Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 37

Child Porn Laws Aren’t As Bad As You Think. They’re Much, Much Worse.

Infopolicy: My last article about the counterproductive laws on the topic of child abuse imagery has drawn quite a bit of attention, and I’m very happy about that. Its worst conceivable fate would have been to lay silenced in stigma, but people seem to have shared it far and wide.

I take one bit of criticism to heart immediately, though, and that is the counterproductivity of talking about “child pornography”. We should be talking about “child abuse imagery” or “documentation of child abuse”. As the latter term implies an inclusion of text-only material, I will use the Child Abuse Imagery (CAI) henceforth.

A common protest to my article was that prosecution of people who record evidence of child abuse, or of teenagers doing things voluntarily, “would absolutely never happen”. The arguments went along these lines:

It would be absolutely insane for the law to say this, and since the law can’t possibly be that insane, you must be wrong. Therefore, you’re an evil person for writing this opinion.

The problem is that I agree with these people: it would be absolutely insane for the law to say the examples I gave, and that the law says exactly that, so the law is indeed that insane. I understand the disbelief, so I’ll be returning to that shortly and list how it has already happened. But first, let’s take a look at what happens when you document evidence of a couple of types of very serious crimes:

If you film a police abuse situation to get evidence and show it to the world so the power abusers can get caught, you’re a hero to the level that your film can cause riots.
If you document a genocide in enough detail that your evidence can bring perpetrators to justice, you’re a worldwide hero.
If you film wartime killings, people will risk their lives – and sometimes die – to bring your evidence and documentation to news studios.
If you risk being beaten up by covertly filming a street battery and assault, you’re welcomed with open arms by the police when you hand over the evidence you produced. (I personally did this, for the record.)
If you film something as serious as a presidential assassination, people will watch the film over and over and over again and your name will go down in history for centuries.
If you film a rapist of a minor to get evidence in order to bring the sick, twisted bastard to justice, you’re the bad guy and will get a worse sentence than the rapist you attempt to bring to justice and jail.

Where is the logic here? Where is the justice? Lionel Dricot elaborates well on this.

I’d like to see people who focus on the feelings of the victims to justify jail terms for CAI possession to justify why you can possess genocide documentation, and you’re even encouraged to have it and distribute it, but that people should go to jail for CAI. Another counter-argument to the above has been that there would somehow be money in the rape evidence case, but not in the others. I can’t quite understand where this argument comes from and I’m sure Fox News, CNN, al-Jazeera, etc, would be very surprised to learn there’s no market at all for filmed evidence of violent crime and other forms of violence/killings.

These laws weren’t primarily written to help children at all, I’m afraid. That’s not their effect, either.

As I described in my last post, these laws were constructed by Christian-fundamentalist pressure groups with the intent of criminalizing normal teenage behavior, and the side effect of protecting child molesters from prosecution, under the pretext of protecting children. I find that completely unacceptable. Outrageous, actually.

Other politicians are not late in exploiting the situation. I learned from Arjen Kamphuis that the economics minister in the Netherlands tried to railroad ACTA through with the argument that it “would only be used against child abuse imagery sites”. (So, ironically, he was arguing for stronger copyright monopoly laws to combat child abuse imagery – not sure how the logic holds together, there.)

Many, when they hear of “child abuse imagery”, imagine horrible images of crying toddlers getting unspeakably abused. But that’s not what the prosecutions are about. That’s why a lot of people who are indicted of possession of CAI get dumbstruck in complete disbelief, and even more so when convicted. But since the convictions are secret, we can’t see what people are actually convicted of, but just assume they are monsters.

So I’m going to take the opportunity to present a rare exception to the secrecy.

A man working with manga comics lost his career over possession of this image: he was found guilty of possessing “child pornography”. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and only on appeal was this image found to not be Child Abuse Imagery.

If you’re a somewhat typical person, you’re now reacting with a OMG I’ve looked at child porn, omg omg I’m a horrible horrible person! That’s normal. We’ve been trained to think and feel that way.

