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Is it child porn if the pictures are of your wife?

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Porn charges have been dropped against a 24 year old ex-cop who has since married the 17 year old girl in the pictures.

Investigators said that while the sexual relationship between White and the girl was legal, his possession of nude images of her was not.

The age of consent in Missouri is 17. Sex between the two is okay, photography is not. What kind of complete fucking moron do you have to be to invent such stupid laws, anyway?

Prosecutor Dean Dankelson says he had to drop the charges last week because the girl could not be forced to testify against her husband.

Life’s a bitch Dean.

The above link was stolen from theagitator.com.

Some links from the comments on that page are also interesting:

Breast feeding picture gets mom charged with child porn

Couple sues over bathtime photos

Posted in Child Pornography, Missouri, Underage sex, statutory rape | Comments Off

Another episode in the U.S. Justice Department’s anti-sex morality crusade

Friday, October 15th, 2010

A middle school teacher in Meridian, Idaho was caught with cartoon images of children engaged in sex acts on his computer and now faces up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine. According to the Idaho Statesman:

Boisean Steve Kutzner, 33, pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release.

Note the fact that he is being charged under obscenity laws rather than child porn which require that the material portray actual children. Child porn laws are designed to protect children whereas obscenity laws can target any material deemed to be sufficiently offensive.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said investigators determined that his IP address had been used to share child pornography in a peer-to-peer file-sharing network in October 2008. After a forensic investigation of his computer in August last year, agents found 70 cartoon images of minors engaging in sexual explicit conduct. Many of the images depicted characters from the TV show “The Simpsons.”

Notice the ease with which they substitute the more inflammatory term, “child pornography” in the story. Anti-sex crusaders rarely let ethics stand in the way of their mission.

So, to summarize, the images do not satisfy the legal definition of child pornography and no children were victimized by anyone. This is pretty much a case of “we prosecuted him because we can”.

The obscenity exemption to First Amendment is a Supreme Court fabrication to justify censorship of unpopular expression and it has a long history of abuse. The supposition that the First Amendment is only meant to protect expression that isn’t too offensive is so illogical as to be ludicrous. The very fact that the public buys into such nonsense suggests an utter lack of appreciation for their rights.

Of course, one could make an argument that someone who looks at such material shouldn’t be permitted to teach, but we must keep in mind that he was not charged with any offense against a child nor is there any mention of any such concerns. Furthermore, if looking at cartoon images of children makes someone unfit to teach children, does looking at adult porn make someone unfit to teach adults? In any case, this isn’t about getting a questionable teacher out of the classroom. Simply firing him would have accomplished that. No, this goes way beyond that. This is about intentionally destroying a person’s life for simply looking at the wrong cartoons.

This story is nothing but another example of how laws originally sold as a means to protect children have become perverted into an opportunity to torture someone for not submitting to a cultural conformity defined by moral crusaders to whom rights are of no importance.

We can all breath a little easier tonight knowing that, Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Boise, Idaho has saved the United States from the terrible destructive scourge of cartoon sex. I’m sure Wendy is quite pleased with how this will look on her resumé.

Posted in Books, Censorship, Child Pornography, Idaho, Obscenity, United States | 5 Comments »

Pentagon reopens child porn investigations

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

AVN reports that the Pentagon is reopening hundreds of cases of government employees who subscribed to websites known to carry child porn. The individuals were initially identified as a result of a 2006 investigation called Project Flicker.

Internal Pentagon reports from 2009 suggest that while some of the accused individuals were investigated, others were not “due to a lack of resources.” Several of the accused work for groups within the DoD such as the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, two of the country’s top intelligence agencies. Some are alleged to hold the highest possible security clearance. Some were employees; others were contractors. One accused contractor with top-secret clearance allegedly fled the country and is believed to be in Libya.

Generally, the military doesn’t like to entrust secrets to people who are easy targets for blackmail. Being a consumer of child porn puts someone at risk for a life-destroying prosecution. That makes them prime targets.

