> Some of this is welcome – the statement about making it a criminal offence to possess images depicting rape sounds a good idea on the face of it, for example, for such material is deeply offensive
Are you fucking kidding me? What's with this pseudo-shamanistic idea that viewing a picture of an act makes you a participant in it? Has everybody lost their mind?
A criminal offence. Stop making up thought crimes, you authoritarian zealots!
Agree completely, this jumped out and slapped me in the face. Even images of actual rape should not be illegal. For one thing, that would mean that, for instance, documenting a rape-in-progress that you are unable to stop would be a crime.
But even aside from that, why on earth should imagery of something be illegal? Producing rape images, sure, rape is already illegal (though sadly not always prosecuted as vigorously as it should be). But possessing an image of an illegal act is not the same as committing that act. Possessing images of a bank robbery, murder or other crime is not in any way akin to committing those crimes, and the Internet is full of videos of crimes being committed (many of which are hosted by large news organizations).
The narrative in the UK is that some recent official reports, following some specific nasty crimes, established that the offenders used 'extreme pornography', and went from mild criminal records to quite extreme acts.
I'm not going to support or detract from those conclusions, there is an argument to have there in both directions.
But at core, that's the reasoning that is being used to push anti porn laws here much stronger than say a year ago.
The opt-out blocking, which is related, is apparently to an extent driven by mumsnet, the Anonymous of the middle aged.
Personally, I see the whole thing as a way of getting the UK's favorite defense contractor's IP filtering/logging equipment into local telephone exchanges. The story is [see el reg] - UK.gov wanted centralized logging/filtering, but that wouldn't get through parliament, so instead they are putting laws in place to make ISPs fit them. The ISPs are getting paid to do this, but need to be made to for the sake of public relations. But making it about porn rather than enacting EU mandated data retention, and putting government specced DPI equipment in every exchange is much more palatable. But I'm reading a lot between the lines here.
If you were a rape victim, how would you feel knowing that images of your rape were being distributed around the internet and used as porn? In a situation like that, there's a clear victim protection argument for making distribution of such images illegal.
Now, that's a very different situation to either someone recording a crime for evidence which should obviously be legal (and I doubt anyone would want to hang on to the images/footage after providing it to the police anyway) or to actors enacting a fictional fantasy scene, which I feel should be legal with reasonable parental controls in place to stop minors accessing it. The law should be capable of differentiating between these situations, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
I agree that protecting victims is a noble goal, but I still don't think it is a criminal matter. If anything, victims should be able to sue people for distributing such materials, but even that brings up a troubling slippery slope.
The problem is that you end up censoring material because it offends someone. Never mind that in this case the offense is truly terrible and unquestionably legitimate, the principle is still the same. And if we censor something because one person is offended, how can we really say "no" to the next, gravely offended person who comes along? Where will it end?
If it's not illegal to distribute them, there's more of a black market incentive to produce them.
Also, your argument about a slippery slope with respect to limits on free speech is in the classical form of a "slippery slope fallacy" because you imply there is no reasonable middle ground without providing compelling evidence. Plenty of countries set limits on speech and function just fine - most or all of the G8 besides the US I believe. (And even the US in this instance.)
It's not a slippery slope to limit speech. It's a slippery slope to limit speech based on that speech being offensive to a person or group. There is plenty of evidence for this, just look at the Muslim world, or the world as hardline American Christians would like to see it. There are a million groups and individuals who are genuinely and actually offended by some bit of content that is currently legal. Open the floodgates just a little and they will all try to shove their way through.
I know you meant limits on hateful or offensive speech. However, for your slippery slope argument not to be a fallacy, you have to demonstrate that there is no possibility of a middle ground. But such a middle ground already exists, in just about every western democracy besides the US.
You can keep your footing on a slippery slope for awhile, but I personally believe that it is an unstable equilibrium in this case. I will admit, though, that in some sense all societies are just in temporary equilibrium, so maybe it's all a moot point. I still feel that it is better to remain firmly at the top of the hill rather than bet that you can keep your footing on the slope.
As for examples, France is in the news for the ban on certain Muslim attire and Turkey is apparently sliding toward theocracy. The argument I'm making is similar to the argument against letting people have all the guns they want (which of course the US does, to terrifying effect): if you don't give people the tools to commit violent acts easily, they will commit fewer violent acts.
This is a bit of a caricature, but the way I see it is there is a valley between two hills. The free speech guys are at the top of one hill, and the social conservatives are at the top of the other. Neither group realizes that the other group lives exclusively on the opposing hill, because to them, anybody they've ever met from the valley seems just like the people who live on the other hill. So they're both afraid of sliding down the slope into oblivion. (Imagine what will happen if we let our girls go to school! Imagine what will happen if we don't let people advocate genocide!) Meanwhile a lot of us are calling up from the valley and saying, "Hey, it's really pretty nice down here, and your hills don't seem that big anyway, so why don't you join us?"
Can you find a source that doesn't show the UK having 5-10 times more violent crime than the US, per capita? I couldn't believe the numbers at first, so I tried but couldn't find anything saying otherwise.
I think the UK is a great example that violent crime will happen despite restricting weapons.
Please cite an example of how the number of guns a US citizen can have creates a terrifying effect? Or did you mean simply that you are terrified of guns?
how can we really say "no" to the next, gravely offended person who comes along? Where will it end?
Y'know this is Europe, not USA. We already have decent laws (going back decades) about lots of things that would not pass the free speech thing in the USA (e.g. privacy law, hate speech law). Claiming slippery slope isn't really a persuasive argument.
Porn is fiction and there's no victim. A depiction of a real illegal act is not what you would call porn, it's snuff video perhaps, and distributing it is already or should be prohibited under different laws.
This is an unreasonably strong statement, and very likely untrue. There is no way for end-users of porn to reliably verify that performers in a specific video aren't under duress, aren't being trafficked, etc. Yes, if one knew that a crime was being committed, one could call it a crime, but this is effectively impossible for the vast majority of porn. At best one can hope that no one was harmed.
My model of Paul Graham assigns that a very low probability.
The parent's argument hinges on being able to clearly distinguish what people call porn from criminally-produced media. Essentially the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
My point is that it's basically impossible to do that, in practice. Sure one could imagine a conscientious porn consumer who only goes to certain trusted producers. Maybe that's what you're getting at with your PG reference?
I don't. But, as opposed to porn, in case of pg the incentive structure seems not to be there.
I remember reading some articles about sex trafficking and porn production, but would have to dig them up to find some actual data.
I somehow doubt porn industry works like IT; I don't think you get to dump your video studio because the formerly free sodas you used for refreshment after the act now cost $.50.
The ancillary crimes happen when the core product is criminalized; that is, you get drive-bys and chemical plant and pharmacy robberies when drug production is illegal such that the only way to compete in the drug world is to commit other crimes to defend your market and get raw materials.
When the product is legitimized, as happened with alcohol in the US in 1933, the criminal element moves out because it can't withstand the scrutiny a legitimate business is put under as a matter of course. Any legitimate brewing or distilling operation is being looked at from too many angles related to food regulations and taxes and OSHA and so on to be able to risk having undocumented workers make bathtub gin in a basement while killing off their competition.
From this, we can predict that outlawing porn, or making some kinds of porn illegal, will only serve to make the production of that porn a nastier, more illegal business which does more overall harm to society.
I understand your argument as it applies to drugs, but the problem when it's applied to porn is that while nobody is harmed by growing drugs, some people are harmed in some porn productions. So it's not an accurate analogy. As an extreme, do you believe it would be better if we could sell snuff films legally?
