9 ms·

Thanks for the background, but somebody has to say it: his failure was looking at child pornography.

mindslight 10y ago
This is not an activity I want to engage in or even associate with people who do, but a nonviolent private activity is not a reason to violently persecute someone, especially to this degree.
- __s 10y ago
  It's not a private activity, it directly supports an industry of violence against children
  - jhiska 10y ago
    You can make the same argument for the adult porn industry, and that leads to one of two conclusions: - That the viewer of adult porn shouldn't be prosecuted for viewing porn. or - That there is a societal / governmental acceptance of the exploitation of men and women, as long as they are adults. The easy argument out of this hypocrisy is to claim that while children can never consent, adults can, but then that opens the can of worms of whether they're "consenting" under coercion, like under threat of not getting hired again to do work or if they're enslaved, and the answer to that is that it depends on the case. At this point it turns political, with one side generalizing that most do consent, and another side also generalizing that most do not consent, and reaching an agreement is impossible because there is a half-truth to both sides, and after a lot of heated arguments, people get worn out, and nothing gets resolved. So instead I'm just going to direct people to read up on the topic of victimology, which is a sub-genre of criminology, specifically how it affects human traffic (which are >90% women, and has a total volume of enslaved people higher than it was when slavery was legal) and get informed and then make up their own mind about it without bothering others.
    - Stanish 10y ago
      Yet another reason a universal basic income makes sense. Slavery by another name becomes much less likely.
    - tnzn 10y ago
      I'm surprised you haven't been called a pedophile/pedophile supporter yet. Every time I tried to have that argument, it happened (tho not in HN).
      - marksomnian 10y ago
        And that is the reason you can never have a rational discussion about the subject. No matter how strong the arguments you present, the other side can always say "b... but... but think about the terrorists and the paedophiles!" and if you reply you get called a sympathiser - for having a rational discussion. Welcome to 2017.
        sgift 10y ago
        Or 16, 15, 19xx, 18xx. Principled defense of something seen as morally wrong was always fraught with "so, you defend it, so, you must like it. Probably, you even do it, don't you?" It's one of the first strategies in the book of shutting down your opposition and probably was one of the first things people tried the moment discussions started.
    - krick 10y ago
      Or you can make the same argument for the diamond industry. Buying a diamond you are committing a crime against humanity, as you are supporting war, slavery and a whole lot of violent stuff somewhere in Africa.
  - mindslight 10y ago
    This is a tenuous argument at best, even more so considering the protocol in question is freenet. Sure it's possible to force a commercial model onto any system, but I'd think freenet would be an especially terrible way to monetize. (And "industry" - seriously??) Furthermore, there is presumably enough existing child pornography out there to satiate any viewer for their entire life. Perhaps increasing access to it is the way to discourage more being made! At any rate, paying for it could still be a crime, as opposed to the insanity of strict liability for bitstring possession.
    - Natanael_L 10y ago
      I've seen articles about people using CGI as bait to fight it.
  - ue_ 10y ago
    > directly supports an industry of violence against children Not necessarily, and even so, can it be proven?
    - erelde 10y ago
      If I see proof (undoctored video) of a dog being beheaded (a child being sexually abused) I think I'm safe to conclude that a dog was killed (a child was raped). If then that video was sold (or distributed in any way) to fetishists of dog beheading I could conclude that there is some kind of commercial (distribution) process going on here. Note for children: I'm using parenthesis in a way that shouldn't be done.
      - ue_ 10y ago
        My point was that the distribution of the material, especially free of charge does not necessarily encourage further abuse, nor does its possession. I do not know, though I admit that I suspect that the abuse would be encouraged because it is being paid for. Edit: In my opinion, the following offences ought to exist with relation to child pornography and abuse: (1) Child abuse is an offence as it currently stands, or with revised ages of consent to better reflect philosophical, scientific and psychological evidence (2) The act of recording of abuse with majority or express intention of furnishing the material for charge or otherwise in order finance or encourage continuing abuse is an offence I think the second part needs some elaboration. I don't think that recording a certain act taking place ought to be illegal, nor I do I think it ought to be illegal to share that material with others. However this presents a dilemma: the abuse may be encouraged by the fact that the material is being sold or even enjoyed. If this encouragement to continue abuse can indeed be proven in a court of law, by some standard deemed appropriate (either the standard 'beyond a reasonable doubt' or the more strict 'balance of probabilities') then the act of making the recording and the act of furnishing the recording, I believe, ought to be an offence. On the other hand, if the recordings are made merely to provide the enjoyment of others, and not for the purpose of encouraging abuse, I do not think there should be an offence. At the risk of over-emphasising the point: A child abuser may be encouraged by (i) money (ii) the thought that people are watching the recording (there may be further motivations). If it can be proven that abuse continued and the abuse was contingent on one or more of these factors, there is sufficient reason to believe that the intent of the recordings aided another crime, which I think may be sufficient to culminate in an offence.
