I've owned a Lexus -- the ES 300 -- for 10 years now and am very happy with how that car has held up. As a result, I've become a die-hard Lexus/Toyota fan, and my next purchase was planned to be the Lexus hybrid model.
However, in lieu of Toyota's errant behavior and its refusal to keep its lawyers in check for something that only promotes their product, I might consider making my next purchase with one of their competitors instead.
I would that that, especially in these tumultuous financial down-times, that Toyota and other companies like them would rather enhance their customer loyalty base rather than diminish it.
So, Toyota, kudos for a great product line, but a thumbs down on your PR with your loyal customers.
What I don't understand is how I run NO A/V software (no, really) - I just run Sygate, a software firewall - and I have not gotten any trojans or viruses in the last... 10 years? Yeah I guess I could have one and not know about it, but I doubt it, disk activity and network activity seems normal (except when Skype decides to route a call thru me, why can't people get their own IPv6 IPs damnit??), and I occasionally run a virus/rootkit scanner over my machine and they come up clean.
A/V is probably unnecessary, if you have a reasonably knowledge of how to use a computer. Yeah most don't, but you're posting Slashdot so you probably do. Why do you use one at all?
One reason: Kids.
One kid uses Linux as much as he uses Windows, and understands how to avoid malware. Alas, he has a lot of friends over that have not learned these important lessons.
Not to mention my other -- younger -- kid, who insists of downloading malware from Disney and other sites that *insists* on using IE to run at all.
One thing I absolutely despise with the AV scanners is just that -- the scanning, that eats up performance both disk-wise and cpu-wise, and always seem to run at the wrong times -- when I am using the machine!
This scanning aspect grows even more germane as we ascend into the commonality of terabyte drives.
We need better approaches to checking files for infections or payloads -- like checking them thoroughly once and then checking any newly created or altered ones at the time of alteration. But even there you take a performance hit, and I know most AV systems already does this to some extent (but will rescan all the drives periodically).
Ah, gotta love Windows. I much prefer to have a clean system and avoid any operations that might introduce a payload -- like running IE, for example.
Google's attempts to flag questionable sites is half-baked, and depends on GoogleBots catching the vulnerabilities before your browser does. And for the poor site owner that's been compromised, Google fails to provide enough details for the site owner to eliminate the potential problems.
Well, I don't use Windows as my primary platform for a number of reasons, virus vulnerabilities being one of them. Not to say Linux doesn't have its share, but they are far less common and if you keep up with the latest upgrades, you'll do OK for the most part.
I think we need to go in a direction of relying on hypervisor-wrapped OSes that can do selective rollbacks to the points before infection. This way, you eliminate the need for scanning everything all the time and better yet, you might put some of the malware protection in the hypervisor itself, at a level the guest OS or the malware could never detect nor evade.
Just a thought for free for some enterprising individual to go make $$$$ from!
I want the news of a potential exploit that may affect me or my organizations to be presented as soon as possible, so I can take measures before the vendor releases a fix.
In many cases, knowing about an exploitable vulnerability doesn't mean you can do anything about it. That is the very heart of the full disclosure/responsible disclosure debate.
There's always something you can do about it -- even if it's a matter of policy vs. technology. Or sometimes there's creative solutions that can be put in place. For instance, if WPA encryption were found to have an actual exploit, you could add an additional encryption layer via VPN or even simply an SSH tunnel. I actually do the latter over the really insecure WEP connections.
This is exactly why the trend of waiting to release news at security conventions is a bad idea. By announcing that there's an exploit but withholding the details, real harm can be done. I understand that security researcher is not a glamorous position (being one myself), and I understand the desire to keep certain details of an exploit under wraps until a vendor fixes them. Ultimately, if you want to wait until the vendor fixes the problem, you do not publish. It's that simple.
Otherwise you end up with, "omg the sky is falling!11!!!11!1! TKIP sux lol may just use open wifi".
As a user of the technology, and as a technologist who is geared to support the firms I work for, I want the news of a potential exploit that may affect me or my organizations to be presented as soon as possible, so I can take measures before the vendor releases a fix.
Get the news out on a real exploit out immediately, but make sure it's real.
What ticks me off is everything someone refers to "God", some basic yet unsupported assumptions are made:
There is just one
That is is gendered
That it is "all powerful", whatever that is supposed to mean.
That it is "everywhere", whatever that is supposed to mean.
That it is supposed to love humans on such a tiny speck of a planet in some unremarkable niche of the Universe
That it is "humanoid.
Amazing how so many assumptions are implicitly made for something that has not only never been observed, but has never even had any objective reason to suggest the possibility of existence.