Then, second thoughts set in, as you realize that there’s not even a naked and much less abused child in this… cartoon, and assuming you’re still a typical person, your thoughts and feelings probably race in this direction:

Wait a minute. This is a cartoon of a clothed child playing in the water. This is not a real child, and there is definitely no abuse going on. This is not even remotely pornographic. What sick, twisted, perverted fuck of a judge ruins a man’s life over this picture?

Unfortunately, it was not one judge, but five in a panel, and their hands were tied by the law: there was a lot of public discussion on the subject, and everybody agreed that the judges had applied the law correctly with no option to acquit. As a result, the man’s career was instantly destroyed, and his computer – complete with family photos, work, and other things you typically have on a computer – was destroyed too. This is where a normal adult’s thoughts go toward something like this:

What evil monsters write a law so twisted, perverse, and plain wrong that it forces academically schooled, decent, and respectable judges to make so obviously perverse a verdict?

…and, well, yeah, that’s pretty much the point I wanted to come to.

The evil monsters are ECPAT, by the way, which I described in my last article, the fundamentalist Christian organization that claims they care about children. Oh, and they vigorously defended the man’s conviction over this image, too, arguing about “violations of children on a conceptual level”. Even the police argued publicly against the law banning possession of child abuse imagery here, arguing – from their viewpoint – that it protects child molesters, as they are forced to hunt comics fans instead of real crime. This is similar to my argumentation in this and the previous article.

Yes, this is the same ECPAT that made it illegal for you to possess naked or sexual images of yourself from before your 18th birthday, arguing that it violates “children in general on a conceptual level”.

The man was eventually acquitted because manga images weren’t realistic enough – the eyes were too big – and not because the imagery as such wasn’t criminally culpable child pornography. The Supreme Court basically bent over backwards to acquit in a highly political verdict, seeing the nationwide attention of the case.

Oh, and I should add: before this verdict was reversed, and the image above declared explicitly legal in Sweden (and therefore the EU), you would also have been sentenced as a sex offender in Sweden for looking at the cartoon image like you just did.

Didn’t say could. Would. Merely looking at child abuse images (including cartoons) is illegal in Sweden. Yes, the Christian fundamentalist group ECPAT again.

When this court case was going on in Sweden, and particularly after the first verdict, several comics artists in Sweden started drawing 17-year-olds having sex, as realistically as possible but still in a comic fashion, and publishing them, intentionally breaking the law in sympathy with this manga translator and comics fan who had been convicted. Unfortunately, I can’t link to them, as they have not been explicitly cleared in a court of law, as that could put me on the censorship list, and I want this article to stay visible.

Yes, you read that right. In the Nordic countries, there is a secret censorship list maintained by the police that most ISPs follow about which domains you’re not allowed to visit. It’s supposed to be strictly CAI only, but has been found to be less than 1% such material, 9 out of 1047 censored domains: in reality, once leaked, it was discovered to be mostly ordinary porn with age certs and all, but also completely unrelated sites like Bonsai gardening that’s on the list of censored sites (koreabonsai.com). For more on this, see this blog post by Oscar Swartz from 2007.

When a Finnish activist published the secret censorship list to criticize this wrongdoing and abuse of power, their site was itself immediately added to the censorship list. This is consistent not with democracies, but with a completely different set of regime, that reporters who expose abuse of power are immediately silenced.

In any case, learning from that event, I choose not to link and display anything but what I know to have been cleared and I hope you understand my priorities (as well as see the meta-point I’m making).

Joe McNamee of EDRi, European Digital Rights Initiative, called the censorship list “Ineffective, counterproductive, and absurd” in a hearing in the European Parliament recently.

Ah yes, journalism. Why don’t we look a bit more at how that profession and activity is affected?

Images and videos of children getting their arms chopped of and/or with their bodies burning are ok, but not naked children. So how about a burning and naked child? Let’s see what happened last time that was published. (If you’re young, you may not remember this image, but it was deeply imprinted in the world’s psyche at the time.)