Innocent people's lives are ruined by drugs every day. One example off the top of my head is people coerced into being drug mules and end up getting caught by Customs. If (violent) porn is legal, the producers will be under much greater scrutiny than if they were forced in to the black market.
I'm not talking about violent porn, I'm talking about non-consensual porn that has no chance of becoming legal to produce. The drug mule problem would go away if we just legalized drugs completely, but the non-consent problem wouldn't go away if we legalized porn completely.
An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.
> I'm talking about non-consensual porn that has no chance of becoming legal to produce.
This can be replaced by simulations using acting and special effects. Porn is about the fantasy anyway.
> An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.
This can also be replaced by simulations, to some extent, but not like porn can be, because it's easier to tell fake ivory from fake porn, for example.
Ultimately, there will always be violence. Some of it will even be recorded for others. But outlawing stuff will just cause more and worse illegal acts to occur.
Yeah, I don't have nearly such a problem with simulations. You don't have to hurt somebody to make them, you're not embarrassing anybody by distributing them (it's typically illegal to distribute any private photograph that the subject does not want distributed), it's not at all clear that simulations increase the likelihood of acting stuff out in the real world, and they may even have a net positive effect over no porn at all. In my own experience with child sexual abuse, if the perpetrators had had access to simulated porn, it's quite reasonable to think that maybe there wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Although I believe that it's harder to detect fake ivory than it is to detect fake child porn, below a certain age.
And I also believe that legalizing videos of illegal acts encourages the illegal acts, provided the videos are willingly being made by the criminals and they are being used for entertainment as opposed to journalism or analysis. But this is really just a belief, and I do understand that you have the opposite belief.
I'd say traffickers are not victim of porn but victims of their producers.
It would be the same case for Nike shoes made by underage children, harvested donor parts masqueraded as ethical donations, fur mantles made with illegally hunted animals, black tuna fished from illegal waters etc. The product is not the problem, the process is to be condemned.
I understand there are some product more prone to abusive behaviors than others, and porn is not the industry with the cleanest image. But assigning the abuses on the products/industry itself is not looking at the root issues (the scumbags doing illegal/immoral things for money. They'd just do other scumbaggy things if porn wasn't worth it).
PS: for clarity, I think less stigma around porn would make it a healthier industry, and I believe there should be more checks to minimize the abuses we see today. It's unfortunate there's so many of them, and I wish porn could become a simple subset of entertainment contents in every way. For now game and anime porn would be the closest to this ideal, with people just doing their jobs in a professional matter with lesser social stigma.
Even focusing on real rape only it's a delicate question.
Perhaps the focus on movie recordings is misleading. It's the same issue as photography, and on the still image side it has been and still is discussed to death: should image of victims be banned ? What can be broadcasted and what can not ? Shouldn't a rape victim's identity be always protected ? Or is it OK if he/she agrees with the publication of convicting pieces ? Or what if he/she kills the assaulter afterwards ? Is it OK to have private shots of events other people don't want published ?
There's hundred of questions we could think of in the lapse of a conversation, just making 'films' illegal won't answer them all.
> Agree completely, this jumped out and slapped me in the face. Even images of actual rape should not be illegal. For one thing, that would mean that, for instance, documenting a rape-in-progress that you are unable to stop would be a crime.
Oh come on. Punching someone in the face is also a crime but I can happily punch a rapist committing the act. The law is not black and white and this sort of thinking only damages discourse.
I can't speak for the UK, but in the US punching someone that is committing an illegal act, however noble your intentions to interrupt or stop the act, doesn't give you immunity to any civil or criminal charges raised by whomever you assaulted. You might have a pretty good defense for your actions, but you're not immune and you're not on the "right" side of the law.
You misunderstand. uxp is referring to immunity from prosecution. The law you cite provides no such thing.
In obvious cases, the person may not be charged, or a judge may dismiss the charges at the outset, but some cases of legitimate self-defense will inevitably go to trial for a jury to determine whether the person acted in self-defense or not.
No, acting as if a law which is currently not even in draft form will stop rapes being reported due to some minor technicality is a ridiculous assumption.
For a start, even if this was the case, the CPS could not possibly bring forward a prosecution in the public interest. It's absurd on its face. Black and white thinking is usually fallacious and especially so here.
I wasn't speculating that rapes would go unreported. I was pointing out that laws often have unintended consequences. I would be much more worried about innocent or incidental witnesses being prosecuted over-zealously or maliciously.
For instance, until recently it was illegal to make an audio recording of another person without his or her express permission. These laws were put in place to prevent criminal "wiretaps" (for purposes of blackmail and the like). Of course every parent who recorded his daughter's dance recital was also committing a felony, but since no one was ever charged for that, nobody complained.
But then the police realized that if they wanted to prevent someone from recording their illegal or embarrassing activities they could arrest the person for illegally wiretapping them. This led to a string of arrests and prosecutions for doing nothing more than documenting police brutality, incompetence or corruption. The point here is that laws have a way of being misused and some laws are easier to misuse than others. Censorship laws are in this category, so special consideration should always be given to the possible unintended consequences when such laws are considered.
Perhaps over-zealous or malicious prosecution doesn't happen in the UK, this seems a bit far-fetched to me, but maybe it's true. It certainly happens in the US.
This is something the majority of HN has absolutely no experience with, so they either a) try to relate it to the tech industry (and fail, see most of the terrible analogies in this thread), or b) reduce it to the most blackest and whitest of situations (see everyone here saying that outlawing pictures of rape is the death of free speech.)
Of course, if 1 in 6 men were victims of an attempted or completed rape, and if 9 out of 10 victims of rape were men,[0] I'm sure the conversations here would be very different.
If the law made it illegal to posses images or video of an ACTUAL rape, I'd agree with it 100% (I hope this already is illegal). If it's a simulation made by two consenting adults, where's the harm? I find Justin Bieber to be "deeply offensive", why can't he be outlawed?
Even that opens up a lot of troubling possibilities when you get computers involved. Does scrolling /b/ and having the thumbnail of a picture that turns out to be an actual rape in your cache count as "possession?" If I email a bunch of rape porn to David Cameron, is he in "possession" of it? What if he downloads the attachment before realizing what it is? Ridiculous, sure - but what if it's not him but a suspect for other crimes or a political nuisance?
Think of this scenario - you own a warehouse, and have a security system installed, with cameras on all sides of the building. A couple of nights later, you get a call from the police - a rape was reported outside your building from the night before. Your security footage would be useful evidence, they say - so you hand it over, not bothering to consult a lawyer first. The next week, you accidentally cut off the county prosecutor driving to work, and he files charges for "possession of rape video", based on the footage you handed over to police. The law has no provision for Mens Rea, so you are quickly convicted and are now labelled a felon and sex offender.
And that's just one of the reasons you shouldn't ban the possession of images/videos of an illegal act.
I agree there's clearly room for nuance, but there always is. No law should ever be treated as black or white, that's why we have prosecutorial discretion, judges, and juries.
It would be great if the world actually worked like that even when someone's promotion or political career was on the line. Selective enforcement leads to cronyism and arbitrariness.
The harm is in convincing people that this is normal or reasonable. It's extremely easy online to find an echo chamber where virtually every post will agree with you. These exist for mens rights groups, anorexics, conspiracy theorists, practically every topic.
Rape porn is one of those areas where the lines between reality and fiction are blurred. It's highly unlikely someone accessing rape porn is doing it because they are aroused by the idea of simulated rape. By providing or permitting a similar echo chamber it is much easier for people to convince themselves their actions are perfectly acceptable.
That is the danger of almost any media that depicts this sort of behaviour. It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
> The harm is in convincing people that this is normal or reasonable. It's extremely easy online to find an echo chamber where virtually every post will agree with you. These exist for mens rights groups, anorexics, conspiracy theorists, practically every topic.