This is just plain silly. Just as silly as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I will strongly assert, though, that mere possession of a sequence of bits on your hard drive should not be sufficient evidence to put you behind bars. There must be direct evidence that the person directly participated in the abuse of a child, or directly paid for those sequence of bits from the abuser or some "syndicate" or "cartel" involved with illegal exploitation of children. This will place the onus of the law and enforcement efforts where they actually belong -- in directly protecting children, and not in doing a moralistic song and dance claiming it's protecting children when it clearly does not.
Well, I'm not sure that I agree with you on "If they got kiddy porn for free, it's not a problem" angle, but regardless of position on that, it's currently a felony to look at kiddy porn. So, thus, law enforcement belongs there. Also, going after the people consuming kiddy porn seems to me to be a highly viable way of getting leads back to the producers, paid or not.
As far as the "nothing to hide" argument goes, we all have something to "hide" -- that is, in fact, what privacy is all about. It doesn't mean what you are doing is necessarily "illegal"; it With the less than perfect justice system we have, you should all the more insist on privacy lest some innocent, consensual thing you might be doing in private should fall prey to the political whims and sways of the day.
Again, I'm not making the "nothing to hide" argument. Never have been. I'm saying that, once you've been caught and a warrant for search has been legally issued, you don't have a right to conceal evidence requested by the law. Privacy laws aren't actually even involved here; this is evidence gathering that's pursuant from a criminal investigation already in progress, for which due cause is already proven.
If we were discussing a case in which, say, police illegally wiretapping someone found evidence of child pr0n, maybe your arguments would be relevant. But they aren't in the context we're working in.
Well, now, this comes down to an argument about whether one not divulging a passphrase is "pleading the 5th" or "hiding evidence." We do have a right not to incriminate ourselves, and I don't see how pleading the 5th on what one's passphrase is is any different on pleading the 5th on where the body is buried. One's motivation in both cases may be to "hide evidence", but there you have it. If you say one does not have a right to plead the 5th in one case, I don't see how one could possibly have the right to plead the 5th in the other.
Ultimately, this boils down to whether or not it would be more prudent to punish the innocent or let the guilty go free. In an imperfect system of "justice" we have these checks and balances, and we do away with them to our peril.
Just because something is a law does not automatically "justify" it, and one would have to make a pretty convincing argument on how, say, downloading kiddie p0rn from the Usenet or other sources for free enhances the activities of those who create it. There is no profit motive; there is not much of a way for the producers to know who is downloading it or to what degree. So convince me.
Of course, kiddie p0rn is itself a morally divisive issue, a legal quagmire, and a lot of other nasties. Is mere presence on one's hard drive a felony, or is actually *viewing* it the felony? If viewage is the felony, how does one go about proving the p0rn was actually viewed? There are intent issues at stake here, and it is not clear to me how one resolves them in any logical and fair manner that would not also involve snagging some innocent people along the way.
It is just as bad to falsely convict a person of child pornography as it is to actively engage in child pornography itself. If you can devise a means that would catch the guilty whilst not harming the innocent in anyway, I am all ears.
But if we want to stick to 19th century thinking, then that is what the laws give us today.
If the officials went through the proper channels and got a warrant from a judge, and if there was actually "sufficient cause", then that's one thing.
Of course, "sufficient cause" is and of itself a nebulous idea. And I simply don't trust law enforcement nor judges. I have seen far, far too many abuses in the past, and many judges simply "rubberstamp" rather than insist on standards.
Nor do I buy the notion that "other systems are worse" -- sounds more like fatalism than anything else. Besides, I don't care about what goes on in other countries, which, BTW, is heavily influenced by the culture and belief patters of the prevailing inhabitants.
Sadly, this is really a "memetic engineering" issue hiding under the guise of "justice" and "morality".
I will strongly assert, though, that mere possession of a sequence of bits on your hard drive should not be sufficient evidence to put you behind bars. There must be direct evidence that the person directly participated in the abuse of a child, or directly paid for those sequence of bits from the abuser or some "syndicate" or "cartel" involved with illegal exploitation of children. This will place the onus of the law and enforcement efforts where they actually belong -- in directly protecting children, and not in doing a moralistic song and dance claiming it's protecting children when it clearly does not.
As far as the "nothing to hide" argument goes, we all have something to "hide" -- that is, in fact, what privacy is all about. It doesn't mean what you are doing is necessarily "illegal"; it With the less than perfect justice system we have, you should all the more insist on privacy lest some innocent, consensual thing you might be doing in private should fall prey to the political whims and sways of the day.
Except that if the safe is in your house and is guaranteed to be yours, they DO and SHOULD have the right, with warrant, to search the contents. Otherwise, any criminal with a safe is automatically exempted from justice. For that matter, by saying that you've forgotten the combination you've committed perjury, and I believe last access time for the software might very well be accessible, even if the information on the drive isn't.