Children running down a road after having had their village bombed with napalm in the Vietnam War. The naked 9-year-old girl near center-middle had her back burned badly, after shedding her napalmed and burning clothes. This image won a Pulitzer and ended the Vietnam War. Today, it would never have been published, and the war would likely have continued for far longer. (Photo by Nick Ut; published under fair use for nonprofit commentary.) More info on Wikipedia.

This image ended a war. Today, it would never have been published. Are the laws that prevent that really okay in any way, shape, or form – laws that prevent stories like the napalming of children from being told?

This image is quite likely child pornography in Sweden today (just compare with the cartoon above…) so I need to invoke a journalistic defense in the law and state it’s being used for current-events commentary, and point at the fact that I have a journalistic license for this blog (utgivningsbevis). Don’t be too sure you can republish it if you don’t.

Moving to things that “could absolutely never happen”, according to reactions, I’d like to highlight how they have already happened in some cases. The most obvious retort has been that “Nobody would accidentally record a rape using Google Glass – they don’t even exist!”. Well, no, they don’t. That’s why I am clear that I think the re-legalization of every kind of observation and re-broadcast will need to be made in a decade, which is even in the headline. However, I still argue that the laws as they stand today are already protecting child molesters.

As for other things that “could absolutely never happen”, that’s a very strong statement. It is enough for me to present one single case where it did happen to prove that it can happen. And even if it’s rare that something happens, that doesn’t matter – even a minuscule possibility of something very bad or very good happening can change people’s behavior fundamentally. To illustrate, Europeans spend millions of euros every week on the lottery, despite the chance of winning the jackpot being something like one in ten billion.

“Nobody would get prosecuted for handing in evidence”: There was a famous case in Sweden where a mother recorded evidence of her children having been abused, by filming them playing, documenting what would have been much too advanced sexual play for that age, handed it to the police, and promptly was arrested for possession of CAI. In the meantime, Social Services gave the father single custody of their children, and banned her from seeing them. She was ultimately acquitted from the criminal charges, but Social Services didn’t change their verdict; she’s still banned from seeing her children ever again. I think that only the most heartless of bureaucrats would call such a fate an “acquittal”.

“Nobody would get prosecuted for handing in evidence”, again: In Spain, prosecution of child molesters grinded to a halt as the local police said outright that people couldn’t legally submit evidence of the crime.

Seeing these cases, would you dare interfere? Would you really risk that your children were separated from their parent over your trying to good? I’d argue that most people wouldn’t, and that the current laws therefore protect child molesters.

“Nobody would ever get prosecuted for having comics”: Well, see above.

“No teenager would ever get prosecuted for having photos of themselves”: This has happened many, many times.

Christian von der Weth has an additional writeup about the toxicity of “possession” as such, when applied to computers – most users have no idea about what files they have on their computer, and it is trivially easy for a webpage to plant images on a computer. (He demonstrates this by planting an image of a cute dog.) Jake Appelbaum makes the same observation.

Reactions to the article

Normally, I have a rather strict comment policy here, about “no rude comments“. This time, I chose to keep the “I’m going to kill you for having that opinion” comments, to highlight the contrast (not to mention the fact that the hate comments are drowned out by constructive discussion, for the first time ever on this subject).

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever read such a nuanced, thoughtful discussion on this subject as in the threads that the article started. I’m very happy to see that people are daring to start clean up this toxic sludge and attempt to make sense of our laws. For examples, look at the Slashdot thread as well as the thread on Hacker News. It’s not just the traditional geek forums, either: Mainstream press such as Business Insider also holds a generally supportive comment field.

The one exception came from the German Piratenpartei, whose leadership quickly sent out a press release distancing themselves from me as a person. That (the distancing) predictably became a story in itself in German press, the exact content of the PPDE press release, rather than the contents and argumentation of my article.

