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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
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.
FTFL:
For all who support the current child pornography laws which criminalize possessions of bits, is there a significant difference between that and a thought crime?
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?
Lets say for argument a corporation decided to produced a hand drawn manga series of lolicon (child porn) erotica and marketed it to an adult population, should the behavior of this corporation be banned? Should purchase or distribution of this material be criminal? Should the website be shut down and all the visitors raided?
Why or why not?
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.
Given most child pornography being produced these days is probably kids sending naked pictures of themselves to each other, I'm struggling to understand the exploitation element.
Anyway, the article didn't demand the legalisation of creating child pornography. It demanded the legalisation of possessing it.
How about you read, understand and discuss the arguments being made, not dismiss it based on your prejudice and ignorance?
Defending child pornography will just make it easier for copyright lobbyists to claim that all pirates are pedophiles. This is a bad strategy.
Pedophile has become communist. It's like being a witch. You're guilty until proven innocent and it can be used as political weapon to oppress all sorts of different groups of people. If you're part of Occupy Wallstreet, Anonymous, or just a rogue journalist you can be framed by a child porn virus and made to look like a pedophile.
So if the fear is you can't be an activist because you fear looking like a pedophile, you're appealing to fear and basically saying don't fight for free speech at all because they'll make you into a pedophile. Of course they can also make you into a rapist or make you dead given the right set of circumstances and if they knew how to get away with it.
Because trying to hide it behind a curtain isn't helping anyone, and attempting to do so gets hundreds of innocent peoples lives ruined every year, if not more.
Because every time some random idiot posts child porn on a forum or youtube or imageboard, a child gets raped.
That's not how things work.
Nobody is saying legalize child exploitation. You are changing the subject.
From teens getting labelled as sex offenders and child porn producers for sharing nude pictures of themselves with each other WHILE IN A RELATIONSHIP at the age of SEVENTEEN to teens themselves using their age as a weapon, I can safely say any child porn laws are plain retarded, if they even exist.
Let's not even get in to the fact that they aren't even CHILDREN in these cases, they are TEENS. But nope, who cares about logic, "they are my CHILD, not my TEEN"...
Don't even bother citing those times where "oh but these people had those charges dropped against them" stories, their lives in every single case have already been ruined simply by the ACCUSATION of it.
Even people who have been accused of murder get less of a beating about it.
He is completely right. Distribution should be illegal, NOT the possession. Possession laws are always awful since they are open to interpretation in every single case. (while some judge might be sane and view a stupid drawing of Lisa giving it to Bart just as something obscene, another would probably want to kill the person drawing it with their own hands. Interpretation from 1 persons opinion should never be in law. Ever. Exact rules or back to the drawing board, DSM isn't exact in the slightest, so don't bring it up)
The laws need to be tidied up, things need to be done to limit damage simply from the accusation itself, and anyone ever abusing their position should be punished severely.
As someone who has a "cousin" who abused her age to lure people in, I speak with experience in saying that people like her deserve to be locked up.
Sadly she got off with it because those people are shit-scared for their own lives to even come forward. Another sex-fiend age-abuser gets off yet again.
She has been disowned from the entire family.
The law IS THE PROBLEM. It lets people like this get away with shit while innocent people get wrecked or scared in to submission.
Actual child porn with actual children is barely within the scope of this. (by children I mean pre-pubescents, the actual definition that law seems to have forgotten)
Just possessing it, regardless of the reason, intent, etc is criminal. The law is very unbending on it. It gets applied pretty draconian at times too. A good example is a teenage couple sent naked pictures of themselves to each other via e-mail. They got out, and both were tried and convicted of child porn charges (and it was upheld on appeal). Doesn't matter that the pictures were of themselves, it is illegal, intent and any other factors are just not part of the law.
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!
If you also read the comments they mention two cases where this actually happened. They are in Swedish, but Google Translate does a fairly good job on them.
Relying on government's discretion to prevent people from being prosecuted for something that the law says is illegal will only work until you run into someone with an agenda, or a mindless bureaucrat. or a fanatic who happens to be in government.
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.
Simon Walsh: How bodged arrest and 'profoundly damaging' false charges have ruined my City Hall career
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/simon-walsh-how-bodged-arrest-and-profoundly-damaging-false-charges-have-ruined-my-city-hall-career-8046087.html
Let me give you another "absurd idea".
In the last 10 years, porn to suit every possible desire has become widely (and very easily) available online.
In the last 10 years, the incidence of rape [i'm talking about the crime, not the conviction rate] has fallen.
Is it just possible that these two might be correlated?
What does this suggest about the crackdown on "child pornography", even of the teenage-consensual variety, or of the purely digital animated variety? Is it just possible that it's going to *increase* the rate of child abuse, rather than reduce it?
You may not like the answer, but it's very straightforward and logical, some may even call it cynical:
Child porn, as defined, a naked child depicted on a photo, drawing, animation or film in a sexually provoking pose or situation is illegal in most of the world because of religious beliefs, nothing else. And if you imagine that 95% of the population is religious, then you can forget about this becoming legal at any point soon.
You may even think that the picture of a naked child is totally disgusting, immoral, horrible, or the fact that someone out there are "having a good time" imagining or watching an image depicting your or anyone's child, even a fantasy child that doesn't exist, simply because you find it so disgusting. Some think it's the most natural thing in the world, but not for others to see etc.
