From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 09:47:06 +0800
To: "Philip A. Mongelluzzo" <phimon@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: spam on this list
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.970623100514.944B-100000@linda.teleport.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970623183907.009c9400@mail.io.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>How do we deal with child pornography and free speech in such a way as to
>allow both to exist and insure our children are not exposed to pornographic
>material until they are at a maturity level where they can deal with it?

You're phrasing this like it's a general policy question, e.g., "If we were 
going to design the best freedom-of-speech legal structure for a society,
what would it look like?", and then trying to apply the answer to that 
question to a very different question, e.g., "What can we do about
free speech policy, given the wording and past interpretation of the First
Amendment, within the legislative/judicial structure created by the
Constitution?" The Constitution does not grant Congress nor individual 
states the ability to make certain laws, even if they otherwise appear 
reasonable or useful; I think it's a shame that people who have sworn to 
defend the Constitution seem to regard it as an impediment (or fail to 
understand that it's intended an impediment) to an all-powerful state. 
(Also, this discussion is, like many law/policy-related ones, 
pretty US-centric, which is not evil but perhaps nonoptimal or unnecessarily 
shortsighted.)

There are three issues here - child porn (broadly speaking, images featuring
children in a sexual context), access to porn by children, and freedom of
speech/expression. It's not clear from your comments whether you're 
concerned with "child porn" or "access to porn by children", or both.

Your definition of the problem is problematic, because it talks about 
"our children" and "maturity level where they can deal with it", which are 
both difficult to fix precisely. Some people would read the phrase "our 
children" to apply to every child within a national jurisdiction; 
some people would read the phrase to refer to their own children, or the 
children in their familiy. Are we talking about single group of children - 
or nationwide groups of similarly situated children, e.g., 9-year-olds - or 
are we talking about millions of individual children and family groups, with 
different standards/expectations/needs? Also, who decides what an 
appropriate "maturity level" is, and what "dealing with it" is? Are you 
looking for a solution which will allow you to control your children's 
access to porn, or a system which will allow you to control all children's 
access to porn? 

I see two broad strategies here - if we're concerned about children and 
porn, we can either control children or control porn. I think that 
controlling children rather than porn is preferable, because:

1.	It provides the greatest amount of expressive freedom to adults
2.	It allows individual parents/families/communities to adopt their own 
local standards for what's acceptable

>If pornography is the enemy of crypto then that is enemy that must be
fought. 
>
>A battle that must be won without killing the enemy to insure continued
>free speech.  Quite a challenge I think.

Or we must find a way to avoid the battle - perhaps by abandoning the idea 
that children are "innocent", and that they're somehow harmed if they hear 
about or see pictures of sexual activity before they're 18.



--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.