According to OhMyGov.com, “The findings of Project Flicker are disturbing on a variety of levels. First, the idea that a substantial number of the people entrusted with the protection of the nation harbor a willingness to harm that nation’s most innocent and vulnerable citizens is upsetting enough on its own. Yet when one stops and realizes the fact that at least 76 people who possess some of the most vital national security information in existence had opened themselves up to all manner of extortion or blackmail by someone who happened to stumble across their dirty little secret, this story takes on a whole new dimension of uncomfortable.”

While the extortion threat certainly exists, the accusation that these people “harbor a willingness to harm that nation’s most innocent and vulnerable citizens” is preposterous hyperbole. That’s about the same as claiming that people who play the video game “Grand Theft Auto” harbor a willingness to go out and run people over with their car or that people who watch adult porn harbor a willingness to rape women. AVN would have done batter to make the extortion point themselves without quoting such utter idiocy.

But, AVN cuts right through the crap with this observation:

It might be added that the excuse that the government lacks the funds to investigate alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse holds little water when it is simultaneously wasting tax dollars going after people like John Stagliano on absurd obscenity charges

Posted in Child Pornography, United States | 5 Comments »

Is Australia’s planned internet filter dead?

Friday, September 10th, 2010

According to the Sidney Morning Herald, Conroy still persists in promoting the idea, but it doesn’t change much chance of ever becoming law:

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, is ploughing ahead with his internet filter policy despite there being virtually no chance any enabling legislation will pass either house of Parliament.

In fact, there is some perspective that the filtering scheme has been something of a political disaster and might be best forgotten.

University of Sydney Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt said, given the catastrophic election result after only one term in government, it was “remarkable” the government was “pushing the very issues that undermined their credibility, rather than focusing their energy on important societal issues”.

“One may wonder exactly what underlies this relentless pursuit of a mirage, given that there is just about zero support outside the cabinet,” said Landfeldt.

“Surely it is no longer a matter of believing that the policy would benefit the general public.”

If anything is true of politics, its that bad ideas have a way of repeatedly returning until they are enacted into law. Only time will tell if the filter will die or be revived in another fit of child porn hysteria.

Posted in Australia, Censorship, Child Pornography | 1 Comment »

Child porn hysteria gets a dose of sanity from an unlikely source

Friday, May 28th, 2010

According to the New York Times, U.S. District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein is defying convention and informing juries of the stiff penalties for child porn charges before they decide the case.

Judge Weinstein, who sits in the United States District Court in Brooklyn, has twice thrown out convictions that would have ensured that the man spend at least five years behind bars. He has pledged to break protocol and inform the next jury about the mandatory prison sentence that the charges carry. And he recently declared that the man, who is awaiting a new trial, did not need an electronic ankle bracelet because he posed “no risk to society.”

Bucking the lynch mob mentality when it comes to child sex abuse accusations can be extremely detrimental to your career and it is exceeding rare to see anyone with the backbone to do it.

Going precisely to the point addresses in my post of last Saturday, Weinstein differentiates between the production of porn which actually abuses children and the viewing of child porn which affects no one.

“I don’t approve of child pornography, obviously,” he said in an interview this week. But, he also said, he does not believe that those who view the images, as opposed to producing or selling them, present a threat to children.

“We’re destroying lives unnecessarily,” he said. “At the most, they should be receiving treatment and supervision.”

Of course, destroying lives is precisely the mission of the anti-sex crusaders who enthusiastically prosecute people under obscenity laws when the material does not even use children as is the case in writing, graphic arts, and computer simulated images.

But the tough penalties have chafed at many judges, echoing previous battles over drug cases.

That’s a great comparison because, like all possession laws, the crusaders are not protecting anyone. They are simply using the law to persecute those with lifestyles they disapprove of. Some people are starting to see through the strategy and are becoming increasingly disgusted with it.