No one ever claimed the justice system is perfect. No justice system ever is or will be. It's great when science can help make more accurate decisions possible; both in allowing the innocent to remain freed, and in allowing the guilty to be caught. Saying "Oh, sometimes convictions made with worse technology have been wrong, the justice system is completely broken" ignores the fact that, well, Ted Bundy was also caught and tried and convicted. So are a bunch of muggers, rapists, and gangsters. It's not a simple case of "good/bad," it's a complicated system that, yes, needs constant supervision and reform to operate well. But stripping any ability to do search and seizure AFTER probable cause is proved and a warrant is issued isn't in anyone's interest except criminals. Period.
Many commit perjury in court all the time -- including the police. Few, if any, are ever punished for it.
In my experiences, I have been falsely accused more times than I can count. All my life, actually. Each and every accusation was simply false, but it didn't matter, as it took a heavy toll. It is easy for someone to accuse or to lie. They can drop a dime, dial 911, spew forth lies, and then the cops that respond may have issues and chips on their shoulders, etc.
How many times have these accusations been correct? Zero.
Yet, it has cost me millions and a marriage. The costs are high for this imperfect system that never seeks to improve itself. As far as I am concerned, a system that injures the innocent in its endeavors to "catch the guilty" is worthless, and I wonder if we'd be better without it.
The media is asymetrical in how it covers stories -- spends a LOT of time on those actually guilty of their crimes, and almost no time at all on those that are innocent and falsely convicted.
Indeed, it can be a challenge to get them to cover such stories, and I was successful only once in doing so.
Innocent people have rights too -- like the right not to be bothered, have their lives disrupted and destroyed by all this maliciousness. But I guess no one cares for the innocent in this country -- the US.
If you are killing Jack to "save" Jill, you have a net effectiveness of zero. You are merely shifting misery from one place to another. You are not preventing misery. If anything, you are creating more of the same.
Nowhere am I claiming the judge is infallible. But a judge trying to match natural law will do a better job that a legislative body with no concern for natural law.
Law is an absolute, when unclear it should be discovered by the judge, not decided by governments. Once you realize that, most of the logical inconsistencies vanish. Some government laws happen to be right, some happen to be wrong. Consider the different laws tentatives to approximate natural law... and look at the intersection preferably:)
Wrong. You replace the logical inconsistencies of the law with the logical inconsistencies, misconceptions, and personal attitudes of the judge. Still frelled up.
You should realize that this is vigilante justice, and that the law should not follow your "fine" example. Furthermore, you should realize that in the heat of the moment you may misinterpret the situation and end up beating or even killing an innocent man.
If you are fine with this, then so be it. But don't think that the justice system should imitate you. You have far more to fear from corrupt cops than child molesters, and any legal system should protect us foremost from the former.
I don't think there is any way in hell I can misinterpret a grown man's penis inside of a 5-year-old. Yes, it would have to be that certain for me to go, as you say, "vigilante". There would have to be absolutely *no doubt*.
On the other hand, I know all about corrupt, trigger-happy, prevaricating cops. They have been the bane of my existence. Cops can and do lie under oath in court; and as such, there can be no real justice. You never know for sure if the poor guy is guilty or if the cops are making it up, perhaps framed him, etc.
When "law enforcement" turns against the innocent, all bets are off. You are absolutely correct. I've had far more trouble with idiot, corrupt, dishonest cops than I have ever had with real criminals. Funny thing is real criminals almost never bother me. Cops always do. Hmmm. What is wrong with this picture?
If you are 16 years old and consent to having sex with a 22 year-old, there should be no "crime" there. The 16-year-old is not exactly a "child" in the same way an 8-year-old is.
There are "mature minor" statues on the books in many states with regards to where the kid wishes to live in the case of divorced parents, and that age is around 13 or 14. There are strong reasons for having such laws on the books.
And if that is the case with that, why should it be any different?
Your attitude scares me. Nobody should be flayed and burned at all, much less where they stand.
Everybody deserves a trial. And everybody who is found guilty at a trial deserves punishment which is not cruel or unusual.
At the risk of Godwinning the thread, they didn't flay or burn the top Nazi leadership. They gave them trials, then hanged or imprisoned them. These people were responsible for far worse crimes than "taking advantage" of a single five-year-old child, but we didn't think that their punishment should exceed the law.
I'm sorry, but if I come across a guy in the act of raping a 5-year-old, there simply won't much left of that guy for the cops to arrest when they finally get there.
