On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 03:31:11AM -0500, measl@mfn.org wrote:
As I understand this story, the guy had a diary which contained written descriptions of things he would *like* to do, not a photo album of kids bent over a table...
Your snotty message notwithstanding (I now regret taking you seriously in the past, and I'll try not to make that mistake again), my point was not to defend the law,
It did not appear [to me] that you were attempting to defend the law.
as I made clear in the portion of my post you conveniently neglected to include.
I did not elide this snippet below. That said, I came in from an 18++ hour day at work, and skimmed through my 700++ emails for the day, focusing primarily on those threads of interest. As there were an unusually large number of them today, I did stay closest to the most recent as a kind of "digest" attempt - if the below paragraph was somewhere in the original thread, it was gone by the time I responded. That said, I will respond to this now.
(In fact, since 1996 and the "morphed child porn" law in effect, Photoshop- created fantasies have been illegal to possess, and people have been convicted under that law, and their convictions (mostly) upheld.)
My point was that this is a natural outgrowth of existing child porn and obscenity laws,
An outgrowth would imply that it is along a continuum that has the same basic "footing". All of your above examples, from the traditional "kiddie porn" to the Feinswine dirty pixel laws deal with visual imagery of the photographic "kind". What we have here is distinctly different: no pictures of *any* kind, real or constructed, *unless*, we are no prosecuting the imagery that we are assuming is present in the mind of the author. He is using *words*, not *imagery*.
and if you're upset at this, you should naturally be upset at the entire framework.
I *am* upset at the entire framework. Regardless of which (or both) of these footings are argued as somehow "morally valid/justified/whatever", what it boils down to is the outlawing of *information*. The outlawing of DATA is a Pure Thought Crime. If we wanted to "Protect The Children" we would make the *act* of engaging a minor in an *act* of nude photography/sex/dope smoking/whatever a serious crime, and we would then enforce it to the teeth. That we do not speaks volumes about who we are "protecting". The "drug war" is the perfect analogy here: it is the posession, which is inherently victimless, which is the greater evil under the "judgement" of our "society". Posession of *anything* is a victimless "crime", and should NEVER be prosecutable.
-Declan
-- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org If Governments really want us to behave like civilized human beings, they should give serious consideration towards setting a better example: Ruling by force, rather than consensus; the unrestrained application of unjust laws (which the victim-populations were never allowed input on in the first place); the State policy of justice only for the rich and elected; the intentional abuse and occassionally destruction of entire populations merely to distract an already apathetic and numb electorate... This type of demogoguery must surely wipe out the fascist United States as surely as it wiped out the fascist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The views expressed here are mine, and NOT those of my employers, associates, or others. Besides, if it *were* the opinion of all of those people, I doubt there would be a problem to bitch about in the first place... --------------------------------------------------------------------