Well, the alternative is... legal child porn?
Not saying I like the laws. But i don't know of an alternative to holding people accountable for data.
Not saying I like the laws. But i don't know of an alternative to holding people accountable for data.
think of it like this: it is legal to posses or make video footage of a murder. but it is still illegal to kill someone for the purpose of making such a film.
The point of criminalizing the data is to suppress the market for it in order to reduce the incentives to create it.
Yes, it is awkward to compare something as awful with something as intangible as anonymity. But if you don't draw the line somewhere you will not be able to have a functional society - in which case we might as well be as humane as humanly possible and make good use of our nukes and make sure that there will be no human suffering in the future to worry about.
I'm more worried about all the people abusing children without doing us the courtesy of publicizing the fact on the Internet.
"Suppressing" the market is impossible. How did it work with drugs? or with alcohol?
The law of the unintended consequences strikes again.
For alcohol, consumption shortly after Prohibition in the US fell to about 30% of pre-Prohibition levels. It then increased over the next few years to about 60-70% of pre-Prohibition levels. It stayed at that level until Prohibition was repealed, and stayed there for a bit after then climbed over the next decade back to pre-Prohibition levels. Cite: Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition, Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, The American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 242-247.
The alternative is police doing their job and prosecuting the people that sexual abuse children, not the people that own the channels used by them.
If they prosecute the people that own the channels every time those are used badly it means somebody will have to intercept and analyze ALL COMMUNICATIONS.
People in power have passion for power and control, they use the excuse of thinking of children for extending their power, they want to know everything from everybody. This is absolute power and is way more dangerous than child pornography because it affects the 100% of the population, not a 1 per 100.000.
The concept is also touched on in the Assange book.
If the goal is to minimize the number of abused children, the methods used should follow a cost benefit analyze to use the finite resources of cash, work hours, and political focus. If a method A, lets call this a child porn blacklist and obligated recording and data mining of every person data traffic to enforce a data ban on child pornography gives say 5% deterrent of abuses for $100 billions, and method B), that educate teachers to see signs of abuse and have mandatory counsel at hand in schools and daycare for a cost of say $10 billions and that has a reduction of abuse cases of around 25%, the choice should be obvious where the money, work and political focus should go. While police and ISP still could do a token effort if they stumble onto something, that effort must not produce less result than if the time and money went to educating the teachers and counsels.
In a practical sense, education is just one of the more obvious thing one can do. Statistics show that somewhere of 95-99% something of cases does not involve a camera, and the people most likely to abuse kids are someone in the kids family. Using that data, and data on how little effective chasing child porn has to reduce future abuses, we should do better in the methods being applied to reduce child abuse.
But that's the practical argument. what about the moral one. Here I point slightly towards a suggested mandatory medical examination of children, a law that has got shot down every single time it has been suggested. but is that law more morally wrong than recoding every single word anyone ever say for indefinite time? its clearly a very much more effective approach to have regular medical examination, and if we are already throwing out moral objections to being recorded all the time, this should not be a big issue? that surveillance has a clear and scientific proven negative effect on society, democracy and science, should also be clearly weight in.
As I see it, current politics are applying ineffective, expensive and morally outrightous methods to deter child abuse, while obvious and effective methods goes unused. At the same time, the ineffective methods are doing long term damage to societies base values.