Possession of Violent Pornography Outlawed in UK

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is reporting that possession of violent pornography is now punishable by three years in prison. This decision was handed down in response to a campaign waged by a grieving mother who lost her daughter to someone obsessed with violent pornography." From the article: "Shaun Gabb, director of the anti-censorship organization the Libertarian Alliance, said: 'If you are criminalizing possession then you are giving police inquisitorial powers to come into your house and see what you've got, now we didn't have this in the past.'"

Re:Ah brilliant

[Richard_at_work]

Well actually this is off the back of a 30 month campaign, 50,000 signature petition and many MPs backing the mother of a victim of a deranged murderer whoes pasttime was viewing violent porn on the internet of the exact manner in which he killed this womans daughter. Its right there in the linked article.

This is anything BUT kneejerk legislation based on media headlines, its coming up from grassroots victims of crime.

System of a Down?

[DesireCampbell]

Violent Pornography [wikipedia.org]?

Not so fast...

[psmears]

“possession of violent pornography is now punishable by three years in prison”

Umm... no it isn’t. FTFA:

The government has announced plans to make the possession of violent porn punishable by three years in jail.

The government have announced plans to make it illegal. So it may happen. But also, the civil liberties types have plenty of time to raise objections, get the sentence changed, get exemptions added etc... which has got to be a good thing.

Re:Steganography...

[dfunct]

I think your forgetting that in the UK its a criminal offence not to give the police your passwords, meaning that if you do hide things like this in encrypted volumes / images then you've got to give the police your passwords when they ask for them meaning that either way your going to jail ...

Re:Disgusting

[Threni]

> Pictures don't cause people to commit crimes.

Exactly. To paraphrase Frank Zappa (who spent a lot of time fighting the censorship of music lyrics):

"There are more love songs than any other kind. If music could alter people's behavior, we'd all love each other."

Re:Steganography...

[jgclark123]

Use TrueCrypt hidden volumes, and keep embarrassing, but legal, stuff in the non-hidden part.

Re:Relation to child porn?

[Dracil]

It actually is in quite a few places. The wiki entry on it discusses its legality in many countries. Heck, even the image being used for the entry gets a lot of heated discussion because some versions of it weren't legal for some Wikipedia users.

Re:Steganography...

[cayenne8]

"Next it will be illegal to listen to a song entitled "Violent Pornography" by System of a Down."

For that matter, guess they could go after some of the classics then too like The Stones' Midnight Rambler [lyricsfreak.com] .

Heck guess we could nix Brown Sugar [lyricsfreak.com] too:

"Scarred old slaver know's he's doing alright...hear him whip the women just around midnight..."

Re:Ah brilliant

[MysteriousPreacher]

There have been similar bans in the UK. I think the Japanese tosa [wikipedia.org] breed was banned here some time back. I can understand people wanting a pet for companionship but seeing something like this being walked down the road on a rather large chain is a bit worrying.

Pit Bull Terriers are nasty things as well. Some dogs are just not suitable as pets, particularly when some clown thinks they can keep it in a suburban area. Restricting ownership of certain breeds is no different to controlling ownership of tigers. Sure they can be trained to behave nicely but most people don't want to take that risk and why on earth would someone want a dangerous animal like that as a pet?

Politicans and Sordid Sex

[aristolochene]

Of course British politicians are well placed to discuss the more sordid end of the sexual response curve...... Like Stephen Milligan MP (Conservative) (died with orange in his mouth, stockings on his legs and a plastic bag over his head) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Milligan [wikipedia.org] Or Mark Oaten MP (Liberal Democrat) (married man. sex with rent boys) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oaten#Scandal_an d_resignation [wikipedia.org] Or David Mellor MP (Conservative) (ugly bloke, sex with hooker in Chelsea shirt) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mellor#Scandal [wikipedia.org] Or Michael Brown MP (Conservative) (Sex with underage boy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brown_(UK_pol itician) [wikipedia.org] Or Ron Davies (Labour) (Caught cruising for gay sex. Claimed he was looking for badgers) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Davies [wikipedia.org]

Re:Steganography...

