Illegal drawings?

[Voight-Kampff]

http://ca.gizmodo.com/5815352/american- ... his-laptop

Hmm. I dunno about this one.

Seems like any time government tries to make drawings illegal, it treads terribly close to invoking the use of "thought police". Not all thoughts and human expression are pure and honorable. But to try and legislate morality? Good heavens! This slope! It's suddenly so slippery...!

[J. Datie]

You know what? Good, I'm glad. Because here in Canada, we have a little thing called "Freedom For Everybody". I don't know if it's actually called that, but whatever. The important thing is, we don't discriminate against anyone, regardless of sex, race, creed, people from the band "Creed", age, religion, sexual orientation, nose size, race, and certainly not fictionalness. Racism, sexism, and realism, are a few of the things you won't find in Canadian laws. And I'm glad, because it seems no other country is will to give a damn about these poor magical girls. Hopefully they'll provide therapy for poor little Nanoha.

[lordcloudx]

And I'm glad, because it seems no other country is will to give a damn about these poor magical girls. Hopefully they'll provide therapy for poor little Nanoha.

umm... sorry but.... ROFL!

On the subject matter though, it seems he hasn't been convicted just yet. I don't know how the Canadian justice system works, but if it's anything like what we have here (Philippines), hopefully, he gets an acquittal or it'll become legal precedence for a flood of similar decisions.

[Voight-Kampff]

And I'm glad, because it seems no other country is will to give a damn about these poor magical girls. Hopefully they'll provide therapy for poor little Nanoha.

Indeed.

Actually, one of the commentors on Gizmodo summed up the absurdity of the situation rather eloquently:

Regarding Christopher Handley:

Well done! I hope this prosecutor gets a promotion. One more scum bag off the streets! I don't know how they do things in Iowa but outside the beltway if you want to commit crimes against children you do it the proper way. Join the priesthood, get your kiddy on, and then in 20 years when your victims are old enough to muster the courage to accuse you, you issue a half assed apology and hide behind the clergy.

Some may niavely think that this loli manga is a victimless crime but did you ever stop to think about the paper mill workers who produced the pages for those books and the lumberjacks who cut the trees down in the first place? How about the makers of Mr. Handley's computer monitor? All of them are now unwilling accessories to the crime. All are now sex offenders. Even you, reader, are now a sex offender for you are as guilty as he is because you have now thought about sexually abusing a child, which, incidentally is exactly what Mr. Handley did. We don't have to be bothered with petty questions like "Did he act on these perversions?" or "Could these same loose interpretations of the law be extended to something I have on my computer?" or even "Isn't this completely bat shit insane?"

No, we certainly don't because we know, for a fact, that anyone who thinks about something will ALWAYS act on it. Case in point: When is the last time you've heard of an armed robbery being committed? Pointless, when simply handing someone a picture of them handing you their wallet will suffice. My only regret is that the prosecutor stopped there. We all know where the root of child abuse comes from...CHILDREN! If we get rid of kids altogether, then and only then, will we finally eradicate child abuse.

[Aleema]

Here's my thoughts on this matter, since it's been one that's been brought up time and time again, thanks to the Tokyo Bill.

I hate pedophilia and pedophiles. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate -- let's just say there aren't enough hates I can type.

But there's also something I believe in strongly, and that's freedom of speech. No matter MY personal beliefs, no matter what I feel or think, I do not have the right to say what others can or cannot do, think, or believe. If it is victimless, of course. We all have to admit that drawn/written pornography, in any extreme, is hurting noone. There have been no proven links. We cannot say rape fantasies or lolicon encourage acts of reality anymore than that video games turn people violent. No matter how I feel about it, if it does no harm, then I should just not involve myself.

Arresting someone on child pornography is a joke for simple possession of it. Go to the root > the developers. Bust the company that produces it. They're the ones making money off of people with disabilities, enabling them. As far as I can tell, lolicon/shotacon is attractive to people who want to feel in control. This is going to be a basic need for all the powerless-feeling losers people out there, and isn't going to go away (and may bubble out into reality without escapism).

Anyway. tl;dr: I may not like it, but it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not the one reading it, and it's not hurting anyone.

