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Jacob Applebaum: "The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and The War on Some Drugs." - Cypherpunks, p43. O/R Books. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/

The book (and The World Tomorrow interviews at http://assange.rt.com/ from whence it spawned) go on to explain why these arguments are extremely bad for the internet. We have to protect the freedom of speech for everyone, or there is no freedom of speech.

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I think we can support censorship of child pornography, and also support protection of anonymity and network neutrality.

Everyone wants to dance around the subject, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. True anonymity makes the criminalization of the transfer of child pornography unenforceable.

Making bad laws unenforceable is the point of anonymity. But you've got to take the end of good laws along with the bad.

What you think can be done is irrelevant by itself; you have to explain or suggest _how_ it can be done.

Police work.

The same way we've been catching criminals for years. Surveillance, warrants, legal due process, etc.

I really don't feel that some reasonable tools in the hands of law enforcement but also checked by the justice system need to encroach on anonymity, TOR or any existing technology. Because despite these technologies, it's remarkably easy for a person to get caught if law enforcement is determined to catch him if they use the same tools they’ve used for generations.

You can wish for both things.

Media made from victimizing children is not "free speech" in my book.

No, certainly not. However, in Germany "child porn" was extended to encompass any (fictional) written narrative [1] as well as paintings or renderings - including manga - or any video involving adult actors that look like minors. So there's a case to be made that not all material that might seem interesting to a child porn consumer produces victims. I'm not an expert in that field, but constantly extending the covered topics is certainly not helpful.

[1] Kubricks Lolita could be illegal in germany now http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056193/

No, but a possession of any kind of media should not be a crime by itself. Nobody is harmed by a video/picture sitting on your hard drive. If you say that it might encourage anyone to do anything - then why is it perfectly legal to have videos of murders and gore?

Right, you may not even know that you have such media sitting in your browser's cache. All it takes is clicking on some link in a spam message, for example. Even if you immediately close it, the damage is done and you don't even know it.

This. Punish those who cause harm.

Possessing a certain sequence of 0s and 1s does not cause harm.

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