April 30, 2008
Child porn: real or virtual? A day in the burbs and the forensics conference
(ALL IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE COMPUTER GENERATED)
To go right to the “real or virtual” article, skip all the emo in italics. I won’t be offended!
A funny thing happened to me this weekend in Huntington, Long Island. I’d taken a commuter train there from Manhattan, to interview someone in a neighborhood that’s walking distance from the local railroad station. (In case you’re wondering why I haven’t posted lately, I’m really busy with other work these days. Why else would I go to Huntington?) So I was hoofing it down New York Avenue when a cabbie screeched up and offered me a ride – for free. “Thanks,” I said, leaning into his window. “But why?” “Because you have to pass the day-labor site. There’s lots of men there from Central America. They yell bad words to women going by.”
I’m 57 years old and slowly shrinking, maybe, but people seldom mistake me for a shrinking violet. I can deal with a few catcalls and “Mami’s” (assuming my wrinkled old self could evoke them in the first place). I tried to elucidate my philosophy to the driver: It’s always worth a few bad words to learn about stuff – then communicate the stuff to others.
Well lah-dee-dah, you’re probably saying. Nice story, but what’s the point? Especially when the real subject of this post is…Child Porn®.
So here’s the point. Lately, when it comes to writing about child pornography issues, I suspect I’ve caught Huntington’s Taxi Disease from my colleagues in the journalism biz. I notice that whenever I get an urge to report on the subject, I start worrying that if I publish it, I’ll hear “bad words” from people from “Central-Weirdo America” – people who actually like child porn. I’ll have to read their emails (some of which make interesting points about free speech, the fourth amendment, government repression, etc.), then decide whether or not to post them. And if I post, the journos of MSM-ville—my colleagues! — might look askance. After all, some have already told me that they, themselves, will not write about child pornography for precisely this reason: it freaks them out to get follow-up email from the pedos.
I’m also afraid my colleagues will tsk-tsk about why I write about this icky subject in the first place. “Is she obsessed or something?” they could be thinking. Perhaps they ask why I don’t insert boiler plate into the first paragraphs of my articles. Riffs like, “Of course, child porn is the most horrible thing in the world, and the people involved deserve strong punishment.” This is supposed to show everyone the writer is a normal person who does not want to hear from pedos. I try to avoid such verbiage because I think it’s knee jerk and stupid. Besides, I’m extremely reluctant to close off communication with anyone. I get some of my best tips about the malfunctioning of our various civic institutions from people close to those institutions – who are often criminals, both apprehended and as yet uncaught. (”M” is still one of my favorite movies.)
I went to a conference a couple months ago where law enforcement officials gave fascinating presentations to other cop types about the state of child pornography on the net. How much of it is real? How much is virtual? How do you tell? This is not stuff the authorities want to talk about openly with the public (or with reporters). On my own dime, I schlepped to Washington, DC to attend. Then I queried a couple of editors about assigning me a piece. No interest. “Whatever,” I thought – “I’ll put it up on this blog.” But weeks have gone by and I just haven’t been able to do it. I finally asked myself why. I realized it’s because I’ve come down with Huntington’s Taxi Disease. I’m afraid. Scared of those emails. Frightened that people I respect will think I’m a nut.
But hey – I’m not a nut. I am obsessed, though: with finding out things other people don’t want me to know, then passing the secrets on, in print. I’ve always been like this. In gradeschool I held drinking glasses against the wall to hear adult talk on the other side. I got sent to the cloak room after telling my first-grade class there was no Santa Claus. I brought John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” to Girl Scout camp (Texas, early 1960s, where every store still had two water fountains) and was told I couldn’t read it because it was too “controversial.” I made a stink, and let other girls read it too.
I have a healthy mistrust of the status quo, especially when it starts trucking in fears about sex, kids, or Sex & Kids®. I don’t like it when the press rolls over and swallows government claims without examining them. Even when they’re about Child Porn®. the one subject that 99.9 percent of supposedly critical journalists won’t touch.
