the supply of kiddie prawns, culture, and american pinhead arrogance

[Publius Q. Citizen]

You're both correct, but you don't mention one point which you both
surely know: the net spans all kinds of cultures.  Including those where

erotic pictures of post-pubescent (but under the US's age of consent)
people
are legal.  And those (admittedly exotic and 'primitive', but existant)
cultures that totally fuck with US norms, e.g., the grandfather teaches
his granddaughter
about sex by doing it, and women get married at 15.  So even if
you have a police camera in every room in America (BTW, a reasonable
definition of 'police state') you can't do much about the rest of the
world.
(Cruise missiles are so much more expensive than digital cameras)

The major issue is that bits (even bits recording a true crime) should
not
be considered actionable ---whether kiddie porn, nazi songs, recipes for
fun,
stories of veillless women voting & driving cars by themselves,
whatever.

In my lil' noggin (not speaking for the Movement (tm)), one cypherpunk
(tm)
ethic is that sticks and stones (and the occasional govt informer) will
break your bones,
but bits will never hurt you.  A post-internet
corollary is that somewhere someone will offend you, and you need
to get used to it.  (Those of us who have allowed ourselves to
review popular media are already used to the chronic offense.)

Sorry to state the obvious, its for our federal observers.


At 12:17 AM 4/12/01 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Eric Cordian wrote:
>
>>If anyone thinks the dissemination and viewing of zero-cost child porn

>>made possible by digital photography and the Internet involves only
>>"pedophiles", each of whom is slowing working their way up to victim
>>number 300, they need to unplug the Sex Abuse Agenda from their
sphincter,
>>and grab a clue.
>
>Especially so since, in the absence of law enforcement interference, a
>limited online supply can serve a huge body of viewers. This makes the
>problem impossible to solve on the demand side. The rational response
would
>be to go back to plain old police work for those few producers that
actually
>harm kids, treat the cases without explicit regard for the sexual
nature of
>the deeds (if there is physical violence, that's punishable quite
without
>specialized KP statutes), and let the images stay online to satisfy
what
>demand there is. In fact it might not be a bad idea to saturate the
market
>by putting the stuff in the public domain and allocating some of the
>considerable law enforcement anti-KP budgets to run the servers. At
least
>th