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Comment by CurtMonash | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a rather extreme hierarchy of wrongs here.

1. The crime that utterly dwarfs all others is involving children in the making of child porn.

2. After that, the crimes that dwarf all the rest are those that provide financial or practical support to child porn makers. Consuming child porn is generally regarded as one of those, and I'm fine with that categorization.

3. I'm sorry, but violating a victim's theoretical privacy by distributing the images a little further doesn't seem to be nearly as big a deal as helping to prevent the next live video of child porn from being made.

I'm usually regarded as being pro-privacy, but privacy is not something to be a rabid extremist about. Preventing physical sexual abuse of children, on the other hand, is a fine area for extremism.

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Screw chilling effects, I'm going to ask this anyway because being afraid of having these discussions is detrimental to making real progress as a society.

Making the assumption* that some decent fraction of those who consume such media would be sated if they could get it and not move on to actually hurting children. Then couldn't a preventative measure be to take all the existing child porn and make it available to them?

Though I guess that risks normalizing the condition and could lead to it being more commonplace (certainly it would appear so as those who successfully suppress it would hide it less) and if it's more commonplace than the fraction that does still act harmfully upon the impulse could, in absolute numbers, exceed those that do today. Figuring out how things fall would first require a good understanding of the numbers.

*I don't know if this is true or false and would be interested to know if there is existing general consensus on the evolution of seeking out fantasy fulfillment over time in general and how it's affected by free access v. restricted access to related material.

Arguably we are at a point where good (here meaning effective) CG or Art should be able to replace such a thing without any real child being abused or having their privacy invaded, which would be preferable.

Of course, in some countries, that too is illegal, for some reason.

This is very much in line with my thinking.

Making of child porn with real children is one of the most horrific crimes in the world. Fighting that by criminalizing other steps in the creation/consumption chain makes sense.

On the other hard, child porn in which no real children were involved is a free speech issue, and I'm on the side that favors permitting it.

There's also a third group of issues -- child porn is used as an excuse for general internet surveillance, which then is used to also benefit anti-terrorism, law enforcement, and anti-piracy. That's why copyright lobbyists refer to (concern about) child porn as being a godsend for their industry.

> Then couldn't a preventative measure be to take all the existing child porn and make it available to them?

What about the victims' right not to have their privacy and dignity violated by the continuing consumption of the material?

Yes, what about that. The only way the FBI is justified is if we ignore that. And if we are choosing to ignore it to justify the FBI's actions then why not do it here for the greater good? Personally I'm with you that we shouldn't ignore it in either case.

I read a post where someone actually set up a honey pot without actually hosting CP. There was an application system where the pedos thought they were going to get cp via an application process or were a big enough part of the "community." I feel like the FBI could have implemented something similar without actually hosting the images. I feel like there is no excuse for distributing cp, even if it is to catch pedos. You shouldn't become a pedo to catch pedos.

Yeah, such a better system. Even set up a bit coin address where they have to pay about $25 to get in to prove intent (along with visiting the site and then logging in).

I was responding to a comment that made the case that prevention of future physical child harm is more important than prevention of revictimization, so I'm just continuing along that line of reasoning. You'll have to ask him if you want an answer for why he felt that trade-off was valid.

There seems to be some evidence to support your assumption. I saw something somewhere that claimed that the frequency of rape has actually fallen over the last 15 years and noted that that correlated with the expanding availability of Internet porn.

That's weak evidence, but at least it doesn't contradict the hypothesis.

Someone should try giving some pedophiles access to a generous supply of computer-generated CP and seeing what happens.

Regarding your assumption: I have a family member who's a child psychologist specializing in abuse cases, and according to her the vast majority of those who consume CP have abused children. Hard numbers are hard to come by because of the illicit nature of pedophilia, but studies involving anonymous surveys (in which the individual's name is withheld and their answers can't be used against them by law enforcement) supports that.

