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Rick Falkvinge On Child Porn and Freedom Of the Press
bazorg writes "Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party blogs on the subject of freedom of the press and foresees how users of Google glasses could be charged for possession and distribution of illegal porn. 'Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring the topic to a serious discussion, and explain why possession of child pornography need to be re-legalized in the next ten years.'"
Possession of bits of any source or type out not be a crime. What you have here is a thought crime, and it doesn't actually deter actual abuse against children to criminalize or attempt to criminalize the thoughts or track down the bits. Chasing bits does not keep flesh and blood children safe from flesh and blood predators but I suppose it keeps pictures (bits) safe from creepy thinking adults.
A lot of laws are going to have to change with the advance in technology. Neuroscience will soon reveal all about the brain, making our paranoid about child predators seem about as effective as the paranoia about witches or communists. It's 2012 and at this time Google probably has everyone's thoughts...*cough* search records in a database. At the same time with neuroscience and in specific FMRI we will know what other humans are thinking, this technology does exist and ought to completely change the justice system.
The main problem with crime in the past is we assumed we would never know what anyone else is thinking, never have complete understanding of motives, never know the best forms of deterring certain events but imagine for a moment that its some point in the future and we know what everyone's thoughts were before they committed the criminal act? Would we view the acts in the same way if we knew the exact thoughts behind the act? If a criminal could not lie and an FMRI lie detector test has 100% accuracy could we change the justice system completely? What about detecting psychopaths, sociopaths, and others who aren't capable of remorse, empathy or guilt prior to sentencing? As far as I'm concerned we should be moving toward abolishing prisons altogether not because we wont have dangerous people but because eventually our understanding of human behavior will be such that we wont need so many prisoners and also if we wanted to we could probably just use house arrest on the non-violent.
We have to do away with the concept of good and evil. There is no good and evil. There may be smart and stupid or competent and incompetent but there is no good and evil. A sociopath or psychopath is not evil, they are simply retarded in a particular physical area of brain development. It hinders their decision making in the same way that any other disorder can hinder decision making in that it makes them less emotionally intelligent. This has been proven by neuroscientists when under FMRI we can see sociopaths brains aren't capable of experiencing empathy, remorse, and have trouble detecting or interpreting fear in the face and body language of others.
If we were talking about artificial intelligence we'd be talking about it like it's a bug that the AI cannot detect fear, or cannot properly make use of the empathy functions or subroutines, but because it's a human being we call the problem sociopathy and in human beings the problem is physical and not a matter of programming so it cannot be easily fixed. For these sorts of individuals we need prisons, but according to most estimates they only represent 1% of the general population yet 20% of the prisoners. This would mean 80% of prisoners aren't sociopaths or psychopaths, even if we assume 50% of that 80% are violent it still leaves 40$ or so of prisoners who aren't sociopaths or psychopaths and who aren't violent.
The most radical idea I'm going to propose is that we get rid of the idea of criminal responsibility. This probably wont happen until far into the future but if we make it into the future with powerful AI and technology, and we understand human thinking and feeling, at least theoretically we will eventually know the true motivations behind all actions. If the universe is predetermined and a lot of actions are based on genes, consequences, what brain type you have, environment, and situations, none of which an individual has full control over, just what is responsible for crime? The role of suggestion, of subliminal triggers, the role of desperation and poverty, the role of lack of intelligence, a lot of different things can convince a person that
CP enforcement is an absolute rats nest of problematic issues. The real pain isn't coming from people deleting evidence of child abuse, it's the edge cases where law and common sense contradict. Throw in trans-national companies being expected to police their networks and varying national laws, you get a recipe for serious problems. As a flavor of what can happen, some parts of the world (like the UK and some states in the USA) have different definitions of what a child is for the purpose of CP law vs age of consent law. So you can have sex at one age, but not film yourself doing it until a later age. Another issue is that some countries don't criminalize CP possession at all (Japan, Russia). So if an American company finds CP in the possession of someone who lives in Japan, what happens? What about the case where the person is of legal age in one place but not another?
Did you even read the article? One of the examples is young people taking pictures of themselves, which makes them child pornographers in the eyes of the law. Is that reasonable? How is that in any way exploitation?
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
He didn't say that (intentional) production should be legalized, just possession. Laws against possession of anything are ridiculous, because someone can just mail the offending item to you and suddenly you're a criminal even though you didn't do anything.
Some of his arguments are good, while some of them are stupid. Yes, I admit that, in a moment of weakness, I actually read the linked article. I promise never to do this again.