Ironically enough, this attempt from the PPDE leadership to prevent a controversy by strongly distancing from me as a person seems to have overshot its target and instead created a controversy within the German PP – one example in this blog post, several more on Twitter. It is not possible for me abroad to determine the scale and scope of this, but I wanted to highlight the full picture. In any case, I’m sad to see the conflict but happy to see the subject being discussed: this is a subject that all PPs must be able to talk about.

(Other PPs have been calmer and just stated the plain truth, that I posted my article as an attempt to spark a debate, and that it is no policy of any party. Easy enough. Those who wanted to could also have added that it is official policy of at least one journalist’s union, which is a good response to any reporter.)

The Piratenpartei aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of massive positive feedback for that kind of neckrisking statement, and I want to thank everybody for that. We all risk our necks every day in fighting for what we believe is right, and I respect each and every one who does.

There’s also all of the silent support, of course. I’ve gotten a lot of support under the table – including from members of the Piratenpartei who want to take the edge off the reaction of their leadership (thanks!), and quite visibly in the numbers of followers/fans on Twitter/Facebook that spiked above the ordinary.

In the meantime, I want my children to grow up a world where nobody thinks you’re brave for stating a political opinion, but perhaps that’s just a feature of Homo Sapiens, seeing that people have been punished for unpopular ideas, thoughts, and opinions for the past 2,000 years or so.

In these credits, I’ve left out the many (hundreds) of mildly positive comments that forwarded the article to their friends (which is fantastic in itself), and wanted to highlight a sample that made me particularly happy about other people daring to break the stigma and discuss this as adult people:

Wow, did not expect to be convinced by this “Three reasons child porn must be re-legalized in coming decade” falkvinge.net/?p=13413 @falkvinge

— Christian Eaton (@christianeaton) september 7, 2012

This month’s balls-of-steel award goes to Rick Falkvinge. And I agree 100%. falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/thr…

— Hanno Foest ℗ (@Hurgotron) september 9, 2012

@falkvinge I have argued these points many times and I have literally had people spit in my face for saying it. So kudos for writing it up.

— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) september 10, 2012

@falkvinge @ioerror I´m sure you have plenty already, but allow me to hand over another balls-of-steel award. Well written Sir!

— Fredrik Strömberg (@01kfreds) september 10, 2012

@dborch Welchem Denkverbot hast Du Dich unterworfen? Rick Falkvinge hat absolut recht.

— Martin Schmitt (@unixtippse) september 10, 2012

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[Display of tweets seems to malfunction at the moment. Working on it.]

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Published on September 11, 2012 04:30

Three Reasons Possession Of Child Porn Must Be Re-Legalized In The Coming Decade

Infopolicy: Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring the topic to a serious discussion, and explain why possession of child pornography need to be re-legalized in the next ten years, and why you need to fight for it to happen.

ABSTRACT

This article argues that our current laws on the topic are counterproductive, because they protect child molesters instead of bringing them to justice, they criminalize a generation of normally-behaving teenagers which diverts valuable police resources from the criminals we should be going after, and they lead to censorship and electronic book burning as well as unacceptable collateral damage to innocent families. Child abuse as such is not condoned by anybody, and this article argues that current laws are counterproductive in preventing and prosecuting it.

When possession of this type of information was criminalized, those who opposed that criminalization (which I didn’t, at the time – this was before my activism) pointed at four major objections:

It would not be effective, and possibly counterproductive, in catching child molesters.
It would lead to censorship without accountability.
Reporters complained it would undermine journalistic freedom that has stood intact for centuries.
Constitutional and political science scholars pointed out that it undermined centuries of free speech/expression traditions in a way that would be used by special interests to silence opponents of business interests unrelated to child porn.

In retrospect, all of this has come true. This is bad enough in itself; it is downright catastrophic. There are three overarching reasons why possession of child pornography must be re-legalized: the ban prevents catching child molesters, especially in light of new technology; it creates a generation of branded sex offenders that did nothing wrong; and it is the battleground for free speech itself. Let’s take these one at a time.

1. The ban prevents catching/jailing child molesters.

This is bad enough as it is today, but it is going to get significantly worse with new technology that is just around the corner. Are you aware of Google Glass? It is a prototype new mobile phone in the shape of eyeglasses.

