Re:Pedophiles (Score 2, Interesting)

I tried out freenet several years ago, and poking around in the content that existed, it was extremely heavily weighted toward child pornography.

Of course Freenet is used for child pornography too, paedophiles would be dumb if they didn't use it for their purposes. You can say whatever you want about paedophiles, I for my myself would call them perverts, disgusting people harming those who can't defend themselves, but one thing I can't say about them is that they're more stupid than other people.

The point is, that Freenet wasn't designed for those people, it was designed to enable everyone to speak up without having to fear censorship. I would estimate that Freenet (0.7) is at least ten times more crowded with "normal" people than it is with paedophiles. I've only twice staggered over paedophile content, of course there's probably much more there but I don't search for it, because of Freenets caching system looking at it equals supporting it, the only way to "censor" this content is not to search for it so it won't spread. The only way we can fight paedophile content actively is to contribute "clean" content, that way we tweak the percentage of child porn and "clean" content. The only way to fight paedophiles is not to bust them, to track them down, to expose them to the angry crowd, that way you get some of them and you get satisfaction for the masses but you don't solve the original problem, it is to give them psychological support, crisis lines, educate the children so they know what to do when confronted with a paedophile. I'm not against penalty for child abusers, but paedophilia is an illness and therefore we should give people who got it a chance to get cured before they can harm our children.

We tend more and more to try to fight the symptoms while we should care more about fighting the cause. This applies to several issues we face today. Instead of building more prisons because of the high youth crime we should be building youth centres and other places for them to meet and do things which are legal. Fighting the symptoms in most cases is easier and gives a more active image in the public, that's why it's a all time favourite of politicians to do so, but we as their voters should take a look behind this masquerade and encourage them not to do so. In a democracy it's not the government which should supervise their citizens, the citizens should supervise the government.