[Nebi]

While it may sound absurd to those of us who have grown accustomed to seeing certain types of imagery portrayed in animation and games from Japan, there are a lot of people who know nothing about it. The employees at the border are not lawyers or philosophers; they merely question and inspect traffic going between two countries. Assuming that the officers involved have had no previous exposure to the magical girl genre, I can imagine how they would be quite disturbed by what was being depicted on the computer. Perhaps they were so repulsed by the discovery that they felt necessary to arrest the individual who had it in his possession. At that moment, they must have had reasonable belief that possession of this kind of material is a crime deserving of punishment and therefore took action. Not to mention it is much easier to arrest a single person than a company.

It just goes to show you how we all perceive things differently, and that society is actually much more conservative than most of us think. Some of us feel that governments should not try to legislate morality, but the fact is that they already do and have been doing so for a long time. I would even argue that laws are merely a reflection of a society's ever changing moral values. Take slavery in America for example.

Well, this is a complex topic. :]

[papillon]

Personally I'm more creeped out by the idea of customs grabbing my laptop as I cross borders and peering over every single file in it looking for an excuse to lock me up.

Leaving the issue of the loli manga aside, do you really think that if a sufficiently annoyed legal official went over your computer they wouldn't find SOMETHING you had done SOMETIME that looked questionable? Can you prove you own every bit of software on the machine? Every MP3? What about your search history? Ever looked for something a bit dodgy for research purposes? Will I be accused of pirating games that I have written because I ran searches for them?

I do not like blind search and seizure.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Personally I'm more creeped out by the idea of customs grabbing my laptop as I cross borders and peering over every single file in it looking for an excuse to lock me up.

Leaving the issue of the loli manga aside, do you really think that if a sufficiently annoyed legal official went over your computer they wouldn't find SOMETHING you had done SOMETIME that looked questionable? Can you prove you own every bit of software on the machine? Every MP3? What about your search history? Ever looked for something a bit dodgy for research purposes? Will I be accused of pirating games that I have written because I ran searches for them?

I do not like blind search and seizure.

I'm with Papillon. Searching computer files seems obsessive and unreasonable. I can't think of anything that justifies it. What is the worst thing someone could do by bringing a computer file into a country that they couldn't do from OUTSIDE the country? Barring that, how easy would it be to just not bring the files on your laptop and then pull them from the internet (maybe your own private ftp source) or from a data cloud, each little piece encrypted? It is over-zealous paranoia wrapped in moral righteousness and it creates "Knight Templars".

From TV Tropes:

"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."
— James Baldwin

"Nothing worse than a monster who thinks he's right with God."
— Captain Malcolm Reynolds from the Firefly episode "Heart of Gold"

Sometimes the Forces of Light and Good get too hardcore. In a deadly combination of The Fundamentalist and the Well-Intentioned Extremist, they get blinded by themselves and their ideals, and this extreme becomes tyranny.

Tyranny is exactly where things like this lead. It doesn't matter if you agree with the Canadian officials that the material was immoral or not, you shouldn't support their actions. Drawings are just thoughts, they are not actions and never have been. Child pornography laws were created to protect actual children from harm, real people whom a crime was committed against to produce the material. No real children are harmed in the creation of drawings - the images are imaginary thought constructs made manifest as imagination in your mind from a combination of lines, just as a word is a combination of lines and shapes that produce an image, meaning, or thought in your head. So already we can see that treating DRAWINGS of naked children as actual child pornography is absurd.

The Canadian law, and similar laws around the world are stupid. For example, under the law I could draw two stick figures having sex, label one a child, post it here, and I would suddenly be guilty of possession of child pornography, just as you would be since the image would then be sitting in the cache of your computer. Isn't it degrading to the real children harmed by sexual assault or forced to do child pornography when their horrible experience is said to be equal to that of an imaginary cartoon character scribbled on a page?

Policing thoughts is the action of a tyrannical state. Again, it doesn't matter if you like or agree with the thought being policed. You let people start regulating what can be thought and what can't, they will do it more and more and eventually start policing thoughts you have.

As to discussion of the specific material and thoughts in this case, you may think looking at drawings of naked children is an indication of a sick mind, or just awful, and you may be right, but taking away the right for someone to do that isn't protecting or helping anyone. Many of you might think that access to such material might induce actual crime against children, but the research says just the opposite.

Access to porn has been shown to drastically reduce rape. Violent crime has decreased more and more with the advent of violent video games. It has been shown that particular violent movie releases INSTANTLY reduce the violent crime rate of a city while they are playing. In other words, if a person has thoughts that are inappropriate to act on, being able to release them in a fictional sense is a catharsis that prevents the thoughts from manifesting into action. Having access to "fake" child porn may be keeping this man from seeking out real child porn, the production of which would harm real, living children. Or, God forbid, seek out physical sexual contact with children to satisfy those urges. Prosecuting possession of fake child drawings may actually be putting more real children in danger.