Essentially, we’re looking at how our mobile phones are turning into devices that look like ordinary glasses, and which let us share what we see in real time, in the present tense. It’s a quantum leap over Facebook’s photo sharing, seeing how photos are always in retrospect, changing into real-time vision sharing and storage. It’s a change as large as when CNN’s reporting of the First Gulf War was being reported in the present tense, for the first time ever: “The night skies over Baghdad are lit up by tracer fire…”.

Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass, a prototype next-generation mobile phone that records and broadcasts what you see. Photo by Thomas Hawk.

This change is going to be significantly larger than when we went from semi-smartphones with buttons to iPhones and Android devices with touchscreens, as our communications devices become wearable and blend seamlessly with our senses.

So imagine a scenario ten years down the road, as you’re taking a stroll in the park. Your glasses (“mobile phone”) are on, as are mostly everybody else’s. You’re broadcasting and recording what you see in public, as is mostly everybody else, in case a friend drops in on your feed and start chatting about it, or in case you observe something where you need to back up your story later, if you’re so inclined – kind of why people use dashcams in cars and constantly record everything that happens.

So, on your lovely stroll in the park, you turn a corner, and to your shock, see a 12-year-old being brutally raped right in front of you.

WHAM. You are now a criminal, guilty of recording, distributing, and possessing child pornography. You are now guilty of a crime that carries higher penalties than the rape and molestation of a child right taking place right in front of you.

The rapist notices you and laughs, knowing that you can’t do anything. If you were to call the police and offer to be a witness to the rape taking place before you, you would lose your job, children, and house over the worse crime you have just committed. As you struggle in panic to delete any and all imagery that could be used to convict the child rapist, hoping that nobody was able to make a copy, you see another person coming into view of the rapist and reacting just like you did.

And on the ground, a 12-year old who is being raped watches helplessly as witnesses turn away and delete all evidence of the crime being committed against her.

This is not some far-fetched science fiction scenario. This is exactly what will happen as our mobile phones take the next step, which has already started, and we will be there in less than ten years. (The very first iPhone was released to sales about five years ago, for perspective – imagine what will happen in twice more the time since then.)

[UPDATE: Some people have complained that no court would ever convict in this scenario, since you also recorded your unintentional approach. But possession of child pornography is a strict liability offense, like possession of cocaine, at least in the entire United States as soon as you know you have it, as well as several other countries. Intent, mens rea, is irrelevant: if you have it, no matter why, you're guilty.]

This brings us to the crucial question why we have the ban on child pornography in the first place.

Is possession of child pornography harshly banned because we want to catch child rapists and molesters, or because we’re so uncomfortable with its existence that we want to legislate it out of our own field of view, raped children be damned as long as we’re feeling comfortable ourselves?

I would argue that the ban on possessing child pornography is already preventing the capture of child molesters, and it will get many, many times worse so in the coming decade. I also have a very strong feeling that the ban is in place because we’d like to pretend that things like this don’t happen, and legislate it out of our field of view, throwing actual victims of crime to the wolves in the process. That’s not worthy.

The question also begs asking – why is it only documentation of sex crimes against minors that are being banned in this way? The lawmen are perfectly fine with a video documenting how a teenager is being stabbed with a screwdriver in both eyes, then murdered (warning: the link is very real, but contains a transcript before you get to the actual video, which you probably don’t want to watch). It’s not the documentation of victimization that we prohibit, nor is it molestation as such – why is the ban just related to anything sexual, and not to the bodily harm itself, which is what it sounds like from the proponents of the ban?

Moving on to a solution, this scenario and problem doesn’t necessarily mean that every part of our child porn laws must or should be torn up. The necessary legislative change would primarily mean that you would always, as in always, be allowed to record and distribute what you see with your own eyes. A journalistic protection law that supersedes all other laws, if you like. The slightest risk of a gray area here, and people will delete all evidence of witnessed crimes against children rather than risking their own jobs and families – there must be no doubt or uncertainty whatsoever, not a shadow of it. As a side-effect consequence, deliberate recording and distribution of child porn from a first-person perspective would also be legalized with this change – but that brings us back to the question why the ban is there in the first place: is it to catch child molesters, or is it there for our own sake, to make us feel good regardless of whether it helps molested children?

