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SIX Policing the Net
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S I X Policing the Net You already have zero privacy—get over it. —Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems The extent of the pedophile presence on the Web may seem startling to those who regard computer networks as an ultimate Orwellian nightmare . Over the last decade, the privacy issue has attracted ever more concern and increasingly demands the attention of legislators. The fear is that the combined efforts of governments, police, and corporations are all but eliminating personal privacy. We might not be too far removed from the terrifying scenes in adventure films such as Enemy of the State, in which incomprehensibly vast government data banks unerringly and almost instantaneously track down anyone using a telephone or sending an e-mail. While admitting that privacy issues potentially pose an enormous threat to rights and liberties, we must ask why, in such an environment , the authorities cannot succeed in thwarting a electronic traffic that permits individuals to build up libraries of five or ten thousand wholly illegal images. Assuredly, it is not because law enforcement agencies in the United States or elsewhere are timid about proactive policing or launching stings; nor do they fear a backlash of public sympathy in favor of the pedophiles. Yet, obviously, the trade survives, with its network of boards and newsgroups. Why? Can traditional law enforcement techniques and approaches hope to deal with such a technologically sophisticated enemy?| 142 | Easy Prey Since 1977, there has been a technological race between child pornographers and the police forces who wish to combat them, and at least until the coming of the Web, law enforcement held the advantage. As long as pornographic images existed in material form, their transmission and storage posed major problems, the worst of which lay in any kind of traf- ficking. The possessor of a child porn picture or video was safe only as long as he owned and viewed it in private and never did anything that might attract the attention of the authorities. Once a magazine or a film was handed from one individual to a trusted friend, there was an immediate danger of police intervention, for who could tell who might be reliable ? The longest-standing contact and conspirator might turn out to be a turncoat to the authorities, perhaps cooperating with them to bargain for a lighter sentence in his own case. Successively, each new measure of communication or transmission was closed down, from the stores through mail order and importation. At first sight, the Internet seemed to continue this pattern, in that we frequently read of arrests of online pornographers who face severe penalties ; to that extent, charges that child porn has been decriminalized are exaggerated. Also, police agencies have invested a great deal of effort in combating this type of crime. Nevertheless, the vast bulk of arrests still involve low-level or plainly careless perpetrators, and this is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. As we have seen, the most common type of easy arrest still occurs when an individual stores child porn on a hard drive, which can come to light in various ways, such as when the computer is used by another person . As the Gary Glitter case indicated, computer repair is another perilous area, though the experienced regulars on the boards were astonished at so blatant a blunder: * Norman > GG’s crime was stupidity. Handing a laptop crammed with CP to a comp shop. DOH! * LoliLuvr > For everyone’s info, it was his cache that got him caught, it was full of pics he had looked at weeks earlier or pages where he only Policing the Net| 143 | [23.20.51.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:32 GMT) looked at one pic, this along with net payments made allowed them to track all his connections, so get tooled up for some safety.1 The Glitter case reinforced the danger of possessing any suspicious material on a hard drive, not because of the police but as a result of prying repair staff: * me > the thing that gets me is that one does not need to look at the pictures on the hard drive to fix a computer. So if they are found than that means that the repair shop was snooping on your computer. * Homer > I work with computers for a living, I will admit that when we fix a computer up we always snoop around, and so does other people I know in this biz.2 In other instances, police...