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I like how you are framing your argument to suggest viewing CP reduces the amount of sexual abuse

I don't need to suggest it studies prove it

while discounting the fact that the children in the CP are, in fact, being abused.

Cerainly many of the children depicted in CP are depicted being abused. However, unless you believe in photographs having magical properties, you must admit that the following logic holds:

A. Pictures of Jews being tortured and killed during the holocaust depict genocide
B. Viewing pictures of the holocaust is not the same as causing genocide to happen

We can reduce these sentences:

A. Pictures of bad thing happening depict bad things
B. Viewing pictures of bad things happening is not doing bad things

which in turn leads to:

A. Pictures of children being molested depict child abuse
B. Viewing pictures of children being molested is not the same as abusing children

I would love for you to give a reasonable and intelligent explanation of why this argument by analogy doesn't work, so far nobody has been able to. I am left to conclude that they think pictures of molestation are magic, whereas pictures of other crimes are not.

You think lawmakers in the US are just going to write those kids off as acceptable losses because you read a research study that claims your ability to view the material makes you less likely to commit the offense yourself? That will NEVER happen in the US. Keep trying to justify yourself, and enjoy the prison rape when you get caught. I hear they give extra attention to the pedos.

Well actually you are certainly wrong that this will never happen in the US considering it is already legal to view CP under New York State law:

http://jonathanturley.org/2012/05/15/new-yorks-highest-court-rules-that-it-is-not-unlawful-to-view-online-child-pornography/

The New York Court of Appeals has released an important decision that viewing online child pornography is not illegal under New York law. The ruling has triggered an outcry and demands for legislative reforms. However, the opinion is worth reading and raises a broader issue on the required level of intent and knowledge for these crimes.


The decision will result in the reversal of two dozen cases involving online pornography. The case before the Court involved former Marist College professor of public administration James D. Kent, 65. Kent who was convicted on 136 counts of procuring and possessing child pornography in 2009. He was sentenced to one to three years.

The case raises an issue that we have discussed previously on how prosecutors pile on counts of child pornography based on each image. However, these cases often involve the download of hundreds or thousands of images in a single click. I have seen cases where a couple of downloads involved a few pictures found to be child pornography and led to charges. In Kent’s case, he was found to have downloaded and then deleted files containing images of children.

Appellate Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote a majority opinion for four of the six judges.

Advocates are calling the ruling an “outrage” and the “decriminalizing” of child pornography. However, Ciparick’s decision simply emphasized conventional notions of scienter: “Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law.”

The case did not involve just a couple of images, making the choice of this appeal more interesting. However, Kent insisted that he was “doing research” on child pornography:

    The allocated space on defendant’s hard drive also contained a “My Documents” folder with subfolders labeled “cdocs” and another labeled “work,” and an additional folder labeled “JK.” The “cdocs” subfolder contained approximately 13,000 saved images of female children, whom Investigator Friedman estimated to be 8 or 9 years old, dressed in lingerie or bathing suits and many with their legs spread open. The “work” subfolder contained an additional 17,000 saved images of female children, some organized into further subfolders named for a particular child. The JK folder held a file labeled “porndef.pb,” which contained a document that included the text of four messages dated between June 1999 and July 2000 and directed to the unidentified recipient “P.B.”1 The messages apparently relate to a potential research project on the regulation of child pornography and include comments such as “sooner or later someone at this college is going to wonder why I keep looking at porno sites.” A final message dated July 11, 2001 states:

    “Well, this last batch pretty much tears it. While, as somebody’s father, I’m pretty appalled by this stuff, I also don’t want to get arrested for having it. So let’s do this—if this is a legitimate research project, let’s write it up and tell the deans (and preferably also the cops) what we’re doing and why. Otherwise, let’s drop it in the most pronto possible fashion.
    “I don’t even think I can mail the disk to you, or anyone else, without committing a separate crime. So I’ll probably just go ahead and wipe them. You have the URL’s if you want to pursue it.
    “See you sooner or later, no doubt. Kent.”

The Court however was concerned (as are many civil libertarians) with how courts have been treating access and downloading of images as proof of intent. With surfing on the web, the concern is that images can be accessed without knowing before hand that they are child pornography. This may not be the strongest such case for the defense but the concern is a valid one:

    Like the federal courts to address the issue, we agree that where no evidence shows defendant was aware of the presence of the cached files, such files cannot underlie a prosecution for promotion or possession. This is necessarily so because a defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists (see United States v Kuchinski, 469 F3d 853, 863 [2006] [to prosecute a defendant who lacks knowledge about the cache for possession of files stored therein "turns abysmal ignorance into knowledge and a less than valetudinarian grasp into dominion and control"]).