Fact is: It's a human body, yes, it's young, and vulnerable. And here is where the two world splits and unfortunately combine because of religion and moral to a sort of smorgasbord of "take whatever you feel is right, and so it shall be and make it law", even though it doesn't make any logical sense whatsoever.
Fact is: If you sexually abuse anyone, be it a child, animal or fully grown human - it's abuse. It isn't more or less terrible if it is a defenseless child. You are defenseless if you where raped anyway, why is another human more or less worth than you?
Fact is: If you "please" a child, and the child was not hurt, but enjoyed it - then you have not per see hurt the child. However - the child is in a learning stage of life, and because we see this as immoral and it's against our religious beliefs or otherwise, the child will come to know this when the child grows up, and therefor the risk is there that the child will at a later stage in life - feel abused and dirty, and thus have it's life "mentally" destroyed and disturbed.
So you see, even though this may have felt right for the both of you - at the time - time and moral and religion both can and will make this a crime and destroy lives. So for that reason alone, this is dangerous.
However, in a perfect flawless world where people have the capacity to think for themselves, where love is favored in front of war and hatred, where being nude is as natural as eating food, where masturbation whether mutual or mono is as natural as a kiss or a greeting, then no harm will come of this - it is ALL mental.
Depicting such fantasies, dreams, wishes (to some) or horrors, infidelity, abuse (to some) on pictures, spreading them around the world, is of course dangerous because of this.
In reality, unfortunately - there are a lot of people making child porn for profit, actually abusing kids for real, and we're talking taking kids from poor families, taking pictures of them against their own will, abusing them, and depicting this with REAL kids with REAL suffering, now THAT IS HORRIBLE, and it happens much more than you may want to think.
Why? Because of money!
If this "nude" hysteria wasn't so blown out of proportions that half the planets a-sexual people have to go undercover just to keep their jobs (and no, not with kids) but just to survive in a hostile territory, there would not be such a demand for it, and a picture like that would be worth no money at all, because it was easily available.
So you see, it's very simple. How can something that feels good, and is good be so bad? Read the above, and put it into perspective, then you can easily see how it could be so bad, and how it could be good. Not that complicated really...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
It happened when they made the law that was poorly worded to do exactly this.
Sure, judges will sometimes be smart enough to realize the law is wrong. But consider this ...
I read about a case many many years ago when PCs were just becoming common, and some internet thing was just emerging. A man had trouble with his PC not working so it takes it to the PC store to have it fixed. They find his hard drive died so they put in a replacement. Being cheap bastards they grabbed a HD known to be working from another PC (not sure why) and put it in the PC to be repaired. The man got the PC back, and there was still another issue, so he went for repairs again. This time they detected child porn on the HD that had been replaced in the previous visit, and called police (as the law required them to do). This man's life was ruined. He wife divorced him. He lost his job. He spent a few weeks in jail. His finances were wiped out by legal fees. In the end after a couple years the judge cleared him of all charges. He never even saw the child porn until a printed copy of one was shown in court. He never even accessed the files involved. He didn't even know they were there.
It is wrong to have a law that even allows this to begin to happen, since we can't have a law that makes everyone forget that it did. There are real things that are wrong enough that we do needs laws against them. But the laws need to be written by people who can thoroughly figure out all the effects. Our existing politicians aren't spending the time to even try, if even they were smart enough to do so (I'm absolutely certain 99% of them are not).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And fringe cases, where the person in possession is underage themselves, or barely older... Teenagers often have sexual relations with each other these days, and 15 year olds sending pictures to each other, or someone who's just turned 18 having pictures of his 17 and 11 months old girlfriend etc... This is clearly a whole different situation than a 40yr old having pictures of a 10yr old.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
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.
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
I was raped as a child at the age of 7 and I am also a victim of child pornography as well. Chances are they're those images/videos of me being raped floating out there somewhere on the internet. Knowing that there are people pleasuring themselves to images and videos of me being brutally raped gave me extreme PTSD as a teenager. Actually this is something that still bugs the heck out of me every time I see something on the news about someone being caught with child pornography and still makes me physically sick. First off he is dead wrong about child porn laws being counterproductive. A high percentage of sexual abuse crimes committed against children are never reported. What happened to me was never reported. Also a high percentage of people charged with child pornography crimes are also found to have sexual abused a child at some point. When you take these two facts into account, chances are when someone gets caught with possession they also sexual abused a child at some point as well. I used to have a co-worker who got caught with a simple possession charge. After the police finished their investigation they found that he was also manufacturing and distributing as well. I've also seen multiple cases were the same thing has happened. So possession of child pornography laws do help to catch child molesters. Plus who the heck would be possession of it if they were not pleasuring themselves to it. And people who would pleasure themselves to it are pedophiles!
Another thing is how the heck do these laws prevent the media from reporting? Gee you never hear some journalist say something like "Oh man I really wanted to show some B roll of some nude 13 year old in this story but I can't because of these laws". Really??!?! This is just nonsense. The part about the Google Glasses was also a bunch of nonsense as well. The only thing I agree with him on is the teenagers sexting part. I think that teenagers shouldn't be charged with a crime for victimizing themselves. Because once these images get out there on the internet, all of the sudden these kids have pedophiles stalking them. Instead parents and schools need to teach kids about the risks associated with sexting. Other than that, what a complete loon this guy is. I've never really thought much about the Pirate Party before this. Mainly because they're not that big here in the US, I think the Libertarian Party(Which I gladly support) covers most of their views. But I've just lost all respect for the Pirate Party.
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.
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.