Don't get me wrong going after the producers of new material is very important just as it is important to go after the human traffickers that facilitate the production.
In a way it's similar to prostitution, where there might be nothing morally wrong with selling or buying sex, but it (potentially?) promotes human trafficking. I doubt that'd the only reason it's illegal though, at least in the US.
It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.
When the topic of child porn comes up, emotion takes over and logic goes away.
One of the largest problems with child porn is the actual definition of child porn. To most people when they hear of child porn, they think of a Person under the age of puberty being forced to engage in a sex act with an adult person.
However 2 17 year olds having sex and video taping it is also child porn, they can (and have been) charged with producing, and distributing said child porn
Many many many teens were arrested and convicted before states starting passing exceptions to the law, and many states today it is still illegal for a 17year old person to send a nude photo of themselves to another 17year old person, haven forbid a 17 year and 364 day old person send picture to a 17 year and 366 day year old person....
Do you know that every image on this server was the "raping 8-year-olds" kind. Did you personally examine every image?
Where are you trying to go with this rhetorical question?
Nobody visits a darknet site called "The Playpen" to trade pics of consenting 17-year-olds. For all you or I know, the site never existed in the first place and the FBI set up the entire thing as a cover to silence dissidents. But that would be a problem with government corruption, not with the definition of child porn.
Which is an interesting viewpoint, to be sure. I wonder whether he'd say the same to an adult victim of rape whose abuse was videoed and passed around for other people to get off on. That's a pretty close parallel, but it never seems to turn up in discussions like these, and I wonder why that is.
I think the idea of being imprisoned for viewing a picture on a website is pretty draconian. We would never stand for it if we weren't so obsessed with vilifying sexual deviants.
The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made. Perhaps the crime should be limited to paying for it, a bit like why we don't allow payment for organ donation.
Does it? In warez rings, new releases are the surest route to high reputation and broad access to content. I don't see an a priori reason why the same might not be true for other sorts of illicit content, including this.
I'm not sure you can legislate it, but I found her position far more satisfying than "oh no I should never have taken the pics in the first place what a mistake to think I wouldn't be hacked".
Most people would consider it a moral wrong I'd warrant. It's like not a crime only by virtue of being a relatively new thing, and other mitigations like it being difficult to police (is there a point in making crimes you don't police and can't prosecute under).
I know it's all maybe's and could-be's, but they're maybe's and could-be's that ruin children's lives.
http://m.phys.org/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-...
https://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+selec...
I recently saw an interview with a conservative Indian figure about porn where one man said "I'm not harming anyone by watching porn in my room" and the conservative man responded with "You might become corrupted and turn into a sex maniac". It sounded like hilariously backward thinking, but that's still how many people think of child porn.
Not to speak of black people being allowed to vote. To marry without consent of their owners.
Sorry - but do you really need more examples, that arguing with an universal morale is just one big smelly pile of bullshit?
Morale and societal norms change and shift over time. We develop and there is no basic morality, just societal contracts. And that is good. We do not need an entity enforcing or dictating our morals. We need rationality to identify the right rules to live as a society and then a system to enforce these rules in the best possible way (not that we do have that in place anywhere in the world). But given your comment/idea and our current systems I rather live in our current systems. I just do not want to be ruled by some morality dictators.
When government attempt to legislate morality is when atrocities and abuse occur.
To millions of people in various religions, being gay is immoral, a woman showing her face or hair, is immoral
Adult pornography is considered immoral by a large part of the population.
Instead of making a case for morality, one should use science and logic to make the case for victimization.
Each person has the self evident right to their own body, aka self ownership. We accept this has as the fundamental foundation of Human Rights.
Society through science has shown that children are mentally not equipped to make a choice to have sex as such society has prohibited adults from manipulating children into having sex. We also recognize that any time one person forces another with violence to engage in sex is a violation of their person hood. We have grouped these 2 crimes into the category of rape and created punishments for these crimes
No morality involved.
Using science should also come into play when evaluating the punishment and criminality of viewing or possessing child pornography.