His first point is probably his weakest and stupidest. It's a paranoid fantasy (involving some kind of uber-nerd/uber-hipster cross) about the government coming down harder on witnesses of a crime than the actual perpetrator. He also loads it with emotional appeals. It's not really very compelling, and it almost caused me to stop reading the article right there. It reminded me of the over-the-top, paranoid fantasies and fallacies that were popular during the time of SOPA. Anyone who dared to call people out on that was labeled a fascist sympathizer, or sometimes just a "concern troll". It bothered me a lot more to be labeled a "concern troll", because the underlying message was that it was perfectly OK to use logical fallacies and propaganda in the service of a greater good. I reject this, and I think using these techniques just hurts a movement. There's always a better argument against authoritarianism than simplistic logical fallacies, such as the slippery slope or appeal to emotion. It's lazy.
The rest of his arguments were actually a lot better. He made some pretty decent points, including the fact that free speech necessarily opposes censorship of even the most offensive speech. He also brings up age of consent laws and the recent spate of "no tolerance" cases against teens who have sent naked pictures to each other. Obviously, there are some problems with the law here. My own personal solution is to lower the age of majority, but I think that's going to be way too contentious. Since nobody is likely to support that, I'd say that we should enact so-called "Romeo and Juliet" laws, which allow teens to screw around with each other without fear of being charged with rape or child porn.
Anyways, it's pretty much standard for progressive politics, and I've seen the same arguments from many people. As a progressive, I generally agree. This wasn't a particularly insightful or well-written example, but it's still good to see that there are progressives out there, spreading the message.
Defending child pornography will just make it easier for copyright lobbyists to claim that all pirates are pedophiles. This is a bad strategy.
If you still support the ban on child pornography then why isn't there a ban on obscene "teen erotica" literature? Why not ban text descriptions, or ban stories which encourage child abuse?
No actual people are physically harmed.
We can't even get Cannabis legalized here, and the arguments for that are much more overwhelming. When children are involved, people shut off their brains.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
One likes to think the person would be considered a hero rather than be charged, but I can see it going wrong for them.
These are the same people who brought you marijuana residue on walls not being evidence of past use or possession, but the vanishingly small amounts of THC in the wall residue was possession in and of itself.
These are the same people who, when presented with more intrusive powers to track terrorists, claimed, golly, no, we will never, ever, not no way, not no how, ever use it for anything but terrorism, then, immediately after the law was passed, started using it against drugs, saying, "The law doesn't specifically state terrorism only, sorry!" They didn't even bother trying to conjure up the meme that drug selling is "a kind of" terrorism. They didn't have to.
These are the same people who are trying to get teenagers registered as lifelong felony producers of child porn who must register as sex offenders wherever they go for the rest of their lives because they took a nude shot of themselves and sent it to friends.
So...with these common horror stories as the tip of the iceberg, I wouldn't put it beyond some prosecutor to try to jail a guy who accidentally filmed a child rape then took it to police as a producer of child porn.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Are we really arguing that no actual people are being physically harmed when children are being forced to engage in sexual activity?
No. Only in the making of the child pornography is a child actually harmed.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
You had me interested until "There is no good and evil".
VERY elaborate troll, good work.
I hope you don't actually want me to elaborate, since you're so much off on so much levels; I'll just point the most obvious:
Pedo material (on a computer) are just bits => pedo material on a printed medium is just paper? Oh, have I already mentioned that to have pedo material on your pc someone, somewhere a child has been harassed (at the least), AND someone, somewhere has harassed a child? There is still "no good and evil"?
2nd: If someone exterminated your family that would be bad, wouldn't it? Still no good and evil?
3rd: Choice. You're ignoring the very root of human nature. "Getting rid of the idea of criminal responsibility" is like removing human nature from human beings. What's left are automata (which is in line with your post)
Bonus Ponts: "Neuroscience will soon reveal all about the brain" HAHAHA! No. Don't count on it anytime soon ("soon" as in my "grandchildern lifespan"). It actually might be impossibile, but who knows.
Anyway, a very good troll, cheers.
There is no scientifically objective basis for determining "evil". We can say destructive and replace that with "evil" in our discussion if you'd like. In that case psychopaths are more destructive not because they are "evil" but because their brains are literally retarded in areas which would prevent them from being destructive. They lack the ability to resist their urges, lack inhibition, lack remorse, guilt, empathy, compassion, pity. Their frontal lobe development is like that of children and in some cases they have less impulse control than children yet our society treats them as adults.
