They can ban you from possessing certain books in the privacy of your own home?!?
If so, then the foundation for this type of law has already been laid. It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone that this type of thing can occur when there is no proper freedom of speech.
That's a two year window where it's legal to do it, but illegal to keep a picture for later. And the window is open a bit wider than that (and leap of logic even grander), for in this age of cell-phone cameras, any picture that someone underage takes of themselves in a sexual activity (or pose) is highly illegal, and they can be prosecuted for possessing it. Thus they are the perpetrator of the crime and simultaneously the victim.
Without coming down either side of this, how is banning a type of picture a "thought crime"? Because consider the intent behind the law. Why would you ban a picture of people engaged in consensual acts? Where is the crime?
The only possible justification for creating such a law would be that you are afraid the possessor is being negatively influenced by the picture, or that the picture is evidence of an undesirable inclination to do certain acts. Both possibilities require the government guessing at what is inside the possessor's mind, and thus the law is creating a "thought-crime".
I am playing devil's advocate here, but the government has a job to maintain a safe and working society. There are laws that restrict personal freedoms because they have a bad effect on society. For example, guns were banned. Again I'm not saying any individual action is correct, but they do have that power. A logical argument could be made that consensual acts in private by a small number of people does not have the same negative impact on society that wide distribution of depictions of those acts would. So, the importnat questions here are: are there things that the UK government _cannot_ restrict in the interest of protecting society? Is the material in question one of those things? Are the materials really harmful (and, according to who) to the extent that they need to be banned? If you are going to make an argument either pro or con regarding banning, you need to answer questions like these. Instead of (simulated) violent pornography in the form of pictures or video, consider it as the written word. Then ask yourself, do you really want to give the government the ability to ban books?
People are *ahem* desensitized to the idea of making certain videos or pictures illegal, because of the widely approved ban on child pornography, but in matters such as this, where consenting adults are involved in the production of the material, I can't see there being any distinction between laws like these and a government ban on certain books.
I'm not saying you need to run a background check every time you want to rent Slut Teachers Get What They Deserve VI. Just that there is a balance to keep between protecting the citizenry from potentially dangerous people and allowing people the freedom to consume whatever vices they need. And I suppose you want the government to keep track of all the books we check out of the library, and monitor and track anyone that reads "Lolita" by Nabokov.
Of course, this parallels some sex laws already enacted where I live. It's legal to have sex with someone who's 16, provided you're not in a position of authority over them... But have a picture of you having sex with your 16 year old girlfriend? Not a wise move. Exactly. It's the government greasing up the slope for some slip and slide fun.
Once it becomes (nearly) universally accepted that merely possessing pictures or video can be as harmful (or in your example, more harmful) as the actual actions therein depicted, it's easy to make the logical leap that other forms of content must be restricted as well.
If fictionally depicting someone being raped or abused is a crime then surely horror flicks must be banned as well. Oh and the Die Hard movies too because they can be training tools for terrorists. No silly, because in those examples sex is not involved.
It's the dirty sin inside of all of us that must be cleansed by the justice system.
The KDE 4 website says quite clearly that it hasn't reached full feature parity and isn't ready for everyday use for everyone. Where? http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
From that page: "KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes."
And who said the release was final? They are releasing new versions every three weeks right now. Seems far from final. Well, by that definition, a software release is never final.
Also from the release page: "The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era..." Sounds like a release for users to me, not some sort of preview or developer's release.
People keep suggesting that KDE should have called 4.0 something other than a release, but again, it is just semantics. It's just semantics until a school or business that isn't privy to the KDE team's reshuffling of release definitions tries to install what is called a final release and discovers that it is still not feature complete and has lots of bugs.
And saying that 4.0 doesn't fully represent everything that 4 will be isn't drivel. Apparently you didn't use KDE 3.0 or KDE 2.0 Huh. Seem a tad strange then that there was controversy about KDE4's release, since everyone apparently is on the same page as to what constitutes a.0 final release. I suppose every "final" release is really only intended for early adopters or as a sort of technology preview. Like Firefox 3.0, when it comes out of beta, will no doubt only be intended for early adopters and developers.
As for releasing it, you don't know what bugs you have until people use the product to an extent. KDE 4 went through alpha and beta builds, but got far more bug reports when people used it after release. True, the KDE4 team probably had no idea that the panel couldn't be resized or that desktop icons weren't functioning properly before they pushed out the final release. This is what final releases are for though, right? For early adopters to discover bugs and report back to the developers? That sounds suspiciously like another release term I used to hear that started with a B...
Then you're just in semantics on what you call a release. I'm stuck on semantics on what a release should be called? The various explanations offered by the KDE developers after the fact was pure marketing drivel ("KDE 4.0 is not KDE4" for example). What they released in January I'd be doing a favor by calling a developer release.
