US Intensifies Fight Against Child Pornography 663
TechnoGuyRob writes "BBC News is reporting that the Bush administration has recently stepped up its measures against child pornography. From the article 'Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more sadistic, using younger and younger children. [...] Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.'"
Re:Will someone please think of the children? (Score:5, Interesting)
Never mind seems like they already have. [com.com]
Remember - Child pornography is illegal, after all (Score:2, Interesting)
RTFA:
The proposals have been sent to Congress and include new laws that will require ISPs to report child pornography and bolster penalties for those companies that fail to do so.
Mr Gonzales also said that he is also investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
As long as the ISPs themselves report the violations of EXISTING law, I have no problem with the first part, and neither should most rational people. I could easily have a problem with the second, but that is not a proposal to Congress yet - just a potential future idea.
Now, could this be expanded on to cause problems in the future? Yes, of course. But just because something may have the potential of being expanded upon later and misused does not mean never do it. New technologies bring new areas of illegal activity that current laws cannot naturally handle. A free society needs to remain vigilant against the natural tendency of government to seek more control, and make sure those new laws aren't misused.
The two aren't mutually exclusive (Score:3, Interesting)
Is anyone actually dumb enough to think this is about child porn?
I am!
This is about the Bush Administration wanting to satisfy its socially conservative base. They don't like child pornography, and they'd like to eliminate it. I see no duplicity in their goal of eliminating child pornography. Their preferred means of fighting child porn simply dovetails with their overall approach to "securing the homeland" from domestic and foreign threats of all kinds. Whenever possible, obtain maximum lattitude to conduct surveillance on Americans and foreign nationals.
The Administration's desire to fight child porn with more surveillance helps them satisfy Bush's core constituents, while furthering his goal of broadening the Executive Branch's surveillance capabilities.
Re:Great.... (Score:2, Interesting)
"I hate the law, but if I say that it'll look like I support terrorism..."
At some point you have to man up and realize you have to speak up no matter how it looks.
WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell is wrong with our country? Cartoons are not reality. Fire the guy and maybe give him one or two years for theft of services (using his work computer for non-work, and that depends specifically on his work contract). But the criminal charges based on his looking at, receiving, soliciting, possessing, or viewing cartoon depictions of anything are fucking bullshit.
I do not see what is so wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
is capitalism in purerest form. who are you to say this is wrong?!
Re:Just an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
To finally end the production of child pornography, unlicensed private possession of photographic equipment is now to be banned. Requirements for a license to possess photographic equipment will include background checks, fingerprint and DNA collection, as well as locks on all photographic devices that require submitting a copy of every image taken with that device to law enforcement agencies before they may be viewed/developped by anyone. Not only will this prevent perverts from taking pictures of naked children, but it will also stop terrorists from photographing buildings and other illegal photographs to plan their attack on our freedom. Anyone found to be in possession of a photographic device without a license, or bypassing the mechanism to submit copies of all images taken to the government, will be imprisoned with tough mandatory minimum sentences regardless of the content of their photographs. Selling these devices illegally will result in a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence. This new prohibition will be just as effective as our prohibition on drugs; it will solve our nations child pornography problem by keeping cameras and camcorders out of the hands of child molestors.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of. Having all your photographs viewed by law enforcement a small price to pay to protect our children and protect our freedom! If you oppose this new policy, you're either a child pornographer or a terrorist, and will be arrested for treason.
You know what the saddest thing is, I had a conversation with a friend who actually believed that such overt invasions of privacy were completely justified to protect the country. Including warrantless interception of every single phone call, even completely domestic. She even said it would be fine if the government wanted to read her diary for no reason. A device in your car that automatically ticketed you for going 1mph over the limit? You're breaking the law, so you deserve punishment. Preventing people from breaking the law was much more important than privacy. She was dead serious, and of course a fanatical right wing republican. She was otherwise intelligent too, science major at my (tier 1) university. This was the last conversation I ever had with her. People like her show what's wrong with this country that allowed these kind of measures to pass.
Porn, Porn, Spam, Porn. (Score:2, Interesting)
we did vote for him (Score:3, Interesting)
The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.
Re:Great.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I had erections when I was eight or so, but my eleven year old brother couldn't tell me what was going on.