What I'm saying is there is competent and incompetent, smart and dumb, but there is no objective good or evil. A smart or competent person is a person skilled at making decisions which are in their self interest and in the best interest of the group. None of us are perfect in this but we strive to be as smart or as competent as we can, as smart as our brains and knowledge allow. Just as some people are never going to be good at mathematics or at many different intellectual pursuits because they are less intellectually inclined, the same can be said with regard to decision making/ethics. Some people are simple ethically retarded and when you understand that then you know they aren't evil.
This is no different from all the other 'prohibitions' we live through. Religious prohibition on sex is what makes kiddie porn and other perversions an issue. Societies with the strictest rules are often the most perverted. They may hide it from the outsiders pretty well, but inside the castle, a bigger orgy you'll never find.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Consider this: if you stumbled across some child pornography, whether on the internet, or if you found a tape in the desert, or CDs in the attic of the house you bought a few years ago, you would be guilty of possession of child pornography. Say that these images depicted the brutal torture, rape, and murder of some number of toddlers. ANYONE would want to turn these over to the police so they could track down the monsters who hurt those children. But you realize that you are criminally liable, with the potential to wind up on a sex offender registry, lose your job, your family, your home, EVERYTHING, if the police or prosecutor decide that you might have wanked off while watching them or something. Rather than trying to help catch those monsters, you instead destroy the evidence, with tears in your eyes, because you aren't willing to endanger yourself or your family.
How you wish that the children had only been tortured and murdered on tape. Then you could have turned it in without fear. Stop confusing possession of evidence of a crime with COMMISSION of a crime. Also stop confusing recording of a crime with the crime itself.
Legalized possession of images of child abuse allows a market for such things to grow larger that it would be otherwise, creating a demand for more child abuse. There could still be laws against profiting from child abuse, but the drug market has proved that where there is money to be made there will be supply.
Someone who has evidence of child molestation could also be considered an accessory if they don't alert the authorities.
That said, the article raised a point that's not at all hypothetical. Not long ago, here on Slashdot, an ISP mentioned occasionally finding kiddie porn on their servers. At first they tried notifying the police. After getting threatened with prosecution, they switched to a policy of quietly deleting it.
Another key point that should be beyond argument is that the rape of a young child has *nothing* in common morally with a 17.9 year old sexting and the law should treat them separately.
Yes, possession of pictures depicting the murder of children is much better. That is why such images are legal. I mean, sure, some REALLY sick people get off on shit like that, but at least it doesn't depict SEX.
It's not just the laws that we need to change, it's our entire attitude towards child pornography. Many people see child pornographers as some sort of pinnacle of pure evil. No one sees them as people. Child pornography is some pretty dark stuff, but the people who make it are fallible human beings. ANYONE could end up in the same place as them. Only when the general public stop demonizing child pornographers can this problem be approached rationally.
RTFA! Nobody is claiming that actually exploiting a child should legal. Quite the contrary, there is a fear that if mere possession of evidence that someone ELSE exploited a child is illegal, the child will get no help because anyone who could alert the authorities will be too busy destroying the evidence.
Consider, bad guy robs a bank. That is clearly a crime, no matter why he did it. Imagine if like child exploitation, possession of a video of someone robbing a bank was a crime of strict liability. Great, now the bank cannot even have cameras inside (just in case) much less give the police a video of the robbery where we clearly see the face of the robber. In the name of not glorifying bank robbery (as if the video somehow does that), we have made bank robbers everywhere safer against prosecution.
I was taught that the most essential role of government was to protect the rights of the minorities against the will of the majority. I have also understood the smallest minority to be the individual. If 95% of a population can get their way, then so can I, just without them and their support. The government is there to stop them from taking away that right, not to join in on the madness in order to curry their favor by tacit support through inaction.
If I wanted to be ruled by a majority, I would just join the majority. If you don't think that quanitity can be used to measure accuracy, then don't pander to a mob's ostensible authority by lumping unique individuals together and calling them the majority. Don't be afraid to stand up for something because terrible people might call you names.
Aren't there existing protections limiting prosecution to knowingly and intentionally committing crimes? I can't see how legalizing possession completely will "fix" the "problem" of accidental prosecution in an effective way. Baby/bathwater and all that.
Unfortunately, possession of child pornography is a crime regardless of the reason you have it, regardless of whether or not you intended to possess it, regardless of whether or not you were even able to access it, regardless of whether or not you even knew you had it. Even cartoon depictions of child sex abuse are illegal in the United States.
As for prosecution, the point here is that possession alone should not be a crime at all -- the original concept was to attack the producers of child porn by attacking their customers, since the producers themselves were so hard to find. The Internet has changed things: people can just download child pornography without paying for it. The law should at least be revised to reflect that fact, perhaps by making it a crime to pay (by money or by barter) rather than to possess. Yes, that means the police will have to actually gather evidence that a person was paying i.e. encouraging child rape, otherwise known as doing their jobs.
