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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

The problem lies on the wide margin of interpretation those laws give the police.

50kph is a number.

"Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.

I remember the scandal when an American Apparel ad depicted a young woman in a thong. People were outraged because she looked minor. In fact, she was 21 years old. I wonder if people think she shouldn’t get any jobs modeling lingerie just because she appears to be underage. To be clear, the ad had nothing to suggest underage girls, just a girl in a thong which I hope everyone agrees does not have any connection to being underage, quite the opposite.

The "height of consent" is a topic that's been circulating among petite women online lately. A lot of people (mostly in western countries) seem to be of the mind that if women don't exceed a certain stature and level of buxomness, they're not an adult (or at least, shouldn't be treated as one), which is directly at odds with the hundreds of millions of women who live out their entire lives never making it past 5'4"/1.63m and/or never developing a shapely figure.

In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.

On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.

The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?

I know it's HN and we love her numbers but legislation that requires interpretation by judge or jury isn't at all unusual. There are also several layers of oversight and courts of appeal in the UK, which are separate from the government.

For a long time there was push to handle some of that under magistrate courts and other approaches so that to properly defend you have to appeal to actually get in front of proper court.

There was at least one case where prosecution never, ever, seen the evidence of supposed CSAM found on accused's computer, and if not for the lucky person having a slightly less overworked public defender, they had high chances of being found "guilty" if of minor offense for having what used to be staple of family photo albums - photo of the toddler grand-kids playing in kiddy pool, which was reported by computer tech at a laptop repair business.

50kph is a number, but that number is (in my jurisdiction) determined by the police. The laws describe a number of things they must consider when making the decision, and for every one of those aspects, reasonable people can disagree.

Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.

> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.

I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.

The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.

I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.

You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.

I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.

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