You are wrong, incredibly wrong. Let's not be so certain. There are many acts of violence which would be extraordinarily traumatizing: having your eyes gouged out, your fingers systematically broken, or your only child beaten to death in front of your eyes, are a few examples. Part of the problem with psychological trauma from rape or sexual abuse is that everyone tells the victim they are irreparably broken, that they can never be truly healed, et cetera.
Now imagine that it wasn't a broomstick and that you have to take HIV tests for a couple of years and can't have a normal sex life with your significant other. Imagine that you can't get out of your car in a parking lot without getting the chills and being terribly frightened? Imagine if you can't sleep at night because you were dreadfully afraid someone might break in and assault you? A tremendous amount of emphasis is placed on sexual crimes in our culture; many insist that victims of sexual abuse are just as damaged as those that are killed, if not worse.
You may very well be right, and sexual trauma may be more intense by a degree, but you also have to keep in mind the irrational societal stigma attached to anything sexual.
"The bill applies to anyone who used a computer to help commit the original sex crime."
Now, the bill is still obscene, but it does not apply to all citizens labelled as sex offenders, as the whole conversation here seems to assume. If only people would R T F A... So many bits wasted.
I really have to wonder what your agenda is when you post something such blatant misinformation.
From the FA:
The bill applies to anyone who used a computer to help commit the original sex crime. It also may be applied to paroled sex offenders under lifetime supervision, but it exempts work done as part of a job or search for employment. And later in the FA:
The State Parole Board currently supervises about 4,200 paroled sex offenders whose sentencing guidelines call for lifetime supervision -- regardless of whether their original crime involved the Internet. To sum up: the bill doesn't apply to all sex-offenders, but it most certainly will apply to sex-offenders whose crime did not involve the internet.
The bill applies to anyone who used a computer to help commit the original sex crime.
This seems to make slightly more sense than how the summary portrays it. If they were convicted of molesting someone through myspace et al, why not take their weapon away from them? On the otherhand, if you didn't know she was underage at that party, from the sounds of things you should still be able to read slashdot.
Can slashdot comments have one of those EULA style things that pops up and asks you to check that you've RTFA'd?
Or maybe some kind of captcha that makes you answer questions about TFA?:P
Yeah, how 'bout that? Did you read the article? If you did, you might have noticed this part:
The bill applies to anyone who used a computer to help commit the original sex crime. It also may be applied to paroled sex offenders under lifetime supervision, Maybe you would have also noticed this, from TFA:
The State Parole Board currently supervises about 4,200 paroled sex offenders whose sentencing guidelines call for lifetime supervision -- regardless of whether their original crime involved the Internet.
There's an important legal difference there, and that is the airline as provider of the questionable content. If someone brings his notebook and watches porn, the stewardess will certainly ask him to stop. If he gets it via the built-in airline system, his answer just might be "but you're providing this, and I've paid for it as part of the ticket price".
And in a court of law, he just might win.
Nah. Use the poster's example. If I bring "Big Hooters" magazine on board with me, and the stewardess asks me to put the magazine away, can I claim, "but I'm allowed to bring reading material on the plane, which is one of the rights I've paid for as part of the ticket price"?
Of course not. The airline isn't specifically providing internet porn, it's providing the internet. If the airline was streaming a porn movie to the passengers themselves (American Airlines presents, "Backdoor Sluts #10"), you might have a point.
If anything disruptive is occurring on a flight, the airline, as a private entity, is well within it's rights to stop it.
Sometimes (opensource?) software projects get ahead of themselves. Stick to what you're good at. Improve the code, make the program faster, leaner, smaller, but there's no need to add in completely unrelated and extemporaneous features.
An anonymous browser built in to a bittorent program? Ugh. With ad-support?!? I just puked into my mouth a little. Make a separate program for that crap, or at the very least make it an optional plugin (with no signs of it or adding resource usage otherwise).
Please Deluge creators and maintainers... you've created a fantastic open-source bittorrent program. Don't ruin it and turn it into another bloated slow Azureus.
