WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN? Just imagine how horrible it would be if the cyber-predators and pedophiles were free to act out their depraved lusts and titillate their sick imaginations with the vilest images of the tender, innocent, nubile bodies of… wait, where was I?
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Even possessing images is seriously illegal. Only police officers specially trained and chosen to work on those cases (volunteering for that unit WILL get your private life looked at. Hard), and a very few digital forensics experts brought in by the police, are authorised to view the evidence, never mind have it stored on random networks. He’s shady, most definitely.
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Power has its uses, sometimes including impunity; but even substantial power tends not to excuse you from the iron mandate of ‘Do Not Make The Boss/Firm Look Stupid. Just Don’t.’ People who violate that one tend to leave to ‘spend more time with their family’ quite frequently. (Now, by the same token, a splashy pedo-show-trial, with daily front page updates from the Daily Heil, would further make the boss look stupid, so he probably won’t get one of those.)
You have to be very, very, powerful indeed before you get the right to make the boss look stupid(if anything, it’s probably easier to simply exceed having a boss at all); but if you are powerful enough that a truly brutal fall would make the boss look stupider, you are usually allowed to skulk away quietly.
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Holly mother of God!
That is what they call oxymoron, or perhaps divine justice.
Personally because there was a distinction mentioned above, I think that making child pron and indulging in said porn should be regarded the same. Its the demand that drives the manufacturing of such content.
Two kids fucking videotaping and releasing the content in the wild wild web, I suppose shouldn’t be regarded as child porn, but how can this distinction be made safely? How can someone verify who is behind the camera?
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My first thought is that it’s a possibility for a cliche set-up. In every internet debate about censorship or draconian clamp-downs on file sharing or prohibited content, there is always some bright spark who suggests flooding the instigators email inbox with outlawed images and then turning them in for technical ‘possession’ of outlawed material.
Shifting from an email to a slightly more sophisticated network plant is not a great leap, and could be seen as poetic and clever by someone with a little too much time on their hands.
Given that the accused is in one of the best positions to know not only what is monitored, and how it’s monitored, but also what the tools are for circumventing that monitoring … it sounds almost too obvious. And stepping away while an investigation proceeds is the right thing to do, if he were acting rationally.
But maybe I’m giving him too much credit. Maybe the sad and stupid obvious answer is the real one. I just would prefer to speculate on an ironic conspiracy run for the lulz instead. That’s much more fun.
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I know what you’re saying, but have you ever met victims of rape or child sexual abuse?
The extent and magnitude of the damage is terrifying. I’m a grown up, and I’ve been through a lot, though thankfully not that, and it is really concerning.
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Is he not some sort of know nothing boss level grade? After all he was brought in to undertake the impossible task of building a porno-filter that won’t leave the government looking stupid. I assumed he is a “big-picture person” (psychopath).
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Like many people, I’ve downloaded porn off the net. Although quite legal in most Western states, it would be enough to have me sentenced in some places (and I’m talking heterosexual here). Note that I haven’t paid for it (nor offered any kind of appreciative comment).
Taking payment into account as being a party at some level, in essence, the distinction is between crime and thought crime.
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That’s exactly my point. You can meet such persons. You can’t if they’re dead.
It has become so absurd that in a number of places, a child rapist is better off killing his victim than letting them live if he’s caught.
Well, since my old account was lost somehow, that is to be my last reply.
Way to go to give the possibility to have a constructive debate, Boingboing…
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Step one: ask the people in the video. If they’re old enough to consent to sex, they’re quite capable of telling you the answer to who filmed it.
I don’t try to be any sort of saint here. As they say “let the first without sin cast the first stone” but it used to be easy to find free pron of all kinds online especially with software like the emule or similar. So payment is not always needed for the crime
in order to ask them, you certainly need to track them. I don’t think they leave their resume with those videos
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If you can’t find or identify them then no one is being prosecuted or added to sex offender lists anyway, so the point is kind of moot. The point in your comment I replied to was not about about abuse, but about people being labeled criminals for recording otherwise consensual, legal acts. If they are not being identified and punished in some way, then that problem doesn’t arise.
If that’s your first thought, then your programming is defective and you should work on that. Your first thought, based on-repeated real-life evidence, should be “Oh, surprise–yet another moralistic family values crusader who knows how everyone else should behave turns out to be a scumbag…”
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If this didn’t involve children being abused, I would think this is a very serious #roflcopters moment.
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Well I am not familiar with legal proceedings, however using or making child porn should be illegal since children are depicted, even if those children cannot be tracked. If they are abused, could be also killed so how exactly do you track them? If there are children watching child pron, thats terra nova for me.
Of course you need to be able to track the user/maker of the child porn to accuse him/her otherwise the point is as you said moot.
I did make a distinction between consensual acts and not consensual ones, but the question still lingers “how do you tell one from the other just from a video?”
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Right. So I’ll just take it you haven’t experienced real-life interaction with traumatised victims.
I get the argument - Nigeria used to have a law (still has?) labelled “you rob, we kill” - i.e. a robber would get the death penalty, so they killed all and any witnesses out of course. Stupid law.
Getting back to normality after any trauma is a long road, getting back from those traumas, even longer.
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In the Grand Venn Diagram of All Things, I’m sure he fits in to a better category than Brits, “evil tory bastard” for one (or three).
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Sure I have, and so have you. Probably more than you know about. The damage might be terrifying, but it’s still something many men and women have recovered from and gone on to have relatively normal lives.
In my eyes, saying that it’s better to be dead than suffer sexual abuse creates the problem that by saying that, you’re essentially advocating for mercy euthanization of victims.
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Come on. Please don’t call it “porn”. Just as abusing children can’t be constructed as consensual intercourse, images of this sort can never be what we usually understand as porn.
It’s neither similar nor worse, it’s unrelated, it’s a different ballpark. The is no child pornography, only documented abuse.
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