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I think there is a very deep and troublesome philosophical issue here. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. A picture of child abuse /is not/ child abuse. Let me ask you a

by toxik 5y ago

I think there is a very deep and troublesome philosophical issue here. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. A picture of child abuse /is not/ child abuse. Let me ask you a counter-question. If I am able to draw child pornography so realistically that you couldn't easily tell, am I committing a crime by drawing?

yunohn 5y ago
What is this absurd counter? Who’s talking about surrealistic drawings? We’re talking about actual material in real life, being shared by users and abusers. To be clear, I’m not supporting surveillance, just stating facts.
- toxik 5y ago
  You should maybe read about the work [0], or just read the rest of what I said. Surrealism has nothing to do with the argument I made, so why do you bring it up? CSAM databases can by necessity not contain novel abuses, because they are novel. In fact, filtering by CSAM databases even indirectly /encourage/ novel abuses because these would not be caught by said filter. Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place, and does a lot to harm our integrity and privacy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
  - ElFitz 5y ago
    > Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place If there is no market for it, there might be less incentive to produce any more of it. Not that I believe we should all be continuously spied by people who merely pinky sweared to do it right and not abuse it.
    - toxik 5y ago
      I don't think market forces are what drive the production of CSAM. Rather, it's some weird fetish of child abusers to share their conquests. I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP. But that's, I think, tangential - I don't understand pedophilia well enough to say something meaningful here.
      - ElFitz 5y ago
        Quite funny: looking for some figures, it seems I wasn’t the first one to do so, and that finding anything even remotely reliable isn't easy at all. See - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000 - https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/260731-irs-should-take-a-closer-look-at-child-porn-industry-finances https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/260... - http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html > I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP. Always appalled me that there is so much of it out there. FFS. For some reason, it reminds me of when the French government decided to spy on BitTorrent networks for copyright infringement (HADOPI). Defense & Interior asked them not to, saying that it would only make their work harder. That some geeks would create and democratise new tools not to be caught downloading some random blockbuster, or even just out of principle, and both child pornographers & terrorists would gladly adopt them in a heartbeat, because while they weren’t necessarily the type capable of creating such tools, they had historically been shown to be proficient enough to use them. Quite hilarious, when you think of it. Some kind of reverse "Think of the Children". We still got HADOPI however, and now any moron has access to and knows how to get a VPN.
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    > Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place This is completely untrue, since hoarders tend to often also be part of groups where images of still unknown abuse circulate. Those images help identify both victims and suspects and in the end help stop abuse.
    - lstodd 5y ago
      I sometimes wonder where logic is, if it isn't on HN. Surely if one takes measures against only existing material, and not production of new, this only encourages appearance of new material. For evidence you can look up what happened with synthetic cannabinoids, and how much harm they brought.
      - donkeyd 5y ago
        Sorry for the late reply, but for evidence you can look up Robert Miķelsons, who was an active child predator in the Netherlands. He was identified due to images found on a computer in the US. It ended up leading police to him, which caused him to stop. According to further investigations he abused an estimated 83 children, one of which was abused close to 100 times. Many of the victims were less than 5 years old, some were babies. Without finding the child porn, he would not have been identified and would've victimized many more children.
- ElFitz 5y ago
  > We’re talking about actual material in real life, being shared by users and abusers. And, more importantly, material that has been and will be produced through the actual abuse of real children. The spreading of which encourages the production of more of it. GP's counter is absurd.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
donkeyd 5y ago
> am I committing a crime by drawing That really depends on the law in the country where you're doing that. According to the law in my country, yes, you are. None of this actually answers my question though, it's just a separate discussion. I would appreciate an actual answer.
- toxik 5y ago
  Right, my question is of course a rhetorical one. If I similarly draw other crimes being committed, the same does not apply. Why is that? And to address your explicit question, it is far too complex and specific to a given community to answer in any meaningful way here. I can tell you what isn't the answer though: deploying spyware on phones worldwide.
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    > If I similarly draw other crimes being committed, the same does not apply. Why is that? The answer is much more simple than you seem to think it is. Because the law doesn't say it is. I can only go by the law in my country, which is that (loosely translated) 'ownership of any image of someone looking like a minor in a sexually suggestive position' is a crime. Since a drawing is an image, it's a crime. Having an image of someone breaking into a home is not a crime according to law in my country. That's why you can have a drawing of that. Your question is like asking "why don't I get a fine for driving 60 on the highway, but I do get a fine for driving 60 through a school zone?" Well, because one is allowed and the other isn't.
    - zug_zug 5y ago
      Yeah but he's using reducto-ad-absurdem to illustrate the law as written is absurd in some cases. So yes you can pedanticly cite the law and have an answer to the question, but you're missing the larger discussion. At somepoint somebody is gonna actually have to tackle that looking at images, especially fake ones, might not only be harmless, it might be safer to let people get release from their fantasies (I'd be curious to see what the research says). Some day, people will say "Obviously nobody cares if you possess it or look at it, obviously, it's just about MAKING it." I think this is follow the process of weed (unspeakable horror, "drugs will kill you" in dare, 1-strike expulsion from high-school or college) when I was growing up, yet now legal to even grow.
sandworm101 5y ago