Well, then, who will? Someone’s got to; guess it’ll have to be me. It’s my mitzvah, my deber social as they say in Spanish – my obligation as someone who hates panic, censorship, religion invading civic life, and the crummy feeling of life getting squeezed and shrunk and stupid because of a frightened world and frightened people. That’s about it for my motives. They’re simple. I just took an Advil® for the taxi-itis.
So — on with the blog and report from that conference.
It was the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual confab, held this year, like I already said, in Washington. Over 4,000 people attended: police detectives, coroners, fire investigators, anthropologists who can gather disarticulated skeletons from a crime scene and put them back together, complete with ersatz faces. The panels were a heady mix of low morbidness and high nerdity. “Identification of Incinerated Root Canal Filling Materials After Exposure to High Heat Incineration.” “Fracture Patterns in Fleshed and De-Fleshed Pig Femora Inflicted with Various Ammunition Types.” “A Test of an Age-at-Death Method Using the First Rib.”
Then, there were the child porn presentations. Their purpose was to discuss everything the Department of Justice (and, for some reason, the Department of Defense) know about how to tell sexualized images of real children – which are illegal to make and possess – from “virtual,” or computer-generated (“CG”) images. The latter are created from scratch and pixels. They don’t show actual kids being victimized. They’re fantasy. So they’re constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. At least for now.
Back in the 1990s, the government outlawed even CG images of sexualized children. But a few years later, ruling in a case called Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court said CG child porn is legal. That was in 2002, when the general consensus was that the technological state-of-the-art for CG human images wasn’t so good anyway. If you concocted a CG image of a child having sex, the thinking went, it wouldn’t fool anyone because it was too low-tech to seem real.
Within a couple of years, though, people caught with child porn images were going to court and claiming they didn’t have anything real, only CG — and that if the government thought otherwise, it would have to prove it.
The government developed several responses. One: find the actual child depicted in the pornography, and bring that real child into court, or bring in the cop who handled her case. This would show beyond a doubt that the defendant’s material was not CG. Another strategy is to match the images in evidence to others previously collected by the feds, then show that the whole set dates to pre-Photoshop times, back when anything that looked like a photograph of a real kid really was real. But what if child victims and old photo sets aren’t available? A third government technique is to tell courts that the average person (an FBI agent, a jury member) can still distinguish what’s real and what’s CG, just by looking with the naked eye.
Is this true? The government would like us to think so. But in point of fact, the boundary between real and CG is getting fuzzier by the year – and the feds are nervous.
A couple of years ago, a Dartmouth University computer forensics professor, Haney Farid, did an experiment. He pulled a bunch of CG images off the Net that had been posted during the past few years on graphic arts hobby sites. He also collected real photos. Then he mixed them up and randomly showed real images and CG to lots of people, without telling them which was which. When viewers saw images depicting non-human themes, like landscapes, they made a lot of mistakes: they couldn’t tell real from virtual. They were much better at distinguishing real people from fake people. Up to a point, that is. Their accuracy only held up with CG’s produced in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. But 2006 images were much more sophisticated and real looking. Farid’s subjects’ accuracy dropped precipitously with this new material. About a third of the time, they got CG and real images mixed up.
So what’s going to happen with 2008 images? 2009 and beyond? Real or fake? Will cops be able tell the difference? What if they can’t? And what the hell is on the web right now? Digitized records of real children being victimized? Or slick CG, showing nothing but some digi-nerd’s fantasies?
Ergo, the Washington, DC forsenics workshops.
First up was FBI agent Amanda Broyles, from Quantico. She reminded her audience of last year’s ruling out of a federal Circuit Court of Appeals: that the government doesn’t have to produce an expert – someone like Dartmouth professor Farid – if a defendant claims his porn was CG instead of real. “This is good,” Broyles told the audience. She reiterated the mantra that laypeople, such as juries, can tell the difference between real and virtual images just by looking.