Be scared all you want but if I see anyone *in the act* of harming another, I am NOT going to wait around for law enforcement or any of that. Head will be smashed, bones will be broken, whatever it takes. If I am "bad" for responding a situation of that nature, then I'll be "bad" every damned time. I am sure the victim will appreciate my "badness" 100,000%!
You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it.
Begging the question.
Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".
Many legal rules are not clear cut, that's why judges are not computers.
First of all, penal law is immoral, only the victims should have a claim against their aggressor. The victim should present the damage in front of a judge, establish the lack of consent, and the verdict set accordingly.
Child molesters cause terrible harm, and should be punished accordingly. It is however less obvious that the average pedophile pervert who consumes the product of these crimes commits a real crime himself. While they deserve contempt it is unclear if they deserve jail.
The real case in the situation where someone for free downloads kiddie porn off the Internet from some public area, is, who is the victim? Does a person, by way of downloading something for free, actually is *doing harm* to that victim in the photograph or video? The kid is not aware of this download, and is most likely on some other part of the planet, not in the neighbourhood. So, how is harm actually being done in concrete terms?
On the other hand, if a person *uploads* the same, that's a wholly different matter.
Next comes the issue of territory. It may be legal in the country of origin, say, for a 16 year old model to exhibit his or her body, and yet the mere possession of that artefact would still be considered "illegal" in the U.S. If it is not considered harmful in the country of origin, why should it still be considered "harmful" in this country?
Well, this is why I never went into law. There seems to be no logical consistency whatsoever with the law.
You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".
In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19. If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or day shy of 18. You had the information available, you're screwed.
The problem with "setting the bar somewhere" is that the moral implications becomes ambiguous. Even if someone knew a model was 17 years and 364 days old, do you honestly think that person should go to jail for years where if the model was a single day older, nothing would come of it?
The spirit of the law is lost on a technicality, and therefore becomes a meaningless rule we are forced to follow, like mindless drones.
They'll have access to the bits. As to what those bits represent? What if it's just purely a random set of bits I created for reasons of entropy? A good encryption scheme would be indistinguishable from pure randomness. Am I "guilty" just for having a set of random bits on my hard drive?
If I give them the hard drive, that's all I am required to do. If they can't make heads or tails of it, that's not my problem, per se. If they want to assume my guilt because they could not make headway of a random stream of bits, than that's a miscarriage of justice.
It's the same as if they took a safe out of my house, but I forgot the combination or lost the key. There could be something in the safe incriminating; there may not be. If they want to nail me up against the wall for forgetting the combination or loosing the key, then I am living in the wrong country.
But then, it's no secret that the "Justice" System in our country is backwards, unscientific, given to political whims and the occasional witch-hunt mentality. How many people on death-row have been freed due to the "Justice" system finally applying a little science to the case? If these guys were innocent all along, how could they possibly been found guilty in the first place unless there were -- and still are -- major flaws in our system of "Justice"?
So, really, if someone is thrown up against the wall, they are screwed in any case. And so, it doesn't bloody matter.
And, given that the hard drive business is about finding evidence to prove in court, not about catching them in the first place, I'd guess that it's not really going to be a deal. For one thing, the court can order you to unencrypt that volume, and while you can refuse, that refusal then becomes evidence against you.
Of course, if I forget the passphrase, that's not evidence against me. And I do encrypt my drives that contain personal information or projects that I am working on, and occasionaly I *do* forget the passphrase. Most annoying when that happens.
Then there is the bit about not incriminating myself. If I plead the 5th, I don't have to say anything at all.
And then there's the cases where someone downloading porn simply didn't know the models were under 18. Those caught with 17-year-old models on there hard drive will be treated the same as some real perp with 5-year-olds.
On another front, it would be all to easy to frame someone for "kiddie porn" by comprimising their computer and copying it there. All the remote technologies, all the spyware, all the trojan horses -- if someone really wanted to frell up a lot of USians he could design a special worm that would download kiddie porn to the targets' computers and delete itself, covering its tracks so well no forensic analysis would know. And the scary thing is, it would not be all that hard to do, either.
And thus you'd have innocent people marred for life, having to abide by "Megan's Law" once they have served their time for the "crime" the never committed, etc.
Creation of kiddie porn should be the thing they'd haul you away and chop off various bits for. Or if you pay for it. Mere presence on your hard drive should, in and of itself, not be enough to frell up your life.
But that's just my take on it. Many will disagree with me, of course, as the witch-hunt mentality rules in the U.S.
Assuming you are not a pervert, how much would someone have to pay you to look through CP all day? What effect would this have on your mental health?
Well, you have to wonder about the guys who signs up for this type of job. I think it's akin to the factor of homophobes getting turned on by homo-eroticism.
