Canada's new child porn laws--implications for ZKS?

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Wed Mar 14 14:10:39 PST 2001


While few countries are havens for child porn, and no one expected 
Canada to suddenly become one, it is clear from legislation happening 
in Canada that is about to become a very poor place to run an 
anonymity service from.

Check the Reuters headlines, e.g.,  at Yahoo: 
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010314/wr/canada_porn_dc_1.html

--begin excerpt of article--

Wednesday March 14 3:52 PM ET
Canada to Criminalize Surfing for Child Porn

By Randall Palmer

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Canadian government, apparently breaking new 
ground internationally, introduced a bill on Wednesday to make it a 
crime to surf for child pornography on the Internet, with penalties 
of up to 10 years in jail.

Canadian officials said they were unaware of any other country with 
similar legislation designed to crack down on child porn in an age 
when it is just a mouse-click away.
...
In Canada, as in the United States and many other jurisdictions, 
possession of child pornography downloaded from a computer is a 
crime. But the bill would go further to ban knowingly bringing it up 
on a computer screen.
...
It would create a new criminal offense of transmitting child 
pornography, for example by e-mail, punishable by up to 10 years in 
prison. Exporting it from Canada would also become criminal. 
Importing it is already illegal.

--end excerpt of article--

Anonymity services like ZKS may be able to claim that they are not in 
violation of the new law, or any existing law, because the suspected 
child porn material was never visible to them or anyone in their 
company.

A law holding ISPs or nym services responsible for the contents of 
material flowing through their system would of course be a slam dunk 
against ZKS and other such places. So far, this is not what the new 
Canadian legislation has.

In Britain, the RIP bill which forces encryption keys to be turned 
over is likely to have effects as well.

The Napster case, and others, show us that anonymity/piracy/porn 
services are likely to come under heavy legal assault if their nexus 
of operations is identifiable.

This was foreseeable many years ago and was discussed on this list 
beginning in 1992-3.  Any data haven or black market service with a 
giant target painted on it is, well, a _target_.

I don't know what the current ZKS business model is...haven't 
followed it for a while...but I would expect them to get a lot of 
heat from this and similar laws.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list