Palm trees and 8
The author then invents a fairy tail where a person with eye glasses with a built-in camera turns a corner and records a child being raped. He then makes the erroneous conclusion that video recording a crime in process would be a crime itself. It would be illegal if the person who caught it with his camcorder just walked away and didn't report it or worse yet posted the recording on the Internet.
Given that people have been arrested for illegal firearm posession for reporting a gun dumped on their property, your dismissal of the hazards here are, frankly, absurd.
However, if turned over to the police it would NOT be pornography it would be evidence of child molestation. It would only become pornography if it were kept by the individual.
ALL posession is illegal without special dispensation given. All possession. If you have some, for whatever reason it's up to the good grace of the police and prosecutor not o nail you for it.
You are a very trusting soul if you are heppy for them to have that power.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Because they can be created without raping an actual child.
So target the actual molester and not the bits. Someone could tell stories about how to molest children and maybe they write from experience and heck for sake of argument lets say a prisoner in prison for serial child molestation writes stories and books, should those books be banned?
My point is the event already took place. The crime was already committed. The bits on the computer at best are digital representations of evidence of the crime but they aren't the crime. The bits did not molest the child.
The bits DO molest the child in a non-physical way. Lets say something horrific happens to you, such as, oh I dont know... rape? it is horrible and traumatic, but it is over and you are healing. Then the rapists put it on youtube. Now people can watch you get raped over and over and over. When you walk into the office everyone stops and looks at you and then tries to pretend to be busy. They don't say "Hey Bob, watched your rape video today!" but you know they did. It's on the internet for anyone and everyone to see, and anyone you meet in your life may or may not be thinking "I saw the guy once... where was... oh SHIT it's butt-rape guy from youtube!"
But that's not realistic, right? Because your rape video couldn't be on youtube, it would be illegal.
There already are embarrassing bits of me and everyone else on the internet. It's 2012. Everyone has nudes somewhere in digital form. Everyone has a sex tape floating around. Everyone can be searched up in a search engine. Anyone could be jacking off to anything I've done or said or thinking anything about any of the bits of me floating around. It sucks but lets not act like thats going to be solved by censorship. Child porn sucks but teenagers and adults have cellphones and take pics and snapshots which will probably be used against them later and thats not including stupid stuff people say online while in altered states.
We gotta learn to accept that all sorts of private aspects of our lives will be on the internet and that it will be on there forever. It's not just rape victims who have to deal with it.
It simply comes down to this:
Possession of a computer file can be as severely punished as the act of sexually abusing a child.
This is a moral outrage: that the government would have so much disrespect for the horror of child sexual abuse that they would equate it -- in terms of criminal punishment -- to the possession of a computer file on a hard disk.
I know that my conclusion is deeply unpopular, but my sense of morality demands that I must come to this conclusion: Those who advocate severe punishment for the possession (not manufacture) of child pornography are acting immorally. They deny and cheapen the horror of child abuse by equating it to the mere act of clicking a mouse button.
There are many dimensions to this issue: legal, psychological, technical, and so on, and we should debate them all. But for me, this is first and foremost a moral issue. Our governments now say that sexual abuse of a child is equal to clicking a mouse, and therefore they have lost their moral compass.
A high percentage of sexual abuse crimes committed against children are never reported.
I've always wondered... How the fuck do they gather statistics about how many unreported crimes occur, if they were never reported? It's this kind of bullshit that has idiots claiming that 1 in every 3 children will be molested! The average child molester molest over 300 children in his career!. It makes no fucking sense. They've got to be just assuming some number occurs, then throwing in a Coefficient of Molestation or something until they get what they want, or what will alarm Senator Hardoncrime the most.
I'd like to take issue with this point. While it is a fact that "if you abuse someone it is abuse", it is much more a matter of opinion the severity of its horror. You can pretend this isn't true. You can pretend that the act of abusing an adult, who has better means of resisting as well as an understanding of what abuse is, is the same as abusing a child, who is easily exploited due to reliance on adults and in many cases is unable to communicate that they have been abused. Also, you can pretend that all rape victims were "defenseless" leading up to the moment of their abuse, but this is another fallacy.
The main distinction is that one of them is proven to create victims and one of them is not.
Creating child porn by actually filming/taking pictures of or otherwise documenting the sexual abuse of a child absolutely is not just a thought crime. A real child is being victimized. Some people who create child porn do so because it gets them off, but some others do so for financial gain to be had from selling it to people who like viewing it. Because of that, simply owning it means that it is possible that one owning child porn is contributing to the financial incentive behind those creating it, and adding to the problem. The main point here is that a direct causal link can be reasonably drawn: If you have a real photo of a child really being sexually abused, it is absolutely the case that a child was sexually abused to create that photo.