Of course, I could be purely mistaken. I mean, no way would law enforcement hire perps to look at these images, right? Of course, not!
You can always trust your friendly government to do the right thing!!
So all some "advanced perp" has to do is change the names of files and run it through a filter or two and totally confound the investigators -- or slow his case down tremendously.
Really Smart Perps will simply encrypt the files or the entire drive and that's that.
So, the system is mostly geared to catch only the stupid criminals. Smart ones will never even show up on the radar screen. But then, that's the way it normally is with "Law Enforcement" -- they will never catch anyone above their own IQ level!!!
This sounds like the worse possible way to search for kiddie porn, because a suspect who wanted to conceal his activities could just change a single pixel, and the entire hash would change. They would need a signature method that doesn't change dramatically when a single bit changes, like something based on a frequency analysis.
Or they can just look at the pictures. At least, that's the way it used to be done.
Slashdot Mirror
However, in lieu of Toyota's errant behavior and its refusal to keep its lawyers in check for something that only promotes their product, I might consider making my next purchase with one of their competitors instead.
I would that that, especially in these tumultuous financial down-times, that Toyota and other companies like them would rather enhance their customer loyalty base rather than diminish it.
So, Toyota, kudos for a great product line, but a thumbs down on your PR with your loyal customers.
What I don't understand is how I run NO A/V software (no, really) - I just run Sygate, a software firewall - and I have not gotten any trojans or viruses in the last... 10 years? Yeah I guess I could have one and not know about it, but I doubt it, disk activity and network activity seems normal (except when Skype decides to route a call thru me, why can't people get their own IPv6 IPs damnit??), and I occasionally run a virus/rootkit scanner over my machine and they come up clean.
A/V is probably unnecessary, if you have a reasonably knowledge of how to use a computer. Yeah most don't, but you're posting Slashdot so you probably do. Why do you use one at all?
One reason: Kids.
One kid uses Linux as much as he uses Windows, and understands how to avoid malware. Alas, he has a lot of friends over that have not learned these important lessons.
Not to mention my other -- younger -- kid, who insists of downloading malware from Disney and other sites that *insists* on using IE to run at all.
This scanning aspect grows even more germane as we ascend into the commonality of terabyte drives.
We need better approaches to checking files for infections or payloads -- like checking them thoroughly once and then checking any newly created or altered ones at the time of alteration. But even there you take a performance hit, and I know most AV systems already does this to some extent (but will rescan all the drives periodically).
Ah, gotta love Windows. I much prefer to have a clean system and avoid any operations that might introduce a payload -- like running IE, for example.
Google's attempts to flag questionable sites is half-baked, and depends on GoogleBots catching the vulnerabilities before your browser does. And for the poor site owner that's been compromised, Google fails to provide enough details for the site owner to eliminate the potential problems.
Well, I don't use Windows as my primary platform for a number of reasons, virus vulnerabilities being one of them. Not to say Linux doesn't have its share, but they are far less common and if you keep up with the latest upgrades, you'll do OK for the most part.
I think we need to go in a direction of relying on hypervisor-wrapped OSes that can do selective rollbacks to the points before infection. This way, you eliminate the need for scanning everything all the time and better yet, you might put some of the malware protection in the hypervisor itself, at a level the guest OS or the malware could never detect nor evade.
Just a thought for free for some enterprising individual to go make $$$$ from!
I want the news of a potential exploit that may affect me or my organizations to be presented as soon as possible, so I can take measures before the vendor releases a fix. In many cases, knowing about an exploitable vulnerability doesn't mean you can do anything about it. That is the very heart of the full disclosure/responsible disclosure debate.
There's always something you can do about it -- even if it's a matter of policy vs. technology. Or sometimes there's creative solutions that can be put in place. For instance, if WPA encryption were found to have an actual exploit, you could add an additional encryption layer via VPN or even simply an SSH tunnel. I actually do the latter over the really insecure WEP connections.
This is exactly why the trend of waiting to release news at security conventions is a bad idea. By announcing that there's an exploit but withholding the details, real harm can be done. I understand that security researcher is not a glamorous position (being one myself), and I understand the desire to keep certain details of an exploit under wraps until a vendor fixes them. Ultimately, if you want to wait until the vendor fixes the problem, you do not publish. It's that simple.
Otherwise you end up with, "omg the sky is falling!11!!!11!1! TKIP sux lol may just use open wifi".
As a user of the technology, and as a technologist who is geared to support the firms I work for, I want the news of a potential exploit that may affect me or my organizations to be presented as soon as possible, so I can take measures before the vendor releases a fix.
Get the news out on a real exploit out immediately, but make sure it's real.
Saw it on the Internet; It's gotta be true!
Well, really, these stories should be checked out more throughly before publication!!!!
