Viewing Child Pornography now legal in New York. WTF?

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/08/11602955-viewing-child-porn-on-the-web-legal-in-new-york-state-appeals-court-finds?lite

WTF indeed. America is really going down the toilet.

IIRC according to the old rules simply accessing a site that ends up displaying child porn (4chan or any message board falling victim to trolling morons) could land you in jail. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who are unaware of how browser caching works or that it even occurs, and can end up unknowingly storing such images for a long time.

I wonder how many jail sentences have been handed down\how many marriages ruined\custody battles lost for something like that actually.

world going crazy lol

So, on one hand FBI and entertainment corporations threaten free speech, while other laws which allow questionable morality behavior, in which you're really watching the products of some criminals, and if you enjoy, you might as well learn to be a criminal, get passed. Sounds very incoherent.

Marcaek said:

IIRC according to the old rules simply accessing a site that ends up displaying child porn (4chan or any message board falling victim to trolling morons) could land you in jail. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who are unaware of how browser caching works or that it even occurs, and can end up unknowingly storing such images for a long time.

I wonder how many jail sentences have been handed down\how many marriages ruined\custody battles lost for something like that actually.

Agreed. It's not uncommon to land on some content that's illegal. The crime should be whether the person is enabling the creation/trade of child pornography, not accidentally stumbling onto it.

It looks like a reasonable ruling and I don't see anything to be alarmed about. There's enough wrong with the world to start worrying about what isn't there.

Anyone browsing porn sites with free pics and vids on the net is bound to get at least some images that are child porn, and others that are probably based on human trafficking and slavery. People shouldn't be punished for just viewing illegal porn unless they participate in its creation in some way, by participating in it, financing, paying or asking for it. If not what, you're supposed to prove it was unintentional? Justice assumes you're innocent unless proven otherwise, not the other way around. Being mere unconnected or inadvertent demand shouldn't be a crime. At most it could be grounds to fire or suspend someone from work or an office if it's evident they did it intentionally and more than incidentally. It's like punishing drug users, voters for what their elected politician did, or people who buy something from a company that committed a crime, or like treating people like terrorists because they did little more than visit an extremist site related to alluded terrorists.

printz said:
Sounds very incoherent.

Much like your post!

myk said:

Much like your post!

Eh, okay if I didn't understand exactly what was the point, or if I compared the wrong things.

myk said:

People shouldn't be punished for just viewing illegal porn unless they participate in its creation in some way, by participating in it, financing, paying or asking for it.

I agree.

Sadly, this is still an issue that a majority of people are willing to throw morally sound, innocent, people in sodomy land prison becasue of circumstance or thought crime. Frankly, I surprised to see this kind of progress at all.

What a moron. The guy is a college professor and he decides to store tons of kiddie porn on a computer, and it was his work computer, no less. I guess it's a good thing he's stupid, because now he'll be taken off the streets, at least for a few years.

myk said:

People shouldn't be punished for just viewing illegal porn unless they participate in its creation in some way, by participating in it, financing, paying or asking for it.

Doesn't demand lead to supply in some cases? If nobody wanted child pron, no one would upload it. I do agree that the law should have to prove that a person intentionally looked at the illegal porn. In this guy's case though, since he apparently had loads of it on his hard drive, I'm thinking he was probably a serious shitbag.

The decision was meant to protect those who stumbled across the wrong site and didn't purposefully download anything. They're not condoning child porn.

It's like punishing drug users, voters for what their elected politician did, or people who buy something from a company that committed a crime, or like treating people like terrorists because they did little more than visit an extremist site related to alluded terrorists.

God forbid regular folks be blamed for anything less than murder. I'm innocent, Your Honor. See, it's all because of society. Big companies forced me to vote for the government that made me buy drugs and visit terrorist websites. I am a poor, poor victim unable to make my own choices without being influenced, although somehow I also know better than everyone how everything should be run and I will tell all about it at lengths on the Internet. Most likely the only explanation for someone as smart and brilliant as me being somehow manipulated is an evil conspiracy by everyone in charge, which makes perfect sense as governments and companies are inherently borg-like entities bent on crushing humanity; which you'd think with their unlimited power they could do but no I guess they don't because we're cunning enough to evade their wrath even though we're at the same time too stupid to not buy drugs or look at child porn?!?!?