This is true as you say for a wide of variety of topics, but criminalizing those kinds of echo chambers is absolutely useless. Giving a person or agency the ability to criminalize those echo chambers in general creates a method of censorship backed by the law for any group of people.
> Rape porn is one of those areas where the lines between reality and fiction are blurred. It's highly unlikely someone accessing rape porn is doing it because they are aroused by the idea of simulated rape. By providing or permitting a similar echo chamber it is much easier for people to convince themselves their actions are perfectly acceptable.
This flies in the face of all statistical evidence we have. Violent crime rates are generally lowering even as violent media, including rape porn, is more accessible.
> That is the danger of almost any media that depicts this sort of behaviour. It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
I don't disagree. The media we watch and consume affects us as a society, but banning media because of the fact that it does so isn't a solution. Stopping rape won't happen just because you banned legal depictions of it.
> This is true as you say for a wide of variety of topics, but criminalizing those kinds of echo chambers is absolutely useless. Giving a person or agency the ability to criminalize those echo chambers in general creates a method of censorship backed by the law for any group of people.
In this case it's not the echo chambers that would be criminalised, but the intention is to block the media that may influence people to seek out these echo chambers. I'm not convinced it will work but that is at least the logic used.
> This flies in the face of all statistical evidence we have. Violent crime rates are generally lowering even as violent media, including rape porn, is more accessible.
There are many theories on this but I am aware of no well controlled study into violent pornography. If the research exists I would love to read it.
> I don't disagree. The media we watch and consume affects us as a society, but banning media because of the fact that it does so isn't a solution. Stopping rape won't happen just because you banned legal depictions of it.
I don't claim that it's a complete solution, but to deny it could solve problems at all requires evidence. I can understand the logic behind prohibiting it, and have seen some (relatively weak) evidence to support the idea that pornography can alter a young person's behaviour significantly based on them trying to emulate what they see as desirable.
> but to deny it could solve problems at all requires evidence
No, to make something illegal, you should have to prove that it is harmful. There is no proof that rape porn is harmful. You can't just throw out a hypothesis and then say "prove me wrong". That's not how science works, and it's not how law should either.
I don't see a reason this argument would apply to simulated rape but not simulated murder. A large number of people enjoy watching realistic simulated murder in movies, in TV, and in video games.
Your argument predicts that murder rates would rise after the arrival of the internet as people who enjoy simulated murder use online echo chambers to validate their belief that murder should be acceptable (it's highly unlikely that they are watching simulated murder for pleasure).
Except murder rates haven't risen since the arrival of the internet.
>The harm is in convincing people that this is normal or reasonable.
I'll assume that by "this" you mean rape fantasies. What if it is normal? Do you think there would still be harm in convincing people of that fact?
> It's extremely easy online to find an echo chamber where virtually every post will agree with you. These exist for mens rights groups, anorexics, conspiracy theorists, practically every topic.
So?
>Rape porn is one of those areas where the lines between reality and fiction are blurred.
Is it? How so? What about romance novels?
>It's highly unlikely someone accessing rape porn is doing it because they are aroused by the idea of simulated rape.
Not so fast. Are you assuming that anyone who would watch/read such a thing is trying to work up their nerve to commit/participate in a rape? Or that once they've seen a depiction that they'll be somehow compelled to go and rape someone?
Here is a quote from an article in Psychology Today: "Many men daydream about getting the girl by rescuing her from a dangerous situation--without the slightest wish to confront armed thugs, or be trapped in a fire on the 23rd floor." Thanks to speeder below for the link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201001/wom...
>By providing or permitting a similar echo chamber it is much easier for people to convince themselves their actions are perfectly acceptable.
Rapists may indeed seek justifications for their actions, or may wish to merely blame some external factor. Is it your opinion that suppressing such material would prevent the behavior? Can you support that opinion with evidence? How about the fact that rape has existed before pornography? Or that rape occurs in other social primates' groups (I'm assuming that no pornography exists for non-humans.)?
>That is the danger of almost any media that depicts this sort of behaviour.
Is there some proof that viewing or reading such material will cause previously ordinary people to become psychopath/rapists? Or is it merely popular to want to externalize blame for one's actions?
>It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
But you want to start stamping it out on the internet first?
> I'll assume that by "this" you mean rape fantasies. What if it is normal? Do you think there would still be harm in convincing people of that fact?
Certainly, rape is one of the most offensive crimes imaginable.
> So?
So the danger is on the Internet you can easily tailor your social circle to agree with you where such a thing would be impossible IRL.
> Is it? How so? What about romance novels?
Romance novels as far as I am aware do not involve crimes.
> Not so fast. Are you assuming that anyone who would watch/read such a thing is trying to work up their nerve to commit/participate in a rape? Or that once they've seen a depiction that they'll be somehow compelled to go and rape someone?
Neither, simply that their fantasy is one of rape, not pretending to rape. If it's just a fantasy then it's creepy but ok, the danger is when an echo chamber is formed and no dissenting voice exists.
> Is it your opinion that suppressing such material would prevent the behavior? Can you support that opinion with evidence? How about the fact that rape has existed before pornography?
No of course I don't believe that suppressing such material would prevent the behaviour. The fact is that many rapists are mentally ill individuals. My hope is that careful management can reduce the exposure these individuals have to reinforcement.
> Is there some proof that viewing or reading such material will cause previously ordinary people to become psychopath/rapists? Or is it merely popular to want to externalize blame for one's actions?
The danger is not to 'previously ordinary people'. The danger is that people with predispositions can be convinced that they are right in their beliefs or feelings. For example, that feminism is against the 'natural order'. That is quite a common one.
> But you want to start stamping it out on the internet first?
Not at all, if there existed such a place where people with rape fantasies could go to discuss them together I would support its closure and perhaps even the monitoring of its participants. It's a fine line to walk but I take issue with the idea that it's either all or nothing. It isn't, responsible measures can be taken without silencing dissent or isolating the vulnerable.
>It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
> the danger is when an echo chamber is formed and no dissenting voice exists.
Looking at the last two decades, I am willing to bet the freedom and diversity of the Internet is responsible for crushing far more dangerous "echo chambers." I am not sure how making a system less diverse or less free (as in speech) is a good thing. It is through diverse, open and free speech that echo chambers are canceled out. People searching out an "echo chamber" on the internet is no different than finding a church group or political group that exclusively prescribes to your views. History is filled with the negative effects of those social structures as well. The real "echo chamber" is a society that feels they know what is normal, appropriate and decent for everyone. It wasn't long ago that women were diagnosed with "female hysteria" and a bit longer since it was thought that whites and blacks couldn't interbreed.
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still."
- John Stuart Mill
>The danger is not to 'previously ordinary people'. The danger is that people with predispositions can be convinced that they are right in their beliefs or feelings.
This goes both ways. Someone predisposed to enjoy sex can be convinced that it is disgusting and wrong and there is something wrong with them. Someone with a predisposition to be open and trusting can be convinced that the whole of humanity is out to rape and murder them.
Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?"
- Joseph Henry Jackson
>Not at all, if there existed such a place where people with rape fantasies could go to discuss them together I would support its closure and perhaps even the monitoring of its participants.
Romance novels are full of depictions of rape. The "unwilling woman in an arranged marriage/kidnapped by the male love interest is convinced that said marriage/kidnapping is totally okay via amazing sex" is an extremely common trope in historical/fantasy romance novels (the trashy kind with Fabio on the cover).
>rape is one of the most offensive crimes imaginable.
No disagreement there, but I said "rape fantasy". Do you consider them the same thing?