2. The laws brand a whole generation as sex offenders.

Our current laws treat the video of a seven-year-old being brutally raped, on one hand, and two seventeen-year-olds who have eyes for nothing in the world but each other making consensual passionate love, on the other hand, as the exact same thing. This is mind-bogglingly odd.

The former is one of the most horrifying things you can think of – trying to picture it makes you cringe in your chair. The latter is one of the most beautiful things you can possibly picture – trying to see it makes your eyes well up with tears from joy. Why are one of the most horrible things and one of the most beautiful things in the world considered one and the same by the law? They’re obviously nowhere similar and have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. I’ll return to the answer to that.

But first, let me say that I started watching porn at age ten, as did most of my friends, and I enjoyed it. I actively sought it out and kept seeking it out (as I still do). Since I didn’t have access to the net at my age ten, I imagine people would start seeking it out earlier today, basically as soon as they get past the “boys/girls are icky” phase.

This is natural.

Let’s see what else is natural for the generation growing up today:

Exploring and understanding their bodies as they go through puberty and afterwards, just like every single generation of Homo Sapiens has done before them.
Communicating like crazy. Communicating everything. All the time. In text, voice, images, and video.
Documenting everything. Including themselves naked. Including sex. It’s a memory like any other, and they’re not limited to 24 photos per roll like I was in my teens.

Technically, most people growing up today lose their virginity through rape. I say “technically”: they lose their virginity through rape because legislators have redefined “rape” to include consensual, voluntary, loving sex between people of typical age of sexual debut. Such a legislative redefinition makes as much sense as redefining the act of murder to include friendly hugs, then complaining that murder rates are up. It also creates a lot of technical rapists and sex offenders who never harmed a single person, but did go against the morals of legislators. (This is not strictly information policy, but is relevant to the context up ahead.)

We observe here that today’s laws have as a horrible and completely unacceptable side effect of branding the entire growing-up generation as sex offenders, ruining their lives if caught with it, under the pretext of protecting small pre-pubescent children. This side effect includes the completely normal communication that teenagers have with each other, which would brand them as child pornographers (of themselves).

This type of dissonance between the pretext and the actual effect of the law can be seen in many lobbying efforts. I call it murder-and-jaywalking argumentation. Here’s an example:

“98% of all children have witnessed a murder or jaywalking firsthand by age seven. Witnessing a murder or jaywalking firsthand can be devastating to a child’s psyche, according to experts. Therefore, we need tougher laws against murder and jaywalking.”

Note how the “or” transforms into “and” at the end, implying that the two should be covered by the same piece of legislation. This conflation is deliberate, and is an attempt to piggyback a petty crime or harmless activity onto something vehemently detested.

In order to understand murder-and-jaywalking legislation, we turn to an ancient Latin phrase: Cui bono? (“Who benefits?”) More often than not, this gives the answer for the underlying reason for legislation.

Let’s take an example. If somebody starts talking about “rape and shoplifting”, and you discover that a chain of grocery stores is behind the wording, two things become obvious: a) they are trying to raise the penalties for shoplifting, possibly to include being branded as a sex offender for shoplifting, and b) they don’t care in the slightest that using rape as a pretext for this special interest dilutes the concept of rape and disrespects rape victims immensely.

The copyright industry has long done a similar stunt, talking about “counterfeiting and piracy”, trying to assert that teenagers who share music between them should be covered by the same legislation as people who manufacture fake and fatal medicine for profit. Pretty much all enforcement treaties of the copyright monopoly are created under the pretext of preventing counterfeiting. Take ACTA, for example (“Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”). That’s another tangible example.

This is where we start tracing where the idea of banning child porn comes from. Cui bono?