Yes. People have been convicted for possession of hand-drawn and computer-generated images. Editing a child's image to make it pornographic is also illegal. So some "deepfake" videos using faces from young celebs are in all likelihood very illegal in many jurisdictions. Images can be illegal if all people are of age, but are portrayed as underage. Many historical dramas take legal advice about this when they have adult actors portraying people who historically married while underage by modern standards. (Ie the rape scene in BBC's The White Princess series.) This is why American porn companies shy away from cheerleader outfits, or any other suggestion of highschools.
- toxik 5y ago
  This topic is really fascinating to me, how we deal with images of bad things. Clearly, murder and assault is fine to reproduce at 100% realism - but even plain consensual sex is forbidden in the US for a wider audience. This reminds me of a classic Swedish movie I watched, I forget its name, it's made in the 70s and contains upskirt panty shots of an actress who is playing a 14-year-old, along with her exploring sexuality with a same-age male peer. I think the actual actress was around 14 years old too. It made me feel real uneasy, maybe because my parents in law were around, but also because I thought "wait, this must be illegal to watch". In the end, the movie was really just a coming-of-age story from a time when we were more relaxed about these things.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    The name can probably be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_films_of_the_1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_films_of_the_1...
- dannyw 5y ago
  Not sure where you get your advice from. Supreme court has ruled loli as legal. You can find it on 4chan in about 30 seconds.
  - stevenicr 5y ago
avnigo 5y ago
I see the argument, but the counterargument is that by you doing that, you could possibly be nurturing and perpetuating abuse. In effect, possessing such material may incentivize further production (and abuse), "macroeconomically" speaking. And I hate that evidently, yes, there is an economy of such content.
ianhawes 5y ago
Yikes, do not engage in a defense of child pornography in these types of arguments. The opposition is gunning for that.
- toxik 5y ago
  I'm not defending any specific point of view. I'm merely pointing out a problem of map-territory conflation.
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    > I'm merely pointing out a problem of map-territory conflation. Using complicated language does not make you smart... It just makes you hard to understand. Maybe if you expressed yourself in common language, you'd understand that the points you're trying to make are bogus.
    - infinitezest 5y ago
      I think OP is saying that it can become less straight-forward to apply judgement in some real-world situations (which is encapsulated in the old adage "the map is not the territory", which I guess I thought _was_ common language but we all love in our own bubbles, I suppose). Anyway, I believe the reason that is often cited for why child pornography is so bad is because it involves the coercion/exploitation of a human being that is unable to consent. I believe OPs position is that if this harm is removed, there would need to be some other grounds on which to prosecute someone. That is, some identifiable harm would need to be demonstrated. There may be a reasonable counter to this argument but I would not say that OPs position is "bogus" on is face.
quenix 5y ago
A picture of child abuse is child abuse in that the abuse of a child was necessary to take the picture in the first place. If the picture had no grounds to spread, it would likely not have been made—no incentive. As such, the fact that the picture is able to spread indirectly incentivises further physical abuse to children.
- toxik 5y ago
  That does simply not follow from logic. Child abuse existed before cameras. Edit: People are unhappy with this refutation, so a second one then. The claim, specifically, is that CP is CA because CP requires CA to happen. So a photo of theft is theft. A recording of genocide is genocide. Clearly absurd. Never mind the context that the pornography in my question is drawn, thus no actual child was hurt. Edit 2: The point was made somewhere that CP is hurtful to the child that it depicts, and this is obviously true - but only if spread. Therefore, distributing CP should be illegal, but that does not mean that it's justified to scan every phone in the world for such images.
  - quenix 5y ago
    Sure, some child abuse isn't perpetrated for the purpose of being filmed and sold/distributed. But a large percentage is. That large percentage is disincentivized when technology that makes it more difficult to spread and/or makes it easier for LE to apprehend owners is implemented. I never said that there would no longer be any child abuse with these steps, just less of it.
    - toxik 5y ago
      I think you'll be hard pressed to show this with any kind of evidence. What happens when you effectively ban some expression? People hide that expression. Likewise, if you are successful in this CSAM pursuit, you'll mostly drive pedophiles to reduce evidence sharing. I bet you dollars to donuts, the people who fuck kids, will still fuck kids.
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    > Child abuse existed before cameras. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about it. While your comment is true, it does nothing to refute anything the previous commenter said. They are completely right. Also the spread of child porn increases the impact on the victim and should just for that reason be minimized.
toolz 5y ago
I think it's very easy to get people to hate things that gross them out. It's always interesting to me how casually people joke about Epsteins death while simultaneously never talking about cp without a gross look on their face. I'm not sure I fully understand how society can be more relaxed with actual pedophiles than they are with cp material. Personally it bothers me to see the focus around things that gross people out rather than the actual child abuse.
bambax 5y ago
> A picture of child abuse /is not/ child abuse. Yes, exactly. It may even help prevent child abuse, because it may help pedophiles overcome their urges and not act upon it. I'm not aware of any data regarding this issue exactly, but there are studies that show that general pornography use and sexual abuse are inversely correlated.
randcraw 5y ago
Or if you make a film about child abuse in which a child actor pretends to be abused, can you arrest the actor who abuses? If any depiction of the act is a crime, then you can. This issue came before the US Supreme Court about a decade ago and they ruled that the depiction of a crime is not a crime so long as the depiction can in any way be called "art". In effect, any synthetic depiction of a crime is permitted. However that ruling predated the rise of deep fakes. Would the SC reverse that decision now that fakes are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing? Frankly I think the current SC would flip since it's 67% conservative and has shown a willingness to reconsider limits on the first Amendment (esp. speech and religion). But how would we re-draw the line between art and crime? Will all depictions of nudes have to be reassessed for whether the subject even might be perceived as underage? What about films like "Pan's Labyrinth" in which a child is tortured and murdered off-screen? Do we really want to go there? This enters the realm of thought-crime, since the infraction was solely virtual and no one in the real world was harmed. If we choose this path, the freedom to share ideas will be changed forever.
emodendroket 5y ago
In many jurisdictions you are.

