An Oakwood, GA man has been ordered to stand trial on felony charges of accessing child pornography at the Hall County Library in Gainesville, GA according to a story at the Gainesville Times. A woman, who was working on a nearby terminal with her 10-year old niece complained to librarians about what she glimpsed. Librarians confronted the man immediately, removed him from the library and revoked his library privileges. The library has filters on its internet computers and recessed workstations with three-sided hoods for privacy.
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bassackward response
Once again a private citizen who was minding his own business has been set upon by hostile political correctness and is being persecuted. What should be happening here is very clear: 1) sue the company that produced the filter for marketing a clearly flawed product; 2) impeach those members of congress who voted for this abortion, CIPA, for allowing themselves to be defrauded; 3) sue the woman who made the complaint for invasion of privacy and kick HER out of the library.
Re:bassackward response
I just can’t get past the skin-crawliness of someone going to a public place and doing google searches for “pre-teen sex” and the like. Can you expect to maintain your status as a private citizen in public place? I truly hate this issue and these arguments because I find it impossible to take an absolutist stance either way. It’d be so much easier to have an unswaying opinion and know I was right.
Re:bassackward response
I would agree with you if it were pornography involving adults. I even agree that the woman almost had to be trying to see the screen if it’s sheltered on three sides. However, in my mind all else is overrided when the story specifies that it is child pornography. There are some things so damaging to society that they simply cannot be allowed… not many, but a few. Dirty pictures of adult, consenting men and women are fine; he can look at all of those he wants. Dirty pictures of a child too young to even really understand sex… well, that’s a different story.
Re:bassackward response
Ah, but the problem is that there are probably very few definitions of “child pornography” that could pass constitutional muster. In some cases, child pornography includes consenting adults in which the adult is depicted as being less than the age of majority. Moreover, most definitions include those who are of child-bearing age — biological adults — and who should not pose any sexual attraction for true pedophiles. I don’t think there are many pedophiles who are attracted to the post pubescent. And, when all is said and done, it is still pretty silly to criminalize people for what they are looking at. In my books, the commission of a crime necessitates a physical action; taking the photographs, for instance. Just looking at porn does not constitute harrassment or molestation.
“bassackwards”
Your subject hits the mark.
Perhaps a more fundamental understanding of the U.S. Constitution would be in order before making pronouncements regarding the Constitutional “muster” of child pornography law?
>> impeach those members of congress who voted for this abortion, CIPA, for allowing themselves to be defrauded…
FYI only the President, the Vice President, and “civil officers of the United States” can be impeached. (US Constitution)
Re:bassackward response
Where child porn is concerned, I think attacking the demand (i.e., prosecuting viewers) is justified as a means going after the child abuse itself. Especially since (paraphrasing something I recall reading from an international conference about fighting child porn a few years ago) the subculture doesn’t trust moochers, so child porn viewers have a strong incentive to be producers as well.
BTW, the Supreme Court did rule that it is unconstitutional to criminalize “virtual child pornography” (e.g., adults posing as minors). I suspect that that’s what one is most likely to find if one searches for “teen sex” on Google.
Re:bassackward response
You raise an interesting point, but isn’t that the rationale behind the ongoing prosecutions of drug users? I remember a brief mention in the news from a couple of years back that the efforts to control the flow of drugs through Canada was only ten percent effective. Since our law enforcement is much the same as in the U.S., we can pretty much the same proportion for their. Despite those efforts, and despite the criminalization of users — addicts who need treatment, not a co-dependent relationship with big government — individual drug shipments through Canada continue to weigh in by the ton. If we get ten percent, and your side gets ten percent, then something like eighty percent is making it through to the streets. In the meantime, addicts are being imprisoned for asinine lengths of time at complete cost to the taxpayer, and which only serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and drug use. In light of all this, I can’t feel any confidence in a system that criminalizes the users of child pornography any more than one that criminalizes drug users.
As for the comment about the subculture not trusting moochers, I can’t give that statement a lot credence without knowing who said it. The whole anti-child porn movement appears very much to me to be based on a rumor-panic (commonly mislabelled as mass or public hysteria), and I tend to regard that movement with the same skepticism I have for Satanism conspiracy theory. Especially since the same people who were involved in that are exactly the kind who would take up the anti-child porn moral crusade.
Most “teen sex” pictures are of legal adults, but this covers another issue of obfuscation. Eighteen and nineteen year old legal adults are also still teenagers. When anti-child porn proponents spout off about “teen sex” pictures, they conveniently ignore the fact that these legal adults are fully permitted to appear in such pictures.
The upshot of it is: censorship, at bottom, is not about pornography; it’s about controlling the populace.
Re:bassackward response
Re “Virtual Child Pornography” you are correct.
See Ashcroft V Free Speech Coalition
FYI
First Amendment and Freedom of Speech–“It’s OK–She’s a Pixel, Not a Pixie”:
Spring, 2003
University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review
Re:bassackward response
I can’t quite buy the drug analogy, since the abuse of children isn’t a necessary element of drug production. And probably a small percentage of, say, muggers are ever caught, and those who do are probably well into a cycle of poverty, but I’m still calling the police if I get held up at gunpoint. Even if the guy’s just holding me up for drug money. (grin)
The bit about child porn moochers was paraphrased from a paper presented by University College Cork psychologist Maxwell Taylor at a 1999 international law enforcement conference on child porn. Had to go the The Wayback Machine to find it; I admit that my recollection was faulty and I overgeneralized the author’s point (http://web.archive.org/web/20001211011100/www.sto p-childpornog.at/frame.asp?lang=en ):
“The notion of mutual exchange of photographs is particularly important in the distribution of privately produced photographs, in our view the most worrying aspect of the trade in child pornography. Exchange acts as an entry barrier, and also gives the process a sense of security; a relationship of Mutually Assured Destruction develops where the partners in the exchange are each dependant on the other for security.”
It’s really not a good paper for the rumor-panic-mongering moral crusaders, as the author later says, “The relationship between collecting child pornography and sexual assaults on children is also not clear. The producer of child pornography is of course filming a sexual assault, but a passive collector may not necessarily be involved in assaults.”