> By doing so, we do not expose ourselves to any sensitive media that is potentially illegal.
This is the part I was looking for. Although I wonder if some of the text parsed might also be questionable in terms of legality.
I also was amazed at it cleanly categorizing the data into Pornography, Violence, Gambling, Hacking, etc., since to my naive mind, some of these categories likely have huge overlaps, especially so on the Dark Web.
Last week, my favourite German lawyer Udo Vetter made a blog post [1] about parents reporting questionable media in group chats to the police.
He warns urgently to never do this.
If you're in a large telegram group, discord, WhatsApp or whatever, and your phone downloads the questionable media automatically, you're already doing a crime (the mere possession of such media is illegal). In Germany, the minimum punishment for the possession of child porn is one year; a monetary fine is not possible and a dismissal of the case due to insignificance isn't possible either.
According to Udo Vetter there have been cases where "concerned parents have brought printouts of the chat messages to the police so that the things are not distributed further. Criminal proceedings for possession of child pornography were the result."
Further down in the blog post how there were funny cases like the police seizing a mobile phone of a drug dealer, and then finding group chats with thousands of users where questionable images were shared. Which will then start a mass investigation on thousands of innocent people, who weren't even looking at that stuff. No one looks at group chats 24/7, especially in fast-moving chats with like 10 messages/minute.
The issue isn't even new. I remember many times when IRC networks were flooded with such media by troll collectives like myg0t, 4chan and whatnot.
[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2023/05/12/lustiger-gruppenc...
If we have to guess one way or the other, it seems like we should assume the same is true of the crawlable dark web versus the non-crawlable dark web.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F23...
I'm trying to extrapolate from these trends, taking them into the future, and then parody them, in a game I've been building. (see my bio if curious)
Although I think distribution causes further distress to the victims, it's much less severe than the initial abuse.
The images, they are artifacts of abuse, which is different to the abuse itself. The actual abuse could have occurred decades ago, in some cases....
A bold claim with no evidence provided
Should the reason we view change what should be viewed? If someone is viewing for pleasure is that a crime, if someone is viewing for healing does that change how we treat them?
Is someone's dead a privacy issue? Should deaths be personal and viewing such an act break privacy laws?
What about fake murder and rape pictures? What about newsworthy pictures/video?
Should we shield society from its negative elements or normalize them?
If we try to prosecute whether it's viewed for pleasure or not, then we are trying to prosecute thought crimes. We are trying to prosecute someone's state of mind there.
No, just viewing someone's death does not violate privacy laws, in my opinion. But if you share the material with others, than it might be right to make that illegal, in my opinion.
We should take such material down, but nobody should ever see jail time or any form of punishment for viewing or reading anything, in a free society. Any situation otherwise is a hallmark of a police state, and it shows how far the Overton window has shifted. How much the frog has boiled over the years.
And seeing the harm caused by the War on Drugs and countless other cases of overcriminalization, it may well be we are living in a de-facto police state, and unaware of it. We've internalized and accepted loss of our fundamental liberties over the years. And this trend started roughly around 1980 or so.
I ended my career over this. I do not want to work in any industry that supports directly or indirectly the prosecution of such "thought crimes". Such prosecution has no place in a free society.
I will not work on any software (or hardware) which provides a traceability or logging facility that can be used to prosecute people for viewing or reading anything. Therefore participation in development of networking equipment is completely out of the question for me. To me it's no different from developing weapons systems, another thing I will not do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bukovsky#"Prohibited_...
These laws over image and text possession[1] are complete and utter madness. It is like Islamic fundamentalism. No way this should be happening in the UK or the USA either, especially in this day and age. We are supposed to be past all of this, just as with blasphemy and heresy laws. Something's gone really wrong here.
1. 'Simple' possession, with no intent to distribute.
I still can't believe this is going on and that people are being prosecuted for the act of viewing or reading certain things on the Internet. That belongs in dictatorships such as China or Russia, not the free world. My God, how the frog has boiled very slowly indeed.
I think it's the metaphorical canary in the coal mine for much worse things down the line...
No other person, or government has the right to dictate to you what you can read or not. It's a fundamental, natural right in my opinion. And nobody can take that right away from you.
They can say anything they like, make any excuses for trying to do so, they still don't have the right to control your reading habits.
Where the argument loses me is that I simply don't believe that the demand in any way causes people to become rapists just to produce content. They were gonna become rapists anyway.
The better argument that seeking it out at all should be illegal is that it's a (very severe) privacy violation. And I would agree with that.
But it is hard to get away from the fact that part of this really is thought crime. In some countries, even things like loli manga are illegal even though no children were harmed making them.
And speaking of demand and exploitation of children, should we prosecute people who bought clothes made with child labour? Their demand also caused child exploitation in some sense. Serious question, because I think prosecuting based on vague economic theories of "motivating suppliers" sets an interesting precedent for all sorts of different behaviours normally thought of as perfectly legal.
