71–80 of 81 posts
So the headline uses the word "pedophiles", but in the article the word is nowhere to be found. Maybe that's because this sting isn't necessarily about pedophiles, but about people watching and trading child pornography. Using "pedophiles" only serves to reinforce the stigma of a already heavily stigmatized minority. The word "pedophile" should be defined as someone with a sexual attraction towards children. It doesn…
The Justice Department contends that the act of viewing a child porn image revictimizes the child each time the view occurs and is the basis for arguing that viewing child porn is not a victimless crime. Yet the FBI seized a server and allows such images to be downloaded and viewed thousands of times over a 2 week period. This would be like seizing the operators of an underground rape dungeon where patrons pay to rap…
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The dissonance is accepted in this case because of the repulsive nature of the crimes, as determined by our current social consensus. Philosophical purity is very appealing, but ultimately the justifications we use for why the law is the way it is only have to stand up long enough to convince most interested parties that we're doing the right thing.
Stated another way, the law is being ignored because these particular criminal defendants' rights don't matter when they're inconvenient, based on the crime(s) they were accused of. When the law is influenced by societal consensus the legal system becomes a farce.
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Not everybody is motivated by money. Some people enjoy being rewarded with karma/lulz/creds/likes. Is someone legally responsible for "liking" a child porn/terror/homeless beating video? Currently you are for the first case, sometime for the second. Should "liking" or viewing criminal content be a crime? That's a tough question. It certainly encourages the production of such content (for money or karma).
So, then, what if: - the website is run by someone unconnected to the original producer of the videos, who doesn't know the website exists? - the person hosting the website got the content years in the past? - the original producer of the videos is no longer doing such things, perhaps is dead or has a life sentence in jail? Also, if we allow motivations like, say, getting high ratings and prominence on a website (and…
Because the idiot had chummed up with the gang, the gang was responsible for recovering their "respect" among the prison society by trying to kill the sex offender.
As long as a sex offender was an "independent" (not gang affiliated) and extremely respectful of everyone, most everyone would leave him alone.
Two exceptions to this rule (that I observed): Blacks and Hispanics. Black guys (and therefore gangs) tended to not see a sex charge as that big of a deal. Hispanics stuck together no matter what.
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Moreover, if you create a legal system with perfect consistency, you'd going to be astounded by how much injustice it produces. The law is not a programming language.
One noteworthy bastardization of modern justice is that our right to trial by a jury of our peers has long been infringed. We are supposed to be judged by people of our approximate age, origin, location, background, etc, to allow for a greater understanding of context. Random jury selection is an abomination.
An artist accused of selling fake fraudulent paintings should be judged by a jury of artists, since these would best understand the techniques used to make paintings and could interpret the evidence to determine whether it was fraud.
Toyota cheating their emissions should only be judged by a jury made up of members of large car dealerships, mechanics, car repair services, etc. These would be best equipped to understand what exactly was done where in the pipeline, and interpret the evidence for or against them.
When a Goldman Sachs executive is accused of fraud, only other Wall Street investment bankers should be on the jury as these are his peers and the only ones who understand the complex financial instruments being used.
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> If the situation is high-stakes, TBB comes with NoScript installed. And you should probably get a burner laptop, do all your web browsing off TAILS, and randomly change your physical location. You are absolutely correct about practicing good opsec, however I have to challenge the usability argument. TOR is already less usable due to many sites blacklisting TOR exits nodes and latency (although connecting to a hidde…
Average Joe probably worries about Average Hacker/Average Stalker If he's up against the government, he's going down.
And the FUD about there the government being so competent that it's impossible to hide from them has to stop. It's just so entirely useless and devoid of reality. If you were going down, for example Snowden would be an unknown name to us.
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Moreover, if you create a legal system with perfect consistency, you'd going to be astounded by how much injustice it produces. The law is not a programming language.
One noteworthy bastardization of modern justice is that our right to trial by a jury of our peers has long been infringed. We are supposed to be judged by people of our approximate age, origin, location, background, etc, to allow for a greater understanding of context. Random jury selection is an abomination.
The Justice Department contends that the act of viewing a child porn image revictimizes the child each time the view occurs and is the basis for arguing that viewing child porn is not a victimless crime. Yet the FBI seized a server and allows such images to be downloaded and viewed thousands of times over a 2 week period. This would be like seizing the operators of an underground rape dungeon where patrons pay to rap…
I think that, while people do care for the victims, their main driving force behind their interactions is hatred of the entire group (both those who commit crimes and those who don't). Hatred they justify by the damage some do, but hatred that does not originate there. It is almost like there is some need to have a group painted as evil beyond any consideration, some group you can openly hate regardless of anything else which fuels it. This is one reason why I think support for treatment of non-offenders is so lacking (other than 'lock them up and throw away the key') and why people tolerate the police engaging in abuse of the very same kind to catch them.
And then, the small piece of my mind which loves a good conspiracy begins to wonder if this wasn't engineered as an constant backdoor into digital rights/freedoms. One only needs to look at laws greater than 60 to 100 years ago to see how vastly different society reacted (often there wasn't much care even when a victim was being directly victimized, especially if they weren't the child of someone white and well off).
I am more concerned that there is no limits to what they can do in regards to a honeypot (trap/etc). You would think child porn would be one thing they would not go this far with. Regardless, I think someone with expertise should be allowed to review any code developed by the government in such operations only to ensure it does not somehow violate the rights of innocents
The judge is not concerned http://motherboard.vice.com/read/judge-rules-fbi-running-chi...
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I feel that people who watch child porn and find it appealing rather than repulsive - qualifies you as a pedophile in my book. It's certainly a lesser crime than actual sexual assault of a child. But watching sexual assault for enjoyment and trading in these videos is still a crime. The term pedophile fits just fine as far as I'm concerned.
It's an overgeneralization, it's like conflating straight males with people that watch a male raping a female.
Regardless, though, the term "pedophile" by definition is someone who is sexually attracted to children. There is no distinction about whether or not they actually committed a sexual act with a child. A person who commits a sexual act with a child is by definition a pedophile and a rapist, since children cannot legally give sexual consent.