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How do you propse to go about fighting online content that is indeed illegal like child pornography? One way is to call upon the server providers to delete the content, and some do but most don't. There is also no official police  that scans the web for illegal sites and notifies the servers and ensures that the content is deleted. The organizations that do work like that are to my knowledge NGO's or voluntary. Calling upong the providers is a problem as well when the servers are in foreign countries and the owners could care less if the money is right. It is an ongoing problem that hasn't been solved on a statutory level.

A propos free speech in the US.. the Child Pornography Prevention Act was overturned in a 2002 Supreme Court Decision Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coaltion. I don't really know if forbidding someone to create virtual child pornography or comics that depict child pornography is really a bad thing but it did violate the "artists" free speech because it was overbroad, according to the decision anyway.

I don't know about the artist, but when a pedophile gets caught, the first thing investigators take from the residence is the computer.

IMO these countries can't really care less about porn, what they are really afraid of is content that does not correlate with their own ideology and might cause their citizens to think outside the box. It all about the flow of ideas. Almost every country, including the US, has attempted to control information in some manner (i.e. Fairness Doctrine).

Countries like Indonesia don't seem to care about child porn or civil rights much, I agree.

There is an ongoing debate in Germany about banning/deleting pedophilic internetcontent. There are quite a few left/liberal groups that liken Germany to a opressive police state that employs arbitrary censorship on its helpless citicenry because of that. They argue that a floodgate would be opened if a ban on content is allowed for anything - today its child pornography and whoops tomorrow free blogging would be all but impossible. The argument is that banning sites like that or making them illegal to be viewable in Germany puts Germany firmly in the same group as North Korea and China and that any outsidethebox content would be next in the sights of an overbearing state. pfft.

If a pedophile "only" has digitally created material and no actual persons were used to the pictures or films, then it isn't a crime to have data like that on his computer.

I may be wrong, but I believe in Japan it is illegal to show genitalia in popular anime and manga, these are drawn or rendered materials.

The problem with such laws is that you give rights to a drawing. By the same token you could then say that any drawing of an underaged person doing drugs, being shot, etc is a similar violation of their "rights" (the drawing) and should curry a similar punishment.

The PROPER way to go about it is to say that drawing sex between an adult and a child is a crime not because it violates the rights of the fictional being, but because the person drawing it is promoting pedophilia. The problem with THAT is that it goes into thought control and or free speech.

However, NONE of those have ANYTHING to do with a government that tries to build a great firewall to control the content that comes in. Remember, in australia the banned site list already includes "sites that oppose the firewall" and "sites that are pro life". (apparently that is hate speech)

You said that there is no police unit whose job is to track child pornography and have it deleted. Why the hell not? it is certainly a more sensible approach then creating a national censorship infrastructure. (And doesn't reduce your browsing speed by 80%).

BTW, doesn't this already exist? I distinctly recall CP specialized police offers being diverted into a special force to track IP violators some years back.

This is EXACTLY what happened in australia. They are pushing the great firewall of australia to stop child porn, but already the ban list includes criticism of the government and certain political ideals (pro life). And they actually tried to deny blogs freedom of speech because some higher ups were offended at the "lies" said blogs said about them. There was a public outrage and it was overturned though. for now.

Japan tried to stop porno altogether, they have never specifically targetted underaged porn.

Until very recently the age of consent was 13 (but it was recently raised to 18). Anyways, they tried to stop ALL porn by banning the show of "pubic hair". This resulted in immediately everyone being shaved, they responded by saying you cannot show a penis entering a vagina, which was responded to with tentacle porn; have a monster insert phallic tentacles into a vagina (it existed earlier, but it exploded during the period of the ban). Nowadays they relented and are content to simply require blurring of genatelia.

Anyways, japan is still the worlds #1 producer of pedophilia cartoon pornography. and they don't seem to have any laws against it.

 

I support laws against child porn, but those laws should actually target child pornography. Shutting down servers, removing content, and the like.

Laws creating a national firewall are designed to create a police state while using children as an excuse.

Say there was a police, federal police or other agency that did track it down. But what happens if the server is not in the US? Now if a german police officer wanted to actively delete content from a server that is in the US (and many servers are in the US), he has to call the provider and ask them to look into it, without the guarantee that that is done. It is very frustrating - I read a portrait of a childporn division head of a statepolice in Germany.  He was really commited to fight internet distribution of CP but he ran into so many walls that he quit.