[Anonymous Coward]

The hidden partition is not represented in the outer volume. If you mount the outer volume like any other encrypted partition, then the hidden partition will be treated as free space. Writing to the outer volume will destroy the information on the hidden partition. That's the problem with hidden TC partitions: Even if you mount the outer partition in protected mode, the OS doesn't know about the hidden data and the first time it writes to a sector which is part of the hidden partition, TC turns the outer volume into a read-only volume. Thus you can't use the outer volume normally, so its data becomes stale. Plausible deniability isn't all that plausible if your encrypted volume is only one tenth full and contains only data from years ago. The outer volume can only use a FAT filesystem because NTFS doesn't leave large enough chunks of continuous free space. That's another point that detracts from the plausibility. There are several other ways of raising at least plausible suspicion that there is a hidden volume.

If you're trying to hide data, use XOR based distributed filesystems.

Link to PDF of consultation paper.

[sharopolis]

Heres a link to the PDF of the paper [homeoffice.gov.uk] this article arises from. It's very vaugue as to how the law will be applied and surprisingly actually shows that the majority of respondents were against the proposal. This is not law yet, no by a long way, the govenment is leaving itself plenty of wiggle room to drop this if it becomes unpopular or difficult.

Re:Ah brilliant

[DDLKermit007]

Actually it's not the dog's fault it's a danger. It's the owner. Problem is most people who treat thier dogs like crap own pit-bulls because they have a rageing hard-on fantasy about a dangerious dog. Every dog breed has the exact same potential to be dangerious as the next dog (except when heavy inbreeding occurs) . I don't personaly own a pit-bull nor will I ever (I'm a basset-hound person), but I have numerious friends and family that own them. Guess what kind of environment the ones that are a bit "mean" live in? People who mistreat thier dogs. Not to mention the ones that own more than one kind of dog end up acting the same way. Dogs are nothing more than children. How you treat them is exactly how they will act.

As something else to think of guess what kind of dogs I've been attacked by? The stupid ass small poodle & toy dogs. I've seen very few of those who have not been mean little fuckers I don't end up kicking because they try to bite me. Do I blame the dog? Not really...those dogs are often times so imbread and thier owners usualy end up knowing jack shit about them they can't be anything, but a pain in the ass to strangers.

In Denmark...

[rbarreira]

I live in Denmark. There are no guns. There is virtually no crime. That's the ideal scenario, not a "peace through guns" one. Now, I know it's complicated to change society in the USA, but it has to start some way. Or do you want to have a country full of gun toting rednecks till the end of times?

Re:Steganography...

[elvum]

RTFA: the law doesn't ban all violent pornography, only "material featuring violence that is, or appears to be, life-threatening or is likely to result in serious and disabling injury".

Re:British Porn Cannot Compare to myRedbook in USA

[werewolf1031]

In London, we call those "Phoneboxes". You can get any perversion you want from the adverts in those.

<sigh> Why is all sex equated with "perversion"? Unless maybe you're talking about two unspeakably ugly people...

All joking aside, it is precisely this attitude that seeking out sex is a "perverted" thing to do, that provides the incentive and the ammunition for folks like US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to make consensual adult imagery illegal [law.com], taking away resources from child pornography investigation units to go after adult pornography. And that was a year ago. How it doesn't create more of an uproar still baffles me.

Getting back to the current topic, keep in mind that much "violent" pornography is acted, not real violence. Here in the States, we call porn with real violence "snuff" films, and they are already illegal here as they depict real, intentional violence against the actors for the sake of creating the film.

Re:Ah brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

No, in the UK it is illegal to possess sexual images that *look* underage, even if they were completely computer generated. That law was passed under Michael Howard.