Double Flee A

More than 65 individuals face child pornography distribution charges after a six-month investigation of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, according to federal officials.

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Stupid excerpt: The General Accounting Office concluded in a report released last year that the risks of inadvertent exposure to pornographic content using P2P software are no greater than those posed by other Internet applications, but the exploding popularity of the file-sharing software has raised concerns that they are providing a safe haven for child pornography traffickers.

That's total crap. P2Ps are FULL of pictures of naked kids, so unless by inadvertent exposure the general accounting office means the person looking for a copy of ""happy happy all the time" by the disney gang and bingo the silly puppy" found little kimmy spread eagle, it's wrong. Inadvertent is a stupid word here. People don't inadvertently download pornography much (though on Kazaa it happens occasionally). When they do dowload pornography on a P2P, they get all kinds of crazy garbage. They advertently wanted to see some tits, but they got little kimmy spread eagle very inadvertently indeed. Then because of the nature of the network, they've already had a chance to "distribute" it again automatically, so there you go. A man wants to look at boobs, he gets five years. Minimum. End of story, do not pass go, collect HIV in prison. The justice system is Out Of Control when a person can do so little and get in so much trouble:

"The maximum federal sentence for the distribution of child pornography is 20 years in prison. The Protect Act, enacted on April 30, 2003, also created a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison for the crime. If an individual committed a prior sex abuse offense, the mandatory minimum is 15 years in prison and the statutory maximum is 40 years."

You go looking for pornography, which is legal, and you go to prison. That's what cyberwar on crime bought us. Another usage of inadvertent springs to mind: "inadvertent possession". It's possible, and if you take the amount of people who got, (meaning have had in the strictest prosecutorial sense) child pornography on a P2P network, then that is a very, very large number. They're not collectors, though.

But differentiating between "collectors" and "accidental possessors of" is not anything you will ever hear of, because we live in an age of impressionism, when TeeVee leaves flavors of reality in the public's mouths, and actual thought is not encouraged. For euphemistic labeling, think "clear skies initiative", "healthy forests initiative", and "USA PATRIOT act". John Ashcroft doesn't want you thinking about pornography either.

The obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, and by making war on images of naked children, the justice department is giving us a war on each other. Moms already buy digital cameras because Mega-marts won't develop photos of their fat, cute little naked babies, but now those moms can go to prison for it if somebody gets them hooked up to a P2P without her knowledge. And that's why I play devil's advocate. Normal people stand to lose out huge. You want to let "let the eagle soar" John Ashcroft tell you what reality is? I don't. I don't want to subvert the facet of conventional wisdom, the facet of reality that says naked children are cute, to the Ashcroftian ideal of morality, which tells us "naked children = evil".

Just because some pervert might get a kick out of something we think is cute doesn't mean we outlaw the thing that is cute. A blanket indictment of all naked children for inciting this with their bodies is insane. Among other things, it might give the kids the impression that yes, they are actually very sexy. That's the weirdest thing that could possibly ever happen, and the "moral majority" witnesses this in silence. It's a complacent conspiracy.

And another thing. If the justice department has actually managed to construct a test that can determine whether a person wants to see kiddie porn to have a sexual kick or to put bad guys behind bars, I'd like to see it. "But then it wouldn't be secret any more and everybody would know how to fake it!" Bullshit. We're talking about two people doing the exact same thing, only some are right and some are wrong. It's not like any other kind of law enforcement ever done. It freaks me out, conjures images of a totalitarian, repressive regime that regulates information. Oh yeah, which is what it is.

Why can't people use their brains a little bit instead of jumping a mile every time somebody talks about kiddie porn? People would rather throw folks in jail for the rest of their lives for having a picture of a naked kid than actually consider for a moment that it's possible the kids weren't taken advantage of, weren't to their knowledge sexualized in the process. And while the majority of pictures collectors of child pornography possess may very well be exploitative, there are a couple that aren't. It just makes worse the disaster that innocent men are incarcerated every damn day in this country. I wish I'd taken pictures of myself naked as a child in all kinds of provocative poses so I could distribute them, just to make people f***ing think a little bit about this. Because that's what it would take these days.

posted by dale @ 7:43 PM