But Broyle was contradicted by the next speaker, Michael Salyards, who hails from the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, in Linthicum, Maryland. (You may be asking why the DoD is investigating child porn. I don’t have the answer. But I suspect it’s a political maneuver — related in some way to how, immediately after 9/11, the Justice Department started cooking up new ways to suspend people’s privacy rights in the name of fighting terrorism. After that played poorly with a lot of Americans, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other government bigwigs started justifying mandatory Internet data gathering, and the Patriot Act’s use of warrantless internet and and other searches, by saying they are necessary to combat child porn. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security is running “Operation Predator,” a program to do things like inspect people’s computers at the border for child porn — though what this has to do with homeland security is not clear, and the program has led to arrests of Homeland Security’s own bureaucrats on child sex charges.)
The first thing Salyards did was PowerPoint a bunch of images that looked like photographs. Only one was genuine, he said. He showed an Asian woman, then another Asian woman. “Which is real?” he gleefully asked the audience, and joked about placing bets. When he revealed which was which, it seemed to me (and many others who were glad we didn’t gamble) that the virtual Asian woman looked realer than the real one. The same was true when Salyards showed images of two females clad in bikinis.
Salyards said that the Ashcroft court ruling, providing First Amendment protection to virtual child porn, has created “legal chaos.” He then spent much time describing tests which go far beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. For instance, you can use digital technology to search an image for “hash marks,” 32-character strings embedded in digital images, including those made by cameras. The feds keep records of hash marks left by cameras that took pictures of real kids being exploited. Meta-data, Salyards said, shows the brand and model of camera used, and even if a flash went off.
Salyards added that you can analyze images down to the pixel level to check for lifelike color ranges. “Real skin is not the same as CG skin,” he noted. “We see more red in CG images.”
Someone in the audience asked if a savvy child pornographer could beat the forensic analysts by inserting CG elements into a real, digital photo. How about if he removed pixels to make it look fake to those DoD examiners? Or added extra color? “You could use Adobe and take out details,” Salyards answered. In a forensic analysis, a real photo would then “pop up as computer-generated.”
After these presentations, it seemed clear that the technology exists to make real child porn look fake. And — much more significantly — to make CG porn which looks genuine enough to fool ordinary people. An obvious question that comes to mind, then, is: how much of this sophisticated child CG is already on the Internet?
My sense from attending the workshops is: Probably hardly any. But the scarcity has little to do with technology. The digital world is now rife with graphics professionals and hobbyists who spend lots of time creating reasonably real-looking virtual people as still images – adults and kids. CG adults (especially women) often look “sexy.” Sometimes they’re even having sex. But virtual kids are not portrayed sexually (though teen girls often look “come hither”). CG kids remain chaste, probably, because there’s no commercial market for child porn and thus no significant money to be made by doing virtual renditions of the stuff. Hobbyists, of course, don’t need money to pursue their passions. But even they are probably reluctant to do CG child porn. It’s not like they can post it on graphic arts websites and get props from fellow artists. Plus, virtual child porn is legal in the US, but it’s outlawed in many other countries. If an American’s CG smut got emailed overseas, he could get in big trouble.
Given the above, I bet most defendants and their attorneys who raise the CG defense are bullshitting. They’ve probably been caught with the real thing.
But for how long will almost everything on the net be real? One thing is certain: if something becomes possible for human beings to do, someone will do it. Salyard, the DoD guy, said that over the past several years, he’s already seen three CG child porn images that were good enough to need analysis by an expert like him. And all the conference speakers expressed trepidations about the next big thing: child porn video. We heard a lot about Tom Hanks’ animated feature film, “Polar Express,” and about “Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within.” We also were instructed to check out www.virtualeve.com, to peruse naked (adult) avatars having sex. But avatar sex is still about “dead eyes” and “plastic-looking ears,” according to the speakers. Nevertheless, asked one, “In ten years are we going to be able to tell” if videos with kids having sex are real or CG? “We have to wait and see.”