It is the same principle as a drug addict - cut them off from any form of a fix and they become desperate and consumed with getting one, whether that means crime to pay for it or robbing pharmacies. Give them regular small doses of a weaker pharmaceutical drug like many drug rehab clinics do, and they can function much better in society and commit fewer crimes, regardless of still being "addicts". In the case in question, we have the ability to provide a fix to the people who have these thoughts of children, just by letting them look at and enjoy fake drawings - it costs us nothing but being uncomfortable and potentially protects a real child from being that fix.

To those that think such material should be regulated because it might "convert" someone, all I have to ask is whether or not playing violent games or movies or watching a rape scene in a movie or game has made you a criminal or a rapist. I somehow doubt it.

No government or body of people in the world should govern morals - that is a slippery slope. In many Muslim countries women must be covered up when in public, cannot drive, must be stoned to death for being a victim of rape, etc. all in the name of "morality". And lest anyone forget, many of the terrorists attacking us these days are doing so because they believe we and our culture are "immoral". The Crusades were to take back the Holy Land because medieval Christians believed the Muslims living there to be "immoral". Homosexuals were rounded up and put to death during the Holocaust become Nazi command viewed them as "immoral". Time and again we have seen the enforcement of morals have horrible consequences for everyone involved.

If someone just has thoughts, no matter what they are, and exercise them with books or drawings or stories that harm no one, then they should be left alone. Thoughts should never be crimes. If those thoughts turn into ACTIONS? Then by all means, prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Until then, follow the old advice: "Live and let live".

[LVUER]

Isn't checking the files in your laptop categorized as intrusion of privacy? Just like how a cop shouldn't be able to enter our house without any warrant or permission from the owner? I'm not familiar with Canada border/custom law, but could they do that, checking every laptop and every files in it? How's if there are some files that other people couldn't see (like top secret projects or something?

If they could, then we should encrypt 90% of our files in our laptop (leaving only system files and other menial files) so no other people couldn't easily look at our files, every time we want to cross a border/airport.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Isn't checking the files in your laptop categorized as intrusion of privacy? Just like how a cop shouldn't be able to enter our house without any warrant or permission from the owner? I'm not familiar with Canada border/custom law, but could they do that, checking every laptop and every files in it? How's if there are some files that other people couldn't see (like top secret projects or something?

If they could, then we should encrypt 90% of our files in our laptop (leaving only system files and other menial files) so no other people couldn't easily look at our files, every time we want to cross a border/airport.

Canada, like the United States, has arbitrary times when you "surrender" your rights - both claim you do so when trying to cross the border. So you have rights until they decide to take them away basically, all at their whim.

Encrypting your files will do you no good. They will demand that you give them the password or they will detain you or refuse you entry into the country. They may even take it as defacto proof of guilt - i.e. you have something to hide. In the very least they could confiscate your laptop.

You can claim business confidentiality as a reason for encryption, but I'm sure they will wish to see proof of this. I might get away with it for example because I have a signed contract of nondisclosure with my company. Thus I have a legal document that says I have information I am legally compelled to keep secret from the public. But really, regardless, both Canada and the US could force you to unencrypt the files anyway. Many times they will threaten you with a separate law that can be shaped to stick, such as refusing to cooperate with a law enforcement officier, etc.

Welcome to the police state slowly being constructed around us to "keep us safe". In the past books might have been burned or banned, but now it is the information on our computers they can fear and claim as "dangerous and subversive".

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin

So, to paraphrase: Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

[LVUER]

Still, I think it's stupid since there are tons of way to make all those forbidden data entering or leaving a country, as long as we have internet that is. I could put all my data in cloud server, upload them in various hosting/sharing websites, and tons of other ways. They just make it a little bit difficult for honest person that scared for things like this and not any more difficult for people who indeed have malicious intent.

Unless they want US and Canada to be completely cut out from outside internet connection, then it's a different story.

[lordcloudx]

Heh, wouldn't the old archive inside an image file trick work?
http://www.asktheadmin.com/2009/05/hide ... image.html

[0ion9]

Heh, wouldn't the old archive inside an image file trick work?
http://www.asktheadmin.com/2009/05/hide ... image.html

btw, that is not only for rars. zip and 7za are some of the others. However, if you're going to go that way, better to use TrueCrypt. It's both more secure and more convenient.