Viewing child pornography online not a crime: New York court ruling

reply to post by boncho

When I was in high school, webcams were just becoming available. Now it's cell phones. Technically, back then, about half our female seniors (16-17) were guilty of producing and distributing CP. Every week people gathered around to hear which girl just took her clothes off. From news sources, it seems teenagers are doing it on cell phones now. (We never had cameras in our phones). I think the problem with a lot of laws, is that they are so open-ended, they fail to make a distinction between something that is harmless and something perpetrated by people with harmful intentions.

Yes so new york makes it okay for ALL pedophiles to view, not just protecting kids posting to their BF and GF on face book.

The rulling states IMAGES to CACHE or ok, so that means ALL pedophiles in new york are now free and clear to view and browse CP.

That means increased DEMAND, so yea in a perfect world they would get the Distribution, but thats hard when #s coming in from overseas.

THis needs more regulation and study before they say Images in Cache are not downloading CP...

I can't believe Im gona say this but this is ONE area they need more regulation and definitions in the law, NOT THIS free pass to seek out and view CP anytime you want.

What's the difference between kidnapping your children to profit off of them in beauty pageants and letting your children model in photos for profit? The mentality of finding children attractive is the same in both cases. One case it's legal and the other it's illegal.

reply to post by benrl


Sounds like you'd rather some innocent or relatively innocent people be railroaded than let a few pervs go free.

That's a fundamental difference among people. Some would rather everyone rot in prison just in case there was a murderer among them and others would rather everyone go free even if there was a murderer among them.

Unfortunately the system as it is is too broken with broken laws and broken application of laws and corrupt or simple error-prone human beings running the whole show and manipulated by a fickle public opinion machine so a perfect situation of everybody bad in cells and everybody good outside of cells will never happen.

Which brings us back to the reality at hand. Either we're willing to risk locking up some kid for sexting and tolerate incidents like peoples homes being raided for wifi trespassers and people getting locked up because their PC's were made zombie porn servers because we can't let it slide that somewhere there's a weirdo jacking it to a naked 15 year old or we press hard as hell on everyone all the time filing our prisons with otherwise non-violent offenders.

I believe you participated in this thread here not long ago: www.abovetopsecret.com...

The arguments are applicable here as well.

What should be done is, assuming every perv comes out of the woodwork to take advantage of this ruling, authorities should be watching, cataloging and tagging visitors to these boards as a "risk" and using that information to hopefully stop actual physical assaults.

reply to post by libertytoall


It's exactly like legalizing drugs. Don't prosecute the people taking them, prosecute the people selling or making them. Viewing child porn and distributing child porn are two entirely different animals. A viewer needs help, a distributor/maker needs a bullet.

/TOA

reply to post by thisguyrighthere

Sounds like you'd rather some innocent or relatively innocent people be railroaded than let a few pervs go free.

Id rather the state learn enough information on topic and media they are trying to regulate. A simple understanding of basic IT and computers and they could make informed intelligent laws, not broad stroke rulings that throw out the baby with the bath water.

It would be extremely simple to establish a pattern of use precedent in the law, ( you will never catch some people, they could use other WIFI and IP)

This would be akin to making DNA not admissible in court simply because they didn't understand some parts of it.

This ruling makes it so in new york you can go to a Pedophile IMG board, view the imgs (in cache and not save them to your HDD) and not be guilty of anything...

Oh right laws can't be common sense.

They need to change the wording of the actual ruling as they don't understand internet technology.

and Ill go ahead and state, Yes intentionally viewing CP should be illegal, Pedophiles include people who look at CP, not just people who actually create it.

The defense of one innocent FB user doesn't apply, the ruling was bunk because its an attempt to fix that problem in the wrong way.

A better rulling would be they have to PROVE INTENT, but thats not the rulling, the rulling is images in cache don't count.

Originally posted by benrl

A better rulling would be they have to PROVE INTENT, but thats not the rulling, the rulling is images in cache don't count.

Ideally. And I agree with you there's no reason that they cant prove intent. It isnt difficult at all to differentiate a page loading then closing immediately and never being loaded again versus a page that is loaded repeatedly and regularly for hours at a time.

Yet the law (as an entity) is amazingly stupid and too often approaches every problem with a hammer. Which in the end results in its own undoing as we see here with this ruling.

Which in turn results in our undoing as undoubtedly a knee-jerk reaction to this will be to give the law an even bigger hammer with which to swing.

Uhm, looking at something shouldn't be a crime. We don't have thought police.

Producing something should be a crime as there would be a victim, but that's it.

Same as the entrapment stings were some cop "poses" as a child. The entrapped person is charged with various crimes against a minor. There was no minor but a figment of an imagination, you know an actual victim, so there was no crime.

Another way to look at that is if I said I was going to kill Sherlock Holmes, said I had a the plan and went to a general place to find said Sherlock Holmes I'd not be guilty of attempted murder UNLESS I projected that figment onto a real person who I intended to kill as Sherlock Holmes. But if that Sherlock Holmes I was going to kill lived only in my mind... no victim = no crime.

The decision by the court is correct in the land of liberty. Or do we all think like Mein Kampf and take all liberty away in the name of child safety?

