The Kid Porn Crusade
Caught in the Kid Porn Crusade
This remarkable Wired article is highly disturbing for a number of reasons. To summarize: a former marine and police officer with just a little too much curiousity about pornography logs into a child-porn web site, downloads some of the material, decides they’re not his style, then signs out. He’s arrested. Psychological evaluation concluded he’s not a pedophile — he was just looking around. But he pleads guity rather than risk an extended, lengthy sentence. Looking in the wrong spot earned him jail time.
You see, one download of one illegal image and you’ve committed a federal crime. And who’s judging you? People who don’t know what GIFs are or that IP addresses are not “digital fingerprints.”
People who logged into the group and did less than this policeman — logged in, discovered what it was, and then logged out — were searched. Computer forensics were carried out on their machines to see if illegal pornographic images had been downloaded and deleted. Images that were part of browser caches were considered “posession.”
And now consider the possibilities.
Through the magic of popup ads, I could serve you — without warning — a multitude of illegal images, any one of which can put you in federal prison for several years. Or I can email you a message with an illegal image in it — if your emailer opens it and shows you the image, then it’s saved somewhere on your computer and computer forensics may find it and hold it against you. I can even download images to your computer without your knowledge, thanks to JavaScript.
Or I could sign up for a child pornography service using your email address. And the feds would be knocking on your door.
How many popup ads a day do you close without even looking at them? Earlier today I mistyped a URL and hit one of those nasty pretend-portal sites that open up bazillions of popups. Who knows what was in them. And let’s not even go into the spam I get.
Every link could be to something illegal. You don’t know; and once you find out the crime has been committed. Our policeman friend arguably knew what he would find, but the bar for breaking the law was set much lower than what he had done.
I have no objections to arresting and prosecuting collectors and distributors of child porn. But think of the effort that’s gone into arresting this guy; how many resources were wasted pursuing and prosecuting him? Was it worth the expense? Weren’t there worse criminals — probably child molesters or true child pornography afficionados — who deserve the harrasment more?
I think we all hope some common sense would be used. We’d like to think that a few images we were either unware of, tricked into viewing, or planted without our knowledge wouldn’t land us in the court facing possession, distribution, and obstruction of justice charges.
But we live in a world where a model student was expelled because he found a box cutter in his bookbag, a world where 4″ GI-Joe guns are confiscated in airports, and a world where a teenage girl is led out of a subway station in handcuffs because she was eating french-fries. Zero-tolerance trumps common sense nowdays. So I want you to think about this for a moment.
Can you be prosecuted for posession of child pornography?
Are you sure?