In a recent “Savage Love” column, sex advisor Dan Savage discussed David Levy’s book Love and Sex With Robots. Levy predicts that in a couple of generations, people will be having romances and copulating with humanoid robots – including, as Savage said with a verbal wince: “kid robots.” Sex robots, he added, will eventually “make fantasies that are currently unrealizable for reasons of biology, logistics, or morality suddenly very, very realizable.”
Well, if 2-D fantasies are just as potent as 3-D for many people, then the time has already come. If the pedo-weirdies that most of us don’t understand can cathect onto visual, CG child porn — thus leaving real kids alone – maybe CG isn’t such a horrible thing. It’s kind of like Henry Darger. He was a reclusive Chicago janitor who, in the 1950s and 1960s, secretly made brilliant, deeply disturbing “outsider” art depicting children with transgender genitals, in scenes of bloody violence, including sexual violence. Darger didn’t have a computer back then. He had only scissors, paper, crayons, and lots of Sear’s kiddie clothing ads. (I’ve mounted one of his tamer productions, above.) His were DG (Darger-generated) works, and as far as anyone knows, he never touched a real child. Was he so different from the pedophiles of today?
Who knows if CG would be enough for these people? The government doesn’t even want to think about it. Most of the feds would rather ape other countries and just ban virtual child porn. To do that, however, they’ll have to prove it has proximate anti-social effects – that it pushes pedophile viewers to act out on real children. So far, claims to this effect have been junk science. But who knows? Maybe real research will turn up. Or maybe not.
If Free Speech were the solar system, everything I’m writing about here would be Pluto – or that unseen eleventh planet that’s even farther out. Questions about child pornography push us to the far, cold reaches of outer space. To Huntington, Long Island, as Woody Allen might say. Where that nice cabbie wanted to whisk me past the unpleasantries, but being just me, with little choice in my me-ness, I had to tell him I’d rather walk … through whatever this Central/Middle America thing was, up ahead.
Oh Debbie, how interesting. Can I ask a couple quick questions… first, I wish you would take on the boring slog of linking to a number of interesting tidbits in your article. Did this conference have a URL? Do you have a link to the news cite where Ashcroft speculated about porn funding terrorism? Etc Etc!
Also, I love the “emo” part, and I want to know what DID happen when you walked past the deadly phalanx of men! ;-). My guess is the taxi driver was the perv.
Now I have to go think about everything you reported!
Actually, I was a little off in what I wrote about Ashcroft speculating about porn funding terrorism. What he’s actually done very openly is said he needs to suspend traditional civil liberties — not so much to fight terrorism, because that gets many people upset — but to smash child porn (which almost everyone agrees is OK). I made the correction and put in a link. Also added about Homeland Security getting involved in anti-child porn work, with plenty of rhetorical flourishes to the public.
I linked to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (see the body of my article), but their info about the conference is very sketchy. If anyone wants me to send a PDF of the pages from the proceedings book which deal with the child porn sessions, email me and I’ll send them along.
About that phalanx of men. Ho hum, just some tired, rightly wary and unprepossessing undocumented non-English speakers trying to make a buck, and me without my fishnets but with my usual penchant for chatting in Spanish with the great American unwashed. On the other hand, that taxi driver seemed like a decent fellow as well. (And he, himself, was a foreigner! Of color, too! Jeez, the world is a complicated place…) — DN
Were you the only media person at the conference? Considering this is an area of law that consistently feeds into regulation of the Internet, you’d think there would be more interest.