Derek

horrible. terrible. what is the benefit ?

extremely disappointing

reply to post by benrl

Here is what I don't understand. First of all, I do not see a crime in anything an Internet user sees on his/her browser by clicking links, or in their cache or history either. But something I have seen a lot is a person, a private individual has CP on their computer, gets arrested, and does hard time for it. While all the time, the ones who upload CP, and the Internet Servers that host CP, and never even investigated, much less prosecuted.
Now I know what you are thinking, the servers are in other countries, and there are no extradition treaty's to prosecute them, right? Well how about blocking the IP? Oh, that falls under Free Speech, doesn't it? Do you see how this works? The only ones ever prospected are American citizens who downloaded some photos and videos one lonely night.
For the Record here, I am against CP in anyway whatsoever, for any purpose or use whatsoever, be that sale, transfer, or conveyance.

reply to post by benrl


This is one of the stupidest things I have heard in a long time from a judge. I can sort of understand the "cache" by accident reasoning BUT then all the nutbars will just keep all their CP in cache. How lame is this. WTF is wrong with these people? Since big brother can read every bit ef'ing information that passes across the internet, they could have this problem wound up in a day. They can find the CP sites no problem, most of these @sshats in government are probably using them (Pentagon scandal, say what?). So it seems to me, they are trying to get some kind of entrapment going or as another poster said, new SOPA type laws to "protect the children." But this is government, they won't be protected, it's just another draconian measure based on an excuse they can get traction with, with the public. It's like big pharma, there's no money in the cure, just treat the symptoms.

Cheers - Dave

Originally posted by benrl
reply to post by boncho

 

No you do not, you don't just stumble on Child porn, even if your on 4chan your not going to end up with a cache full of CP.

And I just had an epiphany

This will cause the crack down on the internet, from the out cry of the rest of the country. This will be the reason they will usher in SOPA like Regulation on the internet.

"to protect the children."

Its a set up.

edit on 9-5-2012 by benrl because: (no reason given)

Good point benrl.

There's a benefit to the establishment, or they wouldn't have made it legal.

To add. It may be legal to view it. But it is still NOT legal to produce it. I can see a lot of newly relaxed peds getting careless, and inadvertently outing themselves, and others they are connected to, that produce this garbage.

Gonna just paste in here what I wrote in the other thread that was shut down regarding this...

The other thread that got started on this and then shut down had a user, Domo1, say...

"So lets say someone posted child pornography on ATS and you happened to view it. It gets stored on your computer and a tech reports it. Boom jail. This is a good ruling in my opinion."

THAT is the point of this ruling. No matter where you happen to go on the net, at any given moment, you could end up with something on your screen that you NEVER intended to get to or to be there, and, by the same token, end up in serious crap because of it.

Just because some internet troll decided to post some 12 year old kid in a bad pose on facebook, and you passed that picture by while browsing, BOOM, to jail you could go, because it is, according to all the laws that were, YOUR FAULT for it being there.

This is, in my opinion as well, a good ruling.

It is NOT making excuses for more of those sick people to do their deeds... it is to protect the kind of people that would have never intended to look for it, never LOOKED for it, and ended up with it in their face regardless, because of the nature of the net and dumb people that use it.

Get things straight, people. Sheesh. Knee jerking without thinking is not going to help "protect the children" and it's certainly not going to protect you from the next troll that decides to have fun posting dumb crap that you would never have looked for yourself.

It'd be like someone walking up to you as you stand on the subway, flashing a photograph at you of some naked kid, and you turn away in revulsion. Then some cop that saw the whole thing comes up to YOU, cuffs YOU and hauls you off to jail for looking at child pornography.

SAME DEAL HERE PEOPLE.


Look at the ruling. It's about INTENT. If a person actually voluntarily downloads the info/watches a vid/downloads a picture/etc, THEN IT IS INTENT.

Before this ruling, REGARDLESS OF INTENT, you go to jail, no collecting $200 and prepare to meet Bubba with an attitude.

The Image Board thing? That's just an excuse. It's obvious when looking through someone's system that intent was there, as opposed to an accidental run-in. This ruling will not protect that kind of person.

Monkey see, monkey do.

Man Sentenced To Probation In Child Trafficking Case

MADISON, Wis. -
A Verona man convicted of child trafficking was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years of probation and will avoid any additional prison time.

The case stems from July 2010, when Paul Ketring was arrested on child trafficking charges.

He was arrested after he offered to pay a prostitute if she found an 8-year-old girl to have sex with him.

As of Wednesday's sentencing hearing, Ketring had already served 18 months of a 7 1/2-year federal prison sentence.

But Dane County prosecutors argued that he needs more prison time.

"What he tried to do was to obtain for money an 8-year-old child who he could have sex with," said Mary Ellen Karst, assistant district attorney. "It got reported because he went to a prostitute who herself was so offended by the idea of a 8-year-old being used for this purpose that she flagged down a police officer."

Ketring was arrested at his Verona home, located across from an elementary school.

Authorities said child porn was found on Ketring's computer after his arrest, and he was convicted in federal court on child pornography charges.

www.channel3000.com...

By the way, meant to say, as well, that i agree this smells like a setup to a bigger ruling coming to me, too.

The knee-jerk reactions of people are already toppling my BS meter across the scale lol By the time this becomes BIG news, I can see it seriously polarizing things.

Good ruling, yep. All around the maypole.

The ruling makes sense. I don't want to be searching for "Green linoleum kitchen flooring" and end up with a 9 yr old performing a sex act on my screen, which means I've viewed child porn and had intent to view it, which I didn't.

This doesn't make New York a good place to be someone looking for child porn online. If anything it baits those who would want to view it to put too much stock in the power of this ruling, and keep "accidentally ending up with images of child pornography" in their browsing history.

I dare anyone who has intent to view child pornography to try and court danger by being a "serial accidental unintentional viewer of child pornography". See how long that lasts before the police come knocking at your door.

The point is that it isn't the fact that it exists, it is the fact that people make it.

There are still laws against creation and storage of such media but making it an infraction to just gaze upon something is quite ridiculous.

reply to post by benrl


No wonder the USA has gone to the pot!