It turns out that the pressure for banning possession of child pornography comes from a whole fruit salad of Christian fundamentalists, under the pretext of protecting children. In the United States, this is pretty much every nutjob in the entire Midwest. In Sweden, this role is primarily dominated by the front organization ECPAT, which pretends to care about abused children, but which has its roots in the fundamentalist Christian organization ECTWT (where the E stands for Ecumenical), and where these Christians keep being in majority at every general ECPAT assembly. Every time these fundamentalists have mentioned child abuse as a pretext to demand new laws, we end up with new criminalization of teenagers instead.

This is where we connect the dots of cui bono with the murder-and-jaywalking deception method, and hairs rise on our arms and chills go down our spine as we connect the dots mentally:

Making insecure teenagers feel guilt, fear, and shame over their own bodies and natural desires, causing them to suppress their instincts in fear, even criminalizing natural behavior and destroying their lives, was never a side effect. It was the whole idea.

In Sweden, ECPAT has pushed through laws that make you a jailable criminal for possessing images of yourself from before your 18th birthday. Can we have a show of hands to see how many think this makes any kind of sense? That this would catch any child molesters?

So does the fact that this law exists – criminalizing people who have photos of themselves, pushed through by Christian fundamentalist organization ECPAT – rhyme better with a concern to catch molesters, or better with the hair-rising conclusion above: an effort to scare teenagers into submission with fear of their own bodies?

Using child molestation as a pretext for shoving your fundamentalist religious morals down the throats of insecure teenagers is about as low as you can sink in my eyes. These people stand lower than earthworms in terms of human value to me.

The fix for this particular problem is to tell the fundamentalist Christians in ECPAT and similar organizations to fuck right off with their perverted high-horse dogmatic morals, throwing them out of the legislative process headfirst, and limit the child pornography laws to cover pre-pubescent children only. Murder and jaywalking should not be covered by the same legislation, because they are not the same thing. Rape of a seven-year old and two seventeen-year-olds making love should not be covered by the same legislation, because they are not the same thing. In case a hard age limit is needed, I would suggest separating children from teenagers at that exact age – children are children until they become teenagers. Many enough have their sexual debut at 13 today. (This suggestion doesn’t mean porn of 13-year-olds could, or indeed should, be sold. Commercial exploitation can always be separately regulated. What it does mean is that teenagers cannot and should not be branded as sex offenders for something they do voluntarily, happily, and consensually.)

If these despicable Christian fundamentalists – including ECPAT – really cared about children, they would welcome such a change, for all the reasons described above. But if you proposed it to them, you would see them fighting it tooth and nail. Cui bono?

(I predict some people will have problems with a 13-year age limit. The countries that already have this limit, e.g. Spain, display no problems at all. In contrast, those with an 18-year age limit have piles and piles of stories of destroyed teenage lives – victims of law, not victims of crime. I like evidence-based policymaking and much prefer it to moral-based policymaking, and a 13-year limit is evidenced to work well.)

3. The free speech war is won/lost at the battle of child porn.

When possession of this type of information was banned, only the net generation saw this as bringing back the book burning times. To the rest of the population, it was about “things on a computer”; the net generation doesn’t see a difference whether a book is on a computer or sitting in a bookshelf.

If regular people had had these laws re-worded into police being able to come into their homes, ransack their bookshelves, and if they found a banned book, they would burn it and arrest the owner – if regular people had understood that this is what the law says, they would be horrified. But those who don’t live online don’t make the connection.

As long as the ban on child porn remains, special interests will use this open wound in our enlightenment traditions of information freedom to infest it with their own ideas of what other information, speech, and communication should be banned and prohibited. We’ve seen everything from gambling companies to the copyright industry use child porn as a pretext for censoring business competition, consequences to society at large be damned, just like in the “rape-and-shoplifting” example above.

(There is a reason the copyright industry loves child pornography. This reason. It opens the door to censorship.)