How many lives of code are in the KDE SVN? He designed the concept of Plasma, designed a complete refactoring, did a bunch of coding himself, did a bunch of PR, changed the build system, and largely rebuilt KDE from the ground up. That is no small task given the time frame. The fact that there is a very stable KDE 4 desktop literally a few months after the 4.0 release said they got it mostly right. To top it all off, at the same time he was also developing Mac OS X and Windows ports from the ground up as well. Perhaps there was too much on his plate. At the very least he should have cut back on some of the PR and hype leading up to the release.
Name one other project of that magnitude that pulled off a release like that this year.
I'd say that qualifies him for best project manager of the year. KDE4 is indeed an impressive project. But it may have been better received, and more easily adopted, if there wasn't a management decision to release it so early before many of the components were usable (i.e. plasma). That management decision, in my opinion, was a poor one, which is why I would say he is not qualified to be the best project manager of the year.
I actually had a mod suggest to me that I should divorce my wife because she bought a laptop that wasn't 100% supported by free drivers. That's a great community. Does your sarcasm detector run on Kubuntu too? Because it's broken.
The problem I see with all these discussions of privacy vs. evil child porn is that there is no way to independently verify how big of a problem child porn on the internet really is.
The FBI would have you believe that it is a huge problem worth drastically expanding surveillance powers over. Yet compared to the 70s, when (afaik) there was legal child pornography being produced and sold, what is the production rate for this type of material today? Are there really any child pornography sites on the internet where people can pay to download child porn? (please no links)
I also worry that the focus of law enforcement's "war on child porn" is shifting from the visual depiction of young children actually engaged in sexual activity with adults, to (1) pictures of naked children not engaged in sexual activity, and (2) material that is made by teenagers themselves. The original intent of having an exception to the First Amendment for child pornography is being distorted. This is especially true when you consider that CGI child porn that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing is illegal to possess (thanks to the PROTECT Act), and that people are being arrested for pasting pictures of children's heads on naked adult bodies: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080418/BREAKING/453898235.
"Records retention by ISPs would be tremendously helpful in giving us a historic basis to make a case on a number of child pornographers who use the Internet to push their pornography" or lure children, Mueller said. This would also be tremendously helpful in compiling a complete profile on anyone law enforcement or the government deems to be suspicious or suspected of committing a crime.
The potential for abuse here is huge. Mueller is trying to distract politicians and the pitchfork-wielding public with scenarios where John E. Pedophile is able to be apprehended because the FBI can see he visited Underage-illegal-pornography.org thanks to the wonders of data retention. But imagine how much information about our lives can be gathered from our ISP records... private medical information, marital problems, embarrassing yet legal sexual predilections, books we read, videos we rent, political groups we favor, and on and on. The government will be able to obtain a vast amount of private and personal information after they gain access to years of our ISP records. And with 4th Amendment loopholes like national security letters in existence, there's no guarantee that this information will only be accessed upon suspicion of serious criminal activity.
The end just doesn't justify the means. The FBI seems to be doing a fine job in stopping the production of child pornography with the data retention policies that are in place. Are there any child pornography websites on the internet anymore? Are child pornographers really "pushing" their product on random internet users? Of course, no one knows the answers to these questions, and it is impossible to independently verify the government's claims without putting yourself in jeopardy of facing severe criminal charges, but it seems doubtful that child pornography is such a rampant problem that it requires opening up a pandora's box of privacy concerns.
Also lending their support for data retention were Rep. Ric Keller, R-Fla., who said that Internet chat rooms were crammed with sexual predators And also crammed with law-enforcement agents posing as sexually curious 14 year old girls (and boys).
Child pornography is the rape of a child for the sexual entertainment of an adult. Could be. Could also be a picture of a naked 16 year old. Or it could be a picture of a fully clothed minor in a lascivious pose. Or it could be a computer-generated image that is nearly indistinguishable from a real picture, but where no actual children were involved.
You hold in your hands the evidence of a real-life sexual assault - in many societies, a capital offense. Yet evidence of a real-life beating or murder wouldn't be illegal at all.
You were damn lucky to have been caught at the American border and not elsewhere. America has some of the harshest penalties for possession of child pornography of anywhere in the world. I wouldn't consider that lucky.
It is not all unlikely that you have paid for these photos and videos - and it is not beyond possibility that you commissioned these photos and videos. It is also not beyond possibility that you are the head of a massive child enslavement ring which brainwashes children to dig for mystical stones in India that will enable you to conquer the world. You can extrapolate all you want on what may be the case, but unless you know any additional facts surrounding this arrest, you are only making spurious assumptions to back up your child-porn hysteria fueled outrage.
Child porn is real evidence of underage children being victimized. Rambo is a fictional movie, in case you weren't aware, maybe it was your own fantasies that got a little bit out of control if you thought for a second they were the same. Yet you could possess a video (real evidence!) of someone being murdered or beheaded (for real!), and not be breaking the law.
