Up front, I want to make it very clear that I’m not looking for, interested in, sympathetic towards or advocating anything about child pornography. My question is due to an article I read in my local paper today, in which a man is discovered to have some on his computer. His defense was along the lines of: “I was looking for porn and stumbled upon it accidentally.” This seems pretty unlikely since I’d imagine real child pornographers (eww I feel icky writing that phrase over and over again) would have their stuff very very well hidden, and not something you could just summon up by looking on google with a few easy searches. Am I right?
I should add that if this question goes against Board rules in some way, I apoligize and the mods can take it down as they wish. I realize that it’s an icky subject, and not one to be taken lightly.
Yeah, I’d agree. I’m certainly not suggesting anyone google anything in order to answer this question. I think I’m more asking for generalized knowledge, though I’m not sure who would have it.
It depends to on age. Is a 17 year old in a porno, child porn?
Legally I guess it would be.
To me, child porn would be pornography of boys and girls that have not reached puberty. You know having secondary sexual characteristics. I would refer to those not yet 18 as underaged porn, which is also, in my opinion wrong.
I do believe it would be possible if you were to search some of the foreign sites. You would be more apt to stumble on models in their teens.
You could also stumble on things like a mother putting her two sons 3 and 4 taking a bath up on Flickr and not restricting it properly so everyone could see it.
If you were searching in obscure ways you might be able to land on someone hosting their own website and had child porn on it.
Let’s say you were using P2P networking and someone had child porn in their “share” folder. Then some site could come along and index that folder and put it in their search results so you’d come upon it like that.
On a slight tangent it should be apparent from the location of the images/videos or whatever else whether it was accidental or not. If they were stored in his internet cache then he may be telling the truth but if they had been saved to a different folder his argument doesn’t really hold up.
Back to the OP I can see circumstances where it could be found accidentally. For example downloading movies over torrents, the torrent name may be something generically sexual and not indicative of the age of the people in the video but if he has downloaded the files and then not deleted them his argument doesn’t hold very well.
Yes and no, there are some sites out there like 4chan for example which is a message board but for posting images. People will post a picture of a clearly underaged person. Those posts get deleted very quickly.
From my understanding from some documentaries I have seen the child porn trade is more of a p2p type deal where people will meet up on message boards or usernet for ISPs that still offer it and use code words to talk and trade.
Putting it all on a website would be WAY to risky as it is easy to shutdown and all ISPs would just block that IP address.
Also there is another issue on what is defined as “art” I have seen a movie on Sundance that showed a naked 8 year old swimming in the water with everything to see. It was a movie, shown on US television on a cable channel. I think since it was classified as art it was ok. It didn’t even seem weird to see honestly because how they pulled it off I wasn’t thinking eww but more like wow this really got pass censors?
The young women in American Beauty was only 17 when she filmed topless but it was ok to put in a movie, one of her parents had to be there during filming though, the naked boy on the Nirvana cover is not child porn either
The porn sites I have been to for umm… research seem extremely strict on avoiding any suggestion of child porn. They even have rules like banning ALL Tracy Lords, even the stuff she did while legal, on the chance that something illegal will show up. The guy on the OP is almost certainly full of crap if he claims to have found it on a website. More temporary sources like 4chan, IRC, and possibly Usenet might be easier to accidentally stumble upon some, but on the WWW it’s doubtful.
ETA: It sounds like I’m suggesting that 4chan is not the WWW. I guess technically they are, but also a force on their own.
Now & Then had an entire sequence of teen & preteen boys skinnydipping & having to run after the girls that stole their clothes. I remember reading that none of the actresses playing the girls were actually onset at the same time as the boys, but all the boys’ mothers were there, plus the mostly female film crew. Technically they weren’t completely naked either; they were allowed to wear flesh coloured “modesty pouchs”. Then again American actors of all ages usually wear cock socks when doing non-frontal nude scens so it had nothing to do with them being underage.
A topless teen isn’t child porn. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of SDMB threads that discuss instance of nudity in film and art that aren’t classified as porn. Let’s not get sidetracked to that discussion, because it’s been rehashed repeatedly, and the OP actually raises two very interesting questions.
First, whether it’s likely that a defendant might have accidentally stumbled on child porn. The federal law actually accounts for that as an affirmative defense.
However, the law also makes it illegal to attempt to poses child pornography, and the FBI has engaged in sting operations in an attempt to catch suspected traffickers.
In the child porn cases I’m familiar with (including the one linked in the paragraph above), the prosecution described how the image was downloaded, making it pretty clear that the defendant knew what he was getting.
And to the OP’s other question, child porn is not that hard to find if you are looking for it. This is clear by reading the indictments. I’m not going to describe the methods, but it’s not rocket science. Distributors don;t necessarily try to hide it so much as they try to make sure they aren’t connected to it. Kinda like drug dealers.
From time to time, folks will push the limits on blogspot, nibblebit, or sensualwriter blogs. These usually disappear within a few days, though [URL="http://nudistjohn.nibblebit.com/blog/"some (NSFW) have taken the defiant position that mere nudity is not illegal.
Depends on what you consider porn. If someone’s looking for clothed models in sexual poses, or non-sexual nudity, or lolicon/shotacon, finding that kind of smut is trivial.