>So the danger is on the Internet you can easily tailor your social circle to agree with you where such a thing would be impossible IRL.
What's that got to do with anything here in this thread? Are you suggesting that HN is an enclave of rapists and aspiring rapists?
>Romance novels as far as I am aware do not involve crimes.
I'm told they do offer depictions of crimes. What other crimes should the depiction of be illegal and censored on the internet?
>Neither, simply that their fantasy is one of rape, not pretending to rape.
Completely unproven. You may repeat it all you like but you've offered no evidence.
> If it's just a fantasy then it's creepy but ok,
If it is just a fantasy then it is by definition, not rape, not an intention to rape, or a crime.
> the danger is when an echo chamber is formed and no dissenting voice exists.
There is no "echo chamber" of rape advocates.
>No of course I don't believe that suppressing such material would prevent the behaviour.
Then what good can come of suppressing the material?
>The fact is that many rapists are mentally ill individuals. My hope is that careful management can reduce the exposure these individuals have to reinforcement.
Why? It is a terribly dangerous precedent to set for something that you just admitted would not prevent rape.
>The danger is not to 'previously ordinary people'. The danger is that people with predispositions can be convinced that they are right in their beliefs or feelings.
So, even though it would not prevent rape, you want the whole of society to have their internet censored and monitored so that a small fraction of mentally ill people cannot(assuming the censorship is effective) get from the internet what you perceive would be a validation of their supposed deviant beliefs?
> For example, that feminism is against the 'natural order'. That is quite a common one.
You want to also censor debate that disagrees with feminists?
> But you want to start stamping it out on the internet first?
>Not at all, if there existed such a place where people with rape fantasies could go to discuss them together.
Even if there was a place where women discussed their rape fantasies?
> I would support its closure and perhaps even the monitoring of its participants.
So you do, in fact want to start stamping out discussion of "deviant thought" on the internet. Should psychologists and therapists be required to report people who admit to having rape fantasies during counseling sessions, so the deviants can be monitored by their local police? Should they be marked with a tattoo (for everyone's safety)? Required to wear a tracking device?
> It's a fine line to walk but I take issue with the idea that it's either all or nothing. It isn't, responsible measures can be taken without silencing dissent or isolating the vulnerable.
Can you point to any past successes of censorship? Successful at either, preventing crime, or successful at not censoring unrelated content?
How is rape porn any different than watching violent movies? Both depict illegal acts. Why is one okay, but the other not? The act of rape is illegal, why isn't that enough?
There's quite a difference in degree isn't there? Violent movies typically feature death but briefly and without detail. Rape porn involves detailed and explicit humiliation of a single subject.
Movies of that nature would face the same uproar, and indeed have (the idea of 'snuff films')
Torture Porn - A splatter film or gore film is a sub-genre of horror film that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and graphic violence[1]
Some are even torture porn with explicitly detailed and violent rape scenes[2]. These are also planned to be banned if I am not mistaken.[3]
You could use the same argument to ban gay pride parades as being gay isn't normal (only about 10% of people are gays), but guess what? The law isn't designed to get you arrested if you do something that others don't want to do and it shouldn't be.
So stop giving a shit about where other people put their genitalia, unless it was not consensual.
My problem with this article is that the assumptions used are simply mirrors of his criticisms. He remarks that 'all they have' is a number of convictions but the arguments on the other side are also particularly weak.
Considering the film Avatar literally has what can only be considered an animal rape scene in it and very few people noticed and actually took children to watch it I don't think 'rape culture' is a particularly egregious term.
I'm no uberfeminist, but I can certainly see how pornography is extremely abusive in most cases. There's a reason there is a genre called 'porn for women' whos primary draw is that there's no gagging or slapping or facials. Sure some women enjoy these actions, but why the heck is it everywhere in porn?
> Considering the film Avatar literally has what can only be considered an animal rape scene
First, have you ever seen two animals have sex? It's almost always what humans would call rape. Second, the "animal rape" scene isn't any more rape than a human riding a horse is (I'm assuming you're referring to the Navi riding the dragon things). It depicted an activity that was normal for those species in their culture.
Coerced sex does occur but 'almost always' is completely wrong. Besides I am not talking about two animals mating, as you then go on to say, it is a scene where a sapient, intelligent being subjugates a 'lesser' creature using a sexual organ for their own goals. It's really not something that belongs in a film that was so widely promoted.
>it is a scene where a sapient, intelligent being subjugates a 'lesser' creature using a sexual organ for their own goals
If you take out the "sexual organ" (I partially disagree with that term as it is also used for the transfer of thoughts) how is this any different than a human riding a horse? In both situations you have a sapient, intelligent being subjugating a "lesser" creature for their own goals.
What's with this pseudo-shamanistic idea that viewing a picture of an act makes you a participant in it? Has everybody lost their mind?
A criminal offence. Stop making up thought crimes, you authoritarian zealots!
This is Europe. When it comes to "right to free speech" versus other rights, we don't have the dial set as far towards "free speech" as the USA.
Completely agree. I can't think of a legal precedent, but if the images are illegal I think it's safe to assume a video that includes that image is also, I'd argue worse but again I don't have a precedent to back that up. And there's plenty of legitimate art that can be described as video that includes rape, which isn't remotely reasonable to be banned.
He points one out himself, The Accused which I haven't seen. Obvious other examples are The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Game of Thrones and the BBC's own The White Queen. The BBC censored that programme compared to the Starz cut, and we still see a young girl get raped. None of them should be opt in as far as I'm concerned.
I don't understand what wording can be used here to avoid banning legitimate stuff and can't easily be worked around.
There will probably be something like a "reasonable person" test for obscenity. However, there is pornography that depicts rape without being actual rape. If the intention is to ban fetish porn, then it is a clear violation of freedom of speech. Whether that is constitutional in Britain is beyond me, since they seem to be much less absolute about free speech than in the U.S., but clearly have some protections as well.
In the U.S., there was a recent Supreme Court decision [1] throwing out a law intended to ban crush porn, in which a woman crushes a small animal to death with her feet. They ruled that it was over-broad and could outlaw, for instance, hunting videos. A new law was passed immediately after the decision that had more specific language, and it has not, to my knowledge, been tested in court yet. Meanwhile, the court has upheld bans on child porn.
It seems to me that there is no need to ban possession of images depicting actions that are already illegal, but courts seem to think it's OK in the U.S.
The difference between murder and manslaughter is primarily intent. I'm asking if the contents of the offenders mind mean nothing to him, what is the difference between murder and manslaughter? If you kill someone by accident when you were negligent is that the same as actively plotting and killing that person intentionally?
As far as I can tell, the "A criminal offence. Stop making up thought crimes, you authoritarian zealots!" comment didn't mean "don't include intent, that would be thoughtcrime" it meant "don't make viewing/possessing pictures illegal, because you can't do so without either making thoughtcrime or making every /b/ (or imgur roulette, omegle, etc) user a felon"
I appreciate that. My issue is with the term 'thought crime' as indeed the thoughts in your mind can determine whether or not you are charged with a crime at all. I don't see a problem with that and only the narrower definition of 'acts purely comprised of thought unconnected to physical actions' really holds up.
It's pretty clear to me that by "thought crime" he means "thinking about a crime without actually committing it (or even intending to)". Viewing a rape video doesn't mean you will rape, or even that you want to rape someone.
The issue isn't whether it matters with what the intent the act was commited, but whether the contents of a persons mind matters when he is doing no crime at all. The obvious answer is pretty simple: not at all.
1 Who will decide what counts as ‘pornography’, and how?
Pornography is everything that gives a politician, cleric or judge a boner.
