With the massive vampire craze in the West, hasn’t a centuries old vampire eternally trapped in the non-aging body of a child been done yet in a novel or movie?
Maybe they’re just making examples of random people? You know, like they usually do (e.g., the Handley case)?
Makes you wonder when average folk are going to wake up and realize that these new child protection laws are out of control. I’m predicting we’re in for a public backlash sometime in the near future. While lolicon in comics can be marginalized, this case highlights that even your average Internet user is at risk. It’s a decision that’s easy to criticise without appearing to be a pedophile.
I agree with Narg - the FBI does not suddenly rock up at your door and accuse you of downloading ‘College Girls Gone Wild’* two years ago. There’s more to this story.
*See, while the FBI could have discovered, though monitoring of P2P services, that he downloaded said file, there is no way they could have known that it was CP unless they were the ones that put said data up for download to begin with. If you think about it, they don’t exactly have the resources to download every single thing on Limewire and go through it to check if it’s CP or not. Nobody has the time to do that.
I’d say that’s also why he pleaded guilty.
That’s how I’m looking at it too.
Handley was plain bad luck: he happened to be the 1 millionth winner of a Customs inspection. Then when the cops went to his house, they learn he collects lolicon. FBI pounced on it like a wild animal… but they didn’t know anything about it, or what to look for… it was just pure chance.
But with this guy, they knew EXACTLY what they wanted: digital child porn. The FBI seized his computer and spend all day and night to just find child porn. Why? Usually when the FBI do a random bust on people, they rummage through the whole house and interrogate the neighbors - like they did with Handley. In this one scenario, they just wanted the computer.
He had to have hit a tripwire or fell into a trap. If it was totally accidental, then why not accuse the FBI of doing a witch hunt on an innocent man? Plus the FBI don’t go after every person who just hits a trap site ¬ñ if a visitor hits the URL then immediately kills his browser and never returns again, they don’t instantly strike. People do make types in the address bar. It’s when you keep going back or stay on the site and download stuff, that gets them a case – they need to prove you’re a sex offender.
Plus why two years ago? I don’t think sting operations for Mafia Godfathers take that long. With Handley they went in the very next day (same for that Virginia pedo case). On top of that: I don’t think there’s a charge about software piracy or copyright infringement… that’s odd too. It’s just all so weird.
EDIT
Also if that College Girls Gone Wild file was an FBI trap – it smacks of being illegal. They lied about what the file contained. Law enforcement can’t do that: you can setup anyone for anything with that kind of strategy. If it was called 6 Year-Olds Gone Wild, then that’s different.
Well, there was Claudia quite a while back…
(Kirsten Dunst, Interview with the Vampire. Including a kiss with Brad Pitt. She was 10. He was 28.)
Yes, quite. It’s very much entrapment - heck, it’s worse than entrapment. This is why I would have liked to know the whole story. I’m not saying the FBI did break the law in a completely random, immoral way to punish a random person for downloading porn, but honestly, I don’t see what the alternative is. There is literally no other way they could have known. At least, that’s the interpretation I get from reading about it - which is why I believe there’s more to the story than that.
Everyone else, if you’re really worried about this, look into TrueCrypt and deniable encryption.
Damn, papillon beat me to it. I immediately thought of the same thing in response to what Narg asked.
Whatever the specifics of the case, note the FBI’s overall stance:
You should report any and every instance of accidental viewing of child pornography, with the likelihood that your computer will be confiscated.
Um, yeah…
I have no way of knowing if this is true or not, but according to this the actual physical magazines don’t exist for CP anymore. They did in the 70’s for awhile, apparently, back when it was legal (which is disturbing). But nowadays, the only ads and so forth in physical magazines, are put there as schmuck bait. It’s not entrapment: entrapment is the cop convinces you to do something you otherwise would never do. A fake ad (“Call here for illegal activity”) that connects you to the police is only entrapment if it falsely claims the activity is legal.
It would not surprise me at all to learn the FBI is engaging in comparable activity online. Honeypots are an easy way to get solid leads. And frankly, they should be. The real kind of CP is forbidden for a reason, and the lack of ability to police the Internet really at all means that it’s far too easy to distribute. If you can make it stop being casual and brazen, you can heavily curtail it, and that is a good thing.
So what happened in this case? I’ve seen speculation that the sequence of events went down like this.
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2 years ago, guy downloads the images in question (that had been deleted and theoretically wiped).
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He deletes and tries to erase the images.
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Much more recently, he tripped one of these FBI honeypot operations - for a different image. That is, the FBI’s honeypot and the 2-year-old image are distinct.
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Therefore, “it was an accident” would be a perfectly valid defense to the FBI’s trap image, but then they find the 2-year-old image that wasn’t properly deleted.
This makes sense. If the FBI got interested because he ended up caught in a honeypot, then the 2-year-old image is unlikely to have been the honeypot. 2 years is a very long time to sit on the lead. This supposed honepot probably got tripped in the recent past. If this is what happened, then entrapment doesn’t really come into play, because the image had nothing to do with the FBI. So it depends.