I don’t see this as a turning point, but it’s nice to see an occasional hero stand up to the intimidation that the crusaders use to suppress any challenge to their own propaganda.

Posted in Child Pornography, Persecution, Rights of the Accused, United States | Comments Off

Fox’s Napolitano opposes child porn laws

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

John Stossel has a program on the Fox Business News cable channel on Thursdays where he promotes a libertarian perspective on various (mostly economic) topics. For those who are interested, he also has a blog on their website.

Last Thursday, the topic was the Free speech and his guests were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ezra Levant, and Judge Andrew Napolitano. The first two are poster children for free speech, both having been aggressively persecuted for merely expressing political ideas.

The real news of interest comes out of that segment of Thursday’s show that was dedicated to the topic of obscenity. During that segment, when the issue of child pornography was broached, Napolitano openly opposed laws that criminalize the possession of child porn. His position rightly separates the issue of using children in the production of child porn from the mere fantasies (ie: thoughts or ideas) involving children. The former can be criminalized while the latter should not be.

To round out the discussion, an audience member expressed the one argument commonly used to justify laws against possession which is that possession creates a market and thereby encourages production of child porn which in turn victimizes children. What makes that argument untenable is the fact that it is so open-ended that the same argument can be used to outlaw almost any act that could conceivably lead to the commission of a more serious crime.

Kudos to Stossel and Napolitano for having the courage to bring some sanity to such a such a volatile topic. The mainstream media have so exploited the issue of children being victimized by sexual predators that “fear mongering for ratings” has become a staple strategy to increase market share and raise profits. In response, the public have become nothing more than Pavlovian attack dogs willing to lynch anyone based on nothing more than a mere accusation. Those who question that mentality are usually branded as being no better than child predators themselves.

On a final note, as anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, child pornography and obscenity are distinct categories of law. Child porn laws concern material produced using actual children. Since much of what is commonly called child porn these days does not actually use children in its creation, it is instead prosecuted under obscenity laws.

The problem with obscenity laws, of course, is that you can never know for sure whether you’re violating them until you’ve actually been convicted or acquitted in a trial. Napolitano not only pointed out that fact on the show, but made the further point that the Constitution requires that citizens must be able to determine before they act whether they are about to commit a crime, a principle trampled by obscenity laws.

Unfortunately, I could not find any video clips of the segment of the show concerning the child porn issue, so if anyone finds one, please post a link to it in the comments.

Posted in Censorship, Child Pornography, Obscenity, United States | Comments Off

Wikipedia, a haven for child porn?

Friday, May 14th, 2010

A few weeks ago, Foxnews broke a story about one of the co-founders of Wikipedia reporting to the FBI that Wikipedia was intentionally hosting child porn.

According to technewsworld.com:

Last month, Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger, who parted ways with the organization in 2002, outed the Wikipedia’s parent, Wikimedia, to the FBI, writing in a letter that the site was intentionally distributing child pornography. It doesn’t get more damaging than that; it would have been very hard to dismiss the claims as the grumblings of an ex-executive gunning for payback, since Sanger had specific examples in two Wikimedia Commons categories, “pedophilia” and “lolicon.” The listings included drawings depicting children engaging in sexual activity with adults.

Of course, child porn laws which are intended to protect children, really don’t cover depictions that don’t involve actual children. To get around that technicality, the feds usually employ obscenity laws. In any case, media sources don’t often make that distinction preferring instead to use the much nastier sounding term, “child porn”.

That the story was reported in Fox News has entertainment value in itself since no other mainstream news organization comes close to Fox when it comes to capitalizing on sex to attract viewers.

The technewsworld article takes the standard position that Wikipedia doesn’t need to include the offending images, which it repeatedly refers to as “child pornography” to support articles on topics like pedophilia and lolicon. Whether a media outlet needs to include certain content is utterly immaterial in a country that encourages (or at least claims to encourage) free speech. In a free country, expression is governed by the choice of the author rather than “need” as determined by some third party who sees himself as an all-knowing arbiter of what other people should be permitted to see.