Morality and Emotion have no place in the law
As such it's the net effect that's important.
This is just where society originates from, instincts allowing for the forming of social contracts. For example if you exchanged resources with another party (your wife) for drugs and hugs, both sides would want for this contract to last. So you need a third party, which can be forced by both sides to enforce the contract.
Enter the pedophiles and gays. Your wife is going to make certain you hate them and she can switch of that hate, via sanctioning there existence (e.g. church/political inclination). That instinct-switch is as important to her, as beauty is to you.
Now, ten years into a cellphone society, where even thought offenders soon will be blatant obvious by constant NN observation all that remains are the instincts. The function is gone, but the gears of this bio-machinery still churn on.
I miss those days, where i still felt burning hatred for some Gears and was involved in affairs of the species in general. Life was so much easier if one just glued arguments to what one feels.
I looked into this whole messy affair, because one of those bastards tried to get on my younger brother when i was young. And for such there should be punishment, even a lifetime in prison. But though crimes, like a deprecated bio-machine, masturbating to a Victorian child-labour-sweatshop , to prosecute those is foolish.
It bewilders me that this comment makes perfect sense in someone's mind.
For starters, to even use the entrapment defense in most jurisdictions requires the judge's permission, which is rarely granted. Second, the burden is on the defendant to show that they would never have engaged in the illegal behavior at all without the police.
E.g., if the police physically threaten or blackmail you into selling drugs, you might have a case. If they simply pester you on the phone a bunch, probably not.
In this case, the FBI didn't force anyone to visit the child porn site, so it's not entrapment. What's up for debate is whether the harm of disseminating the material outweighs the benefits of catching more users.
Why aren't they doing a divide and conquer type approach that would kill these underground communities? Advertise big bounties for snitches and undermine whatever holds them together.
Cue DEA adding Kratom to Schedule I list so they can pad numbers.
This is horrific abuse towards the victims, and gross waste of policing resources that could be used to solve real crimes instead.
DEA/ATF Fake Stash houses?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160809/14081135202/judge...
FBI creating their own Terror plots
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/21/us-terrorism-prosecution...
Or do you disagree that the legal foundation for making the act of viewing/possession (not making or distributing) Child Porn is based in the idea that simply having the child porn is re-victimizing the child depicted
Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 111 "the sentencing judge, who stated “it is a clear reality . . . that every time one of these web sites is opened and every time one of these images is viewed, additional harm is visited upon the victim. "
But I would be interested to hear a knowledgeable opinion on whether the "viewing is new harm to the victim" argument is often employed against producers and distributors, rather than consumers. The argument that distribution makes a market for producers to satisfy would seem much stronger here.
>>>The court quoted academic research, which concluded that “Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place.”
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United States v. Blinkensop, 606 F.3d 1110, 1117 (9th Cir. 2010) (affirming the sentencing judge, who stated)
>>> “it is a clear reality . . . that every time one of these web sites is opened and every time one of these images is viewed, additional harm is visited upon the victim.
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FBI and DOJ routinely state the same in Sentencing, victim impact, and other official court and prosecution documents and activities
The idea that simply viewing child porn victimizes the child, is infact the legal foundation for its prohibition
It is clear and well established fact
FBI routinely creates, plots, then recruits people for made up terrorism plots, then arrests them
The DEA, in partnership with the ATF, recently ran a operation where they recruited people to rob fake stash houses, then arrested the people that were coerced into the plot
Entrapment is often used in prostitution stings as well.
None of these instances are tossed by the courts, entrapment is very much alive and well in the legal system
>>>>For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography.
While true, there are some very significant problems with this. For decades now the basis of the law against viewing child pornography is that each time the image is viewed the child is victimized. Thus by running the server for even 1 second the FBI was, according to the law, victimizing children in order to catch criminals.
If you then claim is no children were actually harmed by the FBI's action then one has to start looking at the very foundation of the Child Porn laws.
Personally I think the ethical and moral position (and should be the obvious one) is that the FBI should not, under any circumstances, be distributing child porn. Period.
Edit:
Sources for above can be found in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432737