Just as there are signs of the "drug war" finally faltering, "child pornography" is primed to continue the erosion of generally held rights in service of a moral panic. This case itself is good news, but the everpresent problem is that the attackers are paid with public funds to try again and again until they succeed. Criminalizing mind altering substances seems downright practical compared to criminalizing patterns of bits.
This "yOu cAn't mAkE nUmBeRS iLlEgAl" thing is one of the most annoying memes I've ever encountered.
It's literally self defeating - you could just as easily say that he has no right to privacy for the contents of the harddrive because the contents of his harddrive is "jUsT aN iNtEgEr" and no integers are secret.
Some patterns of bits are clearly and rightfully illegal.
> This "yOu cAn't mAkE nUmBeRS iLlEgAl" thing is one of the most annoying memes I've ever encountered.
If you take any reference to a concrete phenomenon - the extreme difficulty of policing private data storage and communications - and pigeonhole it into a simplistic caricature, then it's no wonder you see that everywhere?
Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying but you appeared to be the one describing a complex situation as "criminalizing a pattern of bits". IMO it's a level of reduction below what is useful, kind of like arguing against verbal harassment laws as "criminalizing vibrations of air".
I wasn't making a moral argument about the uh, merits, of child pornography, but rather the practical effects of trying to police patterns of bits stored on private computers and transmitted between consensual peers. This level of complexity is relevant, as it describes the scope of the activity, and implies what is required to actually control it.
If most child pornography enthusiasts are caught due to having their computer fixed at Best Buy, have you actually criminalized viewing child pornography, or would it be more appropriate to say that you've criminalized patronizing Best Buy? As stated, that's obviously hyperbolic as bona fide CP enthusiasts are an extreme minority. But we can imagine tripping up innocent people with the letter of the law (eg botnets, teen sexting, unregistered pornography), as well as similar dynamics around much more common "patterns of bits" like say pirated Hollywood movies.
> you could just as easily say that he has no right to privacy for the contents of the harddrive because the contents of his harddrive is "jUsT aN iNtEgEr"
I would say that this is true, the police should be free to try to brute-force his password or crack the encryption used via some other method that does not involve forcing said person to act (such as disclosing his password). Although in said world the police would not have any reason to attempt to decrypt said data as it would be legal.
To play devil's advocate, aren't drugs just “patterns of molecules”? And can't patterns of bits be used for “mind-altering” purposes (broadly speaking, such as in this case)?
Devils advocate would be to engage with the core of an argument, rather than nitpicking my characterizations. The larger point there is that both of those actions don't themselves have any effect outside of some isolated context. This necessitates using invasive methods to police them and also uneven enforcement ultimately based on other circumstances. Each of these aspects causes terrible results that undermine the rule of law itself.