by toxik 5y ago

yunohn 5y ago

What is this absurd counter? Who’s talking about surrealistic drawings? We’re talking about actual material in real life, being shared by users and abusers. To be clear, I’m not supporting surveillance, just stating facts.

toxik 5y ago
You should maybe read about the work [0], or just read the rest of what I said. Surrealism has nothing to do with the argument I made, so why do you bring it up? CSAM databases can by necessity not contain novel abuses, because they are novel. In fact, filtering by CSAM databases even indirectly /encourage/ novel abuses because these would not be caught by said filter. Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place, and does a lot to harm our integrity and privacy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
- ElFitz 5y ago
  > Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place If there is no market for it, there might be less incentive to produce any more of it. Not that I believe we should all be continuously spied by people who merely pinky sweared to do it right and not abuse it.
  - toxik 5y ago
    I don't think market forces are what drive the production of CSAM. Rather, it's some weird fetish of child abusers to share their conquests. I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP. But that's, I think, tangential - I don't understand pedophilia well enough to say something meaningful here.
    - ElFitz 5y ago
      Quite funny: looking for some figures, it seems I wasn’t the first one to do so, and that finding anything even remotely reliable isn't easy at all. See - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000 - https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/260731-irs-should-take-a-closer-look-at-child-porn-industry-finances https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/260... - http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html > I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP. Always appalled me that there is so much of it out there. FFS. For some reason, it reminds me of when the French government decided to spy on BitTorrent networks for copyright infringement (HADOPI). Defense & Interior asked them not to, saying that it would only make their work harder. That some geeks would create and democratise new tools not to be caught downloading some random blockbuster, or even just out of principle, and both child pornographers & terrorists would gladly adopt them in a heartbeat, because while they weren’t necessarily the type capable of creating such tools, they had historically been shown to be proficient enough to use them. Quite hilarious, when you think of it. Some kind of reverse "Think of the Children". We still got HADOPI however, and now any moron has access to and knows how to get a VPN.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place This is completely untrue, since hoarders tend to often also be part of groups where images of still unknown abuse circulate. Those images help identify both victims and suspects and in the end help stop abuse.
  - lstodd 5y ago
    I sometimes wonder where logic is, if it isn't on HN. Surely if one takes measures against only existing material, and not production of new, this only encourages appearance of new material. For evidence you can look up what happened with synthetic cannabinoids, and how much harm they brought.
    - donkeyd 5y ago
      Sorry for the late reply, but for evidence you can look up Robert Miķelsons, who was an active child predator in the Netherlands. He was identified due to images found on a computer in the US. It ended up leading police to him, which caused him to stop. According to further investigations he abused an estimated 83 children, one of which was abused close to 100 times. Many of the victims were less than 5 years old, some were babies. Without finding the child porn, he would not have been identified and would've victimized many more children.
ElFitz 5y ago
> We’re talking about actual material in real life, being shared by users and abusers. And, more importantly, material that has been and will be produced through the actual abuse of real children. The spreading of which encourages the production of more of it. GP's counter is absurd.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