2 Do you understand and acknowledge the difference between pornography, child abuse images and images depicting rape?
See number one.
3 Are you planning to make all pornography illegal?
Only until people find joy in it. When the junior anti sex league is ready we will unban it.
4 What about Page 3?
Don't mess with the freedom of the press to make and break politicians. Yet.
5 What else do you want to censor?
Everything but the truth. There will be special government agency to decide what the truth is today.
6 What happens when people ‘opt-in’?
I will ask daily mail to kindly label them child rapists. Also will suspend the UK libel law for the Daily mail. Then I will offer a ritual sacrifice to the daily mail shrine in my office so the deity will bring more votes to me.
7 What was that letter to the ISPs about?
[Redacted for national security concerns]
8 Are you going to get the ISPs to block Facebook?
Facebook? Book with faces. We hadn't had such things in 1695, haven't kept up with the recent trends.
9 How do you think your plans will go down with US internet companies?
I will delay the tax pressure and they will cave. Too much PITA to chase the money to fund health and education anyway.
10 Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood?
No but it will give is critical tools in being able to delay or outright prevent developing of critical thinking and free thoughts.
On a serious note - if the kid is able to learn about the Holocaust, WW2, Gulag,Wikipedia pages on torture or Greek mythology with pictures at age of 8 (they won't be censored) and not be scarred for ever, his/her mind is probably strong enough to bear the sight of a consenting women and men having sex few years later. Even if it is in a bit weirder ways.
>1 Who will decide what counts as ‘pornography’, and how?
>Pornography is everything that gives a politician, cleric or judge a boner.
So, everything then. The ruling classes have the most profound and perverse paraphilias one can imagine. A friend who is a PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to a Tory MP reports that he is a horse fancier, however prefers to be ridden than to ride.
Through one method or another, sex is still taboo. We can't talk openly about it. It's something that generally happens behind closed doors.
Making this filtering opt-out is a "soft ban". People will have to take that "uncomfortable", "shameful" step of "unbanning" it. If someone watches porn, they've gone to the trouble of getting it unbanned to feed their "filthy" minds.
That's the narrative behind the psychology of this ban being enforced.
The govt. will have a big list of people they can spy on to make sure they're not looking at anything they shouldn't be, and I hazard a guess that the govt. will change their mind on what's acceptable more rapidly now they have a handle on it.
"It is this need to conform to society and control the libido that leads to tension and disturbance in the individual, prompting the use of ego defenses to dissipate the psychic energy of these unmet and mostly unconscious needs into other forms."
Your locked door is your protection of privacy. This is akin to requiring people to register to look at your door to decide if they want to open it.
We all know how wonderful government registries are, because nobody has ever been unfairly prosecuted for sexual preferences and/or orientations, religion, race, etc...
He gave an interview on Woman's Hour where he sounded functionally illiterate. He sounded really confused about the idea of "where the filtering actually occurs", saying that all new computers (by the end of the year) would have to have this filter on, "ticked off by default" (meaning, I think, 'on' by default).
The phrase "tick off" is legitimate and means to put a mark next to, such as with a checklist. It isn't even esoteric AFAIK, it is just that "tick" for "check" is more of a British usage. (To be clear: not saying he isn't confused.)
Oh, yes, this is just a gently confusing inversion.
I was expecting him to say the filter would be "on" by default, because it will be. He's describing it as "off" by default - meaning "show me porn? [ ]" instead of "show me porn? [x]".
(Cultural note: 'ticked off' normally means 'unhappy' or 'dissatisfied'.)
Remember, the purpose of this proposed legislation is not to be implemented, or to achieve specific results; it's to curry favour with Conservative voters, and especially those who read the Daily Mail. It will be pushed through only to avoid the loss of face that would come from "giving in to porn".
(One of the major problems with the Blair years was this kind of closed loop between policy making and newspaper headlines; actual policy impact spewed out in all directions like scattered neutrons leaking from the policy reactor)
Since PCs are falling out of favor, you can bet that all locked-down non-PC devices will be gradually implementing "lawful and compliant" restrictions on user activity, and hefty surveillance "just in case."
Android devices will be no exception, and families/businesses will be encouraged to install "lawful and compliant" software on all new computers. Any vendors looking to get a foothold in the UK will be jumping on this bandwagon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Canonical tries to get in on the action too.
It would be good to see Google take steps, beyond publishing the AOSP repos, to build trust in their systems and services:
1. Publish build-able Android source code for as many products as possible and incentivize OEMs to publish their source code.
2. Support strong encryption for storage and communications, including friendly key exchange and key-signing features. E.g. NFC-enabled key signing in Android devices.
3. Open source client software, e.g. an open source GMail client for Android and desktop, to build trust in their crypto implementations.
The filtering is almost certainly applied on the ISP end, with a web interface to a control panel.
I have no idea what Cameron means when he says it will be on all new computers by the end of the year, but he mentioned iPads. I suspect it's just his confusion about client / server, and that the OS will have no effect.
Yeah, I suggested as much but loose politician lips can sink ships. Especially ignorant ones. A poorly drafted law can have unpredictable consequences and later be impossible to change with the "My opponent wants your kid to be sodomized on the internet by copyright pirate, terrorist, porn industry magnates, blasphemers,{scary moral panic subculture of the month}" argument.
Step 1: Introduce a system and infrastucture for handling online censorship. In the name of "think of the children".
Step 2: Promise with your hand on your heart that this new censorship-machine will never be used for antidemocratic or subsidiary reasons, like saving the governments ass next time we have some of those pesky leaks showing massive government violations going on.
There is no step 2 either, since they made no such claim. It's an inevitability that it will be used for nefarious purposes, so we can also expect Tor to receive quite a bit of attention since VPN services have lately been on the receiving end of unpleasant attention.
> It's an inevitability that it will be used for nefarious purposes
Is it? There's a system in place already for child porn images and while they've made some mistakes, they have yet to block anything political as far as I am aware.
Well, it's now being used to block access to thepiratebay and other torrent sites if I recall correctly. And of course it's now being expanded to ALL porn (though that part has an opt-out) and rape porn.
I'd call that a very clear example of mission creep.
The blocking of Newzbin was a court order, not an action taken by the Government.
It does seem that they want to regulate material 'advocating terrorism' though, which could easily be a slippery slope. Still, without evidence such an argument is fallacious.
I'd call a court order "action taken by the Government". It might not be action taken by the legislature, but it is still government mandated filtering using systems originally intended for child pornography.
I'm not sure it's really fair to say that any system which gets used by the courts is 'the Government'. Almost any system is open to abuse if it's not perfectly constructed, and the blame can lie nowhere else but 'the Government' in this case. It kinda ruins the ability to determine where the actual fault lies. Was it faulty ruling or was it badly drafted law?
Can anyone prove it is inevitable? One might be able to prove that it has always happened that way in the past. Or that all recent attempts ended up that way.
What kind of hell will be unleashed on the poor sap who gets his/her personal webserver blocked mistakenly for the excuse of "rape porn"? I expect he/she could find themselves in a similar situation to this poor guy: http://abarristerswife.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/exhibit-a-th...
Indeed it does, but after this case these powers were removed and in fact this case was used as a benchmark.
The point is that a 'slippery slope' argument is fallacious, as anything can be twisted into this, for example:
ISPs knowing the destination IP address of our traffic? That's just a precursor to them blocking all anti government speech and therefore it is a bad thing.
> Documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have shown that the government relies on vaguely worded provisions in Ripa to justify surveillance programmes such as Tempora.
> “I have a big problem because the business records part of the Patriot Act, which is what was used to justify this, was designed for specific investigations,” Sensenbrenner told Fox News on Friday.