    However, cached images can serve as evidence of defendant’s prior viewing of images that were, at one time, resident on his computer screen. Such evidence, like a pattern of browsing for child pornography, is relevant to the mens rea of both crimes by showing that a defendant did not inadvertently access an illicit image or site or was not mistaken as to its content.

    Nonetheless, that such images were simply viewed, and that defendant had the theoretical capacity to exercise control over them during the time they were resident on the screen, is not enough to constitute their procurement or possession. We do not agree that “purposefully making [child pornography] appear on the computer screen — for however long the defendant elects to view the image — itself constitutes knowing control” . . . Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that

The question comes down to whether there was proven intent and proven possession in the case. In the concurrence by Judge Smith, the dangers of a broad interpretation of the criminal law (as advocated by another judge) was discussed:

    Judge Graffeo Click for Enhanced Coverage Linking Searches argues, in substance, that we can best effectuate the Legislature’s intention by reading the statutes expansively, to include as many “consumers” as the statutory language can reasonably be interpreted to permit. I do not agree.

    Under Judge Graffeo Click for Enhanced Coverage Linking Searches’s reading, someone who does no more than click on a link for the purpose of looking at a pornographic picture for free — someone [*22] who has never interacted with a child victim, has never copied, downloaded or saved a pornographic picture of a child, and has never put a penny in the pocket of a child pornographer — is subject to up to seven years in prison for a first offense (see Penal Law § 70.00 [2] [d]). This is surely a stringent punishment for someone whom many would think more pathetic than evil. Nor can we safely assume that bringing as many consumers as possible within the reach of the law is the most effective way to lessen or eliminate the trade: A policy of draconian enforcement directed at the most minor and peripheral of users is perhaps no more likely to eliminate child pornography than a similar policy would be to eliminate illegal drugs.

One can certainly argue both sides of this question, but the vitriol and hatred directed at these judges is unwarranted and unfair. These judges are not pro-child pornography any more than the vast majority of citizens. They are attempting to maintain basic requirements of intent and proof in an area where politicians have been competing to show that they are the toughest on child porn. These are legitimate concerns raised by these judges, who voted to reverse despite the considerable public pressures and passions.

Do you think rape porn makes you less likely to rape someone? Nope.

Do you think that people who have rape fantasies are interested in actually raping others, or in being raped themselves? That seems unlikely considering rape is the third most popular female fantasy: http://www.care2.com/causes/rape-ranked-as-third-most-popular-sexual-fantasy-for-women.html

You are watching it because it sexually excites you. Whether or not you act on that impulse isn't related to your ability to find the porn on the internet and beat off to it. Your logic is flawed. This is all nothing new. Child molesters will ALWAYS try to justify themselves to normal people and we will keep locking you up in prison. I am sure you feel justified talking about it on a site like this since drugs are illegal too, but there is a big difference in an adult making a choice to take a drug and an adult raping a defenseless child.

Do you think 50% of the world is not normal? Because in 50% of the world PEOPLE DO NOT GET LOCKED UP for looking at CP or even downloading it. In 50% you can download it legally, in over 50% you can view it on the internet if you don't save a collection of it.

No you are just a complete moron if you think that CP will be legal in 200 years. You are a sick child rapist because guys that talk about CP view it and most likely make every attempt they can to have sexual contact with children. You saying that viewing child porn makes a pedo less likely to rape children is about the same as saying people who view pictures of drugs don't actually buy drugs and use them. You aren't smart, and your argument is the most ignorant thing I have read in quite some time. That's all I have to say on this. Pedos belong in jail or 6 feet under.

I don't need to be smart other people already did the research for me:

http://phys.org/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-linked-sex.html

Could making child pornography legal lead to lower rates of child sex abuse? It could well do, according to a new study by Milton Diamond, from the University of Hawaii, and colleagues.

Results from the Czech Republic showed, as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography. And most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan. Their findings are published online today in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.

Diamond and team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes in the Czech Republic as it transitioned from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to a situation where the material was decriminalized. Pornography was strictly prohibited between 1948 and 1989. The ban was lifted with the country's transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offense.

The researchers monitored the number of sex-related crimes from Ministry of Interior records – rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, and child sex abuse in particular – for 15 years during the ban and 18 years after it was lifted.

Most significantly, they found that the number of reported cases of child sex abuse dropped markedly immediately after the ban on sexually explicit materials was lifted in 1989. In both Denmark and Japan, the situation is similar: Child sex abuse was much lower than it was when availability of child pornography was restricted.

Other results showed that, overall, there was no increase in reported sex-related crimes generally since the legalization of pornography. Interestingly, whereas the number of sex-related crimes fell significantly after 1989, the number of other societal crimes – murder, assault, and robbery – rose significantly.

Dozens of studies, dozens of countries, always the same result: making it illegal to view CP leads to significantly more children being molested.

I am a sick child rapist because I can identify trends and extrapolate them to the future?