Now I'm a parent of two girls, 2.5 and 4 years old. Both masturbate so furiously that it's embarassing. The youngest one has even invented a word for her clitoris-- we parents try not to talk about it.
Why the hell is sex taboo?
It is natural and inevitable.
By the way-- how many murders can you see in a week on tv? How many sex acts?
Which one is legal?
Odd eh?
Re:Yah, right. (Score:2, Interesting)
If the ISP is blocking "child porn" and you are thier customer and "accidently" surf a porn site you thought was a legit site; are you responsible? Keep in mind that you beleve your safe from bad sites because your ISP is blocking and protecting you from underage porn sites.
It would be cool to surf porn and not worry about sites from other countries where the legal age is 16 or 17 when your in a country with 18 or more as a legal age.
After all if you hit a underage porn site; it's already to late; the pictures are in your cache!
Short of a vat of acid for your hard drive; your screwed if you get "caught!"
And NO THIS IS NOT A JUSTIFICATION FOR WILLINGLY SURFING "CHILD PORN!" You ass wads out there harming children need to spend some time in a Texas Prison!
Re:What would you say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm.......
Think of the Children (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's the nuke of an information society. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think we can't trust politicians to safeguard our freedoms anymore. We need to assume they're going to try every last trick in the book to get as much information about our lives as possible. In that case, we're going to have to encrypt everything that goes over any unsecured network. It might not be tedious and time consuming, but we're going to have to push back against the Feds or else our right to privacy is going to go out with our right of habeas corpus.
Actually yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One wonders (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, I've been solicited for sex, and I'm not a child, and haven't been in quite a while (by any US legal definition), and I haven't done anything or gone anywhere that ought to cause anyone to think I'm interested.
Being "solicited" isn't necessarily indicative of any criminal activity, since the person doing the soliciting doesn't necessarily have any idea that the person at the other end of the line is a minor; for your statistics to even have the least bit of meaning, they'd have to be restricted to people who knew (somehow) that the person at the other end of the connection was a minor, and STILL solicited them for sex of some sort. And I would argue that unless that sex was physical, no real crime was committed; any harm that you can do against another person over an internet connection which they are willfully participating in, is by its vary nature specious.
I've also always been rather suspicious of these "sting" operations, but since law enforcement and the courts have apparently accepted them as valid, I guess it's far too late to argue the point.
Re:Yah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Who you gonna call? (Score:3, Interesting)
Secondly, how are they going to track those people that use the various anonymizer networks/packages? Then there are all those child porn newsgroups that I see in various listings. Frankly, the genie is out of the bottle. Even blocking at the ISP level/connection level is out if the communications are encrypted. What they are seeking to do is technologically impossible except at the local machine level and despite what they want to achieve, even I won't allow that here despite the fact that I assume I have no privacy whatsoever anyway (that's another issue).
Sorry Alberto, baby, but the best you can do is wail in a corner 'cause that is all you'll achieve.
Re:Not the internet's fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Historically the age of sexual maturity has been falling in many societies at the same time that the age of "legal adulthood" has been rising. Thus having a group of sexually mature people who are legally "children" is something which has only happened fairly recently.
yet mental maturity for the average human is reached in the mid 20s. So 18 means... what? It's an arbitry time, with no actual meaning.
A simple comparison of ages of consent will show exactly this...
Re:First Amendment Nullified (Score:3, Interesting)
Quoting from the case:
Whorley, 386 F. Supp. 2d at 696. The Supreme Court held in Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969) [findlaw.com] that a person was entitled to possess and watch obscene materials in their own home for their own intellectual stimulation, because the State cannot control what people think. However, the Court has consistently rejected constitutional protection for obscene material outside the home. United States v. Orito, 413 U.S. 139, 143 (1973) [findlaw.com]. On the same day it decided Orito, the Court gave obscenity a definition [wikipedia.org], in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) [findlaw.com]. That case, in turn, held that obscenity could be suppressed over First Amendment objections due to the governmental interest in preventing "a significant danger of offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients or of exposure to juveniles." Miller, 413 U.S. at 18-19. Miller and Stanley compliment each other: a person can watch obscene porn in their home, but not where the public or young people can see it. IMHO, that's a sensible approach.Mr. Whorley downloaded child porn at work: strike one. He would have had to transport it from his work to his house through public places where it might have been exposed to unwilling recipients or juveniles: strike two. Did I mention, he worked for the State of Virginia, at a Virginia Employment Commission office? Strike three, he's out.