  - 9mit3t2m9h9a 10y ago
    Supporting or undermining it by unpaid distribution of its disgusting output material? If he was directly supporting it, he would be already convicted based on tracing the payments, I guess. And if obtaining and distributing the output material of a content industry without payment is supporting the industry, let that be put in writing…
- mirimir 10y ago
  Well, enjo-kōsai is merely controversial in Japan. But bare female skin is illegal in Saudi Arabia.[0] De gustibus non est disputandum. What's key is mindfulness. 0) http://livinginsaudiarabia.org/73/pornography-in-saudi-arabia/ http://livinginsaudiarabia.org/73/pornography-in-saudi-arabi...
mirimir 10y ago
Maybe. But we don't know whether he looked at CP or not.
- bigiain 10y ago
  And lets face it, the NSA claim - and win in court with this claim - that "collecting and storing" personal communications doesn't count as surveillance, until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?
  - externalreality 10y ago
    Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower. We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.
    - bigiain 10y ago
      I completely agree with you. It baffles me that anybody can stand up in front of their peers and claim "bulk collection" doesn't violate your privacy until/unless some human ever reads the data you've collected, and it's beyond parody that a judge in a court agreed with this example of mental gymnastics...
  - MertsA 10y ago
    >until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. Didn't it go further than this? Just searching the data for some signal wasn't a "search" because a machine did it, it was only a "search" if you were a match and if you were a match then they had "probable cause" for the search. Not entirely sure how accurate that is but FWIW it seemed like that was the accepted reading of the twisted reasoning on HN back when that came out.
iopq 10y ago
But without 100% proof he can't be jailed. The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to prove it, so how can he be jailed for it already? "Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system
- bigiain 10y ago
  There are other precedents I think. Here (Sydney Australia) the penalty for refusing a roadside alcohol test is the same as the top range blood alcohol penalty. So you can refuse a test, and they'll penalise you assuming the worst-case result you could have produced. I'm guessing this guy is in a quite perplexing quandary - he's betting on whether they'll keep him in jail for as long for refusing to decrypt the drives as they would for the crimes that decrypting the drives expose? (At least I _hope_ that's his quandary - I sincerely hope the reality isn't that he's genuinely forgotten the passwords, and when the FBI/NSA _finally_ bruteforce it, they end up with baby photos, teenaged angst poetry, and a few bittorrented Hollywood movies... That does, at least, seem quite unlikely...)
  - mirimir 10y ago
    If he was using Freenet, there's no doubt that his node handled chunks of CP files, and that at least some of those chunks remain on the drive. Let's say that he never viewed any CP. Even then, can he be sure that investigators won't discover evidence that could be spun to demonstrate that he did view CP? It is quite a quandary :(
    - Natanael_L 10y ago
      If you didn't request it, your node won't hold decryption keys to the files. Might not help him if they believe that the encrypted keyless fragments is enough (which would be a horrible legal argument).
      - mirimir 10y ago
        That's true, of course. But LEA are selecting nodes based on the hashes of those fragments. Many of them won't have cached CP fragments, but merely relayed them. But if his node did, prosecutors could argue that they've identified CP on his computer based on hashes, and have experts testify about reliability, etc. How many jurors would understand Freenet design?
literallycancer 10y ago
>his failure was allegedly looking at child pornography FTFY It doesn't matter what they accuse him of, until they prove it, he's innocent.
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Thanks. I don't care what the charge is, if the government can not prove their case without compelling the person to testify / provide evidence against himself the judge needs to throw that case out. This is terrifying that anyone could be jailed for using what anyone would consider their 5th amendment right.
- hyperpape 10y ago
  He's innocent in court (and my non-lawyerly (aka worthless) sense says the fifth amendment favors him). But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    Says who? Neither of us saw it, so we can't know. There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?
    - dllthomas 10y ago
      I think it's legitimate to say, in a discussion like this one where we're not dealing with punishment, that we should hold to a weaker standard (preponderance of evidence?) than should a criminal court. That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).
      - Freak_NL 10y ago
        That might seem reasonable at first glance, but it tends to turn into a witch hunt — especially with modern day communication channels. That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.