If you’re looking for blatant sexual activity, well…it’s been awhile since I worked for Perverted Justice, but back then it wasn’t that hard to find either, if you knew where to look. Usenet even had newsgroups with names like “alt.sex.children”, although they were mostly filled with spam, last time I checked (and we’re talking years & years ago…)
The easiest way to gain access to child porn is to find a pro-pedo website or blog & gain the person’s trust; however I would NOT recommend that for curiosity seekers, I hope I don’t have to explain why…
Is it possible to stumble across child porn accidentally? Certainly, yes. Even I trip across it from time to time, and I know other SDMB’ers have posted about it in the past. Therefore, it is possible the guy in the OP’s article is innocent – but I don’t think so. Cops don’t file charges unless they’re sure someone’s absolutely guilty.
ETA: @Mr. Downtown: I’ve reported your link, since it may cause legal issues.
I have the movie Baraka and there is a full body shot of a bunch of kids with traditional tribal garb that lacked any covering of the…ahem…lower extremities.
Yes, and to add, I think that the US needs to differenate UG porn and child porn.
Actually, I did hear from a friend that another friend (who’d gotten in trouble for downloading child porn previously) got his net access cut at college when he was trying to find info on pornography for a class. She claims that he showed her some kiddy porn. Then again the friend was really effed up emotionally, so I take her claims with a grain of salt. (not quite borderline personality but stll something very wrong)
I tend to disbelieve people who say they just happened across it. The key in the above statement is that the person (I assume) is actively seeking it.
I have gotten my share of the pop-ups from porn sites and spam about women and horses (although not as much since I use Gmail) and that sort of thing, but never any kiddie porn that was being pushed as aggressively as that kind of thing was. Fortunately.
I have seen run across it accidentally although not in many years. The web as searchable through Google seems like it is anarchy but it is mild compared to some of the stuff that is out there on the internet as a whole. Once you get into bittorrent streams and things, a lot of it is completely mislabeled on purpose so you don’t know what you are really getting until you open it up. Back in the dark ages, Usenet used to be really popular. It is just text based messages like this message board but more wild and free, There was a huge underbelly of it (and still is) of stuff you won’t see through google. People can post the raw ‘code’ to images in multiple messages and you can use utilities to piece them together and display the real picture as a .jpeg or some other common format. I only did this up until 1996 or so when the web was very young and I had a Mac and not a lot of stuff was out there for it. You would think you were downloading and piecing together the code to some cool piece of software and then you got an eyeful when you opened it.
Real child porn, bestiality pics, and everything else you can imagine still exists out there on the internet but you generally won’t find it on Google which is a good thing for all of us. I wouldn’t believe anyone today that gave that defense as a general rule but I can see how it could have happened at one time.
The Japanese P2P networks use plausable deniablity so it’s very possible some child porn could be on your computer of course in encrypted form, so even the user wouldn’t know. In theory you can’t decode it without the complete file.
So I could upload a child porn into the network and then delete it off my computer. Then it’s floating around, well god knows how long.
But you are still downloading and know it. I think the person in the OP argument was, I was trying to DL a public domain copy of XXX file and got YYY file instead.
You could download a torrent and it could be named “Leave it To Beaver.” But until it’s on your computer you don’t know what it is. So suppose I DL “Leave it to Beaver” from a torrent site and it’s 33 episodes. I see the first episode is really child porn and I delete the other 32 episodes. But suppose I forget one of them and only delete 31 and I think I got them all.
Now I’m not saying any of these are good reason or even barely plausable, I’m just shooting for any reason how a file can get on your computer and you not know it.
Anyone who has spent any time on 4chan or other image boards knows that real child porn occasionally gets posted. Mods take it down fairly quickly (minutes at most, if not seconds) but… well, not fast enough to not have seen it. shiver A shame too, because I like those type of websites that deliver random funny images posted by users.
I have some very good friends (a married couple) who both have PhD’s in “sexology” through this accredited university.
The husband of the team – who has written a number of papers on the subject – assured me that almost 90% of the child porn that exists on the 'net has been created by the government as a method to snare and arrest offending pedophiles who actively attempt to trade and buy images.
Just reporting what I have been told. Not commenting on its veracity.
As others have said, it’s very possible to randomly run across child porn on image boards like 4chan. Through just regular browsing, I would find it unlikely in the extreme, but you can’t really browse 4chan more than a couple times (in certain categories) without seeing it. It does get yanked quickly, fortunately, but it is definitely the real reach-for-brain-bleach stuff.
Fortunately, they try to keep things to their own threads that are marked fairly well (for someone familiar with the site), but it isn’t unheard of to go into a random thread about funny pictures and get some images you really wish you hadn’t seen (child porn and extreme gore). If you haven’t been there before, it’d probably be more likely to see it by accident, since you wouldn’t necessary know what this means.
So no, I wouldn’t say child porn is really well hidden. I’m sure anyone who wanted it who was reasonably savvy with a computer could figure out where to start looking. It’s not the kind of stuff that you’re going to find in a convenient form, though – which probably makes it easier to catch offenders, since they’d very likely have to store lots locally due to the fleeting nature of image board postings.
99.9% of the time, you are correct. However, there are people I’ve known (non-pedos) who’ve been arrested for possessing kiddy porn out of voyeuristic curiosity, and at least one who did jail time after attempting to bait & capture real pedophiles. (A major reason I quit being a vigilante…)
BTW, I just realized this…
…is bullshit. What I meant to say was, cops typically don’t file charges unless they’re certain they have a solid case. (Unless you’re Pete Townshend.)
What I meant to say was, cops typically don’t file charges unless they’re certain they have a solid case. (Unless you’re 