To date, the FBI has not filed charges, although there was apparently a mass removal of potentially offending content in order to fend off a Federal attack. Since no one knows what is legal and what isn’t without actually going through a costly and controversial jury trial, you can be certain that a lot of legal content was summarily deleted simply to “err on the side of caution”.

Since the removal sidestepped procedures already in place to deal with such issues at Wikipedia, the ultimate damage might come not from the original accusation, but from the violation their own policies.

I’ve always found Wikipedia to be a useful reference and use it quite often in my posts, but a major part of its usefulness is to give you enough information to enable you to find additional outside sources which will be richer in detail, especially when it comes to graphics and image content. Wikipedia is often assailed for its potential lack of accuracy, but I have yet to find a single source of information on the web that couldn’t be attacked for exactly the same reason.

As is the case for any source of information, it is unfortunate that Wikipedia must feel compelled to police its content for fear of coming within range of murky and highly subjective federal obscenity standards. Wikipedia’s popularity and utility are partly why it attracts attacks from thought-crime crusaders like Larry Sanger and those at Fox News. Users will now be forced to go to lower profile sources to access legal content that Wikipedia eliminates in order to provide itself with a margin of safety against federal intimidation.

Thanks, Mr Sanger. You’re a true American hero. You and your fellow self-serving hysteria-spewing crusaders won’t be happy until every mainstream information source on the planet has been sanitized for third graders.

Posted in Art, Censorship, Child Pornography, Obscenity, United States | Comments Off

Google commentary on internet censorship

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

The Sidney Morning Herald published recent comments regarding the increase in governmental censorship of the internet by the head of policy and government affairs for Google Asia Pacific, Ross LaJeunesse. Basically he says censorship is on the rise and that China is only one of many countries that actively try to control what their citizens are allowed to see on the internet.

While China is perhaps the most dramatic example of Google confronting online censorship, it is not the only one. Google products – from search and Blogger to YouTube and Google Docs – have been blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where we offer our services. In addition, we regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content from our properties.

Unfortunately he makes some comments that play into the hands of those who use the excuse of protecting children as a justification to setup a mechanism for systematic filtering of all internet content:

Obviously, child pornography has no place on the internet or anywhere else.

The problem, Mr. LaJeunesse, is that most government definitions of what constitutes child pornography go way beyond material that involves children. In Australia, merely looking young or having small breasts is all that’s required to ban content. While child porn laws in the U.S. require that the persons depicted in the material must be under age, the government side-steps that requirement by using obscenity laws to prosecute people for material that does not use any real children in its production. In the U.S. the public goes berserk over Calvin Klein billboards showing children in underwear and state and federal prosecutors have established a history of harassing those who produce or sell any material that merely shows children naked without any sexual overtones. Stunningly, the U.S. encourages local one-hour photo labs to report bath time snapshots of naked children that used to be considered standard fare for any family album. No, Mr LaJeunesse, there is nothing obvious about how laws should address child pornography.

While we oppose the Australian government’s proposal, it’s important to note the current public debate about the government’s filtering plan is itself a testament to Australia’s free press and vibrant democracy – it’s a public debate that wouldn’t occur in many parts of the world.

But while we view comparisons of Australia’s filtering proposal to China’s censorship regime as unhelpful and inappropriate, we also worry the government’s plans to enforce mandatory filtering could legitimise government censorship elsewhere.

The problem with censorship is that you must attack it before it becomes a powerful tool of government. In the U.S. the government passed the Patriot act that forbade people from even discussing their victimization by government search and surveillance. While those provisions have since been struck down, the barrier against such laws is exceptionally fragile in all democracies where the government constantly wages a war against its citizens’ civil liberties.

Posted in Australia, Censorship, Child Pornography, Obscenity, United States | Comments Off

U.S. Prosecutor crusades to falsely crucify a man for child porn

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Carlos Alfredo Simon-Timmerman was arrested for possession of child pornography. The only problem was that it wasn’t child pornography and any cop or prosecutor with a double-digit IQ should have known that. Unfortunately, anti-sex crusaders have never been known for their intellectual prowess.