This is not an activity I want to engage in or even associate with people who do, but a nonviolent private activity is not a reason to violently persecute someone, especially to this degree.

__s 10y ago
It's not a private activity, it directly supports an industry of violence against children
- jhiska 10y ago
  You can make the same argument for the adult porn industry, and that leads to one of two conclusions: - That the viewer of adult porn shouldn't be prosecuted for viewing porn. or - That there is a societal / governmental acceptance of the exploitation of men and women, as long as they are adults. The easy argument out of this hypocrisy is to claim that while children can never consent, adults can, but then that opens the can of worms of whether they're "consenting" under coercion, like under threat of not getting hired again to do work or if they're enslaved, and the answer to that is that it depends on the case. At this point it turns political, with one side generalizing that most do consent, and another side also generalizing that most do not consent, and reaching an agreement is impossible because there is a half-truth to both sides, and after a lot of heated arguments, people get worn out, and nothing gets resolved. So instead I'm just going to direct people to read up on the topic of victimology, which is a sub-genre of criminology, specifically how it affects human traffic (which are >90% women, and has a total volume of enslaved people higher than it was when slavery was legal) and get informed and then make up their own mind about it without bothering others.
  - Stanish 10y ago
    Yet another reason a universal basic income makes sense. Slavery by another name becomes much less likely.
  - tnzn 10y ago
    I'm surprised you haven't been called a pedophile/pedophile supporter yet. Every time I tried to have that argument, it happened (tho not in HN).
    - marksomnian 10y ago
      And that is the reason you can never have a rational discussion about the subject. No matter how strong the arguments you present, the other side can always say "b... but... but think about the terrorists and the paedophiles!" and if you reply you get called a sympathiser - for having a rational discussion. Welcome to 2017.
      - sgift 10y ago
        Or 16, 15, 19xx, 18xx. Principled defense of something seen as morally wrong was always fraught with "so, you defend it, so, you must like it. Probably, you even do it, don't you?" It's one of the first strategies in the book of shutting down your opposition and probably was one of the first things people tried the moment discussions started.
  - krick 10y ago
    Or you can make the same argument for the diamond industry. Buying a diamond you are committing a crime against humanity, as you are supporting war, slavery and a whole lot of violent stuff somewhere in Africa.
- mindslight 10y ago
  This is a tenuous argument at best, even more so considering the protocol in question is freenet. Sure it's possible to force a commercial model onto any system, but I'd think freenet would be an especially terrible way to monetize. (And "industry" - seriously??) Furthermore, there is presumably enough existing child pornography out there to satiate any viewer for their entire life. Perhaps increasing access to it is the way to discourage more being made! At any rate, paying for it could still be a crime, as opposed to the insanity of strict liability for bitstring possession.
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    I've seen articles about people using CGI as bait to fight it.
- ue_ 10y ago
  > directly supports an industry of violence against children Not necessarily, and even so, can it be proven?
  - erelde 10y ago
    If I see proof (undoctored video) of a dog being beheaded (a child being sexually abused) I think I'm safe to conclude that a dog was killed (a child was raped). If then that video was sold (or distributed in any way) to fetishists of dog beheading I could conclude that there is some kind of commercial (distribution) process going on here. Note for children: I'm using parenthesis in a way that shouldn't be done.
    - ue_ 10y ago
      My point was that the distribution of the material, especially free of charge does not necessarily encourage further abuse, nor does its possession. I do not know, though I admit that I suspect that the abuse would be encouraged because it is being paid for. Edit: In my opinion, the following offences ought to exist with relation to child pornography and abuse: (1) Child abuse is an offence as it currently stands, or with revised ages of consent to better reflect philosophical, scientific and psychological evidence (2) The act of recording of abuse with majority or express intention of furnishing the material for charge or otherwise in order finance or encourage continuing abuse is an offence I think the second part needs some elaboration. I don't think that recording a certain act taking place ought to be illegal, nor I do I think it ought to be illegal to share that material with others. However this presents a dilemma: the abuse may be encouraged by the fact that the material is being sold or even enjoyed. If this encouragement to continue abuse can indeed be proven in a court of law, by some standard deemed appropriate (either the standard 'beyond a reasonable doubt' or the more strict 'balance of probabilities') then the act of making the recording and the act of furnishing the recording, I believe, ought to be an offence. On the other hand, if the recordings are made merely to provide the enjoyment of others, and not for the purpose of encouraging abuse, I do not think there should be an offence. At the risk of over-emphasising the point: A child abuser may be encouraged by (i) money (ii) the thought that people are watching the recording (there may be further motivations). If it can be proven that abuse continued and the abuse was contingent on one or more of these factors, there is sufficient reason to believe that the intent of the recordings aided another crime, which I think may be sufficient to culminate in an offence.
- 9mit3t2m9h9a 10y ago
  Supporting or undermining it by unpaid distribution of its disgusting output material? If he was directly supporting it, he would be already convicted based on tracing the payments, I guess. And if obtaining and distributing the output material of a content industry without payment is supporting the industry, let that be put in writing…
mirimir 10y ago
Well, enjo-kōsai is merely controversial in Japan. But bare female skin is illegal in Saudi Arabia.[0] De gustibus non est disputandum. What's key is mindfulness. 0) http://livinginsaudiarabia.org/73/pornography-in-saudi-arabia/ http://livinginsaudiarabia.org/73/pornography-in-saudi-arabi...