I guess what I'm saying is that not all slippery slope arguments are wrong, particularly when there are examples showing the opposite has happened.
In particular, I'm arguing for a form of the precautionary principle: don't make sweeping changes to the law unless you've really restricted the scope of those changes to exactly what you want to happen. That doesn't seem to be the case in this. It seems more like:
I want to see the detailed metastudies that clearly suggest exposure to internet porn does significant damage to kids.
I also want to know why this has to be enforced by the nanny state, rather than provided for by already available software? Do the parents have no responsibility?
Actually, since this government likes to full-on lie about evidence [0] let's just wait until we have a chance to throw these demagogue idiots out.
I'd like to see said studies compare the damage done by exposure to porn to the damage done by exposure to sex-shaming religions. Such as the official state religion of the UK, Christianity.
If porn has to be banned because it damages kids, why does religion get a free pass?
I'm no expert, but that seems to be a report by a probably biased organisation, rather than a scientific metastudy looking at sufficient sample sizes and eliminating confounding factors. Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.
I'd be amazed if there was actual evidence that violence in the media actually contributed to real world violence even in children, as I thought this had already been covered at length with the various computer game scares.
Why didn't you just read the report instead of jumping to conclusions? In fact the evidence portion of this is based off over 100 different sources and appears to have been produced by 3 universities.
> Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.
Like I said, I'm no expert, so even if I had time to read the report (I don't) it isn't a scientific metastudy. It's a report, by a quite possibly (probably) biased organisation. So unless I had some special knowledge about the area (I don't) or time to review it in detail (nope) I don't know whether to trust it or not vs. a scentific metastudy.
A weary aside (I am not interested in arguing on the internet cf. http://xkcd.com/386/)
Your rudeness is totally uncalled for. If you excise that rude first sentence your post loses no value (in fact gains some.) I have a healthy skepticism when it comes to politically useful 'facts' like these and thus don't take government-commissioned reports even with many citations on face value. That doesn't deserve condescension.
When someone says "why don't you read XXX instead of jumping to conclusions", and it turns out you not only haven't read XXX but refuse to, the claim that their statement is rude becomes a little hollow.
He pointed out that the study did not appear to be a peer reviewed scientific study, and asked if this was really the case. He was told to read it himself, but reading the report yourself doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the review/publishing process for the report. (Of course since it's not in a scientific journal the chance it received peer review is pretty low.) Telling somebody to read something themselves may or may not be rude, but it certainly wasn't an answer to the question.
I know everybody on HN likes to think they are an expert in everything, but reading 'reports' by think tanks or other political institutions, even ones that cite scientific studies, is a good way to confirm your own biases, but not a necessarily a good way to educate yourself about contentious issues. If you are not familiar with the area of research you won't know what has been missed or ignored or proven unrepeatable or flawed. A peer reviewed meta-study would be much more likely to include the full cross section of available research.
You're probably right, but I think your point is orthogonal to mine. Being told to read something is insulting and rude if the presumption should be that you'd already read it before commenting, but that presumption vanishes when you militantly declaim that you shouldn't have to read things.
I'm biased because I sympathize with the "rude" commenter, in that I think discussions would be better on HN if people took more time to read linked sources and spent less time promoting their own preconceptions.
Also, if this community is as smart as it likes to think it is (no comment), it should be able to extract credible content from think-tank reports without succumbing to their intended conclusions.
You assume the rudeness is in being told to read it, rather than the tone of that. Actually it was the way he went about it, like I said, without that preface to his comment it loses no content and gains civility. There was no need, and my point stood as the kind parent suggests without my having read it. So I disagree, your point is not orthogonal.
I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.
I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.
Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?
Clearly here on hacker news criticising the blessed points of a high karma user like yourself is not permitted (it's costing me karma) so I ought to stop.
It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)
I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.
Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.
So any kind of tone is ok if you disagree with somebody? I mean I disagree with you here, so can I get condescending?
I didn't read it because a. I don't have time to read a 20 page report which I have no skill to assess as correct or otherwise (as I said repeatedly above), and b. my reading it, though it would satisfy you, wouldn't actually get me anywhere, since like I said, repeatedly, I don't actually know whether it's valid or not.
What tone? He said you should read something before arriving at conclusions about it. He didn't add "you moron" to the end of it. And, it turned out, you hadn't read it.
Every criticism stings. They sting me even when I'm confident that I'm right, and even though a Markov 'tptacek could probably get 1000 karma points pretty quickly on HN. Don't confuse the sting of a critical comment with a breach of etiquette.
Say 'Why didn't you just X before jumping to conclusions?' out loud and tell me it's not rude. It also presupposes that my only reasonable response would be to read the whole report and criticise its contents, whereas I suggest you can criticise it from the point of view of who it is written by and the fact it's not a scientific article. I also clearly stated that I just didn't know. Why that justified that kind of response I don't know.
You probably find it less rude as you clearly have more of an issue with people not reading things than the issue at hand. On that point (unless I'm mistaken of course), let me point out I am happy to read TFA and do so all the time, but a 20 page report which I am simply not going to be able to reasonably assess is not quite the same thing, is it?
Is probably just an attempt to get back some of his core voters that he managed to annoy with the whole gay marriage thing.
If/when it fails he can then point fingers at the ISPs and say that it is their fault it didn't happen, which is probably why he is claiming that he is fighting them from the outset as it fits the later narrative better and means he can scapegoat them when the time comes to minimise the splashback.
Where I'm more concerned on this topic is the inevitable presence of a non-curated list of those who voluntarily 'opted in' to having the porn faucet unplumbed.
The character assassinations and prospective employment undoings we've all read about over the past few years, due to (reasonably) tame publicly available information now may pale in comparison to the damage that could ensue if one were to be labelled a 'voluntary pornographer'.
I fear that what has historically been a 'right of passage' may in future be used to retrospectively punish those that can be traced back to such a compelling opt-in.
For those of us that can remember when porn wasn't a series of 0's and 1's, we took great delight in sneaking a peak at the 'forbidden' shows on pay-TV after Mom and Dad had gone to bed. We willingly exchanged a tasty sandwich during recess for a roughly torn page from the Hustler mag that little Johnny had smuggled from his older brother. And later, (0's and 1's) delighted in seeing that lush SERP, born from a 4 letter search phrase and the final 14.4k nod of KRSSHHHHHHH, Go for it, You're in!"
My right of passage was in the school music room, after hours with Drew Barrymore in 1994 - Lusciously posing for me on the cover December's Penthouse.
If Cameron had his way, that memory may now be a piece of data, just waiting to be exploited by a "hacker" collective who do it "for the lulz", or worse, a 1984 style release of public disclosure outing those who were once impure.
Scene opens in PM David Cameron's 10 Downing St. office.
PM: Shall we have tea first, or shall we look at the list? Have you fetched me the list?
Aide: What list?
PM: You know, the list. The list of people that was created when we made pornography filtering opt-out instead of opt-in, and those who opted in to pornography automatically registered themselves in our database in the act of doing so.
Aide: Oh, yes, sir, I have it right, here. It's this volume right here. It is, ahem, quite long.
PM: How long?
Aide: Quite.
PM: (more sternly) How long?
Aide: It is several thousand pages, sir.
PM: Ah. Ok. How very disappointing. Have you scanned the list?
Aide: I have.
PM: And who, might I ask, is it comprised of? Degenerates, criminals, ne'er-do-wells, perverts, thugs, know-nothings, liberals?
Aide: Sir, well...sir....
PM: Spit it out.
Aide: It seems everyone is on the list, sir.
PM: Everyone?
Aide: Yes. Everyone.
PM: Do you mean everyone in Liverpool?
