Is "distributing child pornography should not be a crime" really the hill you want to die on?
One day, some one is going to pass a law or do something that you don't like because the government will have unprecedented access and control of information flow. They can stop you seeing or even sharing. And it may be happening already but nobody knows.
But responding to a case where cryptography is (maybe) used to conceal evidence of possession and/or distribution of child pornography, with, and I paraphrase, "why do we care about this kind of nonsense?", does not advance the cause of encouraging moderate legislation and jurisprudence on this subject.
At the very best, it makes one who advances such an argument look like so completely detached a privacy absolutist as to defend even the vilest of crimes in cases where it might overlap with his pet issue in a potentially negative way.
At only slightly less than the very best, it opens anyone who advances such an argument to allegations of wanting the distribution of child pornography to proceed untrammeled by law, and to those allegations being supported by citation of arguments like 'coldtea's, made in threads like this one.
I get that many here are very theoretically minded sorts, and that, being "systems thinkers", are much happier designing the perfect system of laws and judgment on a clean sheet of paper, rather than dealing with anything so messy as the diversity of politics and opinions which has such a significant impact in reality. I used to be such a person myself. It didn't help me understand a damn thing about the world in which we all actually live, and it made me a pointless nuisance rather than an effective agent in convincing people that even such a hot-button issue as child pornography is not an excuse to abandon all nuance.
I don't demand that my interlocutors, here or elsewhere, develop the same understanding, although I think it'd be a brilliant idea if they did. But I do ask, at minimum, that when they say ill-thought-out and pointlessly absolutist things which tend to make it harder for me to actually convince actual people that at-rest encryption is not dangerous but compelling those accused of criminal activity to divulge encrypted data is, they not act so surprised when I push back on that.
Oh come on, now who's being hyperbolic. Possession of child porn is clearly not the vilest of crimes, as child molestation is obviously much, much worse. And don't pretend like those are remotely the same.
And in any case, I don't think I strayed very far, if at all, into hyperbole, even taken verbatim. Child pornography may not be the same thing as child molestation, but it's still plenty vile nonetheless.
More hyperbole. You really think young cartoon characters conducting sexual acts, which is illegal child porn, is as vile as perfectly legal scat porn? Or is your claim once again hyperbolic because, a) it's not your sexual preference, and b) you assumed, wrongly, that everything classified as child porn is necessarily harmful to children?
You even said that my interpretation of your literal words was not far from your intent, and doubled-down on your claim that child porn is almost as vile as child molestation. I then pointed out that some cartoons are considered child porn, and contrasted that with legal porn that's also widely considered to be vile, then asked if you stand by your claim that underage cartoon sex is really more vile than this type of legal porn (which doesn't even touch on the issue of why vileness is a meaningful metric of legality, as opposed to something obviously meaningful like harm).
So I can't see how I'm arguing in bad faith.
> Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor...
No language exists to include depictions of the sort you describe, which are trivially distinguishable from an actual minor.
Perhaps you argue from the law of a specific US state, but you need in that case to name the state on whose laws you base your argument, and explain why they have a stronger bearing on the matter at hand than the laws of the nation entire.
If you're going to continue to accuse me of engaging in hyperbole, authoritarianism, ignorant pseudoscientific wittering, and whatever else you can think of, that is of course your privilege, and I would never dream of suggesting you demur. But will you please leaven it a bit with actual substance, as in your comment full of rich, meaty counter-citations to my hypothesis around reinforcement, a comment which I look forward to perusing? That was an excellent comment, and I appreciate it! Quite aside from the tantalizing possibility of learning something new and thus improving my understanding of reality, one does eventually grow tired of the same thing over and over; a bit of variety appeals.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornogra...
Police have more than enough tools to catch people using encryption without the ability to compel people to decrypt data. At the end of the day if you have to try force someone to enter a password or fetch you a key then you already fucked up and should have to admit your failure and try assemble a case with what you were able to get before you fucked it up by not getting the data in-flight or otherwise unencrypted.
