Too much money, and not enough to do with it? Wait... I might have gotten it wrong.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9920665-7.html

Apparently the esteemed Senator Biden has started a push to use custom software to monitor P2P networks across the nation, in an effort to stem the transfer of child pornography, and violent scenes of a sexual nature. Now I hate to rain on our idealistic parade here, but I think certain logistics are not being accounted for. Discounting the ludicrous amount of time and effort it would take to centralize any such observational effort, it still would cost in excess of one billion dollars to carry out. Unless I'm much mistaken, and the magical loan fairy does in fact exist, that would mean one billion of our tax dollars are being funneled into a nearly impossible attempt to control what sort of pornography we look at.
I'm also mildly disturbed that this is the man who is reviving a push to "sanitize" the internet. I quote, "(it is) pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation, simply by looking at file names." That right-click - rename function (for us PC users) is a doozy to be sure, but I'd figure that with our tech-savvy generation, most people would have figured out how to rename files. As innocent as "15yearold gangbang anal orgy" sounds, I still think that renaming would be among the priorities here.

At least he's not blaming the internet. "Blaming this problem on peer-to-peer innovation is like blaming the interstate highway system when someone uses it to transport drugs," he says. An astute observation, but naive, I feel. P2P is exactly what the name says - Peer-to-Peer. Direct connection, as much as is possible via the internet. In such circumstances, it is obvious that certain liberties will be taken. There is a lot of freedom on the internet, and such a direct connection makes it even harder to keep tabs on who is trading what sort of file. Plus, it is supposedly difficult to actually pin any crimes on such e-lawbreakers, if you will, because of inconsistencies in things like IP addresses. Tapping an individual computer is a legitimate plan, but then we run into those pesky privacy laws that have been the source of so much controversy. Even ignoring such laws, we run into the issue of logistics again. There is no way the U.S. Government has enough money or time to finance such a wide-spread culling of "uncleans". Honestly, don't we have better things to do with our time and money? I'm not suggesting we ignore child/violent pornography, but I don't see how stopping people from looking at pictures of it is going to solve the issue. We're grasping at the edges of the problem, while ignoring the source.

The definition of child pornography has gotten alarmingly vague recently, as well. Back in 2006, there was the intriguing case of Jeff Pierson (check end of entry for link), the photographer who took pictures of aspiring, under-18 models. To my unending amusement, the prosecutors actually acknowledged that at no point did Pierson actually take any photos of an unclothed, or even mostly-unclothed, minor. Instead, they suggested that the poses of his minors were "illegally provocative". One article in the New York Times went so far as to suggest that what Pierson was doing was the next stage of child exploitation. Never mind the nude movie scenes of Brooke Shields at 12, or nearly-naked Jodie Foster at 14. I'm trying to find the difference in the above scenarios. As sinful as those still-photos of fully-clothed children are, I'm still leaning towards the fully nude minor in movies as being the greater of two evils. Evidently I missed out on the "judging pornography" lessons somewhere along the line, but I digress. With the ruling in that case, the floodgates have been opened on the fine line between sexy and pornographic. Admittedly, the ruling occurred in Alabama, so there is no indication that other states would follow suit. With no nation-wide standard, I would imagine it falls upon individual districts, or maybe state governments, to decide. (That is how it sounds from the article) At that point, there would be no way to universally apply Senator Biden's "Fairplay" software to catch child pornographers.

Of course, all this fails to take into account the overseas child pornography. I'm sure France, Germany, and every other nation will be kind enough to respect our ill-planned crusade against child pornography, and restrict their ability to share files with us accordingly.




http://www.news.com/Federal-case-may-redefine-child-porn/2100-1030_3-6139524.html