Agreed. If only the KDE was so forthright about the release in January instead of trying to cover for the shortfalls of the final 4.0 release by relying on meaningless marketing drivel. They really should have just named it a "developer release" and avoided all this hoopla.
An interesting quote from the article:
But in 2008 alone, investigators using Fairplay have "seen" more than 1,400 IP addresses tied to swapping child pornography files on at least 100 different occasions, Waters said. He didn't say how he identified what he viewed as child pornography, which can include photographs of fully-clothed teenagers taken with their parents' consent. People need to be aware that the definition of child pornography has been steadily broadening since the material was originally declared illegal in the US in the early 1980s.
It has gone from children engaged in sexual activities, to pictures which focus on the genitals of children, to fully clothed teenagers in "sexual poses". As the penalties for simple possession are made ever harsher, so too the definition of what qualifies as child pornography becomes more flexible. Current enforcement practices are not holding true to the original intention of the law.
If so, do you believe that Sen. Biden's desire to prevent the exchange of such material on P2P networks is reasonable in principle (even if it's infeasible in practice)? If not, why? You answered your own question. If it is infeasible in practice, why would I support it? A lot of things are reasonable "in principle" but it's ridiculous to throw money at solutions which are entirely impractical. In principle it would be nice to end all domestic abuse, but that does not mean I am going to support putting police-monitored cameras in everyone's home.
For those who agree that this is indeed a problem, are there any constructive suggestions for tackling it? Or do we just give up, let child abusers swap pictures and videos with impunity and shrug our shoulders about the whole thing? You're trying to play to emotions. We have to try something! You seem to be implying that if we don't support impractical, infeasible methods of enforcement such as Biden's suggestion, we are just shrugging our shoulders and giving up.
There are many ways to stop the exchange of child pornography, as is evidenced by the increased numbers of arrests for such crimes in the past few years. Personally, I wish there was more of a focus on the actual perpetrators of sexual abuse, rather than on the people casually downloading it from kazaa.
Screaming, "think of the children!" and supporting any bone-headed plan that a senator comes up with without considering other harmful ramifications does not help anyone.
It's a shame about your friend, but if you're going to assign blame for her death, I would think free speech on the internet would be very far down on your list. Why are you not blaming advil? Why are you not blaming the store which sold her such a quantity of the drug? Indeed, if your friend was bipolar, why are you not blaming her support network... her physicians, family, or friends?
You claim that websites that disseminate such information are complicit in murder. Are you so sure that there was a direct casual link between this website and your friend's suicide? In other words, but for this website, your friend would never have been able to commit suicide using any other methods?
While I agree with free speech, I think that access to such information should be limited to those who have sufficient information to prove themselves non-suicidal -- exactly like getting a gun license. With such conditions placed on access to information (and who are the gatekeepers?), you most assuredly do not agree with free speech. You believe in very limited "approved" speech, not free speech.
I think other posters have missed the point a bit by focusing on the fact that this case was about child pornography. But what other crime could be committed using a credit card that carries even half the societal scorn as child pornography? With other crimes you face financial ruin and possible jail time; with a child pornography arrest you get the financial ruin, the jail time (lengthier than most other crimes you could commit with a CC), and there is the added bonus of being transformed into a living monster who nearly all of society wishes to punish over and over again.
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I guess I wasn't clear enough. That was entirely my point.
They can ban you from possessing certain books in the privacy of your own home?!?
If so, then the foundation for this type of law has already been laid. It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone that this type of thing can occur when there is no proper freedom of speech.
The only possible justification for creating such a law would be that you are afraid the possessor is being negatively influenced by the picture, or that the picture is evidence of an undesirable inclination to do certain acts. Both possibilities require the government guessing at what is inside the possessor's mind, and thus the law is creating a "thought-crime".
People are *ahem* desensitized to the idea of making certain videos or pictures illegal, because of the widely approved ban on child pornography, but in matters such as this, where consenting adults are involved in the production of the material, I can't see there being any distinction between laws like these and a government ban on certain books.
Just imagine the chilling effect this would have.
Once it becomes (nearly) universally accepted that merely possessing pictures or video can be as harmful (or in your example, more harmful) as the actual actions therein depicted, it's easy to make the logical leap that other forms of content must be restricted as well.
From that page: "KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes." And who said the release was final? They are releasing new versions every three weeks right now. Seems far from final. Well, by that definition, a software release is never final.
Also from the release page: "The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era..." Sounds like a release for users to me, not some sort of preview or developer's release.