The child porn that Simon-Timmerman had in his possession was a video called “Little Lupe the Innocent; Don’t Be Fooled By Her Baby Face.” The movie stared noted film actress Lupe Fuentes.

Despite the fact that it would have been a simple matter to verify the age of the porn star, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenifer Yois Hernandez-Vega proceeded to prosecute Simon-Timmerman based solely on the fact that the star looks under age. Yep, that’s correct. Prosecutor Hernandez-Vega apparently thinks that a guess based on nothing more than appearance trumps the actual fact of her age.

Reading through the story, it’s patently clear that the prosecutor was not the slightest bit interested in justice or the innocence of her target. She was totally vested in a conviction despite any facts and enthusiastically embarked on a crusade to destroy the life of Carlos Alfredo Simon-Timmerman using her powers as an agent of the government.

Rather than issuing a subpoena to verify the age of Ms. Lupes, AUSA Jenifer Yois Hernandez-Vega demanded that the adult porn actress personally appear in court. Ms. Lupes had to fly from Venezula to testify in Puerto Rico.

After hearing testimony and examining her passport, the trial court ordered the prosecutor to dismiss the charges.

Anyone with even a hint of humility would have questioned whether they exceeded their authority and backed off in order to avoid embarrassing themselves and their office, but federal prosecutor Hernandez-Vega persisted far beyond the limits of credibility to the point of malicious harassment, if not an outright assault disguised as due process.

And the ending is the saddest part of the:

Although the innocent man spent two months in jail before being able to make bail, Jenifer Yois Hernandez-Vega will not even be given a reprimand. She’ll continue in her unethical ways, and there’s nothing anyone will do to stop her.

As long as the public blindly encourages an aggressive steamroller approach to law enforcement, where career building completely overshadows even the pretense of justice, this kind of behavior on the part of prosecutors will continue. The American public has gone from erring on the side of innocence to wholesale incarceration and “letting god sort them out”.

Welcome to the Sex Hysteria Hall of Shame, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenifer Yois Hernandez-Vega.

Posted in Child Pornography, Law Enforcement Abuses, Police Misconduct, Prosecutorial Misconduct, Rights of the Accused | 1 Comment »

Reason takes on obscenity

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

While the video is about John Stagliano, There are a few points that need to be highlighted here.

First, the video hits on the fact that porn that uses children in its production is evidence of a separate crime and can be prosecuted independent of obscenity laws. In other words, obscenity laws don’t protect children because the production of porn using children is illegal without obscenity laws.

Secondly, anyone with the intellect of a fifth grader could see that the First Amendment does not include any exemption for obscenity. The words are just not there. The Supreme Court invented that concept and the American public swallowed it just like Winston Smith finally accepted that 2+2=5 (except Winston Smith had the backbone to resist it for as long as he could).

The video points out that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was originally banned in the U.S. despite the First Amendment. The lesson to be learned by that is that the First Amendment has absolutely no power of itself to protect anything if the public is unwilling to stand up for it. In general, the public does not stand up for it. A few civil rights organizations regularly defend it in court, but the voting public is often of the opinion that offensive speech does not deserve to be protected.

Finally, as we see in this case, one of the biggest defenders of the First Amendment happens to be one of the more reviled industries in the country: the porn industry. Something to think about next time you hear someone disparaging pornography as being a destructive vice unworthy of respect. The government knows that it can persecute the porn industry with impunity because the public doesn’t care. And while it’s convenient to think of the porn industry as an impersonal monolithic entity, it consists entirely of ordinary people who, like the rest of us, simply work to earn a living. I can think of a lot better uses for my tax dollars than beating up on them.

Posted in Big Brother is Watching You, Censorship, Child Pornography, Obscenity, Politics, Pornography, United States | Comments Off