Amazing how so many assumptions are implicitly made for something that has not only never been observed, but has never even had any objective reason to suggest the possibility of existence.
This is just plain silly. Just as silly as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Well, I'm not sure that I agree with you on "If they got kiddy porn for free, it's not a problem" angle, but regardless of position on that, it's currently a felony to look at kiddy porn. So, thus, law enforcement belongs there. Also, going after the people consuming kiddy porn seems to me to be a highly viable way of getting leads back to the producers, paid or not.
Again, I'm not making the "nothing to hide" argument. Never have been. I'm saying that, once you've been caught and a warrant for search has been legally issued, you don't have a right to conceal evidence requested by the law. Privacy laws aren't actually even involved here; this is evidence gathering that's pursuant from a criminal investigation already in progress, for which due cause is already proven.
If we were discussing a case in which, say, police illegally wiretapping someone found evidence of child pr0n, maybe your arguments would be relevant. But they aren't in the context we're working in.
Well, now, this comes down to an argument about whether one not divulging a passphrase is "pleading the 5th" or "hiding evidence." We do have a right not to incriminate ourselves, and I don't see how pleading the 5th on what one's passphrase is is any different on pleading the 5th on where the body is buried. One's motivation in both cases may be to "hide evidence", but there you have it. If you say one does not have a right to plead the 5th in one case, I don't see how one could possibly have the right to plead the 5th in the other.
Ultimately, this boils down to whether or not it would be more prudent to punish the innocent or let the guilty go free. In an imperfect system of "justice" we have these checks and balances, and we do away with them to our peril.
Just because something is a law does not automatically "justify" it, and one would have to make a pretty convincing argument on how, say, downloading kiddie p0rn from the Usenet or other sources for free enhances the activities of those who create it. There is no profit motive; there is not much of a way for the producers to know who is downloading it or to what degree. So convince me.
Of course, kiddie p0rn is itself a morally divisive issue, a legal quagmire, and a lot of other nasties. Is mere presence on one's hard drive a felony, or is actually *viewing* it the felony? If viewage is the felony, how does one go about proving the p0rn was actually viewed? There are intent issues at stake here, and it is not clear to me how one resolves them in any logical and fair manner that would not also involve snagging some innocent people along the way.
It is just as bad to falsely convict a person of child pornography as it is to actively engage in child pornography itself. If you can devise a means that would catch the guilty whilst not harming the innocent in anyway, I am all ears.
But if we want to stick to 19th century thinking, then that is what the laws give us today.
Of course, "sufficient cause" is and of itself a nebulous idea. And I simply don't trust law enforcement nor judges. I have seen far, far too many abuses in the past, and many judges simply "rubberstamp" rather than insist on standards.
Nor do I buy the notion that "other systems are worse" -- sounds more like fatalism than anything else. Besides, I don't care about what goes on in other countries, which, BTW, is heavily influenced by the culture and belief patters of the prevailing inhabitants.
Sadly, this is really a "memetic engineering" issue hiding under the guise of "justice" and "morality".
I will strongly assert, though, that mere possession of a sequence of bits on your hard drive should not be sufficient evidence to put you behind bars. There must be direct evidence that the person directly participated in the abuse of a child, or directly paid for those sequence of bits from the abuser or some "syndicate" or "cartel" involved with illegal exploitation of children. This will place the onus of the law and enforcement efforts where they actually belong -- in directly protecting children, and not in doing a moralistic song and dance claiming it's protecting children when it clearly does not.
As far as the "nothing to hide" argument goes, we all have something to "hide" -- that is, in fact, what privacy is all about. It doesn't mean what you are doing is necessarily "illegal"; it With the less than perfect justice system we have, you should all the more insist on privacy lest some innocent, consensual thing you might be doing in private should fall prey to the political whims and sways of the day.
Except that if the safe is in your house and is guaranteed to be yours, they DO and SHOULD have the right, with warrant, to search the contents. Otherwise, any criminal with a safe is automatically exempted from justice. For that matter, by saying that you've forgotten the combination you've committed perjury, and I believe last access time for the software might very well be accessible, even if the information on the drive isn't.
No one ever claimed the justice system is perfect. No justice system ever is or will be. It's great when science can help make more accurate decisions possible; both in allowing the innocent to remain freed, and in allowing the guilty to be caught. Saying "Oh, sometimes convictions made with worse technology have been wrong, the justice system is completely broken" ignores the fact that, well, Ted Bundy was also caught and tried and convicted. So are a bunch of muggers, rapists, and gangsters. It's not a simple case of "good/bad," it's a complicated system that, yes, needs constant supervision and reform to operate well. But stripping any ability to do search and seizure AFTER probable cause is proved and a warrant is issued isn't in anyone's interest except criminals. Period.