mirimir 10y ago

Maybe. But we don't know whether he looked at CP or not.

bigiain 10y ago
And lets face it, the NSA claim - and win in court with this claim - that "collecting and storing" personal communications doesn't count as surveillance, until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. While a personal hard drive full of child porn is unlikely to be "innocently" explained away quite that easily, I wonder if owners of, say, usenet binary hosting newsservers ever need to claim that defence?
- externalreality 10y ago
  Bogus defense IMHO. Acquiring the ability to query a database is enough to constitute surveillance. I wonder if my land lord could use the same logic to legally record me in the shower. We have to understand that, much like it's a military's responsibility (and desire) to go to war, it is the goal of spy agencies to gather all the intelligence it possible can. In both cases it is up to law making bodies comprised of "the people" to check these agencies' ambitions.
  - bigiain 10y ago
    I completely agree with you. It baffles me that anybody can stand up in front of their peers and claim "bulk collection" doesn't violate your privacy until/unless some human ever reads the data you've collected, and it's beyond parody that a judge in a court agreed with this example of mental gymnastics...
- MertsA 10y ago
  >until a human queries the database and reads from the collected interceptions. Didn't it go further than this? Just searching the data for some signal wasn't a "search" because a machine did it, it was only a "search" if you were a match and if you were a match then they had "probable cause" for the search. Not entirely sure how accurate that is but FWIW it seemed like that was the accepted reading of the twisted reasoning on HN back when that came out.

iopq 10y ago

But without 100% proof he can't be jailed. The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to prove it, so how can he be jailed for it already? "Innocent until proven guilty" is the foundation of our legal system

bigiain 10y ago
There are other precedents I think. Here (Sydney Australia) the penalty for refusing a roadside alcohol test is the same as the top range blood alcohol penalty. So you can refuse a test, and they'll penalise you assuming the worst-case result you could have produced. I'm guessing this guy is in a quite perplexing quandary - he's betting on whether they'll keep him in jail for as long for refusing to decrypt the drives as they would for the crimes that decrypting the drives expose? (At least I _hope_ that's his quandary - I sincerely hope the reality isn't that he's genuinely forgotten the passwords, and when the FBI/NSA _finally_ bruteforce it, they end up with baby photos, teenaged angst poetry, and a few bittorrented Hollywood movies... That does, at least, seem quite unlikely...)
- mirimir 10y ago
  If he was using Freenet, there's no doubt that his node handled chunks of CP files, and that at least some of those chunks remain on the drive. Let's say that he never viewed any CP. Even then, can he be sure that investigators won't discover evidence that could be spun to demonstrate that he did view CP? It is quite a quandary :(
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    If you didn't request it, your node won't hold decryption keys to the files. Might not help him if they believe that the encrypted keyless fragments is enough (which would be a horrible legal argument).
    - mirimir 10y ago
      That's true, of course. But LEA are selecting nodes based on the hashes of those fragments. Many of them won't have cached CP fragments, but merely relayed them. But if his node did, prosecutors could argue that they've identified CP on his computer based on hashes, and have experts testify about reliability, etc. How many jurors would understand Freenet design?

literallycancer 10y ago

>his failure was allegedly looking at child pornography FTFY It doesn't matter what they accuse him of, until they prove it, he's innocent.

dbg31415 10y ago
Thanks. I don't care what the charge is, if the government can not prove their case without compelling the person to testify / provide evidence against himself the judge needs to throw that case out. This is terrifying that anyone could be jailed for using what anyone would consider their 5th amendment right.
hyperpape 10y ago
He's innocent in court (and my non-lawyerly (aka worthless) sense says the fifth amendment favors him). But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  Says who? Neither of us saw it, so we can't know. There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    I think it's legitimate to say, in a discussion like this one where we're not dealing with punishment, that we should hold to a weaker standard (preponderance of evidence?) than should a criminal court. That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      That might seem reasonable at first glance, but it tends to turn into a witch hunt — especially with modern day communication channels. That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.