Aide: I'm afraid I mean everyone in the UK, sir.
PM: That's 60 million people.
Aide: Indeed.
PM: That's nonsense. The Britons are more decent than that! Next you'll be telling me that the Queen herself is on the list!
Aide looks down at his feet.
Aide: Um.
PM: Oh for God's sake, sir. Don't tell me that the Queen is on the list!
Aide: I'm afraid she is.
PM: Wait. So you're telling me that, when I turned pornography filtering on by default nation-wide, that every single natural born citizen of the UK, including the Queen, chose to get to their computers, logged into the filtering system, and opted in to pornography?
Aide: That's what it seems like, sir. Er, well...there is one who is not on the list. UK tennis player and Wimbledon champion Andy Murray is not on the list. He is as pure as new-fallen snow.
PM: National treasure, that chap.
Aide. Indeed. But everyone else is on the list.
PM: Ballocks. Ah well, I tried. It was for the children, you see. Now if you'll excuse me I have some porn I mean, er, ahem, important reading I have to get to, privately.
It will be interesting to observe if this gets into law without being challenged.
UK public did not really care about "Tempora" etc. as far as i could see it. (i hope i am wrong) And systems like these are just the front door approval to cover the other systems.
They tried to implement a system like this in Germany and failed miserable but every society acts differently we are still up in arms against the spying programs. But in most countries this topic already vanished from mainstream media.
A government mandated crude filter applied by the ISPs by default, controllable by the account owner, would probably be acceptable to enough people in England for it to go through without much fuss.
But even with that there are obvious problems. Ann wants to turn the filter off, but Bob is the account owner, and Ann doesn't want Bob to know. Chas is their 15 year old child and he finds it trivially easy to bypass the filter.
And now Cameron has announced much wider plans, with many more flaws.
I'm annoyed and disturbed that Cameron is mixing in some measures against images of child sexual abuse and measures against normal pornography. They are very different problems[1] and should be dealt with very differently.
It would be great if image search engines could make reporting images to the Internet Watch Foundation[2] easier. That might go someway to appeasing the politicians. I doubt it would get much use. I search for a lot of images, every day, and I go down the long tail of the search, and I have never seen any images of child sexual abuse.
Perhaps search engines could provide some statistics of searches for certain words associated with child sexual abuse. This would have to be done carefully, but I'm not thinking of normal terms that every day people might use (someone doing research, or a child who has been abused) but some very specific terms that only people involved in trading images of child sexual abuse would know. I'm sure they have their own lingo.
[1] I say problem because that's the word they use, not because I think regular pornography is a problem.
[2] IWF are the regulators in the UK for this kind of thing and they coordinate with law enforcement world wide. http://www.iwf.org.uk/
As I always note in threads like this, this is not a problem of censorship or defining what is "pornography". These are all distractions from the real problem: a legalized violence employed by people calling themselves "government" to achieve their ends.
"Anti-porn law" in plain words means this: if you happen to provide an internet connection to some people, you will have to do what we say, or we will bring people with guns to make you to or give up your property (and maybe put you in jail too). We may ask for suggestions in form of "petitions" and "voting", but only within the imposed framework which you are not allowed to bypass. E.g. you are not allowed to vote for not sponsoring this whole mess by not paying your taxes. And even if you can, there's a mob rule: 50%+1 will overrule you.
When Apple censors porn on App Store, no one really cares because Apple does not point guns at people. You may use any other device, any other distribution platform. You can build one on your own. Apple only tries to be nice to people and attract customers voluntarily. This 180º opposite from how government operates. Government does not really try to please people, that's only for decoration. Underlying principle is to force everyone to obey.
'Family filter', what a crock of shit, similar to the crock of shit verdict that GCHQ's use of PRISM was deemed legal (by whom exactly?). We know you want to spy on us, don't use the bleeding hearts at mum's net to get your agenda passed.
Exactly. I thought we'd had the intelligent debates about censorship and the Internet over ten years ago!
Same old crap, wrapped in some slightly different packaging.
You could call a referendum on this one and get it through, just by asking a thinly veiled question like: 'Do you think our children should be protected from pornography?'. Just flash a picture of Jimmy Saville visiting a hospital while you ask it.
I feel this country is getting less and less progressive at every turn and u-turn.
Some furore over some phone hacking - remember that? Remember that eavesdropping is a bad, bad thing? Then a few months later, happily talk about eavesdropping/filtering the nation. Sickens me, even more than Mandy's mutterings.
Boxed into a corner - will be wiping ballot paper on arse at next election.
11. Did you know that there's this thing called HTTPS?
Blocking pornography can only be haphazardly done at the ISP level, because porn sites like most sites do not encrypt traffic by default. (I'm still not sure why this is, but it makes it much easier to find out if people are browsing porn at work.) When you make this decision, some porn sites will use HTTPS and the ISP won't know what content is being transmitted. Are you planning on creating a database of IP addresses which will be censored? What will you do about the likely false positives, or the generous number of IPv6 addresses now available?
He's not the only politician to have spouted off loudly about this stuff lately.
Each one of them seems to think that Google is the internet, and that if they don/t index something it doesn't exist. Each one of them also (intentionally?) conflates images of child abuse with images of consenting adults.
They come across as extremely ignorant. Unfortunately this isn't confined to a single party.
> 10 Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood?
question 10 is indeed the most important one, IMHO blocking porn on the internet is not going to stop kids to have access to adult content so it's really pointless unless you want to have a start point for something bigger (censorship)
With regards to "corrosion of childhood", I believe "access to adult content" is a bit of a red herring. More worryingly, kids are spending more time indoors, isolated (often on the Internet/games consoles, though that's missing the point).
As little as ten years ago, you'd generally see kids playing outdoors, in the parks and in the streets, often unsupervised. Now, thanks (I can only assume) to paedo-paranoia, parents are unwilling to allow their children to play outdoors at all, let alone unsupervised. I'd consider this to contribute more to the corrosion of childhood than "access to adult content" - especially since they'd likely have less of the latter if they spent more time being kids.
I think the delay in starting a family is also a big factor. Anecdotal evidence (including personal experience) suggests that older parents are more anxious about their kids since, from a purely biological perspective, replacing a lost one is no longer possible. That makes people paranoid about the dangers to the kids they have. The paedo-paranoia and (my pet peeve) endless stories of dead children in the media only go fuel parental anxiety further.
So if Cameron want to stop the "corrosion of childhood", a crackdown on media outlets eliciting emotional responses to boost readership would be a better place to start.
It's not just parents. My local school (~500 metres away) doesn't let students walk to and from school unaccompanied by an adult until they are eleven.
I'm gently sympathetic to the "let's help children avoid accidentally stumbling across hard core pornography". I don't think this is the right way to do it, and I don't think it's nearly as much of a problem as it used to be, although the various porn-video sites don't seem to require any age verification at all.
Google and DDG and others seem to be working hard to reduce the amount of pornographic content shown to people doing searches. (A Google image search for [vintage beef] largely returns the YouTuber and Minecraft player, and not vintage naked men. Even without filtering explicit results it's just a few naked men, and nothing "horrible".)
Email is a lot better than it used to be, I think. It would have been nice if the UK had implemented a real anti-spam law when we had the chance. Existing law means it's only illegal to show porn to people under 18 if you do so for the purpose of sexual gratification. (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/12)
This article doesn't make the distinction between "porn" and "illegal content" half clear enough. Porn is not illegal (and in my view not necessarily immoral) to make or to watch. Using child abuse arguments to legitimise legislation about porn is just disgusting.
Seriously, a pubic morals campaign under the banner of "think of the children" looks antiquated in the 21st century.