donkeyd 5y ago

> am I committing a crime by drawing That really depends on the law in the country where you're doing that. According to the law in my country, yes, you are. None of this actually answers my question though, it's just a separate discussion. I would appreciate an actual answer.

toxik 5y ago
Right, my question is of course a rhetorical one. If I similarly draw other crimes being committed, the same does not apply. Why is that? And to address your explicit question, it is far too complex and specific to a given community to answer in any meaningful way here. I can tell you what isn't the answer though: deploying spyware on phones worldwide.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > If I similarly draw other crimes being committed, the same does not apply. Why is that? The answer is much more simple than you seem to think it is. Because the law doesn't say it is. I can only go by the law in my country, which is that (loosely translated) 'ownership of any image of someone looking like a minor in a sexually suggestive position' is a crime. Since a drawing is an image, it's a crime. Having an image of someone breaking into a home is not a crime according to law in my country. That's why you can have a drawing of that. Your question is like asking "why don't I get a fine for driving 60 on the highway, but I do get a fine for driving 60 through a school zone?" Well, because one is allowed and the other isn't.
  - zug_zug 5y ago
    Yeah but he's using reducto-ad-absurdem to illustrate the law as written is absurd in some cases. So yes you can pedanticly cite the law and have an answer to the question, but you're missing the larger discussion. At somepoint somebody is gonna actually have to tackle that looking at images, especially fake ones, might not only be harmless, it might be safer to let people get release from their fantasies (I'd be curious to see what the research says). Some day, people will say "Obviously nobody cares if you possess it or look at it, obviously, it's just about MAKING it." I think this is follow the process of weed (unspeakable horror, "drugs will kill you" in dare, 1-strike expulsion from high-school or college) when I was growing up, yet now legal to even grow.

sandworm101 5y ago

Yes. People have been convicted for possession of hand-drawn and computer-generated images. Editing a child's image to make it pornographic is also illegal. So some "deepfake" videos using faces from young celebs are in all likelihood very illegal in many jurisdictions. Images can be illegal if all people are of age, but are portrayed as underage. Many historical dramas take legal advice about this when they have adult actors portraying people who historically married while underage by modern standards. (Ie the rape scene in BBC's The White Princess series.) This is why American porn companies shy away from cheerleader outfits, or any other suggestion of highschools.

toxik 5y ago
This topic is really fascinating to me, how we deal with images of bad things. Clearly, murder and assault is fine to reproduce at 100% realism - but even plain consensual sex is forbidden in the US for a wider audience. This reminds me of a classic Swedish movie I watched, I forget its name, it's made in the 70s and contains upskirt panty shots of an actress who is playing a 14-year-old, along with her exploring sexuality with a same-age male peer. I think the actual actress was around 14 years old too. It made me feel real uneasy, maybe because my parents in law were around, but also because I thought "wait, this must be illegal to watch". In the end, the movie was really just a coming-of-age story from a time when we were more relaxed about these things.
- teddyh 5y ago
  The name can probably be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_films_of_the_1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_films_of_the_1...
dannyw 5y ago
Not sure where you get your advice from. Supreme court has ruled loli as legal. You can find it on 4chan in about 30 seconds.
- stevenicr 5y ago

avnigo 5y ago

I see the argument, but the counterargument is that by you doing that, you could possibly be nurturing and perpetuating abuse. In effect, possessing such material may incentivize further production (and abuse), "macroeconomically" speaking. And I hate that evidently, yes, there is an economy of such content.