How many lives of code are in the KDE SVN? He designed the concept of Plasma, designed a complete refactoring, did a bunch of coding himself, did a bunch of PR, changed the build system, and largely rebuilt KDE from the ground up. That is no small task given the time frame. The fact that there is a very stable KDE 4 desktop literally a few months after the 4.0 release said they got it mostly right. To top it all off, at the same time he was also developing Mac OS X and Windows ports from the ground up as well. Perhaps there was too much on his plate. At the very least he should have cut back on some of the PR and hype leading up to the release.
Name one other project of that magnitude that pulled off a release like that this year. I'd say that qualifies him for best project manager of the year. KDE4 is indeed an impressive project. But it may have been better received, and more easily adopted, if there wasn't a management decision to release it so early before many of the components were usable (i.e. plasma). That management decision, in my opinion, was a poor one, which is why I would say he is not qualified to be the best project manager of the year.
The problem I see with all these discussions of privacy vs. evil child porn is that there is no way to independently verify how big of a problem child porn on the internet really is.
The FBI would have you believe that it is a huge problem worth drastically expanding surveillance powers over. Yet compared to the 70s, when (afaik) there was legal child pornography being produced and sold, what is the production rate for this type of material today? Are there really any child pornography sites on the internet where people can pay to download child porn? (please no links)
I also worry that the focus of law enforcement's "war on child porn" is shifting from the visual depiction of young children actually engaged in sexual activity with adults, to (1) pictures of naked children not engaged in sexual activity, and (2) material that is made by teenagers themselves. The original intent of having an exception to the First Amendment for child pornography is being distorted. This is especially true when you consider that CGI child porn that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing is illegal to possess (thanks to the PROTECT Act), and that people are being arrested for pasting pictures of children's heads on naked adult bodies: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080418/BREAKING/453898235.
The potential for abuse here is huge. Mueller is trying to distract politicians and the pitchfork-wielding public with scenarios where John E. Pedophile is able to be apprehended because the FBI can see he visited Underage-illegal-pornography.org thanks to the wonders of data retention. But imagine how much information about our lives can be gathered from our ISP records... private medical information, marital problems, embarrassing yet legal sexual predilections, books we read, videos we rent, political groups we favor, and on and on. The government will be able to obtain a vast amount of private and personal information after they gain access to years of our ISP records. And with 4th Amendment loopholes like national security letters in existence, there's no guarantee that this information will only be accessed upon suspicion of serious criminal activity.
The end just doesn't justify the means. The FBI seems to be doing a fine job in stopping the production of child pornography with the data retention policies that are in place. Are there any child pornography websites on the internet anymore? Are child pornographers really "pushing" their product on random internet users? Of course, no one knows the answers to these questions, and it is impossible to independently verify the government's claims without putting yourself in jeopardy of facing severe criminal charges, but it seems doubtful that child pornography is such a rampant problem that it requires opening up a pandora's box of privacy concerns.
Agreed. If only the KDE was so forthright about the release in January instead of trying to cover for the shortfalls of the final 4.0 release by relying on meaningless marketing drivel. They really should have just named it a "developer release" and avoided all this hoopla.
It has gone from children engaged in sexual activities, to pictures which focus on the genitals of children, to fully clothed teenagers in "sexual poses". As the penalties for simple possession are made ever harsher, so too the definition of what qualifies as child pornography becomes more flexible. Current enforcement practices are not holding true to the original intention of the law.
If so, do you believe that Sen. Biden's desire to prevent the exchange of such material on P2P networks is reasonable in principle (even if it's infeasible in practice)? If not, why? You answered your own question. If it is infeasible in practice, why would I support it? A lot of things are reasonable "in principle" but it's ridiculous to throw money at solutions which are entirely impractical. In principle it would be nice to end all domestic abuse, but that does not mean I am going to support putting police-monitored cameras in everyone's home. For those who agree that this is indeed a problem, are there any constructive suggestions for tackling it? Or do we just give up, let child abusers swap pictures and videos with impunity and shrug our shoulders about the whole thing? You're trying to play to emotions. We have to try something! You seem to be implying that if we don't support impractical, infeasible methods of enforcement such as Biden's suggestion, we are just shrugging our shoulders and giving up.
There are many ways to stop the exchange of child pornography, as is evidenced by the increased numbers of arrests for such crimes in the past few years. Personally, I wish there was more of a focus on the actual perpetrators of sexual abuse, rather than on the people casually downloading it from kazaa.
Screaming, "think of the children!" and supporting any bone-headed plan that a senator comes up with without considering other harmful ramifications does not help anyone.
You claim that websites that disseminate such information are complicit in murder. Are you so sure that there was a direct casual link between this website and your friend's suicide? In other words, but for this website, your friend would never have been able to commit suicide using any other methods? While I agree with free speech, I think that access to such information should be limited to those who have sufficient information to prove themselves non-suicidal -- exactly like getting a gun license. With such conditions placed on access to information (and who are the gatekeepers?), you most assuredly do not agree with free speech. You believe in very limited "approved" speech, not free speech.