So in another thread people did not like my comment that CP possession is legal in half of the world and will be decriminalized in the other half within the next few hundred years. So I don't want to clutter a bunch of random threads up with these never ending debates, and have decided to make one thread to address the topic for the rest of eternity. In the future when threads go in this direction, I will point people to this one. I also am sick of making the same points every single time, and an authoritative thread on this is clearly needed since we have had about fifty in the past and many threads have derailed into people debating about this (mostly debating with me, though they usually start it!).

So here we go:

Quote from: kmfkewm on August 08, 2013, 08:27 am

Child porn possession is legal in half of the world and probably will be legalized in the other half of the world within the next few hundred years.

You can't be serious! One of the most ridiculous statements I've ever seen posted. You can do what you do kmfkewn, that's your choice, but to suggest that child pornography possession will be legalized in the remaining 50% of countries where it's currently illegal, over a period of a few hundred years, is outrageous and unconscionable. A more realistic expectation would be to suggest that CP possession is deemed illegal in most, if not all of the countries where it's currently legal. Anyone who actually believes countries such as the US, UK, Australia, etc, would ever soften their stance on CP possession, needs to have their head examined.

I am serious there is no way CP viewing is going to remain illegal in those countries over the next few hundred years. First of all it is already legal to view child porn in New York state, it just isn't legal to save it. The court there has determined that having CP in RAM or a cache on your drive is not a crime, and it is only a crime to intentionally download CP from a website. They are confused on technical things, but essentially they have ruled that you can surf CP but not keep a long term collection of it on your hard drive unless it is from browser cache. Of course federal laws trumps state law, but technically it is already legal to surf CP sites in New York State.

Second of all, despite the cries and foaming at the mouth of the common people, the federal judges are not really fond of child pornography viewing laws in the first place. They continue to sentence people far below the suggested levels and to petition law makers for softer laws against CP viewing.

http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com/CM/Articles/Federal-Judges-Encourage-Reduced-Sentencing-for-Child-Pornography.asp

Third of all researchers keep finding that decriminalizing child pornography viewing causes a very substantial drop in child sex abuse, and that is certain to eventually become common knowledge. The war on CP viewers is counter productive to a strategy for reducing molestation rates, and all the science backs this up.

Fourth of all the internet is becoming more and more prominent and the reasonings behind CP viewing being made illegal in the first place are less and less relevant. The entire argument the supreme court gave for allowing CP to be illegal is outdated and irrelevant today, there is no commercial market for CP it is almost all traded for free on P2P networks, research has shown there is very very little overlap between child porn viewers and molesters, etc. Additionally CP offenses are going to continue to skyrocket as more and more people have access to the internet, the number of CP offenses has been exponentially growing and there are no signs of this ever letting up. Truth is many people who are told not to look at something will seek it out, and there are many different other reasons people look at CP as well and the internet is making many of them (such as general pornography addiction) more common.

There is also the issue of many minors themselves being turned into sex offenders for obtaining images of their naked peers, in many states they are already having discussions about legalizing the exchange and possession of images of naked teenagers between each other, and this will obviously be a stepping stone toward decriminalization of possession of naked underage teenagers for everybody (how can they say it is legal for a 17 year old to have a picture of a naked 14 year old, but not legal for him to when he turns 18? Does he need to burn the picture? delete it off his phone? what about when forensics recovers the deleted images that used to be legal for him to have??). Either they can lock up all of the teenagers who now have camera phones and very frequently produce child pornography of themselves and share with their boy/girl friends, or they can legalize the possession of jailbait pornography for teenagers which will certainly lead to the legalization of jailbait pornography possession for everybody.

As some states declare viewing CP to be legal (like New York already has), federal judges continue to rally for greatly reduced sentences, researchers continue to find that allowing people to view CP causes a sharp decline in molestation rates, as the arguments against child pornography become less and less relevant to modern times, as research continues to show that people who view CP are very rarely child molesters, as the truth about government propaganda leaks out, as the nations are faced with criminalizing their children or decriminalizing child porn possession, I am certain that it is going to be legal to view and possess CP within the next few hundred years, in the large majority of the world, no doubt about it.

shut the fuck up mate. history is moving in the opposite direction. thankfully. you sound like a filthy pedo.

lol. I love to argue with people about this they get so mad and have no arguments and I have such great arguments and citations. Give me some evidence that "history is moving in the opposite direction" , citations etc? You sound like a fucking retard.

So I read about the program used, it is far from ideal, uses an old symmetric algorithm that has some known weaknesses but none of them seem to break it in common usage yet. It looks like it is a dying symmetric algorithm that will probably be broken in more practical situations some time in the fairly near future. It is already broken in specific edge case scenarios but I don't think from my quick glance over it that this situation will be one of those. So pretty much not a symmetric cipher that you want to use, had problems yesterday, has a lot more today and will probably have a lot lot more tomorrow, but it is not ROT-13 or something and can still probably provide some level of security if it is properly implemented.

