My wife has become very interested in fighting against child pornography. In addition to volunterring in our community, she would like to involve herself in reporting illicit child porn web sites.
In searching the net we came up with www.condemned.org, which is a volunteer organization that reports child porn web sites.
Has anyone had experience with this organization or anything similar?
Although I think this is a great idea, I’m also concerned about how to go about it. I mean, I don’t want her actually going to child porn web sites on our computer, even if it is with the intent of reporting it to law enforcement.
I wouldn’t. I mean, it’s noble to want to seek out the bad guys and all, but in seeking them out, you’ll most probably wind up getting some prohibited material on your hard drive. And that is, shall we say, frowned upon by the law. Your good intentions might not be enough if you run afoul of, say, a hotshot DA who’s out to prove he’s tough on crimes against children or sexual predators or whatever.
Unless you’re hired by that organization or something, I’d leave the “seek and destroy” to the pros, and just report those sites you may come across incidentally.
Not that I’m implying that you normally come across such sites…
Maybe you should ask the local police department about how to do this in a law-abiding manner?
I certainly applaud your wife’s commitment to stop people from victimizing children, especially after this horrible Samantha Runnion situation, but taking advice from well-intentioned people on this board who may not fully understand the intricacies of the laws might be risky.
Besides, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to post in public ideas on how one could hide the fact that one has been to child porn sites. Goodness knows that we don’t need to give any help to any child predators out there (sadly, I’m sure there are some out there lurking on even this board).
Just writing over the data won’t make the case un-recoverable. The government reccomends a wipe of all 0’s then all 1’s (or is it all 1’s then all 0’s) then random 0 and 1’s over that.
Given Spath’s post (a thought I overlooked), please delete my prior post, I hadn’t thought that it might be used to help a child pornography artist/downloader.
Please do repost that I’m interested in starting a grass-roots kiddy-porn hunting system that helps put those people in jail… And please mention my basic ideas…
We can work together and write some perl code that searches them out, and reports those pieces of crap to the proper authorities…
My bad for mentioning methods of avoiding gov’t charges… anyone interested in hunting them down, please reply to this thread.
once again… MODS, DELETE MY PREVIOUS POST!!! NOW!!! It could be used to protect those we’re all against…
Well, here’s a somewhat related question. I was looking for something a while back, I don’t remember what, and I grabbed a file off Kazza that came up on the search. When that file downloaded, it was called something like “real kiddie porn.mpeg”. Huh? How’d that come from that search? Anyhow, I played it- I figured if it was actual kiddie porn I could report it-but it was a standard porn video- 25 or so year old girl wearing a schoolgirls uniform. NBD, but not what i was looking for. The thing is, ever since then, it’s been listed under the “file” tab in Windows Media Player, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it. Does anyone know where XP keeps the history file for WMP? I’ve played dozens of other mpegs and stuff, but the same 4 appear under “file”, “real kiddie porn” and a couple of other movies. They don’t change. I’ve deleted the mpeg, but I don’t want a “kiddie porn” listing on my 'puter at all, y’know?
I don’t know all the particulars. But I believe it is illegal to posess child porn of any kind, and most definitely illegal to transfer it from person to person.
And there is a lot of legal precedent in the U.S. that says it’s still illegal even if you didn’t know about it. So for example, it’s my computer we’re using. My wife goes on her quest to rid the world of kiddie porn, and actually views a few sites with the intent of reporting them. Those images would be on my hard drive, and their existence could be used to prosecute me as others in this thread have suggested.
So before my wife and I involve ourselves in the fight against child pornography, I want to make certain what we can and can’t do.
You know, the fact that viewing the material at all could be illegal makes child porn an even more insidious problem. How is one to go about eradicating it if it can’t be searched for? Perhaps the authorities have people who specialize in this, which would be good. But I doubt they have the manpower to really do a good job of it.
Tough problem we’re trying to solve here. I’m glad my wife feels strongly enough to want to personally do something. She’s a great lady, and I hope I can help her. Everybody keep the advice coming please.
Bobo, your suggestions are good, but I’d like to avoid having to view the material at all.
All I can tell you is that once, I received an unsolicited e-mail offering me kiddie porn. On the advice of my uncle, a lawyer, I called the local FBI office and forwarded the e-mail to the address they gave me.
I then deleted it from my in-box and never thought about it again.
Bottom line: the FBI are the folks with jurisdiction over child pornography, so your local FBI office is the best place to call for advice on the subject.
Yes, having real live child porn on your computer generally violates state laws, and sending or recieving images that cross state lines generally violates federal law. The “virtual child porn” where no real children are involved thing is cloudy; the SCOtUS recently invalidated such a law as overbroad, but seemed to indicate if it was more carefully drafted it might be legal as well
I can’t see any way that you could seek out the offending material without actually viewing it; the Alt text for images and the Meta tags are often deliberately misleading; web authors often include all sorts of words and phrases in them that are not relevant to the site in an attempt to get more hits and earn more money from clickthrough on their banners and popups.
Your intentions are noble, but I think you’d be best advised to leave it to the experts; I can’t imagine that there’s any great chance of you finding something that the authorities aren’t either already aware of (and could be monitoring in order to catch the whole gang) or are capable of finding for themselves.
If you stumble across something (and it’s difficult to imagine that you would do so while searching for apple pie recipes), then it’s probably a good idea to report it.
I would advise not going at this yourself.
Those in law enforcement who work with this are only allowed to work a short number of hours-per-whatever in order to avoid being completely broken down by what they find.
If your wife wants to help out, suggest that she put her time and energy into raising money for organisations that combat this. Be sure that you check out the organisations properly first tho. http://www.ecpat.net are, afaik quite “on-the-ball”, ymmv.
Other ways to help are to donate time or money to shelters in your city that work with homeless children and young people, etc. Getting some of the kids out of the situation where they can be exploited is also a way of working against the baddies.
Working against it getting made is maybe easier and/or more productive than catching up with the guys who download it.