(January 22, 2016 at 10:49 am)paulpablo Wrote:(January 21, 2016 at 9:57 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Then why, in this case, are they allowed to purvey real child porn? It is the analog of selling real drugs, insofar as 1) it is disseminating the moment of abuse of a minor, and 2) stoking the lurid desires of the pedophile.The problem I have with the arguments against the FBI are that most the posts on here that argue against the FBI are loaded with emotionally provocative language like this. The FBI ran a porn website, they stroked the lurid desires or paedophiles.
That was the point of my post.
What they did is took over a child porn website and left it running rather than shutting it down in order to make some arrests. The act of them doing so is ethically questionable to a degree but if you use your common sense it is probably justifiable.
A law is just something that is made up for the safety of people to prevent them doing certain actions and so on, and there's lots of laws against actions that the police are allowe to violate all the time, the police can break the speed limit, imprison someone, if you stop the police doing what they're doing its obstructing the law if they stop you and you don't comply it's obstructing the law.
Is-ought fallacy, firstly.
Secondly I have a serious problem with people who blithely accept that police should be able to break the law. Police can break the speed limit -- but not any time they feel like it. They have to justify such law-breaking with results. With 215,000 members at that site, and 137 arrests, can it be said that their breaking the law has been justified?
From the article:
Quote:The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves. But it did not dispute that the agents allowed images that were already on the site to remain there, and that it did not block the site’s users from uploading new ones while it was under the government’s control. And the FBI has not said it had any ability to prevent users from circulating the material they downloaded onto other sites.
“At some point, the government investigation becomes indistinguishable from the crime, and we should ask whether that’s OK,” said Elizabeth Joh, a University of California Davis law professor who has studied undercover investigations. “What’s crazy about it is who’s making the cost/benefit analysis on this? Who decides that this is the best method of identifying these people?”
[Emphasis added -- Thump]