On a related note, the Internet Watch Foundation released its annual report regarding exploitation on the Internet. The numbers they cite certainly call into question the numbers the feds/Ernie Allen tend to come up with: http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/news.229.htm
There were a lot of people in attendance and I didn’t ask who was who, but I have not seen any reports on these workshops in the press — DN
Wow, CG child porn never even occurred to me…and I guess that is why, though I’m stunned and fascinated by your article, I am reluctant to link to it. Because as you said, if something becomes possible for human beings to do, someone will do it. And the more people who find out about it, the more people there is to be tempted to do it - especially if this is a potential money-making venture.
Debbie,
The stuff you write about is fascinating. Don’t stop. Even if you’re the last person on earth writing about it.
Abe
At this time, making good CG animation is very expensive, whereas it is relatively cheap to buy and use live children. It is also a small niche market, and so not very remunerative. Consequently, I don’t think very much believable CG child porn, if any, is being made. At some point in the not-too-distant future, if progress continues to progress, people will have computers that will generate apparent live-action movies for scripts written by or for them (”Click here to see Marilyn Monroe mud-wrestle The Blob!”). We observe the beginnings of this in contemporary video games. No doubt some people will order up child porn. But I’m not at all sure there’s ever going to be a significant overlap between live action and published CG movies in small niches like child porn. Of course this won’t stop the cops from drumming up business (taxpayer funds and political excitement) about it.
Making hentai may not be very expensive, but it is very labor intensive and people not only spend hours (weeks? months?) devoted to its creation, its also part of a fairly large market. In japan you can buy plastic kits of perversity - someone is spending the time and money to construct scenes, make molds, cast kits, and others are buying them. There must be some sort of market for this in order to make such things profitable enough for those people to continue making such kits and selling them - otherwise this business would have been starved out.
This is all part of a slippery slope to “protect us from indecency.” I know people in the adult industry who know this but do not dare speak it in public lest they be branded “untouchable” by their peers - the adult industry is paranoid beyond reason about being associated with child porn. And yet most realize this attack on “child porn” that was first launched under the Clinton administration is just the first step in protecting us from ourselves.
How many children are “indoctrinated” into sexual exploitation via child pornography? This is the entire reason for upholding bans on it and yet I’d bet you the reality is damn few. Ask any agent about how many photographs they find of children viewing child porn compared to how many they find of children viewing adult porn. Kids dont need to see other kids to things to accept it as normal - duh. Anyone who’s ever bought a “bob the builder” toy set for their four year old to help keep him out of the “real” toolbox knows this; Any mother who’s ever had to wash mommy’s make-up off her little darling knows this.
And so it goes. Once the junk science that proves causality is accepted by mainstream america (just as it was for child porn - and as we were warned by many - even constritutional lawyers - yet dared not listen), big brother can go to work on the real scourge: the adult sites. Because its out there and it’s accepted and our children are seeing it. Think of the children!
I was involved with the precursor to the DoD lab, the AFOSI computer crime division. (see wikipedia air force office of special investigations)
The military has it’s own set of laws (UCMJ) and prosecutes its own crimes. As such, it has its own police force. The military police (MPs) handle things like theft. The OSI handles things that are more “felony” type crimes as well as intelligence investigations. Unfortunately members of the armed forces commit all kinds of crimes, including child porn.
AFOSI and the other military investigative agencies have been investigating child porn for a long time, and afosi in particular has one of the longest histories of investigating computer crime. They had agents dedicated exclusively to computer crime in the 70s.
In short, this isn’t some kind of power grab, the DoD simply decided that it would be cheaper to have a single centralized capability to handle computer evidence than to fund it in each branch. They have a training facility and coordinate closely with other federal agencies to share investigative techniques. And while they do not investigate each other’s crimes there is a degree of cooperation between the various agencies that have specialties in the area of evidence handling and processing, such as processing PDAs or certain types of obsolete magnetic tape.
No conspiracy. From my experience its actually one of the things that our government has done right.
Actually I could see a market for believable CG-CP stuff.
There is already a market for ‘lolicon’ and some of that is animated. It is not a huge market and the quality is generally below that of other hentai but it gets better every year as the tools come down in price and go up in sophistication.