Yep I can't go on. How do you people even keep your bullshit straight, it's amazing. People complain about "the elites" being out of touch with society, but if they actually listened to "the common man", they might only want to nuke everyone from orbit. For real, not only from under your tinfoil hats.

Krispy said:

The decision was meant to protect those who stumbled across the wrong site and didn't purposefully download anything. They're not condoning child porn.

Tell that to 99.9% of the idiot public. Sadly, the majority does not understand how computers function. In fact, you can be mule-ing child porn, accumulated third party information, viruses, etc. and not even know it. Everyone commenting thinks that this law will open up the door for pedophiles, but it's not; it's protecting the people who genuinely accidentally encountered illegal material. We need to get past the: "won't someone think of the children" (or should I say: "Won't the government monitor the public so I don't have to watch my children") and understand the real threats.

Phml said:

Gobs of horseshit.

Unless you simply use your computer to check your email or use facebook, you can't predict what someone has posted in a thread, what someone has hid in a zip folder/torrent/p2p, what really lies behind that miss-labeled link, what pops-up on an image search, what a worm/virus downloads, etc. Heck, I enjoy imagefap.com, but I might be unfortunate enough to click on a gallery before the mods could jump in an remove the content and ban the user. And even so, a user has to see the illegal content before they can report it to be be removed. Circumstance, can happen. I didn't even bring up web accelerators...

People are so dumb.

EDIT: I don't even now if I addressed Phml's point, becasue it's so... retarded.

Vordakk said:

I'm thinking he was probably a serious shitbag.

But isn't pedophilia a psychiatric disorder? And you say that he is a shitbag just because he has it? That's kinda cruel...

Knee-jerk reaction aside, seems like a fine law. Spend more resources getting rid of the creators and making an example than trying to snag a few pedos on /b/

Memfis said:

But isn't pedophilia a psychiatric disorder? And you say that he is a shitbag just because he has it? That's kinda cruel...

DSM-V outline says only if they've acted on these urges, apparently. I'd say, innately, there's nothing really wrong with pedophilia. Not the usual cup of tea sexually for people, but if it gets some people off then whatever. The problem comes when they act on these urges and, for example, molest a child.

Memfis said:

But isn't pedophilia a psychiatric disorder? And you say that he is a shitbag just because he has it? That's kinda cruel...

Yes, but it's people's actions that matter. If you get off on violent media or rape, that doesn't mean you're going to commit the crime. The reason that child porn should be illegal, is becasue it's trafficking and making demand for creation. You can rage about morality all you want, but thought crime is the issue.

Phml said:
God forbid regular folks be blamed for anything less than murder. I'm innocent, Your Honor. See, it's all because of society.

With that you're attacking something that isn't related to what I said, and just because the consideration of social circumstances in crime is a "leftist" stance and myk is a "commie" or "liberal" (as if they were the same thing) so he must be talking about that. I'll give you an analogy of what I was saying:

Say I think neoliberal policies are classifiable as a crime against humanity because they create economic disparity, social disruption, unemployment and war. If you voted for some neoliberal-supporting candidate like, let's say, Sarkozy, should I be vying to have you imprisoned, exiled or fined because of that? And you voting for Sarkozy is much more influential, and does much more moral and material damage to anybody, than you just visiting porn sites, even if you jack off to sexually explicit pics of an 11 year old girl. Condemning someone for viewing child porn in private, in a case where all the viewer did was give the site it's hosted on "hits" is an attack against freedom of conscience. Proper laws that address child porn punish hosts and promoters, and not isolated viewers that gave nothing to the child porn industry or anyone else.

"Hey, it's hard to prove whether someone who has some child porn pics somewhere in his computer didn't take them himself, pay for them or request them, or is part of a ring that promotes it, so I have a wonderful idea, let's just punish anyone that has any such porn on their system without the need of direct proof of those cases and lets argue that if the possession of child porn is a crime, child porn files in a hard disk is the possession of child porn!"