As it is now, the internet is hogheaven for all sort of perverts and will stay that way. The decentralized way the internet functions almost guarantees that CP is unstoppable. Unless there is global legal and administrative cooperation all of a sudden, of course. But as it means alot of paperwork and doesn't involve a guarantee to success to - such cooperation even  between friendly highindustrialized countries like Germany and the United States isn't without difficulties.

 

international cooperation. It would certainly be more useful then the copenhagen global warming summit.

Say you are a US agent and you find child porn hosted in france, you contanct your french peers. There are only about 195 countries in the entire world. And not a single one of them allows child porn.

http://geography.about.com/od/countryinformation/a/capitals.htm

And do keep in mind that the whole CP issue is a strawman argument. The censorship networks do not effectively block CP, and they ARE used to block free speech. there is not a single case where it didn't happen that.

Sounds easy enough - just contact your peers.. but it isn't very effective in stopping it as of yet. Maybe it is a strawman argument in the debate over censorship, but on its own it isn't a harmless topic at all. You are right about the climate summit though, they wasted millions in organizing the whole thing, and all for nothing. I guess the city of Copenhagen was happy because of all the business that came into town, but that's about all the positive there is. Imagine how many concrete meaningful environmental projects or research could have been funded with that kind of money.

Generally I think some mandatory rules in the net wouldn't hurt. They are applied in other publications and contexts - you can't write or say everything you want after all. Freedom of speech doesn't allow you to tell everybody they should murder the president (that would be a felony, right) or your classmates or publish flyers or a book where you state that you'll kill your teacher etc., call for acts of violence against a specific group and so forth. Why should that be legal on the web then? The internet shouldn't be a carte blanche for every psycho out there to spout of their violent nonsense.

While it is true that you cannot PRINT everything you want, that is the SERVER side issue. Likewise, in print, you can only control what is printed in your own country. Someone can easily send a letter containing illegal materials to you from another country.

Introducing such a censorship on the internet is akin to introducing "mail opening stations" where government employees open every single letter you get to look for illegal material. Because that is EXACTLY what they are doing, they are introducing special hardware, that opens all your internet communications, and looks through it for banned materials.

You say they "couldn't hurt"... every single country that has implemented such a system ended up with it being used for limiting freedom of speech. Even australia, even the french plan... there is no exception. To date there has never been a country that introduced such massive spying and censorship on communcation that has not also included censorship of political speech.

I hope for the sake of australia it can turn away from the authoraterian path it has chosen.

There seems to be no easy way to solve the problem.

Spying on communication, now that is something. Just yesterday my newspaper ran a special feature on how the electronic imprint left by us by cellphones, lowjacks, internet and landlines, credit cards, social networks etc. (this data is stored in Germany for 6 months) makes it possible to analyze exactly what you do, who you know and meet and possibly even what you talk about. In other words, there is absolutely no privacy. There is software that gives you a graph where all those connections you made are colourcoded according to their frequency and length for any given date. It is quite possible to find out about a persons social circles and so on.

Honestly, I find that a little spooky. This software is used by the government (obviously) like police and intelligence agencies but it is also not very hard to obtain so private eyes etc use it as well. Basically there is no privacy left because everybody uses electronics.

I don't know how long this data is stored in the US, and how hard it is to access it. Data privacy protection doesn't seem to be too big of a public issue.

 

in the us it is stored for 6 months. (up from the previous 3 months requirement), there are currently calls to increase that to 18 months.

Just because there is little privacy left doesn't mean we should support making things worse.

and there is a far cry between "person A called person B 3 times this month" and "person A called person B 3 times this month, here are the recordings and transcripts of the conversations"

True. I am a bit wary of Web 2.0 anyway. People share personal information a little bit too carelessly. I mean even JU.. read enough posts of a person and it is possible to come to a pretty good conclusion of said bloggers political oppinion and stance, where they work in some cases, what they do, background, experiences - a pretty conclusive picture forms out of little mosaic pieces. Isn't that the sort of information that spies tried to find out in the past by placing bugs or befriending a person of interest etc.? Now all they have to do is read a blog or facebook page.

You don't necessarily need transcripts and recordings to draw conclusions. You can watch the spread of information and find out who calls the shots behind the scenes in organizations that way. The example the article had was the organization of a strike or demonstration. If the police issued a ban on a demonstration (here,  you have to tell in advance and register the demo) you could follow who called whom and how the calls/information spread in the relevant organization to find out exactly who is important behind the scenes. I suppose it is helpful to analyze criminal organizations and terrorist networks - but there is no transparency about who has access to data like that and if those that do have access act responsibly. There had been several data scandals here were big companies in Germany (mail service and the major train company) lost millions of datasets. Data like that is worth a lot of money.