Many commit perjury in court all the time -- including the police. Few, if any, are ever punished for it.
In my experiences, I have been falsely accused more times than I can count. All my life, actually. Each and every accusation was simply false, but it didn't matter, as it took a heavy toll. It is easy for someone to accuse or to lie. They can drop a dime, dial 911, spew forth lies, and then the cops that respond may have issues and chips on their shoulders, etc.
How many times have these accusations been correct? Zero.
Yet, it has cost me millions and a marriage. The costs are high for this imperfect system that never seeks to improve itself. As far as I am concerned, a system that injures the innocent in its endeavors to "catch the guilty" is worthless, and I wonder if we'd be better without it.
The media is asymetrical in how it covers stories -- spends a LOT of time on those actually guilty of their crimes, and almost no time at all on those that are innocent and falsely convicted.
Indeed, it can be a challenge to get them to cover such stories, and I was successful only once in doing so.
Innocent people have rights too -- like the right not to be bothered, have their lives disrupted and destroyed by all this maliciousness. But I guess no one cares for the innocent in this country -- the US.
If you are killing Jack to "save" Jill, you have a net effectiveness of zero. You are merely shifting misery from one place to another. You are not preventing misery. If anything, you are creating more of the same.
Gotta love the great ole' U.S. of A.
Nowhere am I claiming the judge is infallible. But a judge trying to match natural law will do a better job that a legislative body with no concern for natural law.
When you find such a judge, please let me know.
Law is an absolute, when unclear it should be discovered by the judge, not decided by governments. Once you realize that, most of the logical inconsistencies vanish. Some government laws happen to be right, some happen to be wrong. Consider the different laws tentatives to approximate natural law... and look at the intersection preferably :)
Wrong. You replace the logical inconsistencies of the law with the logical inconsistencies, misconceptions, and personal attitudes of the judge. Still frelled up.
You should realize that this is vigilante justice, and that the law should not follow your "fine" example. Furthermore, you should realize that in the heat of the moment you may misinterpret the situation and end up beating or even killing an innocent man.
If you are fine with this, then so be it. But don't think that the justice system should imitate you. You have far more to fear from corrupt cops than child molesters, and any legal system should protect us foremost from the former.
I don't think there is any way in hell I can misinterpret a grown man's penis inside of a 5-year-old. Yes, it would have to be that certain for me to go, as you say, "vigilante". There would have to be absolutely *no doubt*.
On the other hand, I know all about corrupt, trigger-happy, prevaricating cops. They have been the bane of my existence. Cops can and do lie under oath in court; and as such, there can be no real justice. You never know for sure if the poor guy is guilty or if the cops are making it up, perhaps framed him, etc.
When "law enforcement" turns against the innocent, all bets are off. You are absolutely correct. I've had far more trouble with idiot, corrupt, dishonest cops than I have ever had with real criminals. Funny thing is real criminals almost never bother me. Cops always do. Hmmm. What is wrong with this picture?
There are "mature minor" statues on the books in many states with regards to where the kid wishes to live in the case of divorced parents, and that age is around 13 or 14. There are strong reasons for having such laws on the books.
And if that is the case with that, why should it be any different?
Your attitude scares me. Nobody should be flayed and burned at all, much less where they stand.
Everybody deserves a trial. And everybody who is found guilty at a trial deserves punishment which is not cruel or unusual.
At the risk of Godwinning the thread, they didn't flay or burn the top Nazi leadership. They gave them trials, then hanged or imprisoned them. These people were responsible for far worse crimes than "taking advantage" of a single five-year-old child, but we didn't think that their punishment should exceed the law.
I'm sorry, but if I come across a guy in the act of raping a 5-year-old, there simply won't much left of that guy for the cops to arrest when they finally get there.
Be scared all you want but if I see anyone *in the act* of harming another, I am NOT going to wait around for law enforcement or any of that. Head will be smashed, bones will be broken, whatever it takes. If I am "bad" for responding a situation of that nature, then I'll be "bad" every damned time. I am sure the victim will appreciate my "badness" 100,000%!
You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it.
Begging the question.
Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".
Many legal rules are not clear cut, that's why judges are not computers.
First of all, penal law is immoral, only the victims should have a claim against their aggressor. The victim should present the damage in front of a judge, establish the lack of consent, and the verdict set accordingly.
Child molesters cause terrible harm, and should be punished accordingly. It is however less obvious that the average pedophile pervert who consumes the product of these crimes commits a real crime himself. While they deserve contempt it is unclear if they deserve jail.