This issue came up while I was talking with a friend (who’s a girl). To my surprise, she defended the law’s right to prosecute accidental viewing of child porn (her argument being that the trial would sort out whether it was accidental or not). To my amazement, when confronted with the Handley case, she went on to affirm that obscene drawings of fictional children should also be illegal. I threw every argument I knew at her; she was convinced that only pedophiles would look at lolicon, and that exposing oneself to lolicon would lead one to rape children–despite me pointing out that there was no solid proof to back up that claim (she responded with a case where a child rapist “admitted” that he was influenced by such drawings). She refused to acknowledge that correlations of child rape with viewing of child porn / lolicon were essentially meaningless (as correlation does not equal causation). Furthermore, she claimed that “protecting the children” was worth the loss of freedom of speech, again citing that there’s no reason to look at lolicon unless you’re a pedophile anyway (and if even one child was protected, the blanket ban would be worth it). She scoffed at my “the default should always be liberty” argument, saying that using the harm principle as a universal legal standard was far too simplistic, and that I was impossibly trying to pigeon-hole the world into a black-and-white view. She went on to claim that there was much “free speech” that wasn’t worth defending (e.g., hate speech), and that such speech should be illegal as well if there was any potential merit at all to banning it. She also saw no problem with the use of law to legislate morality.
We’re talking about an otherwise intelligent person here, working towards her PhD, with no particular biases. A rather liberal person as well that’s pro gun control. This is the dogma we’re up against.
Has this friend of yours studied any history? Has she seen what happens when people willingly discard freedoms for what they believe is the greater good? Has she seen the state of countries where people don’t have free speech? Heck, has she even heard this quote from Benjamin Franklin:
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
This friend of yours is in for a very rude awakening if her reply is something along the lines of “Well all that was from back then, we’re smarter than that now” or “We’re more civilized than those people are”. Anyone who thinks that should read “The Wave” by Todd Strasser.
Out of curiosity, how is ‘pro gun control’ a liberal view? Seems pretty right wing to me. Restricting personal ownership of guns, restricting personal ownership of loli eroge… I don’t really see how it’s that far a leap of faith to assume there would be people that would believe both of those to be a good idea. They’re both about restricting personal liberties entirely because they MIGHT threaten the comfort/safety of others.
EDIT: Probably don’t need to state the obvious here, but this post should not be interpreted as being for or against gun control, because I’m neither =P
It’s tradition, not logic, that governs politics.
The right wing believes in small governments and the government keeping their nose out of your business. Unless your business is having gay sex, or looking at porn, or smoking pot, or anything that conservatives think is “icky”. The conservative view tends to be “Whatever a Christian Patriarch thinks is right.” Don’t mess with me and what I do with my family, leave my money and my guns alone, punish all those sinners out there.
Actual libertarians, as I understand it, are more on the “Leave EVERYBODY alone and mind your own business” side of things. Hardcore ones don’t even believe in police.
Liberals have more of a “take care of everyone” ethos and therefore a tendency to meddle and try to regulate freedoms for the greater good. If something is badly wrong in society, the government should try to fix it. Of course, they don’t always get it right with what needs to be fixed. So for the moment, they think that heavily restricting access to guns may cut down on murders, etc. (There’s some evidence in Canada, as I understand it, that restricting ownership of certain kinds of guns drastically reduces the rates of murdering your wife.) However, if they banned all guns and it didn’t actually do any good and then they were approached from the angle of more FREEDOM = greater good, they could change course again.
Problem with the Canada/gun example… England did ban handguns… gun crime skyrocketed (I think 349% was the number).
I tire of gov’t and people in general trying to stifle freedom because “someone might get hurt”… I mean come-on! I can kill myself by simply tripping over my own two feet. Does that mean I should cut off both my legs?!?
Yes I just straw-manned the argument… well, not really because that is basically what their argument is. So HAH! Victory is mine! :twisted:
England’s gun crime is incredibly low. Like, someone gets shot in one town and it’s national news for a week. While I’m not completely familiar with the stats relating to England banning handguns, I know that some anti-gun-control sites have been seen referring to “skyrocketing” figures in certain areas when they mean that the number of shootings went from 1 to 2. Yes, shootings doubled, but the crime was already so rare that it was statistically insignificant. Other sites list “gun crime” as having gone way up while overlooking the fact that since having a gun was now a crime, anyone caught with one automatically increased the figures!
Which is to say, quoting random stats is highly unreliable without being able to interrogate the sources. 
Which is why I phrased the Canada thing the way I did - ONE study showed that ONE kind of crime went down and this is the reason why people tend to FEEL that restricting guns is good for safety. It may or may not actually be the case.
I personally suspect that it’s not owning the gun that’s the problem, it’s being an idiot with the gun. Therefore I’m more in favor of things like waiting periods, safety classes, and banning the obviously insane from buying guns rather than banning everyone. But that’s just me.
I think I should have the right to own a tactical nuclear warhead. I mean no one would rob me, if they knew I had the capacity to annihilate an entire city block. Hell… let’s give everyone a tactical nuke. Crime will drop to 0% one way or another. 
A terrorist might rob you.
Dark_Shiki, ask your friend if she thinks that we should all go to jail. After all, every single person in the world is a potential criminal. Every single person could rape a child tomorrow. Maybe we should all go to jail - just in case? If she says “yes” - ask her to set an example by going to jail herself.
No SANE person would dare rob you. Unfortunately you vastly underestimate all the insane people in the world… Not to mention all the supposedly sane people that will steal and sell anything for money…
What if they stole your nuke? =P
Mutual assured destruction. It’s worked out so far, hasn’t it? :roll: