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Comment by boosting6889 | Hacker News Reader

The Justice Department contends that the act of viewing a child porn image revictimizes the child each time the view occurs and is the basis for arguing that viewing child porn is not a victimless crime. Yet the FBI seized a server and allows such images to be downloaded and viewed thousands of times over a 2 week period. This would be like seizing the operators of an underground rape dungeon where patrons pay to rape children - and allowing such an establishment to run for 2 extra weeks to catch the patrons, regardless of any collateral damage that occurs to innocent children as a result. People would be up in arms over this. So, does viewing an image of child porn cause additional harm to the child in the image or not? Which is it? (This of course excludes instances where the viewer is paying/supporting production of the material)

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It's the FBI -- not just a law enforcement agency but a national security/counter terror agency. For such agencies the Constitution and the laws become vague and flexible. Under color of law, the FBI can essentially do anything they can present a plausible law-enforcement case for.

A few years ago we had a shitsplosion involving the BATF running illegal guns in order to "catch criminals", with the result that few if any criminals were caught and Mexican drug lords found themselves in possession of nifty new guns. AFAIR none of the major decision makers lost their jobs, let alone were prosecuted.

I wonder how much actual law enforcement purpose is behind these ops and how much of it is just a game of "let's see what we can get away with".

The dissonance is accepted in this case because of the repulsive nature of the crimes, as determined by our current social consensus.

Philosophical purity is very appealing, but ultimately the justifications we use for why the law is the way it is only have to stand up long enough to convince most interested parties that we're doing the right thing.

Well biologically the person has inherited some genes that function in such a way as to lead to their obsession with young people. At the end of the day this is very much a mental problem that can be remedied with bioengineering. Not much else you can do for these people.

To criminalize it in all of its forms, is the same thing as criminalizing any sexuality. Perhaps one day we'll create an algorithm that can generate these images without anyone being involved -- does that sound distasteful as well.

At this point even artful depictions of a sexual nature are illegal, criminal offense.

Has it been proven that Pedophilia is genetic, tho?

Has homosexuality? In general in many of these cases they is definitely some element of OCD involved, as in hoarding millions of images, and the criminal offenses are set up in a way to penalize for each image using the same sort of logic as above. But then that's common for other people with what are considered normal sexual orientations, having a huge porn collection.

I mean the deviant element of this is that it's all so taboo, I mean after all "think of the children" (tm). We should treat it as any other crime and try to do harm reduction.

There was an episode of radiolab or something where a guy had a brain injury and became an obsessive child porn collector. The DA argued that even if he had an illness, if he was cognizant enough to hide his activity from his spouse, he was cognizant enough to seek help instead of continuing his behavior in secret.

Well biologically the person has inherited some genes that function in such a way as to lead to their obsession with younger people.

That includes everyone. Women with the most neotenous traits are considered the most attractive in every human society.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_humans

So is that to say that it's completely a choice and so we should treat these people as criminals and simply jail them with harsh sentences if they don't conform to our societal norms?

Stated another way, the law is being ignored because these particular criminal defendants' rights don't matter when they're inconvenient, based on the crime(s) they were accused of.

When the law is influenced by societal consensus the legal system becomes a farce.

Well, in this example the rights that are being ignored are not those of the defendants, but those of their victims to not be further victimized.

I think when the law is not influenced by societal consensus it becomes a farce. In many ways the societal consensus on morality is law wheather it maintained by the state, vigilantes or in this case a legal fiction which is some combination of both.

I think this quote by the recently passed Justice Scalia is appropriate here

"the Constitution, or any text, should be interpreted [n]either strictly [n]or sloppily; it should be interpreted reasonably"

The law is Societal Consensus.

If you're looking for consistency in the US legal system you're going to be sorely disappointed

Moreover, if you create a legal system with perfect consistency, you'd going to be astounded by how much injustice it produces.

The law is not a programming language.

One noteworthy bastardization of modern justice is that our right to trial by a jury of our peers has long been infringed.

We are supposed to be judged by people of our approximate age, origin, location, background, etc, to allow for a greater understanding of context.

Random jury selection is an abomination.

You are arbitrarily defining "peer".

I see what you're saying. A computer programmer accused of a hacking crime should only be judged by other computer programmers, since they understand the domain.

An artist accused of selling fake fraudulent paintings should be judged by a jury of artists, since these would best understand the techniques used to make paintings and could interpret the evidence to determine whether it was fraud.

Toyota cheating their emissions should only be judged by a jury made up of members of large car dealerships, mechanics, car repair services, etc. These would be best equipped to understand what exactly was done where in the pipeline, and interpret the evidence for or against them.

When a Goldman Sachs executive is accused of fraud, only other Wall Street investment bankers should be on the jury as these are his peers and the only ones who understand the complex financial instruments being used.

I honestly can't tell if you are being sincere or sarcastic.

Beautiful comment.

Jury randomisation has positives and negatives. Yes, it means that juries are unlikely to have the necessary context for a case. It's the job of the attorneys and expert witnesses to provide that context. This is not a good thing, and can cause miscarriages of justice. This is why appeals are a thing. On the other hand, you get a more statistically consistent justice system with jury randomisation. Not to mention that you immediately lose any bias during the jury selection (on which criteria should I pick a "peer"? random selection is much less prone to bias). The job of the justice system is to aim for consistency as well as justice (it would be unjust if the courts were not consistent -- yeah, yeah I know).

Thank you. This has always been one of my biggest issue with sting operations. For most such operations, there is little to no collateral damage, but in this particular case, they support the same damage that makes the action a crime to begin with. Yet somehow most people seem to not care. I have my own theory on why, based not on just this, but on looking at how people treat all sorts of issues related to this subject, especially when dealing with someone who hasn't offended in any way (including not having viewed such material as mentioned here).

I think that, while people do care for the victims, their main driving force behind their interactions is hatred of the entire group (both those who commit crimes and those who don't). Hatred they justify by the damage some do, but hatred that does not originate there. It is almost like there is some need to have a group painted as evil beyond any consideration, some group you can openly hate regardless of anything else which fuels it. This is one reason why I think support for treatment of non-offenders is so lacking (other than 'lock them up and throw away the key') and why people tolerate the police engaging in abuse of the very same kind to catch them.

And then, the small piece of my mind which loves a good conspiracy begins to wonder if this wasn't engineered as an constant backdoor into digital rights/freedoms. One only needs to look at laws greater than 60 to 100 years ago to see how vastly different society reacted (often there wasn't much care even when a victim was being directly victimized, especially if they weren't the child of someone white and well off).

Even criminals themselves including rapists and murderers have a problem with child pornographers and child sex offenders.

It's kind of like how the CIA produces, sells, and profits from drugs so it can "catch the really bad guys".

Viewing the image also creates a market for it, since you'll get bored of it and will want another one, even if you'll not pay for it.

The same way downloading pirated material creates a market for it, even if you download it for free and the providers don't get money from it (but are rewarded with scene creds)

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