But how does prosecuting someone for accidentally viewing it, because some sicko posted it on a public forum, helps exploited children?
It depends if the quantity of data uploaded qualifies as an image of illegal abuse. If it contains fragments of the image, that do not represent such acts, then it's not illegal. The user was being negligent or reckless in not disabling the upload facility completely, it's his/her duty to do so in that case, to prevent further harm to the victim from occurring.
And I think that is where we can draw the line and it becomes a crime? And sentencing will take into account the intent? Might not result in jail time if it was just one file?
The creation of those videos are crimes and the distribution and possession should be too. Videos like George Floyd and JFK are recorded by bystanders and are evidence of crimes.
Slippery slope
My God, what has the world come to nowadays. All done in the name of protecting us from a so-called widespread threat to our safety. Straight out of a fascist's playbook there. History repeating itself again?
Anyway it's all completely overwhelming to comprehend, emotionally. Time to take a break, to pull the network cable out of the back of my computer, and be back to normal, instead of living in Orwell's 1984 world, come true. Thankfully there's so much more to life than the Internet.
The link between abuse and consumption is concrete in this case. Buying more eggs requires the farm to raise more hens, which causes more male chicks to be shredded. There is a direct supplier and customer here, and money is clearly transferred.
So the average person consumes 277 eggs per year [4], that means approximately every 2 years, we all shred a male chick alive, by proxy. And by using the same argument as for the illegal pornography, we should be going to jail for animal abuse?
1. https://backyardpoultry.iamcountryside.com/chickens-101/how-...
2. https://thehumaneleague.org.uk/article/what-happens-to-male-...
3. https://demeter.net/chick-culling/
4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consum...
With illegal pornography, which is information, and can be copied effortlessly at zero cost, and when no money is transferred, the link between consumption and abuse is much less clear. In fact most of those images are distributed for free, so I guess it's pirated illegal pornography that people are viewing then? That hardly makes a direct case for increasing the production of such images?
Consumers trade material with each other, and a high value is placed on original or custom content - which in turn leads them into finding victims so they can become producers.
It is absolutely vile and consumption does lead directly to abuse.
In any case, I already pointed out that there are gradations here, and you didn't address any of those points.
I've emailed my senators on the EARN IT Act here in the US. None of them have engaged in the conversation even after multiple times reaching out. What's really annoying to me is that they are elected and paid with my tax dollars, yet the best they can do is send me some precanned non-response and all of them hide behind form contact these days. There's no way to email them directly anymore because they don't want to have to deal with that open line of communication. While I understand that I'm sure there are a lot of horrible things that get sent to them - that's the job. And there's plenty of ways to filter abusers in 2023.
Citation below, from a reliable source:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2013/11/21/rescuers-redeemers...
" The focus on sex trafficking, therefore, becomes yet another channel through which Christian institutions are able to carry out their sex-negative agenda, particularly by casting themselves as Rescuer, Redeemer, and even the familiar role of Western male hero saving the passive and helpless female. "
Another one below, less reliable though:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-exodus-cry-the-shady-ev...
Finally, it's disturbing in how the two-way (transmit/receive) nature of the Internet as a medium, has virtually let all these "morality police" organizations into our homes, to watch over us, through their lobbying efforts to change the law. That wasn't possible with radio and satellite television, which were receive only. Where you could watch or listen to anything you wanted and explore freely, without ever having to worry about the thought police breaking your door down, should you happen to stumble over something deemed "inappropriate" by them. The difference between that and the Internet is stark and highlights the sheer madness and insanity of what the Internet has made possible.
The Internet became like the telescreen in George Orwell's 1984 novel. You can never be sure if it's watching you or not.
In the past, this was the stuff of nightmares, but it's here for real now in the 21st Century, because of widespread Internet usage in society.
And your children are at risk from it, from sexting, from a teenage son coming across this material and viewing it, maybe even intentionally. Perhaps the risk of your children being prosecuted for breaking these laws is greater than the risk of them being physically abused by a pedophile?
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-sex-offender-registries-...
https://jlc.org/news/most-states-require-some-youth-be-sex-o...
https://magazine.jhsph.edu/2022/harms-placing-kids-sex-offen...
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/chi...
In my jurisdiction, firstly it requires knowing possession (i.e. if it was just in your web cache because it was downloaded in a hidden img tag) and you didn't know it was there, then you would technically not be guilty.
My jurisdiction also has a safety valve that allows you to immediately delete the image after viewing it and realizing the nature of the content. As long as the deletion happens within a reasonable time, there is no crime. The problem with this is that it is an affirmative defense, which means you have to prove your innocence, you are assumed guilty. (There are many crimes where you are legally assumed guilty rather than innocent)