So I can't seem to get my messages to follow the thread structure of
this mailing list and I seem to have come up against various points to
lets look at them altogether:
Eric Moeller said "Please define "child pornography".
Yeah, this is clearly something I should have started with. Definitions
are human constructions imposed on a vague and fuzzy world. I think the
concept I was going for was media that contains images of minors being
physically or sexually abused. And I was going for non-cartoon, real
people types of minors. I was drawing a line about what kinds of things
I wanted to be party to distributing. Who defines "what is porn" and
"what is not" is open to question. I don't have a simple answer.
Ian Clarke said "I have seen no evidence that the wide availability of
child pornography leads to more abuse of children, and have even heard
arguments that it can reduce actual abuse by giving these people a
relatively harmless outlet for their desires."
Sure, I am open to that possibility, but in the absence of reliable
statistics it comes down to which arguments we choose to believe. One
can also argue that pictures of children being abused requires children
to be abused. Now sure, if there's lots of material already available,
then its availability needn't encourage the generation of more. I have
never been trying to suggest that viewing child porn makes the person
viewing it more likely to commit abuses. I was just saying that if
someone was abused in the generation of something, then I would prefer
not to be distributing it.
It also seems to me possible (although by no means proved) that creating
an environment where people can distribute this stuff anonymously might
give the people who make this stuff an incentive to create it and
distribute it, knowing they can't be traced. But these are all just
ideas, since we don't have any hard statistics to ground ourselves in.
I don't know if you guys saw the BBC documentary on the wonderland
group. They were using the internet and various cryptographic
techniques to share child porn. At one point a member in California set
up a web cam in his bedroom, enticed in a girl who was attending his
daughters slumber party and sexually abused her in front of the web cam,
while 5 or 6 guys in other states and countries looked on and made
requests which this guy then carried out.
The police caught the people involved and prosectued them. It occurred
to me that if all the images had been routed over Freenet, then perhaps
they never would have been caught.
Now saying that some technology has the potential for abuse is not to
say that that technology should be banned or anything. We have the same
issue with Nuclear power and genetics. But the question I keep coming
back to is does protecting freedom of speech require _anonymous_
distribution of images. In what way would purely text based
_anonymous_ distribution fail to protect freedom of speech?
David McNab said "With such total freedom and control, you can build in
logic to detect and suppress uu-encoded media.
You can even censor out naughty keywords like 'fuck' and 'cunt' and
'felch' and cum. You can even ban the word 'sex', unless a grammatical
analysis shows the word being used in a strictly gender sense. We wish
you luck with your new, clean, anonymous text-only p2p network."
Yeah thanks for the sarcasm. I don't have any wish to filter out these
kinds of words, because I don't believe that anybody had to be abused
in order for them to be generated. Of course we could have a case where
we had a text description of child abuse, or documents that provided
instructions on how to gain access to minors that I would find equally
unpleasant, and I don't have an easy answer for that. I'm still trying
to work out these different things. I'm not saying one thing is right
or wrong, I'm just trying to explore the possibilities.
David McNab also said something along the lines of "You don't blame the
cameras involved in the creation of pornographic images" "child
pornographers use the postal service, haven't you heard of common
carriers"
No. But when I buy a camera I am not making resources owned by me
available by me for use by the child pornographers. If I run a freenet
node, then I am putting my resources (bandwidth, cpu, disk space) into a
pool some of which can be used to distribute child pornography. You
could say that when I buy a camera I put money into the hands of the
camera company, who then build more cameras that can be used by child
pornographers, but the link doesn't seem as direct, as when images of
children being abused might actually get stored on my computer.
The same arguments apply to this "Common Carriers" issue. Sure child
abusers use credit cards, but when they do they can be tracked, the same
as when they use the postal service or the web. I think it is a
different matter when we start talking about providing a framework that
supports _anonymous_ transactions, and it requires each participant to
add resources to some common pool.
I never suggested that we ban the distribution of images full stop.
There are non-anonymous means to distribute images. I was just saying
the argument suggesting "free speech requires that people should be able
to distribute images anonymously", seemed to have some holes in it.
Like maybe the ability to distribute text anonymously would be enough.
No one has really addressed that point yet.
Also, the other big point, is what about the right of the children who
were abused in order to generate the images, to not have their likeness
broadcast all over the planet? The common theme I'm hearing is "well
that's the price we pay to protect freedom of speech", but again what I
am asking is, do we have to have _anonymous_ distribution of images to
protect freedom of speech? Wouldn't anonymous distribution of text
(assuming that it could be done) be just as good at protecting freedom
of speech.
CHEERS> SAM
p.s. guys, try to stay calm on this okay, I'm trying to work through
these issues logically and rationally. If people want this all moved to
another discussion area then I can happily set one up on egroups. I
believe in freedom of speech and the importance of P2P systems, but I
baulk at using Freenet, and I think other people do too. You might
think we are all mad, but it is in your interest to convince us why we
are wrong in a logical fashion without resorting to sarcasm etc.
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