Thanks for taking the time to expose the witchhunt.
Interesting reading. I don’t know what to think about the legality CG child porn… after all it could be either a positive (by allowing pedophiles an outlet that doesn’t directly hurt anyone) or a negative (by encouraging pedophilic tendencies).
I’ll definitely be watching the news for interesting writeups such as this.
And She Was said “and I guess that is why, though I’m stunned and fascinated by your article, I am reluctant to link to it. Because as you said, if something becomes possible for human beings to do, someone will do it. And the more people who find out about it, the more people there is to be tempted to do it - especially if this is a potential money-making venture.”
This is exactly the thought process that gets the public to allow the government to revoke individual rights of privacy and person. Failed logic tells them that it will prevent crimes that there is NO evidence will be committed. Yes, there is NO evidence for it. There is, in fact, evidence that when some taboo is no longer suppressed and forced underground, that less of it occurs than did when suppressed. This is true for drugs, sexually explicit materials, and several other taboos here in the USA. This does indeed tend to support the thought that not suppressing child pornography where no child is involved would then decrease ACTUAL child pornography.
This logic is further supported by other logic. Simply telling a child “don’t touch, it’s hot” will ensure that they experience the pain of a burn more likely than not. If you remove the taboo of ‘forbidden’ then it loses allure for some people. When it becomes ‘no big deal’ in the eyes of most, just a weirdness that some people have, only those suffering will partake of it.
Midget sex is a fetish. Did the existence of more midget sex cause a jump in those collecting it? Or is nobody tracking the same effects in other things?
My apologies if I seem to ramble. Does beer lead to heroin? Is CG child porn a gateway activity? Prove it. I’d like to see the proof please. Prove that violent video games leads to violent teens? It does the opposite according to recent studies. Does fantasy role playing lead to the inability to deal with real life issues? Someone please prove it and show evidence.
The existence of constitutionally guaranteed speech has not led to riots, so how does CG child porn supposedly lead to actual child pornography and more importantly child sexual abuse?
Does watching infidelity on television lead to real life infidelities? Copycats of such things tend to be people who would make poor decisions in the first place. The percentage of copycats per 1000 people does not increase with greater awareness.
Basically I’m saying that those who would punish all who possess even one image of child pornography are using failed logic to remove yours and my rights. The danger of this is clear: you are safe until you are found guilty of possessing or doing something that ‘they’ believe to be bad. Today it’s child pornography; what will it be next month? Next year?
I do NOT condone child sexual abuse. I also do not condone the abuse our system rains down on those who have harmed no other human being.
Yes, it takes discussion and even argument to arrive at sound public opinion regarding these sometimes confusing gray areas. Should it be kept in secret and only discussed by judges and lawyers we would be abrogating our rights as citizens to help define what is ‘public decency’ and what is not. If you surrender those rights and responsibilities, perhaps you don’t deserve them in the first place?
So, keep writing and discussing. It IS your duty as journalist and citizen.
I believe in the Constitution and the rights it guarantees me, and I blatantly oppose those who would have me surrender those rights, even if I choose not to use them in confusing gray ways.
It is not just free speech, it is about defining public decency and what is not. It is about defining how cruel a community we wish to be, and how cruel we would treat those who are ‘not like us’ in some small way.
The scope and breadth of human sexuality is far more than the missionary position once per year in the darkness. It’s time that we began exploring it correctly, adding more definition to what is normal, and what is not. It’s time we stop punishing people as evil doers and start treating them like fellow humans. Let us not forget that the same group of men and women who would vote on such laws are the same group who not so long ago were found guilty of ignoring the existence of, or participating in the use of children for sexual pleasure in WASHINGTON D.C. of all places. Yes, that got brushed under the carpet quickly and never gets brought up during such discussions. Elected officials seem to have a penchant for doing things that are illegal but making laws to prohibit such activities.
Glass houses and throwing the first stone etc.
