14 ms·
UK official involved in national porn filter arrested for child porn
- zimpenfish 13y agoI wish I could be surprised by the ongoing hypocrisy of our UK politicians but ...
- Justsignedup 13y agoRemember that anti-gay republican who was caught having sex with a male prostitute in an airport bathroom? Haters gonna hate (themselves).
- christoph 13y agoIt's hilarious just how badly you can pick them... Immigration minister resigns after hiring illegal immigrant cleaner http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10626150/Mark-Harper-resigns-after-hiring-illegal-immigrant.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/106261... Communications director resigns after phone hacking scandal http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jan/21/andy-coulson-resigns-david-cameron http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jan/21/andy-coulson-re...
- gadders 13y agoLabour ex-ministers support paedophile pressure group? http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/20/dailymail-harrietharman http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/20/dail...
- DanHulton 13y agoI dunno, the Immigration minister there seems like he acted pretty well. When he hired the cleaning lady, she showed proper documents and - if I'm reading this correctly - insisted she continued to have the right to work even when she didn't. When he found out his mistake, he corrected it by letting her go and resigning. Maybe the article's being too generous, but that seems like pretty above-the-board behaviour for what seems to be an honest mistake.
- philbarr 13y agoIf I remember this correctly, I think he had just been actively accusing employers of not doing due diligence when hiring people and that ignorance was no excuse. Then it turns out that he was doing the exact same thing...
- christoph 13y agoYes. He was in the process of passing legislation that doubled the fine for "lazy" employers that didn't fully check the immigration status of their employees.
- CrazyIvan 13y agoAt first he didn't like it but then it grew on him. Damn you Internet! It is all your fault! If only he could go back in time, implement filter and come back nothing would have happened!
- vrikis 13y agoThis comment wins best comment of all time haha.. If only he could go back in time...
- j7512 13y agoOh how ironic...
- Justsignedup 13y ago... without missing a beat, Patrick Rock went on record to say "As you can see, this filter is very effective, it even caught me. Kudos for a well implemented mechanism, I can only hope such sick, sick, basters like myself will be caught and put away promptly."
- dspillett 13y agoA lot of people who are rabidly fighting against the Internet being a free-for-all are significantly damaged and assume the rest of the world is damaged in the same way so need to be protected.
- taybin 13y agoSo if the internet were a free for all, there wouldn't be child pornography? Your logic here doesn't follow.
- dspillett 13y agoNo, I neither said nor meant anything of the sort. I was meaning that people who overreact and propose unworkable solutions tend to be those that have a problem themselves. They assume we all need saving from ourselves in the same way that they need help, they have trouble coping with the idea that their thoughts/desires/reactions to such things are far different from everyone else because in (almost) every other way they consider themselves normal. Filtering the web will not make any real long-term difference to either those distributing or those looking for CP, IMO. You are not going to just stumble upon CP because a filter failed: people distributing that sort of material don't want to be found that easily because they don't want the authorities to stumble upon them. Likewise if someone really wants to find that sort of thing then the sort of filters proposed with not stop them in the slightest. It is one of those "people problems" that I very much doubt you can fix with technical measures (how you could fix it I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure that the proposed filters will be ineffective and will cause inconvenience elsewhere while not actually doing their job).
- clarry 13y agoI still find it incredible that merely possessing some files is enough to get you arrested and possibly end your career. Weirder still, it seems to be ok to have just about all other sorts of horrific photos depicting, say, brutal violence..
- corin_ 13y agoI could be wrong, but I think there's far less of a market for producing photos of brutal violence than there is for producing photos of illegal pornography - the law is really about trying to kill the market, rather than it actually mattering that they are looking at the photos (really the only reason to punish people for looking at them is that by stopping these people you can help take away the incentive for people to produce them in the first place). Edit: In response to tomp's comment about how cartoon images can be illegal... yeah, I don't understand that. Maybe there's scientific evidence that paedophiles who look at cartoon images are more likely to become sex offenders than those who avoid all pornography? Even then, not sure it's the right approach... but who knows.
- e40 13y agoMaybe there's scientific evidence that paedophiles who look at cartoon images are more likely to become sex offenders than those who avoid all pornography? Even then, not sure it's the right approach... but who knows. Or maybe there's evidence that looking at any type of pornography decreases illegal behavior and the people making the laws don't give a crap about real data?[1] [1] http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/04/porn-and-rape-the-debate-continues/ http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/04/porn-and-rape-the-debate-...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- slashdotaccount 13y agoBut how can be the market destroyed when there is a demand. We should understand that there are those people who are being attracted to minors (we call them pedophiles), call this a disease, or whatever, but these people exist, and the vast majority of them are normal people in the real life. We, normal people (or what is normal?), are attracted to other adult people, but it doesn't make us rapers just because we imagine having sex with somebody. And it doesn't make those people child-molesters if they are only imagining it. And we are allowed to watch porn. If we want to kill the CP market (so the criminals stop shooting new CP material) let's give those people the possibility to watch it legally (because if not they are going to do it illegally). Let's collect all those already made illegal materials and give it to them for free (like the medical marijuana) so they can somewhat fulfill their sexual desires without harming anybody.
