Declan McCullagh wrote:

Subject: How "child porn" laws ban pix of girls in leotards

At 11:54 -0700 6/9/97, Vangelis wrote:

...

None of this out-of-control angry mob shit, alright? THINK. If it's too hard a task to go after ONLY those genuinely responsible and you'd rather go after their friends, family, co-workers, customers, or anyone else you've rationalized as somehow indirectly encouraging the activity w/o actually participating, then you've got no business playing vigilante - you've become just another wreckless crusader *blinded* by his own self-righteous outrage. Christianity, the Nazi Party, and Prohibition, and McCarthyism (just to name a few) have already given us enough of those.

It seems logical to deduce that a child pornographer would want to cover up their activity by loud protestations about child porno on the internet. The obvious solution to child pornography on the internet is to attack those who most loudly protest against it.

The main reason folks seem to be in a lather about the "threat" of child porn is that it might ruin the Net for everyone. That is, it gives Congress an excuse to censor it and bring it under ever-tightening controls.

Perhaps the answer, as with alcohol and gambling, is to put child pornography under government regulatory control. Find a way to tax it. Then only those who were not decent, law-abiding child pornographers would have to fear imprisonment.

Also, I see a lot of uninformed rants on this list about "we must uphold child porn laws." Few people seem to realize that the long-standing Federal child porn law outlawed *pictures of dancing girls wearing leotards*. I'm not making this up. No nudity. No breasts. Certainly no genitals. But the Supreme Court upheld the conviction in the Knox case. Now the law is even worse, since it criminalizes morphed images that *look* like kids in leotards, even if the models were 25-year old adults.

And William Geiger could be criminalized by the fact that his bad speling and the gramma make his posts *look* like crypto. TruthMonger