Keep writing. MORE people need to think about what is right, not fewer. Those that look askance of you, well, explain that their reluctance to write about it is a sign of their weakness, not a sign of not wanting to support perversions.
If soldiers did not kill (something they should not like doing) then armies would be useless. What kind of pen wielding soldier claims fear of the war they chose as a profession?
Keep writing. Bravely so. Thank you
This is not true that 99% of journalists never write about child po..n in non witch hunt way
http://estrinyefim.newsvine.com/_news/2007/06/23/798199-internet-porn-hysteria
The problem here I can see, nobody should be prosecuted for having any digital pictures,
This is just stupid, similar with witch hunts
from last century.
But now they are much better prepared.
Here is what they want to do in the nearest future
http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.185
It seems for me that Debby are trying to justify
this modern porn war.
I do not understand that
The situation here remind me situation in USSR, when communist reporter wrote article about Orwell 1984.
This was crime to possess this book, and nobody could read it. So reporter wrote: I did not read this book, but everybody know this is very bad. The same is with C. porn.
Somebody who just viewed it are guilty of very serious crime,
almost same with terrorism. Are you sure there are this kind porn as government describe. I have never seen something like
department of justice are talking about
CG is moving ahead in leaps and bounds. Debbie, your work is exemplary! I suspect that the estates of old and dearly departed actors will soon find a new source of revenue. You just take a huge sample of John Wayne scenes and paint the skin with real images from film. Combine with a huge audio sample lexicon, composite into our new cowboy, render forever and have the “real” John Wayne back in film. We won’t need any of them new-fangled sissy action stars anymore - all movies can then be John Wayne movies. Ah. The march of technology. Gotta love it.
I should have taken the blue pill.
“One thing is certain: if something becomes possible for human beings to do, someone will do it.”
Enter the idea of cloning for porn…
In 1967, documentarian Frederick Wiseman made a film called ‘Titicut Follies,’ about the conditions (including patient abuse and full frontal nudity) that took place in a state hospital for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. There were, of course, numerous attempts to suppress the film.
At one point, after the film had been screened at a Massachusetts legislative hearing, one legislator denounced the film and said that he didn’t see that anybody could watch this film without being debased and corrupted. Another legislator promptly stood up and suggested that the entire legislature, having just watched film, were now debased and corrupted and should resign en masse. LOL
A couple thoughts:
(1) Spurious “It’s CGI!” defenses can be avoided by making the CGI defense “affirmative”; that is, if the defense wants to claim that an image is CGI, it has to prove it. The government would not normally have to prove that it’s real. Or, better:
(2) A photo of a real child can be so digitally distorted that it is unrecognizable as that child. But if it is made into pornography the child was still exploited. Likewise, illegal CGI images involve real children even if an image is not of any single child, because the knowledge of what a child looks like is taken from all the children the CGI-er has ever seen. They have all been exploited. (Explicitly so if the image is based on a “composite”of real children.) Congress should make this reasoning a legislate “finding” and re-pass the anti-CGI CP law.
I find the comment regarding crafting legislation to shift the burden of proof to the accused and to further craft legislation to criminalize an act of speech through legislation designed to ’side-step’ the Constitution more disturbing than the advance in technology that might make digitally or even mechanically crafted analogs to organic beings more ‘real’.
If pornography, of any sort, is crime, then it is thought crime. Can we afford to take this dangerous step? Should we ban Voltaire? What of Blackstone. Obviously, Benthan has won that debate. If Blackstone goes, what of Locke.
No one condones harm to children and other living things. No one, except governments who send children off to die to further their political aims and brand the harm as ‘collateral’ damage.
If there is to be Freedom of Speech, the freedom must be in the words and not in the speech. You do not write to defend child pornography, you write to defend Freedom of Speech and war has taught is that invasion must be stopped before the enemy, backed by its armada, must be halted before the first step is taken on the beach. If you do not believe that, ask the citizens of Illium.