Of course I expect to be told I'm wrong, I'm just curious to hear why.
It's because accurate age verification is nearly impossible to implement on the internet without dramatically changing the way the internet, as we know it, works today. Necessitating identification of casual internet users would eliminate many of the user-generated sites and content on the internet, because they would be unable to comply with stringent age-verification rules. What has allowed the internet to blossom is the (perceived) anonymity. While you could argue the lionshare of those user-generated sites eliminated would be adult-themed (not just porn but profanity, violence, etc.), it's irrelevant, because those are the sites that are in demand.
If this was implemented on a wider scale, it would be the end of the internet as a medium for free exchange of communication, and turn into a corporate-dominated shell of what it once was. It would become cable-tv. All that's needed to change internet into a cable-tv like service is a foot in the door; once you accept various regulations and restrictions on content, legislation will come pouring through.
Make no mistake. Proponents of this type of legislation have no real interest in protecting children. They want to change the internet, and eliminate the access to pornography and uncensored communication. It is the righteous few attempting to force their views on the vast majority of the population.
I want to make something perfectly clear... I don't think people that buy / find on the ground and keep (WTF would anyone keep something that sick?) childpr0n are any better than people that molest children.
That's fascinating. So if a 16 year-old girl picked up a photo of a naked 15 year-old boy (in a sexual pose) and brought it home, you would think she was no better than a 50 year old man who raped a 4 year-old? Do you think they deserve the same punishment?
I trust you know the definition of child pornography, and that you realize there does not have to be two people involved, nor does the underage subject even have to be naked if there is a concentration on the genital area. I'm sure you also know that the age of consent is 16 in many states in the U.S., and therefore you could legally have sex with someone but be arrested for manufacturing child pornography by taking sexual pictures of them and sharing them with no one else.
Does your sense of morality/justice have anything to do with protecting the actual children involved, or are you just basing your views on irrational hatred? Do you believe people under 18 who take pictures of themselves and send it to someone else should be arrested?
I assume you just immediately think of worse-case scenarios whenever you hear about child pr0n, but I would be interested to hear your answer.
If you were the child, how would you think about someone wanking over pictures of you being abused?
I would be much less disturbed by and angry at that person (who I would likely never know about) than the person that did the actual abusing. Many people seem to want to apply to both the actual abuser and the picture-wanker the same amount of blame.
Some people would say that possession pictures/videos of a crime where the victim is in the picture should be a crime unless there is a valid professional reason to possess the pictures.
Who is saying that? That sounds insane. Would we be allowed to possess pictures of the World Trade Centers on 9/11? Footage of prison riots? In-store camera videos of purse-snatchings?!?
Should people be thrown in jail for many, many years (as they are with child pr0n) for possessing the gruesome videos/pictures of Islamic fundamentalists cutting off the heads of captured soldiers and civilians that float around the internet?
Are you actually considering his responses, or are you just using brain-auto-reply to type out a kneejerk reaction?
if some grown woman choses to allow her body to be exploited that is entirely different than exploiting children for the sexual gratification of perverted scum.
You are correct, which is why it is a good thing there are also very harsh laws to punish scumbags who molest children. The other poster is talking about possessing pictures of the crime. If someone didn't pay for child pr0n pictures, but found them lying in a gutter somewhere and kept them, would she be somehow helping to molest a child?
ps - I find the fact that you are promoting violence towards someone for expressing an opinion very disturbing.
As far as I can tell, there is no "Right to Privacy" in the Magna Carta, The US Constitution or the Bill of Rights (4th amendment is. I don't really get where this comes from, can someone explain?
The right to privacy has been inferred from the 4th Amendment (and also the due process clause of the 5th and 14th amendments) by the Supreme Court.
It is also considered a fundamental right by most; thus the Ninth Amendment applies:
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
I'm just guessing here:
The guy probably wasn't involved in any of the CP "scenes". If he was getting stuff from the internet (freenet, 4chan, 7chan, 12chan, etc...), they he probably would have been clued into the use of cryptography.