How about creating child pornography being a crime? That's what's actually hurtful.
Regardless, if you're saying we should focus more on treatment and less on caging people, I can get behind that. If you're saying we should just abolish the law and do nothing on the consumption side - we likely disagree on the harm done or the role of government in society.
Same. But just lately it seems like the push is toward normalization, and that complicates the matter considerably.
Not only would this expand the scope of "criminal" to include people who have not committed such crimes (and may never do so), but I think it's a futile and petulant exercise, albeit one with benefit to intrusive law enforcement (and I'm echoing feedback provided elsewhere in this thread).
In any case, these are all currently crimes in their own right, so they fall under your first category, rather than your second, so I'm not quite clear what sort of point you're making here.
I was answering the question below:
>Your proposal ignores it - legalizes its distribution, in fact. Why?
If, in response to my answer, you conclude that committing a crime is an action tantamount to sharing, viewing, or possessing information about it, I disagree, and I think your outlook is frighteningly authoritarian. "Action" was a poor word choice. "Actions which entail direct harm", such as raping a child, should be illegal, I should've said. "Actions which entail indirect harm", such as possessing, sharing, or viewing data, should not be, in my opinion.
That doesn't matter if you're ignoring actions' directness and level of harm altogether and arguing that, since a judicial body classifies an action as a crime, it is a crime, and so I should agree that it should be a crime. But, in that case, I also disagree, and I think you're being a poor advocate for orthodoxy.
>ongoing harm to the victims, which, while not unreasonable, I think might be a weaker argument than that distribution in particular may make and expand a market even when not done for money
Here, I think you're doing it more justice. Incidentally, though, I'm the other way around. The "harm to victims" angle is much more salient than the "increasing demand" one, but both are pretty spurious to me, and certainly seem like underwhelming reasons to imprison and permanently cripple the lives of people whose only actions consisted of manipulating bits in storage media to the direct harm of no one.
You're also underplaying your hand here somewhat, I think - either that, or you find your own arguments unconvincing. You've already conceded, in your concept of "indirect harm" (still harm, but less so?) and the weaksauce relative-injury argument which constitutes your last paragraph, that the distribution of child pornography does inflict ongoing harm on those abused in order to produce it - but you don't think that that harm suffices to justify the injury inflicted upon those who engage in such distribution, but not such production, in the course of being convicted of and punished for that crime. That the former are innocent, and the latter are not, seems not to move you; your concern appears instead to be purely utilitarian.
I don't suppose it would be surprising if you were indeed unconvinced of this - it strikes me as a very difficult position to defend! But I'd be interested to see whether and how you do so, nonetheless. Or perhaps I've misgathered your point?
I don't think anyone would argue this "cures" the tendency - certainly I will not! But, at the very least, I can't see how it could do other than make a pedophile less likely to graduate to child molesting, to have built a strong habit of not acting on the urge - and, again, vice versa.
There are also other forms of harm than the physical. I am not myself moved to dismay by the possibility of images of my own abuse circulating on the Internet, although that may have more than anything to do with the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no such images were made, and in any case said abuse occurred long before the dawn of the era in which such distribution became trivially simple. But I hardly imagine it is my place to tell someone who does find such a possibility - or a certainty - dismaying, that she is wrong to feel that way, or that she should not consider herself to be harmed thereby. Nor do I believe it is anyone else's place to do so.
Reinforcing the circuits to reward yourself with more porn, not with molesting children. Your whole point is exactly the kind of pseudo scientific rationalising every authoritarian uses to push their "moralistic" agenda.
Real studies have actually shown that exposure porn reduces recidivism and tendencies to molestation, except in a small class of pedophiles which already have violent tendencies.
All of the studies purporting to demonstrate links between possession of child porn and child molestation are plagued with methodological errors [2]. This issue is so emotionally charged that most of the science around it is garbage. The stigma against child porn is no different than claiming that consumers of staged rape fetish porn must all be closet rapists, and viewing this porn will simply make them act on it. It's a patently absurd claim.