Note: the following is personal speculation. There's a difference between downloading obscene porn at work and at home. At work, other people might see it. At home, that's much less likely. The only people who 'receive' the porn in a p2p download are the common carrier ISPs in between the sender and receiver. Generally speaking, the Bush administration notwithstanding, carriers aren't required to monitor the content of the bits they push, nor should they be due to Fourth Amendment policy reasons. Some do voluntarily -- that's up to them. If they do intercept the content and analyze it, they are no longer 'unwilling recipients', and since child labor is outlawed, they aren't juveniles either. Therefore, the justification in Miller for suppressing the content-based speech shouldn't apply. (And for goodness sake, ISPs already know that most of their traffic is porn anyway. It's not like they'd suddenly be taken by surprise.) Courts should be required to find some alternate reason to justify the speech suppression, or they should allow the download, despite its obvious obscenity, on First Amendment grounds.
If someone is convicted of downloading virtual child porn at home, then I'd start to worry about the Bill of Rights being eroded. Until then, I'm going to stick with guarded optimism and counting the days until January 20, 2009 [cornell.edu].
Any limitations or safeguards? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Mr Gonzales also said that he is also investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders."
My questions about this are:
1) What safeguards are put in place, so the system isn't abused? If John Doe is accused of browsing for kiddie porn, what proof is considered sufficient to let someone browse his internet usage? It *should* be the normal burden of proof as required for a normal search warrant, but as we've seen, the government has already shown it is willing to work around that limitation.
2) What limitations are put in place? If we've obtained a search warrant for John Doe's internet records, how detailed are the records going to be? A list of IP addresses? Site names, and the time spent at each site? Data amount transferred? Specific lists of webpages requested? In any case, it's a lot of data that the ISP will need to retain. Granted, storage space is relatively cheap, but if they ask for all packets a person sends/receives, that's a LOT of data.
3) Will the ISPs inform their customers of any changes that occur? Though I haven't seen a contract that they use, I would hope that it contains a clause about protection from fine detail tracking. (If you think someone's filesharing, you can get a rough guess by the quantity of traffic going through specific ports. You don't need to reassemble the entire file to make a rough guess)
I guess in an ideal world, it's treated much the same as phone records - you accessed IP foo, with 25MB transferred - with the same burden of proof required to get access to both. The primary difference between the two, though, is that phone companies charge you on whom you call and connect to, while ISPs don't have site-specific rates. (Yet, at least.) To get phone records, the phone company merely needs to query their existing database of records. To get internet usage records, the ISP needs to implement new technology that they probably don't already have.
Re:One wonders (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:One wonders (Score:3, Interesting)
Thoughtcrime
In the US it is a crime to walk into a bank with a gun, but it is not a crime to stand outside of a bank with a gun. So by your logic, if a man walks up to the door of a bank with a gun in his hand and a policeman sees him he should not be arrested for attempted armed robbery? The policeman should wait until the man with the gun actually says, "give me the money", and takes hostages before trying to arrest him? From the description given in the above posts these are people who solicited for sex and then showed up at this "minor's" house. My hypothetical bank robber didn't think about robbing a bank, many people do that, he actually bought a gun and went to the bank with it fully loaded. The perverts described above didn't think about having sex with a child, they went to the child's house after having already solicited them for sex. This is the difference between thoughtcrime and an attempted crime. Remember simply showing up at a kids house by itself is not enough for a conviction, these men or women would have had to at some point indicated that they had the intent of having sex or sexual contact with the "minor".
Comrade. (Score:3, Interesting)
Spying on citizens is widely supported (Score:3, Interesting)
Some how i doubt spying on citzens would satisfy any citizen base?
Plenty of people [usatoday.com] support wiretapping. I don't, and I doubt most Slashdotters do, but the Slashdot crowd isn't even remotely representative of the overall American electorate. It's hard to believe, but about half the country believes that giving the government more police powers will lead to a more secure nation.
