Why would any normal person draw kiddy porn to begin with?
Maybe they are not drawing "kiddie porn" in their minds -- but something else. Aliens who mature differently. Or maybe they are drawing childhood fantasies. Who knows?
If there was no consumption, there would be no production.
This is wrong in every respect (with the exception of paid for consumption, of course). If someone downloads kiddie porn for free that consumption is largely invisible. I think only true idiots would post the stuff on a website, which would get taken down quickly anyway (and be highly trackable). So the vast majority of the consumption will be by less visible means, such as Usenet, P2P, and the like.
If there is no money incentive, why go through the risks of recording the illicit acts? It doesn't make sense. If one is predisposed to do it anyway just for the hell of it, it is obvious such a person will not be deterred by lack of consumption, so the kid is violated anyway. 1 download or 1000000 downloads would make no difference, since the perpetrator would not ever know about them.
Child porn isn't something you would use a studio for. It is something that is a home-based business.
My point exactly. It's hard to make a profit at your business if people are getting their copies for free.
So again you prove my point -- it's the *paid for* consumption that drives it, not the free consumption. And most likely, the "third-world hovels", as you put it, make their money locally anyway. They will probably not be able to put together the resources to charge for this stuff online, and if they did, would make themselves easy targets to track down. At which point Law Enforcement will actually have some worthwhile work to do -- finally.
And the "third world" people have a tough problem -- sell your kids and eat; don't sell your kids and starve. And it's not just porn -- it's for "terrorist" operations as well. We here in the Rich West have the luxury of being able to moralize about such things, but if you are in their shoes, what would you do? I often find that one's morality is almost always one of convenience. It's always someone else that's "amoral", never oneself. Funny how that works.
Want to end child porn? Want to end the recruitment of kids turning them into human bombs? Then you have to end the conditions that causes people to have to make the choice between their kids and their food. It's just that simple -- and that complicated.
Quite a lot of the CP investigations are actually in conjunction with either molestation or production of child pornography (i.e., the "real perverts").
Not most of the stories I hear about. But then it may be in the way they are reported. If there's an actual child molestation case, then the computers are taken to find more evidence as a part of the bigger investigation, and are probably not even mentioned in the news story.
The noted ones are those where there is no real molestation or exploitation -- just bits and bytes discovered on someone's hard drive.
Creating fake tracks that fools forensics isn't as easy as it sounds. For example, if someone did just as you described and wrote malware that downloaded kiddie porn and created fake tracks, and that malware spread to millions of machines, the whole security and forensics community would hear of it. People would study the malware, determine what false tracks it made, and then it would be easy to demonstrate whether the files on your computer were the result of that malware. (Hell, you'd have to do this -- otherwise every single person caught with CP would say, "Oh, that malware downloaded it," and you'd need to prove otherwise in court.)
If I were to write such a beast (which I would not, of course!) I would have that in mind as I were writing the code, and would make sure it would lay down differently-patterned tracks each time so that it would fool all but the most astute of forensics investigators.
And it wouldn't even be a challenge to fool the point-and-click software most of the lackeys use, in any case.
Probably the biggest headache would be getting past all the different malware detectors out there. That would actually be a much bigger challenge than fooling the forensics investigations.
It can be fun contemplating how to fool the idiot investigators and the virus scanners alike, but I would never DO such a horrid thing, and I hope no one ever does. I am very big on the rights of innocent people.
That being the case, these morons would be totally lost with a computer like mine running Linux. I'm using XFS in most places, and have files I mount as encrypted drives for stuff I want to keep private. They probably wouldn't even recognize those files as mountable drives nor know what to do with the Bash scripts I've written to mount and unmount them. Not to mention the several virtual Windows installations.
And yes, they do hate geeks. The local cops have certainty given me enough hell in the past. I should've sued them for their efforts, but didn't have time. If they screw with me again,this time I'm prepared. They WILL be sued.
I guess it's just not easy being a cop.
Prosecutors (District Attorneys) do not get elected for being soft on crime. Judges don't get elected for being soft on crime. They get elected for being tough on crime, facts be damned. Judges rarely get removed for sending innocent people to jail, and District Attorneys don't seem to get disbarred for pressing charges with false accusations.
True, but how do these guys sleep at night? I mean, knowing you are destroying the lives of innocent people? I've always wondered about that.
What's worse is that you could dump a random set of bits on someone's computer and claim it's an encrypted drive of kiddie porn. There'd be almost no way to prove otherwise, unless a really bad PRNG was used to generate the sequence.
I believe in all US jurisdictions the browser cache is not considered to be evidence of intent.
Nobody gets convicted because of their browser cache, at least in the US.
The moral of that story, kiddies, is that if you are going to do kiddie porn, hide it in your browser's cache!
If a cop catches you on (1), you're nailed. If (2), then you're humiliated. You just can't win.
See, we've all been lied to in Civics class. We'd like to think we're "innocent" until proven "guilty", but that's not how the system works.
Sorry, I expect too much of the human race...
He should get a much more severe punishment, including a massive fine payable to the victim.
Faking this kind of thing should be a 10 year minimum stretch plus a minimum 100,000 dollars payable to the victim.
Or, we should decriminalize the mere possession of bits and bytes on your hard drive. It scares me to think how many may have been nailed for kiddie porn unjustly because someone else planted it -- and was able to keep mouth shut about it.
Law Enforcement should be spending its efforts going after the perverts that create kiddie porn, where it would actually do the poor kids some good. As far as possessing the bits and bytes on your computer, the only requirement should be to delete it. Not go to jail and have your reputation ruined and have your life f***ed up over it.
But I know -- that would make too much damned sense.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