European Commissioner Cecilia “Censilia” Malmström successfully pushed for an EU-wide censorship regime on the pretext of child pornography. Others have not been late in its wake to attempt exploiting and expanding the censorship regime to suit their own purposes.

Politicians have even gone as far as saying that child pornography is “not a legitimate expression”, and therefore not covered by constitutional freedom-of-expression, even if there isn’t an explicit exception in law. This is a legislative hair’s breadth from saying that your political opinion “isn’t a legitimate opinion”, and therefore not constitutionally protected speech.

Child pornography is horrible and awful from every angle and in every aspect. But it is not dangerous to the fabric of society. Censorship and electronic book burning, however, is.

The overall freedom of speech is won or lost with restoring freedom of information and, as a result, re-legalizing possession of child pornography. Yes, it’s awful – but so is the video of a teenager being stabbed in the eyes with a screwdriver; that’s no reason to create a censorship regime. Today, we have an open wound in our constitutionally protected right to speak freely that is being infested again and again.

We must heal that wound, exactly like the constitutional scholars warned when the child porn ban was first enacted. And that requires you, and every other information freedom activist, to let go of the stigma associated with this toxic subject and stand up for the enlightenment traditions.

Just daring to talk back will take many people completely by surprise. They won’t understand what’s going on and won’t have a script to follow. You won’t have to defend against “defending pedophiles” – you can refer to many others that take the same stance, like the Swedish Association of Journalists, who demand the ban on child porn to be repealed (the linked article is a statement from their chairperson). The entire journalistic profession doesn’t demand this from a desire to harm children – there is obviously something else that causes the entire reporters’ association to be sternly against, and demand a repeal of, the ban on possession on child pornography. That “something else” is a care for the open and transparent society.

“The Swedish Association of Journalists has taken a clear stand against the child pornography legislation, which prohibits possession of works classified as child pornography.” — quote from the linked article

This is where the battle stands, and this is where the war is lost or won.

If we lose the battle over freedom of information, we will lose it over the ban on possession of child pornography and infestations spreading from there until the open society has been killed. If we win it, we will win it over repealing the ban of possession of child pornography [as well as any other kind of information] and healing this wound. This is where the battle stands, this is where the war for freedom of speech and the open society is won or lost. This is the wound we must heal.

Also see the follow-up article: Child Porn Laws Aren’t As Bad As You Think. They’re Much, Much Worse.

UPDATE: Lars Hallberg wrote a comment on G+ to this article that makes for a very good summary, so I take the liberty of copying it in as a conclusion and a TL;DR:

It’s not illegal to film a murder.

It’s not illegal to possess a film of a murder.

But it’s still illegal to murder people.

And it’s illegal to initiate a murder for the purpose of filming it.

If you have taken part in a murder and have film of it, the film may be usable as proof against you.

I can’t see that Rick suggests anything different here – i.e., I see no suggestions that it should be OK to molest children for the purpose of filming it. That’s good.

In the end it’s as simple as this: it should never be illegal to merely possess information, any information.

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Published on September 07, 2012 04:30

Three Reasons Child Porn Must Be Re-Legalized In The Coming Decade

Infopolicy: Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring the topic to a serious discussion, and explain why child pornography need to be re-legalized in the next ten years, and why you need to fight for it to happen.

When possession of this type of information was criminalized, those who opposed that criminalization (which I didn’t, at the time – this was before my activism) pointed at four major objections:

It would not be effective, and possibly counterproductive, in catching child molesters.
It would lead to censorship without accountability.
Reporters complained it would undermine journalistic freedom that has stood intact for centuries.
Constitutional and political science scholars pointed out that it undermined centuries of free speech/expression traditions in a way that would be used by special interests to silence opponents of business interests unrelated to child porn.

In retrospect, all of this has come true. This is bad enough in itself; it is downright catastrophic. There are three overarching reasons why child pornography must be re-legalized: the ban prevents catching child molesters, especially in light of new technology; it creates a generation of branded sex offenders that did nothing wrong; and it is the battleground for free speech itself. Let’s take these one at a time.