Since he wasn't getting it from the internet, it was probably pictures of people he had access to. His kids. Neighbors' kids. Relatives.
Pretty hard to claim it was planted when you have nudie pics of your daughter sitting on your lap...
You're not just guessing, you're making wild accusations.
On the other hand, The New York Times, Washington Post, and the like, are actually decently respectable media outlets that, though respected, are generally ignored by the general public in favor of whatever is mentioned in church, or on the telly... And yes. I will 100% blame the media for the fact that George Bush somehow still has a 25% approval rating.
You pointed out the real problem with the respectable media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. They lost all respectability when they cowed to the government and drank the administration's kool-aid of fear just when the American public needed them most: before the invasion of Iraq.
Instead of doing independent, reliable investigative journalism, these news organizations just rehashed the bullet points the administration was feeding them. The New York Times gladly published front page stories about the danger posed by Iraq's "stockpile" of WMD's (in particular Judith Miller's series of propaganda pieces), while generally ignoring or banishing to page A16 any coverage of the huge anti-war protests taking place around the country.
The "respectable" newspapers in the U.S. have a lot of work to do if they want to gain the trust of the American people (by that I mean the five or six paying attention). Until then, they may as well just talk about Britney/Paris or post pictures of girls with big boobies; it would probably be less damaging to the country overall.
Encryption keeps getting easier and easier to use - someday my job wont be possible without good case law forcing defendants to give up encryption keys. The only other option is to step up the use of no-knock search warrants and live acquisition. Problem is... when a daughter accuses her step-dad of molesting her and taking pictures - there is usually a family fight long before law enforcement gets involved. This leaves the subject days to encrypt and clean any evidence he has.
Here's a thought... why don't you use her testimony and physical evidence to convict the bastard. People (and this includes L.E.) are often so fixated on child-pornography that they forget the very serious underlying crime. Of course, if you're in law enforcement you realize that most states provide for special testimony for child victims so they don't have to testify in open court, so that isn't an excuse.
You don't need a no-knock warrant if you're truly busting some sicko who is molesting his step-daughter. If the penalties for molestation need to be increased or if child removal in situations of suspected sexual-abuse need to be easier, then those things should happen, but don't rely on the insanely harsh child-porn laws to boost the punishment and jeopardize everyone else's 4th Amendment rights at the same time.
Didn't England recently pass a law that says just that?
They did. The RIPA act. I'm very surprised this sort of law has been passed in the U.S. yet as well. A few more cases like this and it very well happen.
12 separate offenses? What a waste of money and work force, this will become a huge overhead for the legal system, and a costly one, the American government should be more concerned in getting ahead of China than in suing their citizens a hundred time for a simple crime. What a waste of resources.
I completely agree, criminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs is a big waste of time and resources, and is a huge overhead for the legal system... oh wait, we're on a different subject now, aren't we?
It never stopped them before, and it won't stop them now.
Mind you, IANAL, and the DoJ apparently has better things to do than go after low-level copyright infringers, it seems like congress wants to change that to help Hollywood...
But the DoJ is also sensible enough only to care about huge pirate rings selling bootleg copies, not Joe Infringer downloading at home. Hollywood hates that, obviously, but the DoJ has real work to do and I hope they keep doing it.
Wow, thanks for the info. Even if the DoJ has better things to do (I won't go as far as to deem them "sensible"), there's few things worse than making millions of people instant criminals, thus paving the way for selective enforcement whenever the powers-at-be feel like it.
Plus, there's the obligitory forfeiture provision.
It's perfectly reasonable to think that a rapist *might* change his MO.
That's not perfectly reasonable at all, unless you also believe it's perfectly reasonable that all violent criminals, from schoolyard bullies to murderers, might decide to rape young boys and thus everyone should be on the sex offender list.
I wonder if there is a similar milestone path for rapists and/or child sex offenders?
