RE: Legalization of child pornography?
September 9, 2012 at 11:50 am
(This post was last modified: September 9, 2012 at 12:00 pm by Tiberius.)
Whilst I agree with the general gist of the article, that in some cases, possessing child pornography shouldn't be illegal, I think the conclusion it makes is ridiculous. There are distinct cases where a rational review process can determine whether the offender purposefully tried to obtain the images.
Walking through a park with a video camera and accidentally recording a child rape is not purposefully trying to record a child rape. Nor should it be punishable if you keep the images to either give to the police as evidence, or because you simply forgot to delete them.
In the Information Security realm, being convicted simply for having child pornography is becoming more of an issue, since a lot of pieces of malware are used to host child pornography on innocent users' computers without their knowledge. Also, due to the prevalence of Cross-site Request Forgery (which is ultimately an unfixable problem due to the way browsers work), an attacker can plant child porn on your computer simply by getting you to visit their website (in any browser).
In my opinion, the governments need to wake up and revamp existing legislation, because punishing innocent people is already happening. Technology has moved faster than the legislation, and it is effecting people's lives for the worse.
On the other end of the spectrum, I think certain types of child porn (such as animated child porn, where there is no real victim) should be legal. If paedophiles use that rather than trying to find actual images of children, or actually going out and trying to rape a child, I think that would save quite a few children.
Edit: I just read some of the comments of the article, and one of them highlighted a very good point. What about parents who take photos of their children whilst naked (in bathtub, etc.)? Are they guilty of possessing indecent images of children? What about if the parents shared the images with friends or family (because photos of babies are cute)? Heck, my mum had a framed photo of me naked in a paddling pool at one point.
Walking through a park with a video camera and accidentally recording a child rape is not purposefully trying to record a child rape. Nor should it be punishable if you keep the images to either give to the police as evidence, or because you simply forgot to delete them.
In the Information Security realm, being convicted simply for having child pornography is becoming more of an issue, since a lot of pieces of malware are used to host child pornography on innocent users' computers without their knowledge. Also, due to the prevalence of Cross-site Request Forgery (which is ultimately an unfixable problem due to the way browsers work), an attacker can plant child porn on your computer simply by getting you to visit their website (in any browser).
In my opinion, the governments need to wake up and revamp existing legislation, because punishing innocent people is already happening. Technology has moved faster than the legislation, and it is effecting people's lives for the worse.
On the other end of the spectrum, I think certain types of child porn (such as animated child porn, where there is no real victim) should be legal. If paedophiles use that rather than trying to find actual images of children, or actually going out and trying to rape a child, I think that would save quite a few children.
Edit: I just read some of the comments of the article, and one of them highlighted a very good point. What about parents who take photos of their children whilst naked (in bathtub, etc.)? Are they guilty of possessing indecent images of children? What about if the parents shared the images with friends or family (because photos of babies are cute)? Heck, my mum had a framed photo of me naked in a paddling pool at one point.