According to her? Her!? And what would a woman have to lose, if there was a whole caste of psychologically outcasts to disappear? No social justice warriors and priests to be pressured into services with loaded husbands? Your expert is not neutral, this whole machinery that spawned her, heavily depends on all gears turning as they turn now. Which doesn't make the machinery bad, quite contrary. I support the upholding of pressure on pedophiles - it guarantees a sort of basic contract security, even if society would be near-collapses. In a era of total surveillance, their crime-rate is bound to drop to zero- but the continued exploit of thought-criminals is a necessary stabilizer. Viv la Leviathancybernetics!

That sounds extremely vulnerable to selection bias. If she specializes in child abuse cases, obviously she's going to see more child abusers. People who own CP but don't abuse children would be unlikely to interact with her.

She didn't perform the study, she just told me what the literature says.

Now that those "literature" correlates with my feelings, suddenly i can appreciate its self-evident scientific value. I wish there was a way to take back all those comments on psychology/sociology papers i posted on hacker news.

I don't buy it for a second. Instead, I think that those who use but don't physically touch an actual child are so unlikely to get caught, the numbers are horribly biased.

To give some example numbers, say that 5% of those who view the material ever directly harm a child. And say that 100% of those who harm a child view the material. Now, say that 50% of those who harm a child get busted, but only 1% of those who don't get busted for viewing the material. The end result would be that of those caught about 5 of every 7 who viewed material harmed a child directly.

Now, the numbers are made up, but there are many values that lead to a false conclusion if people only look at those caught.

Those surveys were of people convicted of possession of CP only.

Yes but how do those convictions happen? If it comes from an interweb honeytrap, then it will give somewhat unbiased data. But I suspect a lot of people caught for possession are people at the fringes of a abuse case where the cops couldn't prove this individual actually abused someone, but could get them on the lesser crime.

And how many charged with child molestation will have the police raid their homes and check their computers? How many will end up only being charged with child porn to spare the actual child the trauma of going through a case and how many times is there not enough evidence to convict for child molestation but there is plenty to convict for child porn?

Admittedly, I don't have the study on me, so I can't confirm this. But I imagine the study would screen out anyone like that, that seems like a pretty obvious thing to do.

Even if there's some truth in that -- and I agree with the others here who have pointed out the likelihood of selection bias -- it doesn't actually bear on the question of whether greater availability of CP makes the consumers more, or less, likely to abuse children. Supplying these people with computer-generated CP -- maybe even giving them some ability to generate scenarios to their liking -- might give them a way to release their urges in fantasy, reducing their desire to act them out.

I know, it sounds disgusting. But if it turns out to actually work, I think we have to set our disgust aside. If not, well, back to the drawing board.

I like to tell this to people when they start gushing about Japan because of their cleanliness or law and order or whatever, but they didn't make private possession illegal until a couple years ago. Before then it was just production or possession with commercial intent that was illegal. And the new law still doesn't apply to manga/anime. Is Japan a hell-hole? Are Japan's children all psychologically ruined or at a much higher threat of abuse because of the prevalence of anime/manga porn? (Some quick googling on opened investigations suggests a mere 0.0075% of Japan's children are affected per year.) To me Japan seems fine. (Another odd behavior is that daughters bathe with their fathers, sometimes (like 6-10%) all the way up to high school age.)

> daughters bathe with their fathers

Isn't it that the whole family bathes together? The way you put it makes it sound like it's just the two of them, which doesn't fit the impression I have, though I don't really know.

The notion that pornographic content does not produce desire for the acts depicted is on its face ludicrous and should be clearly false to anyone who has ever consumed pornography.

Not quite. Perhaps a consumer of pornography consumes only what they already like. Personally, watching, say, bondage out of curiosity didn’t make me like the stuff.

People who question what the FBI is doing are not "rabid extremist". That combines an ad-hominem and a straw man fallacy in the same line.

You then claim that preventing child abuse is a fine area for extremism. That's an appeal to emotion and also a fallacy.

Perhaps we could debate whether extremism is justified but let's do it without all the nonsense you wrap around your argument to cloud the real question. You say that extremism is justified but all of the reasons your posit as justification are fallacies.

The thing is that it's not really about what's right or best, it's about what's lawful.

It is definitely good that this happened and that the people using the sites for CP were identified and caught.

It is scary for the FBI, an agency that upholds the law, to break the law, even if it is for good reason.

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