The second issue is that the security it can provide is very implementation dependent. It seems like it needs to be extremely carefully implemented to avoid it being easily crackable, and there are many systems using this algorithm that have implemented it incorrectly such that they are quickly crackable. As far as this particular text editing program goes, I have no idea if they implemented it properly, I can find very little information about this editor as it is quite obscure. I would lean toward thinking that they probably fucked it up just to be on the safe side, but it is possible they implemented it correctly.

The third issue is that they limit the password size to such a low number of characters and such a small selection of characters that without a PBKDF (which I cannot find if they use) the very most entropy the password is going to have will be just under 100 bits, but that assumes that the password is actually randomly generated and not some words or something human created.

All of these things together paint a pretty bleak picture, but not as bad as no encryption at all being used. It is possible still that the heavens will smile on your customers, and the symmetric algorithm has just enough life left in it to be strong enough in this scenario, it was implemented properly by the people who made the text editing program and the password was pseudorandomly generated or very close to random and human created, and hopefully there is a PBKDF as well to give it a bit more strength. But honestly I wouldn't get my hopes up very high.

Quote from: kmfkewm on August 08, 2013, 08:11 am

Quote from: BlueGiraffe on August 05, 2013, 10:54 pm

Quote from: remoulade on August 05, 2013, 10:45 pm

Quote from: BlueGiraffe on August 05, 2013, 10:38 pm

Quote from: remoulade on August 05, 2013, 10:36 pm

Is it names, addresses and SR usernames?

Yes, they can be linked with minor effort.

Does that include the lottery winners or only paying customers?

To be honest, I'm not hugely worried, as abby says I reckon it would only be the repeat customers who'll receive a visit from LE (assuming your TorMail account is even of interest to LE, it might not be). Have you otherwise openly discussed your vending activities, unencrypted, on the account?

Lottery winners are listed but without any connection to a SR username.

Everything else is PGP encrypted in there - this is the only thing that is not.

Why the fuck would you keep an entire list of addresses and SR usernames of every single person who ordered from you? That is horribly insecure and fucking idiotic to say the least. Not only this but you share them with arbitrary other people who clearly don't even know what encryption is, and passed around the internet? Clearly nobody should ever do business with you ever again. After a vendor sends me something I expect my address to vanish instantly, never should it be stored unencrypted! At the very least you should have used a fucking salted hash list to store the addresses for confirmation and told people reships need to be to the same address. Then only a salted hash list would have leaked out.

I fucked up kmfkewm. For clarity: all data was stored encrypted, and always sent encrypted. Except this one time. My employee was familiar with PGP and used it all the time. This one time, for some reason, PGP would not encrypt, and so her well-intended work-around was to put it in a regular password protected document. She believed (most erroneously) that this was as secure as PGP.

I'm not saying this to excuse anything at all. The fuck up is of horrific proportions, and despite the fact that I am very security conscious and do things with extreme care, I am totally culpable for not training her adequately to know that that was definitely NOT an option to consider if PGP was not functioning (she had to re-install it in end to get it to work). I'm only saying this so that the details of what actually happened are known in truth.

I'm not defending any criticism at all though. How could I? This is deep and extreme. My apology, and my commitment to utterly rectify my protocols, is all I have left to offer. I'm surrendered to how this plays out even if it means I walk the plank, and I appreciate you being direct in your criticism of me (really).

BG

Depending on the type of document and how she password protected it, could still be secure enough if it used actual symmetric encryption and the password exchange was done securely.

Quote from: remoulade on August 05, 2013, 10:45 pm

Quote from: BlueGiraffe on August 05, 2013, 10:38 pm

Quote from: remoulade on August 05, 2013, 10:36 pm

Is it names, addresses and SR usernames?

Yes, they can be linked with minor effort.

Does that include the lottery winners or only paying customers?

To be honest, I'm not hugely worried, as abby says I reckon it would only be the repeat customers who'll receive a visit from LE (assuming your TorMail account is even of interest to LE, it might not be). Have you otherwise openly discussed your vending activities, unencrypted, on the account?

Lottery winners are listed but without any connection to a SR username.

Everything else is PGP encrypted in there - this is the only thing that is not.

Why the fuck would you keep an entire list of addresses and SR usernames of every single person who ordered from you? That is horribly insecure and fucking idiotic to say the least. Not only this but you share them with arbitrary other people who clearly don't even know what encryption is, and passed around the internet? Clearly nobody should ever do business with you ever again. After a vendor sends me something I expect my address to vanish instantly, never should it be stored unencrypted! At the very least you should have used a fucking salted hash list to store the addresses for confirmation and told people reships need to be to the same address. Then only a salted hash list would have leaked out.