Perhaps you should know the answer to that question before you think it's "perfectly reasonable" to assume that a man convicted of raping adult women also wants to rape young boys.
You seem to be implicitly using an argument frequently advanced by opponents of the death penalty. That argument is that the worst possible thing imaginable is to execute an innocent person and so it is better to execute no one than to risk executing an innocent. The problem with the previous argument is that executing no one will mean that some percentage of convicted, guilty murderers will end up back in society, either by serving non-life sentences or by being paroled or by escaping confinement, and that some of these freed murderers will murder again, perhaps multiple times before they are reapprehended. The net result of abolishing the death penalty can (many would argue would) be an increase in the number of innocents unjustly killed. Any system of crime and punishment is imperfect. While the rare execution of an innocent wrongly accused is always an enormous tragedy and injustice, it may have to be accepted as part of the best practical solution to the problem of protecting society from murderers.
Who the hell makes these ridiculous arguments? First off, people who otherwise would get the death penalty would not be eligible for parole. That's just silly. Second, if you're making an argument that a significant percentage of those sentenced to life in prison might escape and kill others, that's almost even sillier (and preposterous).
The main point, however, is that there is a big difference between random psychos killing innocent people and the State killing innocent people. If you can't see that difference and the problems inherent with the latter scenario, then don't worry about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine that it wasn't a broomstick and that you have to take HIV tests for a couple of years and can't have a normal sex life with your significant other. Imagine that you can't get out of your car in a parking lot without getting the chills and being terribly frightened? Imagine if you can't sleep at night because you were dreadfully afraid someone might break in and assault you? A tremendous amount of emphasis is placed on sexual crimes in our culture; many insist that victims of sexual abuse are just as damaged as those that are killed, if not worse.
You may very well be right, and sexual trauma may be more intense by a degree, but you also have to keep in mind the irrational societal stigma attached to anything sexual.
Of course not. The airline isn't specifically providing internet porn, it's providing the internet. If the airline was streaming a porn movie to the passengers themselves (American Airlines presents, "Backdoor Sluts #10"), you might have a point.
If anything disruptive is occurring on a flight, the airline, as a private entity, is well within it's rights to stop it.
Sometimes (opensource?) software projects get ahead of themselves. Stick to what you're good at. Improve the code, make the program faster, leaner, smaller, but there's no need to add in completely unrelated and extemporaneous features.
An anonymous browser built in to a bittorent program? Ugh. With ad-support?!? I just puked into my mouth a little. Make a separate program for that crap, or at the very least make it an optional plugin (with no signs of it or adding resource usage otherwise).
Please Deluge creators and maintainers... you've created a fantastic open-source bittorrent program. Don't ruin it and turn it into another bloated slow Azureus.
Of course I expect to be told I'm wrong, I'm just curious to hear why.
It's because accurate age verification is nearly impossible to implement on the internet without dramatically changing the way the internet, as we know it, works today. Necessitating identification of casual internet users would eliminate many of the user-generated sites and content on the internet, because they would be unable to comply with stringent age-verification rules. What has allowed the internet to blossom is the (perceived) anonymity. While you could argue the lionshare of those user-generated sites eliminated would be adult-themed (not just porn but profanity, violence, etc.), it's irrelevant, because those are the sites that are in demand.
If this was implemented on a wider scale, it would be the end of the internet as a medium for free exchange of communication, and turn into a corporate-dominated shell of what it once was. It would become cable-tv. All that's needed to change internet into a cable-tv like service is a foot in the door; once you accept various regulations and restrictions on content, legislation will come pouring through.
Make no mistake. Proponents of this type of legislation have no real interest in protecting children. They want to change the internet, and eliminate the access to pornography and uncensored communication. It is the righteous few attempting to force their views on the vast majority of the population.
I trust you know the definition of child pornography, and that you realize there does not have to be two people involved, nor does the underage subject even have to be naked if there is a concentration on the genital area. I'm sure you also know that the age of consent is 16 in many states in the U.S., and therefore you could legally have sex with someone but be arrested for manufacturing child pornography by taking sexual pictures of them and sharing them with no one else.
