twitter's Journal: FBI Focuses on Porn, Despite Shaky Evidence.

File under blame the internet.

Cybercrime, the majority of which involves child pornography, is now the FBI's third-highest priority, behind counterterrorism and counterintelligence. The new program's proponents equate image viewing with rape and murder and punish those caught accordingly.

"Sending people to prison for five or 10 or 15 years for looking at pictures is killing an ant with a sledgehammer," said Peter Greenspun, who defended Charles Rust-Tierney, the former ACLU head sentenced to seven years in prison for downloading hundreds of images. "These people are being put on sex-offender registries, they are being ostracized from the community, for looking at pictures."

This despite statements by other government experts who contradict the program's rational.

[In 2002] the Crimes Against Children Research Center, funded in part by the Department of Justice, completed a study that revealed that rates of reported child sex abuse in the US have dropped by 30 percent in the past 10 years. The center's director, David Finkelhor, attributes this to effective public education, a general improvement in such child-welfare indicators as teen pregnancy and child poverty, and aggressive prosecution and treatment of those who abuse. Although he expresses concern that in certain people easy access to child porn might help develop the proclivity to abuse, or reduce the inhibitions against acting on those impulses, he says flatly, "There is no evidence that the Internet is fueling an explosion of child sexual abuse." He adds that "pornography is not one of the major causal factors" in the abuse of kids.

So, are we going to see this used as a tool to frame and remove political opposition?