedophile.
I think it is also time to remember that the transition between "child" and "adult" does not happen in the magic of the 18th birthday, but is a process. An 19 year old having a 17 year old girlfriend is perfectly normal, and if they fancy to take nude pictures of each other I find it ridiculous to consider this child porn.
The real sick thing about this is this so called "age of consent". minors are NOT allowed to consent to anything by law. age of consent means your parents are allowed to consent. If you 18, and six months older than your 17 year old girlfriend, sleeping with her is only OK if her parents allow it, otherwise they can press charges. Same with labor laws. They can litteraly force you into sex/work, but you cannot make the choice yourself? All in the name of "protecting the children". Many states also have exceptions for marriage. While a 15 year old sleeping with a 35 year old will land the 35 year old in jail, unless of course they are married. Then its legal. No one questions the abilities of being able to marry a child.
Just to chip in, I've been jacking off to all sorts of porn since I was 9 - sodomy included. OTOH I've never been in a relationship, and feeling suicidal (last part comes with a big thanks to my nutty parents).
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Or 15 year olds that are sexting... seriously that is the state of play now. You can be put on a sex offenders list for taking photos of yourself. Under these circumstances please explain who the victim is, the person knowingly taking photos of themselves and distributing them? Or the recent issue in Australia of a well know artist that painted children naked but without their bits showing and all the crazies came out the woodwork completely glossing over the difference between art and porn or even nudity and porn. Or how about Japan and their comics? I bet if real doll (TM) brought out a 12 year old model all the same arguments would be made including "think of the victims" despite there being no victims. Crazies gonna craze!
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
More like the law doesn't give a shit if it's real or not, but actually considers pretend porn equally evil with actual porn.
Newsflash: Never attribute to incompetence that which is actually due to malice.
True but letting kid rapists off easier to encourage them to cooperate is rather akin to paying ransom to a terrorist. And in your case, holding onto a child that you've raped just because you don't want to get caught is rather like kidnapping that child and holding them for the ransom of a reduced sentence in exchange for cooperation. It's basically caving to the rapist/kidnapper's taking the child hostage. And that will only encourage it in the future.
We should not reward child rape by making it easier to avoid a stiff sentence. What we should do is step up enforcement and go after child rapists for both rape and kidnapping.
Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.
It actually gives hackers a way to blackmail people they don't like by *planting* child porn on their computer.
Oh wait, that already happened.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/08/disgruntled-brit-plants-child-porn-on-bosss-computer-calls-cops/
Some anonymous folks infiltrated "darknet" and exposed thousands of these sickos a couple of months ago. Anon has been outing pedo's left and right for about a year where the FBI seems to be fumbling.
It's more like promising the terrorists that, if they surrender without hurting anyone, they're going to get a trial before getting executed, instead of being lined up and shot as soon as they surrender.
The end result is the same, but it does make it much more likely that the innocent will survive.