Tynan on Tech

Child porn is the third rail of the Internet: Come anywhere near that topic and you’re very likely to get jolted. As with terrorism, many otherwise rational people lose all reason when it comes to this topic. Question the tactics of those who oppose it, and you may be misconstrued as supporting it.

So, for the record: child porn is bad. People who create and sell it ought to be locked up for a long time. But the hysteria over kiddie porn downloads has gotten nuts, and the laws surrounding it are totally out of whack.

Example du jour is the story of Matthew White, a 22 year old in Sacramento who says he “accidentally” downloaded some kiddie porn via Limewire while hunting for actual adult porn. Per Sacto’s CBS13 news station:

Matthew White, 22, said he was surfing for pornography two years ago on Limewire — a fire sharing application that allows users to trade music, movies, games and pictures — when he discovered that some of the files he had downloaded were images of children. Matt claims he quickly erased the files….
About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family’s home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn’t find anything.
Investigators later were able to recover the deleted images from deep within the hard drive.

According to the story, rather than do 20 years’ hard time, White is planning to cop a guilty plea. He hopes to get three and a half years, plus 10 years on probation and a lifetime on the national registry of sexual offenders.

The word “accidentally” is in quotes because, well, we don’t know what he really did. But those who scoff at the notion that it’s possible to accidentally download something that can land you in the slammer for 20 years have probably never used a P2P file swapping system or otherwise perused the dark side of the net. So here’s an example that might prove instructive.

Some years ago I was researching a piece on services that claimed to give you “unlimited access to thousands of Hollywood movies” for $20 a month. They were, of course, scams — all you got for your $20 were some links to Bit Torrent files or P2P networks. But I wanted to try it out, because I was pretty sure even if you did get illegal access to movies, the experience would be so crappy no one would want to do it.

For my test I picked the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Not because I particularly liked the movie (it sucked), but because I knew I could find lots of copies of it — and, in general, the more copies there are, the more nodes, the faster the download.

I downloaded an 800MB copy of what I thought was the movie. But when I launched it, I did not see jumpy images of Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson shredding George Lucas’s legacy: I saw cheap, home-made porn — something put together by frat boys with a digital video camera.

Why someone would need to fake the title of a porn movie to get people to download it is totally beyond me. But had that movie been even more salacious — or the actors just a few months younger — I could have been looking at 20 years up the river myself. At the very least, I would have faced a long, costly, uphill legal battle to prove that I wasn’t “trafficking” in child porn.

(And yes, I deleted that movie file. That was at least three computers ago. So the odds of the Feds busting down my door for that, at least, are remote.)

The fact is, it’s easy to accidentally download something nasty off the Net. Any time you view a Web page containing photos, you’ve technically “downloaded” all the images on it, which means you’re legally responsible for every image on every page you’ve ever looked at. Starting to get nervous yet?

People have been convicted for possession of kiddie porn on the basis of a thumbnail image found in their browser cache. So you don’t really have to go looking for that stuff; if you troll enough adult sites (or sites with adult pop-up ads, or sites infected porn-based malware) it will eventually find you.

Most surveys put the number of Web users who visit adult sites at between 30 and 50 percent. So even if you’ve never visited the naughty side of the Web, people sitting on either side of you probably have.

You don’t even have to download the nasty stuff; merely clicking on something pretending to be child porn is enough to get you fitted for an orange jumpsuit. Just ask Roderick Vosburgh, who let his lesser instincts drive him toward clicking a link to an FBI honeypot designed to catch would-be pedophiles.

Sending someone to prison for 20 years for something like this is itself a crime, IMHO.

The advice given in the CBS13 article about what to do if this happens to you is anything but comforting:

The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it’s better than the alternative.

Call the Feds, and maybe they won’t send you up the river. You’ll just lose your computer. Nice.

I’m all for fighting child porn, but this isn’t the way to do it. Unlike, say, arresting drug users or johns trolling for prostitutes, pursuing offenders like Matt White does nothing to hurt anyone in the kiddie porn industry economically, because the people getting convicted don’t seem to be paying for it.

All these laws do is to create headlines and attempt to convince the public the authorities are “combating” child porn when they’re really not.

Want to rid the Net of child porn? Great. Go after the people who create it and distribute it. Want to create a disincentive for downloading illegal porn? Fine. But the penalties for it shouldn’t exceed those for more violent and destructive crimes, like robbery or manslaughter. Just one man’s opinion.

Got a bone to pick with that? Do 20-year sentences for looking at pictures reduce incidents of child abuse? Post your thoughts, pro and con, below or email me: dan@dantynan.com.

This post did NOT originally appear on InfoWorld.

Image courtesy of Third Rail Music.

Tags: bad laws, child pornography, fbi, p2p