The real case in the situation where someone for free downloads kiddie porn off the Internet from some public area, is, who is the victim? Does a person, by way of downloading something for free, actually is *doing harm* to that victim in the photograph or video? The kid is not aware of this download, and is most likely on some other part of the planet, not in the neighbourhood. So, how is harm actually being done in concrete terms?
On the other hand, if a person *uploads* the same, that's a wholly different matter.
Next comes the issue of territory. It may be legal in the country of origin, say, for a 16 year old model to exhibit his or her body, and yet the mere possession of that artefact would still be considered "illegal" in the U.S. If it is not considered harmful in the country of origin, why should it still be considered "harmful" in this country?
Well, this is why I never went into law. There seems to be no logical consistency whatsoever with the law.
You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".
In particular, when we get to the 17-yo case, it's as simple as this: did you think, in good faith, that she was of age? If yes, you should be home free. We're talking reasonable doubt here. It's reasonable to think a 17-yo is 18 or 19. If it was publicized as kiddie porn in any way, I don't care if she's 15 or day shy of 18. You had the information available, you're screwed.
The problem with "setting the bar somewhere" is that the moral implications becomes ambiguous. Even if someone knew a model was 17 years and 364 days old, do you honestly think that person should go to jail for years where if the model was a single day older, nothing would come of it?
The spirit of the law is lost on a technicality, and therefore becomes a meaningless rule we are forced to follow, like mindless drones.
If I give them the hard drive, that's all I am required to do. If they can't make heads or tails of it, that's not my problem, per se. If they want to assume my guilt because they could not make headway of a random stream of bits, than that's a miscarriage of justice.
It's the same as if they took a safe out of my house, but I forgot the combination or lost the key. There could be something in the safe incriminating; there may not be. If they want to nail me up against the wall for forgetting the combination or loosing the key, then I am living in the wrong country.
But then, it's no secret that the "Justice" System in our country is backwards, unscientific, given to political whims and the occasional witch-hunt mentality. How many people on death-row have been freed due to the "Justice" system finally applying a little science to the case? If these guys were innocent all along, how could they possibly been found guilty in the first place unless there were -- and still are -- major flaws in our system of "Justice"?
So, really, if someone is thrown up against the wall, they are screwed in any case. And so, it doesn't bloody matter.
Plenty of smart people get caught, dude.
And, given that the hard drive business is about finding evidence to prove in court, not about catching them in the first place, I'd guess that it's not really going to be a deal. For one thing, the court can order you to unencrypt that volume, and while you can refuse, that refusal then becomes evidence against you.
Of course, if I forget the passphrase, that's not evidence against me. And I do encrypt my drives that contain personal information or projects that I am working on, and occasionaly I *do* forget the passphrase. Most annoying when that happens.
Then there is the bit about not incriminating myself. If I plead the 5th, I don't have to say anything at all.
On another front, it would be all to easy to frame someone for "kiddie porn" by comprimising their computer and copying it there. All the remote technologies, all the spyware, all the trojan horses -- if someone really wanted to frell up a lot of USians he could design a special worm that would download kiddie porn to the targets' computers and delete itself, covering its tracks so well no forensic analysis would know. And the scary thing is, it would not be all that hard to do, either.
And thus you'd have innocent people marred for life, having to abide by "Megan's Law" once they have served their time for the "crime" the never committed, etc.
Creation of kiddie porn should be the thing they'd haul you away and chop off various bits for. Or if you pay for it. Mere presence on your hard drive should, in and of itself, not be enough to frell up your life.
But that's just my take on it. Many will disagree with me, of course, as the witch-hunt mentality rules in the U.S.
Assuming you are not a pervert, how much would someone have to pay you to look through CP all day? What effect would this have on your mental health?
Well, you have to wonder about the guys who signs up for this type of job. I think it's akin to the factor of homophobes getting turned on by homo-eroticism.
Of course, I could be purely mistaken. I mean, no way would law enforcement hire perps to look at these images, right? Of course, not!
You can always trust your friendly government to do the right thing!!
But then you can't pretend it's not a search and you don't need a warrant.
Oh, leave it up to "our finest" to find new and renowned ways to circumvent our basic constitutional rights!
Really Smart Perps will simply encrypt the files or the entire drive and that's that.
So, the system is mostly geared to catch only the stupid criminals. Smart ones will never even show up on the radar screen. But then, that's the way it normally is with "Law Enforcement" -- they will never catch anyone above their own IQ level!!!
This sounds like the worse possible way to search for kiddie porn, because a suspect who wanted to conceal his activities could just change a single pixel, and the entire hash would change. They would need a signature method that doesn't change dramatically when a single bit changes, like something based on a frequency analysis.
Or they can just look at the pictures. At least, that's the way it used to be done.