Heh, I like how my opinion ended up being representative of the common man and the masses and you decided to side with economic elites against those sweaty masses as a result of your conclusion about my particular opinion. I do feel honored that you classified me as capable of speaking for the people, though!

Vordakk said:
Doesn't demand lead to supply in some cases? If nobody wanted child pron, no one would upload it.

Why stop at punishing anyone looking for child porn but who is unwilling to pay for it and does not promote it, and not also anyone visiting the sites where it may be linked along with other explicit stuff? If no one demanded porn, how could there be any child porn demand, and thus supply? Like, "let's ban porn and prostitution because they are venues that include child porn and sexual human trafficking." Some groups are aiming to do just that. After all, punishing a few fools who allow others to see they had child porn in their cache isn't going to affect many other anonymous millions who may be viewing if for whatever reason, thus adding to the demand intentionally or not. Banning porn altogether would decrease the demand much more effectively.

If you start banning related and more general behavior because it furthers the problem, you end up burning books. The alternative is to go directly for the problem, and while it's harder to get at directly than with sweeping bans, it avoids restricting many harmless or legit activities.

Hmm sounds stupid on paper, but in all can protect people who accidently stumble upon such thibgs, especially those who browse places as seedy as 4chan or as Tech said, an imagefap gallery (With a non-obvious name) that the mods can't get too right away.

myk said:

Anyone browsing porn sites with free pics and vids on the net is bound to get at least some images that are child porn, and others that are probably based on human trafficking and slavery.

Overall, your post seems well reasoned, but it seems to be based on this assumption, which I find questionable.

It seems reasonable to assume that there probably are a few people who accidentally stumble on the wrong site occasionally, though - perhaps by clicking on a dodgy link, from a spam email or otherwise.

fraggle said:

Overall, your post seems well reasoned, but it seems to be based on this assumption, which I find questionable.

It seems reasonable to assume that there probably are a few people who accidentally stumble on the wrong site occasionally, though - perhaps by clicking on a dodgy link, from a spam email or otherwise.

Searching for broad porn on Google image can do it. Or any community image gallery like imagefap. Again, it's out there before it gets reported by a regular user.

More than assumption I was referring to what I found when I checked some free stuff promo sites. The "probably" is also that you generally can't tell whether any girls pictured are working in decent conditions or are under extortion or abducted, or whether they're really adults. Considering that, anyone browsing porn may as well be "promoting human trafficking" on the same grounds people browsing child porn are accused of furthering child abuse. Thus some human rights groups attack porn in general.

There are hundreds of porn promotion sites and blogs with images leading to galleries and videos, they have a method where instead of leading to the selected gallery the link sometimes leads to another such promotion site instead, in a sharing method they have that tries to make browsing people be exposed to many such sites, and some have less trusty stuff, including evident forced sex and girls that look younger than 18. If a link is reported dead, they generally make it go to a random related site. They are sorted in categories, but some are mixed. You click on one with just girls, and it leads to one that has many girl (I mean nude females, not necessarily underage) pics but perhaps some sex, and if you click on a sex link there you may end up on one with more explicit stuff, and so on. If you concentrate on clicking on pics where the girls look very young, they start pulling up promo sites with more such content or other extreme stuff. Some also produce pop-ups with other such sites, to increase exposure.

There may also be people who use it vicariously to satisfy fantasies, knowing it's safe unlike trying to have sex with a child, which may result in being reported or caught. Behind the idea that the user should be punished for browsing illegal porn is that the person is "learning" what he or she is viewing, like saying DOOM taught Harris and Klebold how to kill. The law treats people like children or idiots lacking in morals that must be watched and scolded. Fundamentalists tend to favor this stance, and serial killers have used it to try to blame porn for their behavior with their support (at least Ted Bundy did.)

myk said:

There are hundreds of porn promotion sites and blogs with images leading to galleries and videos, they have a method where instead of leading to the selected gallery the link sometimes leads to another such promotion site instead, in a sharing method they have that tries to make browsing people be exposed to many such sites, and some have less trusty stuff, including evident forced sex and girls that look younger than 18. If a link is reported dead, they generally make it go to a random related site. They are sorted in categories, but some are mixed. You click on one with just girls, and it leads to one that has many girl (I mean nude females, not necessarily underage) pics but perhaps some sex, and if you click on a sex link there you may end up on one with more explicit stuff, and so on. If you concentrate on clicking on pics where the girls look very young, they start pulling up promo sites with more such content or other extreme stuff. Some also produce pop-ups with other such sites, to increase exposure.