About the only possessors of child porn that are at high risk of molesting a child are the ones that actually produce it, and so had already sexual abused children [4].
[1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1123799?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
[2] https://www.fd.org/docs/training-materials/2012/FJC2012/Chil...
[3] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y
While it would be a stretch to postulate that the effect of child pornography on those disposed to it exactly matches that of drugs which provoke massive dopamine release on those who take them, the effects of dopamine on sexual behavior in the human male, and its role in the brain's reward system in general, lend I think considerable plausibility to the hypothesis that engaging in pedophilic behavior centered around child pornography, and obtaining sexual satisfaction thereby, tends to potentiate further engagement in the same behavior.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01497634940...
This shouldn't be surprising. Consumers of rape fetish porn are unlikely to actually rape someone, but actual rapists are likely to consume rape fetish porn. Furthermore, in countries where porn of all kinds was legalized, including child porn, enjoyed falling rates of child molestation.
The OP is making some of the same old arguments people have trotted out against porn for decades, just couched in pseudo neuroscience. The fact is, we don't understand these relationships to the degree the OP needs to justify his causal claims.
On the other hand, children are extraordinarily vulnerable to many forms of abuse, this among them. In a system of laws one of whose explicit purposes is to afford those vulnerable to mistreatment protection under law, I don't think it is on its face unreasonable to argue that children merit extraordinary protection as well. While there is perhaps a fair question to be asked around whether the sort of law under discussion actually serves that end, I would at the very least suggest anyone raising the question in a serious way be very well prepared to answer objections and counterarguments of every imaginable sort.
You could argue that looking at CP is no different then looking at a murder photo.
Both are a picture of a crime you didn't commit.
nice counterargument
Were I, though, for some unaccountable reason required to clarify my opinion on Rawls' situation despite it being in no way pertinent to the discussion at hand, I would note that I consider his treatment in contravention of both the right to speedy trial and, although I'm not as sure about this one, habeas corpus as well. The case as a whole, and the prosecution's attitude toward it, strike me as a solid example of the troubling habit of overreach our legislative and law-enforcement communities seem to be developing toward strong cryptography, which is as morally neutral as any other technology.
On the other hand, it's rather difficult to argue other than that a government unable to maintain order is unable to effectively govern, and not at all difficult to understand how, viewed from such a perspective, effectively impermeable cryptography might well seem an imminent danger to the security of the state and of those of its citizens not engaged in the sorts of activities which tend to undermine the ability of the government to maintain order. I understand that, especially since last November, the Overton window around opinions on the United States government has shifted such that mere deep and lasting mistrust seems absurdly moderate. But there is nuance here, and to ignore it in search of easy answers is as foolish in this context as in every other.
And quite aside from all that, there is the strong utilitarian argument to be made that this is not the hook on which to hang your defense of encryption, privacy, et cetera. Pedophiles and child molesters come in for about the strongest opprobrium our society ever brings to bear. Do you really not have anyone else around whom to build this case, so that you might have an easier time arguing against such mistreatment of someone as yet convicted of no crime? If you exclude refusal to decrypt a volume on demand from the permissible causes for a finding of contempt, you solve this fellow's problem, too. Can you really not find any way to do that that doesn't involve putting him front and center, where it is literally impossible to separate the substance of the issue from the allegations of extreme unsavoriness which will be leveled against his character, and by extension yours as well?
Remember, if you're going to make a meaningful contribution in this realm, you must of necessity do so in the world where we actually live, not the one where you'd prefer that we did. In the world where we actually live, pedophiles and child molesters are the lowest of the low, and even the mere accusation of involvement in such activities is often enough to ruin lives. It's already hard enough to sell the argument you're making. Why is it worth your while to make it a whole lot harder?
Why do we care for people distributing "illegal material" in the first place?
And how come this "illegal material" doesn't ever get decrypted? Catch them then.