- peizo 13y agoSmells like a set up.
- chrisdevereux 13y agoThe most interesting thing about this to me is that shortly after the advisor was arrested, the rightwing Daily Mail started a smear campaign against senior members of the opposition, effectively accusing them of having supported paedophilia in the 1970s[1]. It dominated UK headlines for about a week, until the Ukraine crisis, at which point the (much more serious and concrete) allegations against the government advisor are revealed. Nice work. [1]: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/20/dailymail-harrietharman http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/20/dail...
- BgSpnnrs 13y agoThe DM broke this story too. Defo an interesting timeline of events.
- chrisdevereux 13y agoThat's interesting. Check out how far down the front page it is, though! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
- doreo 13y agoIt is hugely prominent on todays dead tree front page though http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/daily-mail/front-pages-today.cfm?frontpage=34955 http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/daily-mail/front-pages-today.c...
- chrisdevereux 13y agoAh, fair enough.
- gadders 13y agoAnd as that Guardian article concludes: "But I'm with the Mail on this. On the basis of the paper's evidence, I think Harman, Dromey and Hewitt do need to address this matter seriously. It isn't good enough to say the world was different then (as some have been suggesting in relation to the recent crop of historic sex abuse court cases) because there has never been a time when it has been all right to advocate sex with a child."
- sandwell 13y agoIn a double dose of irony it was the Daily Mail who originally broke the story, the very same paper who are being petitioned to stop posting pictures that sexualise under age girls. https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/daily-mail-mailonline-stop-the-daily-mail-sexualising-children https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/daily-mail-mailonline...
- timw6n 13y agoEven more worrying is the fact that it appears that he was tipped off about the police investigation by senior Downing Street figures. He resigned from his post at the policy office several hours before the NCA came to arrest him at his flat, which meant that he could potentially have had the opportunity to destroy evidence.
- sailfast 13y agoI imagine it would be somewhat trivial to entrap / SWAT somebody with this kind of imagery and then make an anonymous phone call, right? The tendency to rush to judgment on these issues is what makes those kinds of tactics much more powerful. Not saying that is the case here, but it's something I try to keep in mind whenever headlines like this hit the news. It is rare that we ever see the follow-up verdict / judgment reach the same level of visibility.
- izzydata 13y agoAlways wondered about these types of systems. If you are filtering certain content then wouldn't you at some point have to of had the content yourselves to hash it for checking against later?
- doreo 13y agoThis system doesn't involve hashing, just blocking a blacklist of URLs. Digital forensics labs come across a lot of child porn in their daily work though so it isn't much of an ethical challenge to build a hashlist of illegal material.
- argumentum 13y agoThis is a longish, but awesome quote from my favorite Christopher Hitchens speech that's quite relevant to this: Every time you violate – or propose the violate – the right to free speech of someone else, you in potentia you’re making a rod for your own back. Because (…), to who do you reward the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom you’re going to award the task of being the censor? Isn’t the famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what is fit to be passed and what isn’t, is the man most likely to become debauched? Is there anyone you find eloquent enough to decide for you what you could read? You would give the job to decide for you? To relieve you from the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Does anyone have a nominee? Hands up? You mean there is no one who is good enough to decide what I can read? I had no idea.. But there’s a law – or some pebbling sub section of a law – that says there much be such a person. Well to hell with that law. It is inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently already know already. About this censorial instinct: we basically know already what we need to know, and we’ve known it for a long time, it comes from an old story form again a great Englishman (..) Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author of the first great dictionary of English language. When it was complete he was waited upon by various delegations of people to congratulate him, (..) also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London (…). Dr Johnson, they said: “we are delighted to find that you’ve not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.” “Ladies, said dr Johnson, “I can congratulate you on being able to look them up.” Anyone who can understand that joke gets the point about censorship, especially prior restraint as it is known in the US for it is banned by the first amendment of the Constitution. It may not be determined in advance what words are apt or inapt. No one has the knowledge that would be required to make that call and – more important – one has to suspect the motives of those who do so. In particular those who are determined to be offended, those who will go through a treasure house of English language (..) in search of filthy words, to satisfy themselves, and some instinct about which I dare not speculate… - Christopher Hitchens http://howtoplayalone.wordpress.com/hitchens-on-free-speech/ http://howtoplayalone.wordpress.com/hitchens-on-free-speech/
- jseliger 13y ago
- taybin 13y agoI'm seeing a lot of snarky comments, but the only reason this is being talked about is for the irony. It neither proves nor disproves that a filter is helpful or harmful for child pornography.
- iamwithnail 13y agoHe's not an official, he's a special adviser, there's a substantive difference.