My already low opinion of Alberto “Torture’s Okay If I’m Scared Enough” Gonzales took another blow when reading about his desire to make ‘mandatory data retention‘ part of the government’s attempt to fight child pornography.
He seems to have lost the plot, and the logic, when it comes to fighting child porn – that the greater crime is the child abuse required to make the material. Though its consumers are sick and reprehensible, targeting them is like trying to stop cocaine smuggling by arresting people babbling their way out of nightclub bathrooms. In making the fight against child porn about stemming its distribution online, Gonzales is saying the official policy is not to protect children from abuse, but to find abusers via evidence of their crimes.
It’s not crime-fighting at all, it’s clean-up. Child porn is evidence of failed policing, not something we should be happy to chase in favor of more difficult, more effective and more rewarding pre-emptive criminal investigation.
Of course, fighting child porn like any other criminal activity doesn’t require additional government power. When the FBI need to know what someone’s looking at on their PC, they can already go to a judge and get authorization for a wire-tap. A need to log every event at every computer is as unnecessary as a drive to open and scan every piece of mail.
However the difficult approach, of trying to save children before they’re harmed by attacking the organizations which produce child porn, not the sites that distribute it (like Yahoo! and Google) doesn’t allow for more comprehensive monitoring of the law-abiding majority and doesn’t allow failures to be blamed on inadequate legislation.
Gonzales is driving for laws that will lessen liberty and cement a view that we can’t prevent organized child abuse, but can only incarcerate offenders and put the victims through therapy. It requires the public to believe that child pornographers aren’t using the mail system, in-person meeting and the phone to avoid the ease with which data can be tapped and stored online. We’re not that stupid and Gonzales clearly is. I’d rather have the original Muppet as Attorney General.
Popularity: 40% [?]
Gonzales is the worst kind of idiot – one with power. This fool is dangerous.
It is a lot of rot, Sam. I think child pornography is stoppable in a few steps.
1. follow the money.
2. arrest, and convict the people making money from child pornography.
When child pornagraphy is not profitable, it will go way underground. But if the federal government wants to go at child pornography they way they have gone after drugs, then they are doomed to fail, and a lot more children will be molested for profit. It is a damned shame really.
Just my off the cuff 2¢.
-L. Smith
Okay, I’ve got Gonzo on this blog and a video from the muppets on Carly Milne’s blog. Is this muppets week in the adult industry?
L. Smith – Unfortunately I doubt there’ll ever be a day when child pornography is unprofitable as long as people want sex and sexual maturity is simply defined as a matter of age.
Imconvinced – The first rule of ‘Muppets Week’ is don’t talk about muppets week.
Good points, Sam — I admit I never thought about it that way in terms of these laws being clean up measures. However, I somewhat disagree that child pornography can’t be extremely reduced in profability. Why not target domains and ICANN and give a tax break to any company that cleans up domains bought and used for distribution. As for servers, though sadly alot of it is hosted in the United States, the FBI could send information to the host server country and threaten a surchage in trade (CP Tarrifs) for each server still running the contained CP if the country decides tio ignore it.
I guess that would be following the money though, eh?
Otty – I agree that child porn can be made less profitable and more risky for some, but meant to say the harder it is to find the more profitable it’ll be for the few. The incentive for the boldest goes up when it becomes increasingly hard to trade.
I have a horrible feeling that a lot of child-porn is offline and analogue, traded hand-to-hand and thus virtually ignored by the units ostensibly trying to fight cyber-crime.
I think each abuse is a bomb going off and we should seek to stop it from happening if in any way possible.
I have a horrible feeling that a lot of child-porn is offline and analogue, traded hand-to-hand and thus virtually ignored by the units ostensibly trying to fight cyber-crime.
I wonder why you think this. I think you make good points but this one has stuck with me. Just my 2¢, but I would think the hand offs would cost a hell of a lot of dough.
I often wonder about the price of marketing in the mix. Was watching a repeat of the Simpsons the other day, and Lisa was at the mall, and wandered into a store where they wanted to sell her a tank top with the words ‘Sassy B!tch’ upon it. Lisa said; ‘I’m eight years old.’ the sales lady said; ’so is your look.’ It was funny in the Simpsons, but not so funny in real life where all the marketers are trying to turn children into sex objects. Kind of frightening.
The subject is a rotten one all around. I think the start is with the money. Find out who is making the money off the domains, who is processing the credit cards, and who is profiting. Follow the money is my mantra, I guess.
I think each abuse is a bomb going off and we should seek to stop it from happening if in any way possible.
It is the ‘any way possible’ thought that grabs me here, Sam. It is the any way possible that put people like Gonzolaz in power.
I am just a chap who writes stories about burn victims, and the occasional threesome and so am not too worried yet, but when they start coming for you chaps, then i will take my site down and disappear into the ether.
-LS
L. Smith – The great KRS-ONE (Knowledge Reigns Supreme – Over Nearly Everyone) used to talk about being ‘Criminal Minded’, not ‘Criminal Active’. Being criminal minded myself if I was to commit any crime in todays world I’d avoid any electronic communication about it entirely. It’s just too leaky. To think that smart child abusers are still building websites seems a little basic to me. The news makes it seem pretty clear that a lot of these offenders are happy to travel in the pursit of victims and a face-to-face meeting’s a lot harder for the law to track than an email.
Please don’t pick on ‘any way possible’ – I didn’t say ‘by any means necessary’ and you’re presuming the universe of possiblities I’m reffering to is extra-legal or even extends to the present administrations idea of okay, well you’re pressuming a lot.
I have to use bold words – I’m a blogger after all…