Luckily with today's monitored porn communities, only idiots surf those types of sites these days. But again, circumstance may vary anywhere on the net. Clicking on a legit icon can take you to any kind of gallery.

And weed is still illegal

One other thing is that "intention" is evidently linked to having pedophile tendencies. If you visit the promo sites I described, you're doing so intentionally and in the process view some pedo stuff. Consciously, visitors can avoid those sites altogether because otherwise pedo images may appear occasionally. The only difference is that some people are excited by those pics in particular and will thus click on them by impulse. Assuming a pedo is a criminal only if he or she abuses a child materially or causes such abuse, accosting these people because of their sex drive and related browsing habits is an attack on freedom of consciousness.

myk said:

One other thing is that "intention" is evidently linked to having pedophile tendencies. If you visit the promo sites I described, you're doing so intentionally and in the process view some pedo stuff. Consciously, visitors can avoid those sites altogether because otherwise pedo images may appear occasionally. The only difference is that some people are excited by those pics in particular and will thus click on them by impulse. Assuming a pedo is a criminal only if he or she abuses a child materially or causes such abuse, accosting these people because of their sex drive and related browsing habits is an attack on freedom of consciousness.

Yeah, thus we're back to thought crimes. In a country that still thinks homosexuality is dire and evil, we won't see much second thought on the subject except "hang 'em high."

Mr. T said:

And weed is still illegal.

It must be the anal retentive that still harp on weed becasue it's probably the biggest thing the government could exploit for money second only to cigarettes.

I hear Japan pretty much treats drug users like pedo-scum, is this true?

Japan probably treats drug users worse. It took a long time to outlaw child porn in Japan and their laws are less strict than Canada's. Meanwhile, being caught with some pot in Japan gets you thrown in jail for at least a month -- with work. They seem to like having prisoners do work to buy their lunches. That part's not so bad, but they really don't seem to like drugs.

Anyway, one of the sad truths about most people is they don't see anything wrong with the notion of thought crime. It's one of those things that makes me hate democracy; people want to use votes to oppress others with different ideas about how to live.

Aliotroph? said:

Japan probably treats drug users worse. It took a long time to outlaw child porn in Japan and their laws are less strict than Canada's.

Canada has some of the strictest regulations when it comes to "child porn." I use those quotations becasue Canada banned many, many foreign films they deemed as child pornographic. The German classic The Tin Drum was relatively recently lifted from the ban list.

At least we're safe from ridiculous drug convictions. And prostitution may become legal in Toronto.

Child pornography is deplorable, but this ruling is good.

Technician said:

Luckily with today's monitored porn communities, only idiots surf those types of sites these days. But again, circumstance may vary anywhere on the net. Clicking on a legit icon can take you to any kind of gallery.

Any child-porn site these days with a lot of content would most likely be an FBI honeypot. Can you believe some people are caught due to the fact they used their credit card to purchase content? That is how you catch them, set up a site, wait to get a _lot_ of subscribers and then swoop. I am sure this happens. But why is /b/ still up? I guess they do not host the images for long, but they give it away for free. I have heard that the FBI monitor 4chan as well, that must be why.

neubejiita said:Any child-porn site these days with a lot of content would most likely be an FBI honeypot. Can you believe some people are caught due to the fact they used their credit card to purchase content?[/b]

Most people can't put two and two together. I don't know about the states, but Britain uses these tactics.

But why is /b/ still up? I guess they do not host the images for long, but they give it away for free. I have heard that the FBI monitor 4chan as well, that must be why.

Because /b/ isn't openly pedophilic. When stuff like that does popup, it's quickly removed and the person is banned. There is no actual commerce or trading. And this is hopefully what this new law will prevent: innocent people having their lives ruined becasue they stumbled upon the wrong thread.