You can say what you like about these people being duped, but at some point you have to concede that the importance of privacy is not a universal constant throughout America. To some people, flag burning, for example, is a much more important issue.
Stupid is as stupid does (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be easier and faster to surf the internet for kiddie porn and bust the sites that are spreading it?
Of course it would. All I am saying is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Many people presuppose that the Bush Administration's end goal is a police state. I would argue that the Administration doesn't have the imagination necessary to fight terrorism (or pornography) through more effective means. It sees signal interception of all kinds as a panacea, so it attempts to use this capability whenever it can, even if the tool doesn't even remotely solve the problem.
I think the Bushies believe they are truly doing something that will put a dent in child porn. I also think we give them too much credit when we assume that every move they make is based on shrewd Machiavellian politics. If the record shows anything, it is that this White House has been as effectively managed as the Texas Rangers were managed during Dubya's reign there.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Scare tactics (Score:2, Interesting)
More widespread sure, but how the hell does the Internet empower the other three?
On one side people will say "they're turning us into a police state!" and on the other people will say "we have to combat this serious problem!", but I think every single one of us can agree that saying "the Internet has somehow made the porn more graphic/sadistic/young" is illogical.
How to Deal with a Straw Man Argument (Score:1, Interesting)
What he has done is to create what is called a "straw man" argument. You create a straw man, a boogey man, and you point to it and you shout and you scare people with hypothetical threats of dire consequences if something isn't done about this "creature". The fact is, the creature is exactly that, a creation of the speaker, with the vaguest "shape" of truth. Yes, child porn exists, but it is *already* being vigorously prosecuted by our fine local and federal police, thank you very much.
So, what is the counter to a "straw man" argument? If you challenge the straw man itself, you actually fall into that very old and obvious trap of seeming complicit in the thing. Don't bother.
There is only one counter to the straw man argument, and that is to make a *bigger* straw man of exactly the same variety! One so huge and so hideous that it becomes apparent to even the dumbest person that this is completely ridiculous, and that anyone that thinks along these lines must be mad.
So, for example, Gonzales has trotted out this straw man of child pornography as a pretext. So what you would do is create a very public one-person media crusade on this issue, *backing the AG to the hilt!*
It goes like this; "Yes, this is a serious problem! What the police are already doing is not enough! What the AG is recommending is too tame! We need to start a government department dedicated to reading the emails of every citizen, scanning them for suggestive remarks about children, and possibly other indications of moral terpitude while we are at it. We need to turn the Internet against people who might use it for nefarious ends by regulating it to the hilt - we need to put an Internet camera in every home! We need to register and license men before they can become fathers! A penis is as dangerous as a handgun, and much more common! Everyone is suspect! Your children could be in danger even as we speak! We are all in danger from these anonymous monsters walking the streets. I would round up anyone who has ever accessed a porn site and create a national database of suspects immediately... I would..."
You see? When people do or suggest crazy scary things, as the AG has done, we need to *immunize people* against the kind of thinking that the AG is exhibiting, by taking that line of reasoning to its logical extreme. This extreme is clearly *more frightening* than the original threat.
At first when you do this, you will actually begin to attract the crazies. This is an indication you are succeeding. You need to press on however, to ever more extreme positions until you have no followers at all - until even the crazies think you're crazy, just short of being arrested.
If one were to do this with all seriousness, without even the tiniest hint of irony or sarcasm, one could cause even the most rabid supporter of the original proposition to distance himself from it and from every suggestion of it.
To my knowledge there is in fact *no known counter* to this counter of the straw man argument, other than the use of force or constraint to stop you.
This is in a strange way what happened with the creationism debate - it was started by Bush expressly to deflect public attention from the administrations most recent bunglings. In short order, it was shown to be the thin edge of the wedge of Christian Fundamentalism, which is actually quite scary in itself to the majority of Americans. Especially when it touches on their children's educations. So it was made to look ridiculous by the very fact of having been seriously followed to its logical conclusion. Now no one in their right mind would be caught dead suggesting it again - we have been immunized against it as a society.
When someone like the AG does what they have just done, suggesting something so obviously Orwe
Re:oppression (Score:1, Interesting)
"No, I support defending the Constitution of the USA. Are you calling the founding fathers pedophiles?"