"We see stuff that we don't like. Some of it is stuff that you wouldn't like. Some of it is stuff that paid lobbyists are telling us not to like. We don't understand the Internet, nor international law, and we want to do something about this stuff that we don't like. Some of that stuff is actually serious and causing harm to real people. Some of it is stuff that paid lobbyists claim is causing indirect harm (unemployment) to real people."
I'd like to see better, stronger, cleverer measures taken against images of child abuse; against the people who abuse children for those images; the people who make those images, or who share those images, or who distribute those images, and probably against people who possess[1] those images.
I'd like to think there's effective ways for international law enforcement to track people trading things like plutonium or other specialist radiological materials.
Many people would happily give up some freedoms to give law enforcement powers needed for those things.
So it's baffling to me that regulators point to movie piracy or mp3s or fake handbags. Most people don't care about fake rolex watches; they certainly don't want to allow weird privacy violating laws to be passed just to crack down on sellers of fake rolexes.
[1] I accept that more research is needed. If someone can show me excellent quality research that possession of images of child abuse reduces a person's risk of abusing a child in the real world then I guess possession becomes less problematic.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/30/child-por... There does seem to be some evidence to indicate that this is actually the case. However I don't think it should even be granted that just because a a digital item has the potential to be abhorrent to human sensibilities, this is adequate justification for the policing of all digital content. Even assuming child pornography is not, there could be other digital items within this category (images of snuff, detailed plans for wardrobe lab production of biohazardous / infectious diseases, whatever) that certainly are.
My objection isn't that there is zero potential for some degree of damage from those things, but that actually policing them is one hundred percent utterly impossible. All allowing legal enforcement agencies to try does is give them wide ranging fishing powers and the curtailment of civil liberties in the general populace. So not only do any attempts to actually accomplish anything in this area fail on principle, they simply give people in power a skeleton key for the abuse thereof by justification of whatever digital closet horror you can be manipulated by.
The mathematics of the situation is this; Digital content can be stored and transmitted completely privately and there can be no method by which this can ever be exposed. The consequences of this fact are limited to the transfer of knowledge only, from which nobody can directly be harmed.
Although I am an anarcho-capitalist so I even carry this theory over into the real world, at least in the real world the objection that real people can be directly physically hurt or killed by the absence of strong centralised authority to keep various boogeymen at bay has some basis in reality if you accept that is the best way to prevent those negative externalities.
Online, the worst that can happen is that you are mentally exposed to some deeply unpleasant things. And typically this is only in the case that you have searched for them extensively, so it appears to be the definition of a limited harm victimless crime.
I'd like to see better, stronger, cleverer measures taken against images of child abuse; against the people who abuse children for those images; the people who make those images, or who share those images, or who distribute those images, and probably against people who possess[1] those images.
I'd like to think there's effective ways for international law enforcement to track people trading things like plutonium or other specialist radiological materials.
Many people would happily give up some freedoms to give law enforcement powers needed for those things.
So it's baffling to me that regulators point to movie piracy or mp3s or fake handbags. Most people don't care about fake rolex watches; they certainly don't want to allow weird privacy violating laws to be passed just to crack down on sellers of fake rolexes.
[1] I accept that more research is needed. If someone can show me excellent quality research that possession of images of child abuse reduces a person's risk of abusing a child in the real world then I guess possession becomes less problematic.