Does your sense of morality/justice have anything to do with protecting the actual children involved, or are you just basing your views on irrational hatred? Do you believe people under 18 who take pictures of themselves and send it to someone else should be arrested?
I assume you just immediately think of worse-case scenarios whenever you hear about child pr0n, but I would be interested to hear your answer.
Some people would say that possession pictures/videos of a crime where the victim is in the picture should be a crime unless there is a valid professional reason to possess the pictures.
Who is saying that? That sounds insane. Would we be allowed to possess pictures of the World Trade Centers on 9/11? Footage of prison riots? In-store camera videos of purse-snatchings?!?
Should people be thrown in jail for many, many years (as they are with child pr0n) for possessing the gruesome videos/pictures of Islamic fundamentalists cutting off the heads of captured soldiers and civilians that float around the internet?
Are you actually considering his responses, or are you just using brain-auto-reply to type out a kneejerk reaction?
if some grown woman choses to allow her body to be exploited that is entirely different than exploiting children for the sexual gratification of perverted scum.
You are correct, which is why it is a good thing there are also very harsh laws to punish scumbags who molest children. The other poster is talking about possessing pictures of the crime. If someone didn't pay for child pr0n pictures, but found them lying in a gutter somewhere and kept them, would she be somehow helping to molest a child?
ps - I find the fact that you are promoting violence towards someone for expressing an opinion very disturbing.
It is also considered a fundamental right by most; thus the Ninth Amendment applies:
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
That is astonishing. The first thing this guy thinks of with tech issues is "OMG think of the children!!!"?
Why would any Slashdotter support him?
Instead of doing independent, reliable investigative journalism, these news organizations just rehashed the bullet points the administration was feeding them. The New York Times gladly published front page stories about the danger posed by Iraq's "stockpile" of WMD's (in particular Judith Miller's series of propaganda pieces), while generally ignoring or banishing to page A16 any coverage of the huge anti-war protests taking place around the country.
The "respectable" newspapers in the U.S. have a lot of work to do if they want to gain the trust of the American people (by that I mean the five or six paying attention). Until then, they may as well just talk about Britney/Paris or post pictures of girls with big boobies; it would probably be less damaging to the country overall.
You don't need a no-knock warrant if you're truly busting some sicko who is molesting his step-daughter. If the penalties for molestation need to be increased or if child removal in situations of suspected sexual-abuse need to be easier, then those things should happen, but don't rely on the insanely harsh child-porn laws to boost the punishment and jeopardize everyone else's 4th Amendment rights at the same time.
Didn't England recently pass a law that says just that?
They did. The RIPA act. I'm very surprised this sort of law has been passed in the U.S. yet as well. A few more cases like this and it very well happen.
Gee, where's your faux outrage now?
There's plenty of outrage to go around. Don't break this into red vs. blue BS. What part of "2001" don't you understand?
Support the constitution and the 4th Amendment no matter what year it is, and no matter what party is currently in "control".
It never stopped them before, and it won't stop them now.
Plus, there's the obligitory forfeiture provision.
Here's a link to this frightening law: http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/17-18red.htm
Toss a Teddy Ruxpin speaker into a Real-Doll and I'm good to go!
A non-functioning "release-candidate" uses 40% less memory than it's predecessor. Impressive.
I'm going to announce "Super-duper Desktop 8.0 RC3" which is nothing but a blank screen, but it's so efficient with memory!
Perhaps you should know the answer to that question before you think it's "perfectly reasonable" to assume that a man convicted of raping adult women also wants to rape young boys.
It's 43% for all crimes. As others have pointed out, it's more like 5-6% for another sexual crime.
The main point, however, is that there is a big difference between random psychos killing innocent people and the State killing innocent people. If you can't see that difference and the problems inherent with the latter scenario, then don't worry about it.