ianhawes 5y ago

Yikes, do not engage in a defense of child pornography in these types of arguments. The opposition is gunning for that.

toxik 5y ago
I'm not defending any specific point of view. I'm merely pointing out a problem of map-territory conflation.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > I'm merely pointing out a problem of map-territory conflation. Using complicated language does not make you smart... It just makes you hard to understand. Maybe if you expressed yourself in common language, you'd understand that the points you're trying to make are bogus.
  - infinitezest 5y ago
    I think OP is saying that it can become less straight-forward to apply judgement in some real-world situations (which is encapsulated in the old adage "the map is not the territory", which I guess I thought _was_ common language but we all love in our own bubbles, I suppose). Anyway, I believe the reason that is often cited for why child pornography is so bad is because it involves the coercion/exploitation of a human being that is unable to consent. I believe OPs position is that if this harm is removed, there would need to be some other grounds on which to prosecute someone. That is, some identifiable harm would need to be demonstrated. There may be a reasonable counter to this argument but I would not say that OPs position is "bogus" on is face.

quenix 5y ago

A picture of child abuse is child abuse in that the abuse of a child was necessary to take the picture in the first place. If the picture had no grounds to spread, it would likely not have been made—no incentive. As such, the fact that the picture is able to spread indirectly incentivises further physical abuse to children.

toxik 5y ago
That does simply not follow from logic. Child abuse existed before cameras. Edit: People are unhappy with this refutation, so a second one then. The claim, specifically, is that CP is CA because CP requires CA to happen. So a photo of theft is theft. A recording of genocide is genocide. Clearly absurd. Never mind the context that the pornography in my question is drawn, thus no actual child was hurt. Edit 2: The point was made somewhere that CP is hurtful to the child that it depicts, and this is obviously true - but only if spread. Therefore, distributing CP should be illegal, but that does not mean that it's justified to scan every phone in the world for such images.
- quenix 5y ago
  Sure, some child abuse isn't perpetrated for the purpose of being filmed and sold/distributed. But a large percentage is. That large percentage is disincentivized when technology that makes it more difficult to spread and/or makes it easier for LE to apprehend owners is implemented. I never said that there would no longer be any child abuse with these steps, just less of it.
  - toxik 5y ago
    I think you'll be hard pressed to show this with any kind of evidence. What happens when you effectively ban some expression? People hide that expression. Likewise, if you are successful in this CSAM pursuit, you'll mostly drive pedophiles to reduce evidence sharing. I bet you dollars to donuts, the people who fuck kids, will still fuck kids.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > Child abuse existed before cameras. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about it. While your comment is true, it does nothing to refute anything the previous commenter said. They are completely right. Also the spread of child porn increases the impact on the victim and should just for that reason be minimized.

toolz 5y ago

I think it's very easy to get people to hate things that gross them out. It's always interesting to me how casually people joke about Epsteins death while simultaneously never talking about cp without a gross look on their face. I'm not sure I fully understand how society can be more relaxed with actual pedophiles than they are with cp material. Personally it bothers me to see the focus around things that gross people out rather than the actual child abuse.

bambax 5y ago

> A picture of child abuse /is not/ child abuse. Yes, exactly. It may even help prevent child abuse, because it may help pedophiles overcome their urges and not act upon it. I'm not aware of any data regarding this issue exactly, but there are studies that show that general pornography use and sexual abuse are inversely correlated.

randcraw 5y ago

Or if you make a film about child abuse in which a child actor pretends to be abused, can you arrest the actor who abuses? If any depiction of the act is a crime, then you can. This issue came before the US Supreme Court about a decade ago and they ruled that the depiction of a crime is not a crime so long as the depiction can in any way be called "art". In effect, any synthetic depiction of a crime is permitted. However that ruling predated the rise of deep fakes. Would the SC reverse that decision now that fakes are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing? Frankly I think the current SC would flip since it's 67% conservative and has shown a willingness to reconsider limits on the first Amendment (esp. speech and religion). But how would we re-draw the line between art and crime? Will all depictions of nudes have to be reassessed for whether the subject even might be perceived as underage? What about films like "Pan's Labyrinth" in which a child is tortured and murdered off-screen? Do we really want to go there? This enters the realm of thought-crime, since the infraction was solely virtual and no one in the real world was harmed. If we choose this path, the freedom to share ideas will be changed forever.

emodendroket 5y ago

In many jurisdictions you are.