Murdoch: I don't know, John. What if I get busted?
McCain: Relax. It's just election year grandstanding.
Murdoch: That's what you guys said about
http://www.cpsr.org/prevsite/cpsr/privacy/ssn/SSN-History.html#history">social security numbers.
It's true, McCain's
http://www.geocities.com/advocateletters/mccain-s-4089.html">"Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act of 2006" could start throwing ISP people in jail. The ISPs will of course fight it tooth and nail, but a bigger question is, how big of a problem is child pornography really, and is it an emergency worth criminalizing the Internet over?
A poster a couple of weeks ago posted that almost all of the images are from when child porn was legal in other countries. Google confirms that.
In fact, the scare is largely
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume4/j4_2_1.htm">moral panic perpetrated by law enforcement, law makers and activists. It is not a billion dollar a year industry and "The most generous estimates of the value of foreign child pornography entering the United States — according to known seizure figures — would probably not exceed $5 million."
Is $5 million too much? Sure, but it isn't that simple either. If that is bad enough, why inflate inflate the number of victims and the current threat?
The figures which Robin Lloyd had mentioned as a working hypothesis were repeated by Densen-Gerber as fact:
Lloyd's book documented the involvement of 300,000 boys, aged 8 to 16, in activities revolving around sex for sale.22
She then multiplied the number by two, because her intuition told her that 300,000 girls were also involved in such activities. She then multiplied it again by two since, according to Lloyd, the real figure was "twice what he (could) statistically validate,"23 and this lead to something like a million children. The chairman Conyers multiplied this again by two since, he reasoned, America had not only one million runaways but another one million school drop outs. In this way the contours of a national disaster were drawn. According to Conyers:
"So we have somewhere possibly in the neighbourhood of 2 million kids who form a ready market for sexual exploitation from pornographers and the like."24
Densen-Gerber could not agree more.
So what if it's less? One child is too many. Hard to argue with that. But if we are going to pass laws based on an emergency, what is the real number? And how many children are currently being abused to make child porn?
We can say, therefore, that the number of children involved must lie between 5,000 and 10,000. This number comes nowhere near the estimates of Robin Lloyd (300,000 boys) and Densen-Gerber (1.2 million), for the United States alone. Nevertheless, 10,000 children is an impressive figure. The child pornography problem may have been crassly overestimated by some, but it is also not possible to dismiss it as negligible.
That's worldwide when it was legal in many countries. So what is the real emergency that justifies drastic regulation? Wouldn't that be the number of children currently being abused in current child pornography filming? Other counties found relatively small fines and jail time enough to wipe out the child pornography trade. That would indicate we need not go to extreme measures, and since the FBI undoubtedly knows almost all the images are old, from times when it was legal, and of pictures of children who are now adults, they would know when new images suggest current abuse. That is why they did an
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/05/13/child.porn/index.html">Amber Alert when there was immediate danger. That makes sense. Concentrate on and go after current abuses.
Rather than make ISPs a branch of the police, why not create a program that constantly scans for these pictures? It could work something like the photo identification software used in England, that matches people with their IDs. It could match the pictures and tag and remove them. I've never once seen any child porn on the Internet, so it must be in specific locations that must be sought, and the government could concentrate on those locations. Such a bot could find and wipe out child porn on the Internet fairly quickly and keep it clean. History tells us warnings, short jail time and fines would be enough. Anyone who currently makes child porn is facing some real hard time already. The sex crimes alone is enough to land them in jail for life.
But wiping out child porn probably isn't the real goal of the government anyway. Regulation of the Internet is. They just need a good excuse. We don't need to regulate the Internet, but only need to bust those who break any current laws, of which there are already plenty enough. Don't fall for this.
EDIT: word
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