So, with real child porn it absolutely is not a thought crime - it's an actual crime, and people who possess it should be charged with a crime because they are to some extent intentionally facilitating the abuse of children. It may be an incredibly slender connection, but it is absolutely a connection to a child being sexually assaulted.
With fictional stuff - drawings, photoshops, stories - there is absolutely no proven causal link between people writing and consuming those things and actual children being abused sexually. It may be that drawings, photoshops and stories about child sexual abuse encourage some people to do it, but it can't be proven because there are no children directly involved in the creation of those things. It would be roughly the same as saying that violent video games lead to murder sprees and as such should be banned. The problem here is that some people think that their own personal distaste for such things means that there must be a direct link between those things and children being hurt - that is not so. The main point here is that if you have some fiction about a child being sexually abused, you cannot say that absolutely a child must have been sexually abused to make that fiction.
So, because there is no direct link between fictional child porn and children actually being hurt, THAT would be a thought crime. It would be roughly equivalent to putting someone up on charges of attempted murder because they spent all day playing Call of Duty and so clearly they must be about to kill someone. There's no actual child being assaulted/no person being killed, so there's no actual connection to a child being assaulted/person being killed. No link.
There's also a grey area: Does fictionalized child porn create a culture in which child sexual abuse becomes more acceptable or more likely? Proponents of bans on fictionalized child porn say yes it does, while opponents either cite free speech or theories that fictionalized child porn reduces the likelihood of people seeking real child porn or actually abusing children themselves. Depending on how convincing one finds the arguments, one could go either way.
Personally, I find any kind of representation of child sexual abuse presented as a form of sexual gratification (fictionalized or real) to be disgusting, but I'm at least willing to acknowledge that my being disgusted by something doesn't mean it should be criminalized if it can't be shown to actually cause harm to innocents. That's something all too many people who are on a "think of the children" crusade don't get: their personal distaste doesn't automatically change the facts to suit their opinions.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
But you know, thanks to the internet we have more access to violent porn than ever yet there hasn't been an explosion of Ted Bundys. In fact rapes have gone down and violent crime in general has gone down. Explain?
I want to stop the next Ted Bundy too and I want to prevent rape, murder, torture, just like you do. I just don't think banning any kind of pornography will make a difference. People either have the ability to behave or they don't, they have impulse control or they don't, they have empathy or they don't. If we are dealing with psychopaths then they probably don't have any of that but what if the majority aren't psychopaths?
Why are we locking people up who clearly aren't psychopaths? If they aren't psychopaths how do you know they are capable of child molestation? It's not like everyone is equally capable. It's like with rape, why assume everyone is equally capable of rape?
You can take two people and put them in bad environments and one could turn into a serial killing rapist and the other could become a priest and the difference would be in the brains of the individuals not the environment. The same could be said about porn, while some people would view child porn or have rape fantasies and ultimately be unable to resist their urge to act on it, the vast majority of people would be able to resist the urge. I'm willing to bed the vast majority of people have had dark fantasies of some sort, or just dangerous thoughts, whether thoughts of murder, rape, torture, or anything else, but we don't condemn them for these thoughts so why do we make a special category for people with pedophile thoughts?
If you can think about killing your wife, your boss, or raping someone, and not get arrested, why should anyone else get arrested for whatever sick violent thought they think about? Creation of child pornography is not merely thinking about it so arrest people who create it but possession is just equal to thinking about it.
Technically speaking the child continues to be harmed long after the making of the content. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way. It doesn't have to be sexually, though certainly sexual abuse tends to be one of the more scarring forms of psychological trauma. Now imagine that your victimization was captured on film, and long after the abuse was over, you are periodically reminded of that abuse because the pictures of it resurface somewhere on the net.
Heck just the KNOWING that there are people out there who are watching it for their own sick pleasure would be enough to add on years of therapy for most victims. Add in the potential for someone you know to see your victimization (even accidentally, plenty of people upload child pornography to sites just to get off on shocking people who see it, take a look at 4chan for example), and recognize you from it. There's plenty of ways that continuing to distribute bits and bytes of computer data that represents child pornography harms the people involved.
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The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."
Joining the catholic church also helps a lot. Let's not ignore in all this hysteria that the vast majority of child abuse does not originate with strangers looking for more material for their kiddie porn collection. Most culprits are known to the victim and often very close. Family members are the largest group, priests and other persons of implicit trust the second largest.
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