And if anything it will make abuse harder to identify and track down - instead of sharing online it will be shady deals out of the boot of a car. The NSA can't intercept that (or can they??).
Only in Great Britain. A stuffy, red faced PM whipping up a righteous moral panic because images of this awfully taboo and horrendous thing called human sexuality are freely available to all.
Is this the beginning of a return to the Victorian era, with it's forceful sexual repression and the insidious forms of abuse that came with it?
Sad. Not the actions of an enlightened, open society.
Tony Blair and friends had already kickstarted an attempt at restoring Victorian values. Didn't get very far, but bad ideas never die. I can understand how this sort of thing looks good to a politician, tbh.
Cost: zero.
Support from press: great (the Daily Mail has been campaigning on it for months already).
Support from senior citizens (i.e. people who actually get their ass to the ballot box every time): good.
Possibility of blowback in polite society: none (who's ever gonna discuss porn at dinner parties?).
Negatively affected in a direct way: nerds (don't move votes), kids (don't move votes -- in fact, if they protest, senior citizens will support it even more, so it's a win-win).
Economic benefit: likely net positive, since somebody will have to maintain these filters, these captive portals, these opt-in/opt-out forms, right?
What is not to like ? Ah yes, that "open society" thing. You see, this government is run by old money people; they were running the show when "open society" didn't even exist, and will likely keep running it for the foreseeable future. Openness and freedom were a necessary evil to win the Cold War. Now that XX century utopias have been dealt with, we can all go back to the old way of doing things, what what?
I think they have miscalculated completely. Everybody in the internet generation looks at porn, not only is it normal joking about it is and while one might not want to discuss this over the dinner table much politics have started in bars or over alcohol - here attempts to ban porn would be discussed and laughed over.
I find this article overly critical. Leaving the feasibility issues aside, I don't think most parents will just rely on this measure and totally forget about their own responsibilities. What, do people not teach their kids against taking drugs, just because they're illegal?
Also, assuming that the NSA will use the list to find terrorists or child pornographers is also ridiculous. If there's a porn site the ISP's keep track of (so they can "opt" it in the program), chances are that the site does not have illegal porn on it, so why the fuck would they care? Even if it could be used for public shaming, who the hell still cares about who watches and who doesn't watch porn?
The only legitimate complaints are those regarding feasibility, like what counts as porn (do sites that allow it, but are not really about it, count, like reddit? or to a lesser extent, as already mentioned in the article, facebook) but hell, might as well just ask why all politicians make promises they can't keep. The article would have been way more credible if it kept to sane arguments, rather than trying to throw around random criticisms like #2, which makes references to porn that is already illegal, or #3 and #4, which would obviously never come to fruition.
As for #10, which is a legitimate question, definitely not, but it's an aid towards it, with a significance in the long term that is yet to be discovered.
There are some of us the would love an ability to opt-out of certain parts of the internet. I understand the problem with censorship. But I would love the option to opt-out. Especially when children are involved.
The internet is an amazing source of information. But currently it is not safe to leave a child alone on the internet. Is there a way to keep every one happy?
This is going the slippery slope rabbit hole of censorship. They start with this "noble cause", then other things will also be censored that the politicians consider bad.
Why doesn't the ex politicians explain why they are on consultant payroll salaries from the big banks, why are they going to undemocratic Bilderberg group meetings with no public meeting agenda notes, why is CFR setting the agenda. What is the Trilateral commission planning, why are the members hand picked. Is it democratic? Why are new political leaders flown there on private jets? Why do we have central banks that central plan interest rates and ever increasing debts that make the bank owners richer for every round that goes around?
Why are we ordinary people being mass surveillanced in Stasi 2.0 fashion in the name of terror hunting?
The result was one of the biggest protests in Germany and a huge anti-censorship petition (signed by about 130,000 people). The law passed legislation nevertheless, but remained in a strange state between legislative and executive, because nobody dared to enforce this crappy law anymore. Some months later, the law was repealed - mostly unnoticed by press:
This makes a nice tagline, but the first amendment, like almost all of the other ones, has been eroded over time. For example, having to have a permit to protest in high traffic areas.
I'm sure it was hyperbole, but how many guns do you really need at the grocery store? If it's not a zombie apocalypse, my vote is on a maximum of one, assuming you are licensed to carry it, of course.
My sister's family computer has a porn filter on it. Seems like a great idea because they have small children. But here are some of the sites it blocked:
Don't sign an e-petition, write to your MP [1]. If nearly 8000 people got in touch with their MP about this, it woukd be the singular topic of the next Prime Minister's questions.
It is worth mentioning that the ban on images of rape is to bring the rest of the UK in line with an existing Scottish law.
Therefore anyone who sees this as a right-wing thing is clearly wrong as (people are frequently fond of saying) there are actually more Pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs. The Scottish Parliament is currently dominated by a left-wing nationalist party that wants to remove Scotland from the UK.
If ISPs in the UK have a shred of decency, I'm hoping they phrase the opt-in as "would you like the internet you pay good money for to be unfiltered?" as opposed to "would you like to be able to access pornography?". It gives the subscriber plausible deniability, and changes the conversation to being an empowerment versus a shame.
I'd support this two-tier scheme if, on the clean feed, we could do away with the semi-secret blacklist and the stupid anti-p2p blocks. By all means help to keep schools and libraries away from pr0n, but leave competent people alone.
>the statement about making it a criminal offence to possess images depicting rape sounds a good idea on the face of it
How does making images of consenting adults doing something completely legal sound like a good idea in any way?
"My position has always been that there's two types of people opposed to pornography: those who don't know what they're talking about, and those who don't know what they're missing."
- Larry Flynt
I'd love to be able to say that we'd never see this in the U.S., but there are certain former presidential candidates (mostly Republican) who I can easily imagine trying to implement something similar.
If pictures of bad crime and abuse are undesirable, then shouldn't we start with the worst crimes, like murder? And thus ban every depiction of murder?
Hardly a scandal, although that won't stop the Guardianistas tilting at their windmills. Besides, this censorship silliness has been going on for months.
The internet is HUGE. Detecting porn is a non-trivial task, but even if you solve it, you will still need insane infrastructure to crawl the internet and apply your magical algorithm to every image on every website.
Exactly and with all the massive cuts they're making because we spend far too much, is this really what they should be spending money on? The NHS is in shambles (visibly worse than under Labour), people having to pay for the extra room whilst their children are away fighting in Afghanistan and many pensioners much less than well off and the government wants to fund a porn blocking filter that's undoubtedly going to cost tonnes? I do not like my government.
1. You draw up a blocklist of offending domain names and IP addresses for child porn websites and get ISPs to block them
2. Force google not to return results for people searching for child porn.
Because politicians and their advisers really do seem to think it's that easy and that if it's not listed on google it's not on the internet. It's stunningly ignorant.
This move is to please middle England since they read all the headlines about '1/3 of kids addicted to porn' and stories about teenage rapists heavily implying porn made them that way.
Oh I know about cleanfeed, ever since the wikipedia debacle. The issue is that they think it actually solves anything!
I wish it was only one side of the house that was into this rubbish, but various Labour front-benchers have come out with very similar nonsense. Also the last labour government seemed to be full of "All Porn is Rape" style feminists * .
( * please note, I consider myself a feminist in as much as believe in absolute equality and free self determination for all humans, I just disagree with some aspects of some feminist philosophy. As do a lot of prominent feminists AFAICT)
Are you fucking kidding me? What's with this pseudo-shamanistic idea that viewing a picture of an act makes you a participant in it? Has everybody lost their mind?
A criminal offence. Stop making up thought crimes, you authoritarian zealots!