Comments on: Senator to propose surveillance of illegal images

Proposal from Sen. John McCain would force Internet providers to report illegal images, even "cartoons."

[galaxyartist]

persons who do not exist?

Am i right that this law proposes punishment for doing something whereby you would commit a crime and person who doesn't exist? { except in cyberpsace}
sorry but I would really be upset about being punished for sending a picture of popeye.

[Central_office_tech]

This is about child porn(for now)

Some pedophiles I guess send cartoon images of kids. Think Japanese cartoon porn. If you are caught doing this you can be locked up just like as if you sent child porn from real life. Personally I think this is far reaching and over stepping a bit.

I know guys who like flat chested women. I know girls who shave it all. How do you say the girl in this cartoon is not 18. There is no one to say here is her birth certificate. I have met women in their 20s who look like teens.

I think this is a step to remove all porn from the net under the guise of child porn.

[00requiem]

Criminalizing art = WAY too far

The core of anti child-porn laws is to prevent abuse of children, amirite?

Where has respect for other people's speech gone?

[tech_no_man]

Civics

If you remember from your Civics or Government Classes from High School and or College, "The Senate is immune from any laws enacted by the Senate." What this means then is that you will have to get your pornography and or art (you know the non-existent model) from your good Senator!

Those that didn't know that the Senate was immune from prosecution. Sometime ago there was a young woman that went after a Senator for sexual harassment and lost because the Senate is immune from the laws that govern you and I!

[Too Old For IT]

Thoughtcrime

The core of anti child-porn laws is the government attempting to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects.

"Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters."
-- George Orwell, [i]Nineteen Eighty-Four[/i]

[lisa donaho]

Rights

Where your right to free speech end is where they violate someone else's rights.

However I am still looking for where it says we have the right to not be offended.

[philnye]

Not bad but why don't they...

Not a bad idea but again like most legislation, the figure heads come up with an idea, bathe in the credit and pat themselves on the back, and leave no guideance or solutions as to how to implement the idea in the first place. What about a bill that holds congress accountable for "bad ideas" and the associated costs to the public for those shallow thoughts? Or how about this, why doesn't congress put this kind of effort into reducing our SPAM problems that plague ISPs, corporate, and and private e-mail services and cost millions of dollars a year from all of us?

[ComputerUser1024]

SPAM

Spam is despicable. Some of the legislators are somewhat responsible for some of the spam going out. I think I have seen election campaign spam just this last election.

[fabled1]

I agree...

Agreed 100%...

[Methuss]

McCain is an idiot

This law would make most Anime illegal. Even the not so hard core stuff like Full Metal Panic or Steel Angel Kurumi would be illegal.

They guy is a total idiot.

[Methuss]

McCain is a retard

This law would make most Anime illegal. Even the not so hard core stuff like Full Metal Panic or Steel Angel Kurumi would be illegal.

They guy is a total idiot.

[Methuss]

McCain is a retard

This law would make most Anime illegal. Even the not so hard core stuff like Full Metal Panic or Steel Angel Kurumi would be illegal.

The guy is a total idiot.

[fredhetz]

Someone Will Run For President

Hillary Clinton came down on video games as a prelude to running for president. McCain is doing this as a prelude to what I'm sure will be his announcement. Every one has to make sure they show how they have "family values" so middle America will see them as an ally. If this isn't pandering, then why the heck is Miss America going to be there when the announcement is made? What is up with that? Has she become the seal of approval for good child porn legislation?

[dmm]

I am skeptical

Despite agreeing wholeheartedly with what he is trying to accomplish, I am skeptical of McCain's motives. As advertised, this law would never survive a free speech challenge, and he surely must know that. Just for starters, it makes no distinction between a 17-year-old posing seductively in a string bikini with her parents' permission, and a naked 5-year-old being exploited without anyone's knowledge (other than the pervert). Even though I personally think the parents in the first case are disgusting morons who are not fit to be parents, that doesn't mean I think that the state should put them in jail. Certainly it shouldn't be put in the same category as the latter case.

[disco-legend-zeke]

start by burning all art books and oil paintings

since most libraries and museums provide internet access or have websites, we must scour the pages of art books and the walls of museums for those evil lacivious cherubs.

what about TV commercials?

While the intent of the law is commendable, the reach certainly exceeds the bounds of free speech.

[fred dunn]

Next the intellectuals...

After all they can think for themselves and are a danger to the goverment.
Then find a subset of the populous and blame all that is wrong with them and send them to Guantanamo or start buidling "internment camps" throughout the United States.
This could help to solve the illegal immigration issue then because there would be forced labor for all of those in the camps so any meanial or dangerous jobs could be done by them.

"Deja-Vu all over again"

[mark fox]

McCain & Bush, Cheney, Inc: Hate SouthPark

Yes they are all idiots. Child Pornography is wrong, so is what the prez and company has been doing for eight years. You don't see McCain jumping on that bandwagon!

[ComputerUser1024]

Communism

I am no fan of pornography, in fact I despise it. I hate it when I go to a web site that slams me with it or when some one sends me spam mail promoting such filth.

This proposed law strikes me of something that would have originated in a communist country. Since when did we start having the KGB in the United States and since when was it illegal not to report your neighbor. I thought that communism fell a few years ago. It is scary that a few senators are trying to revive it in our country. I think they need another means of stopping this activity by the porn pusher rather than punishing people for not turning them into the KGB.

[ralfthedog]

You are confusing communism with totalitarianism.

You can be one without the other.

[kalmia]

Why do people like McCain?

What at all is likable about this guy? As far reaching as this goes, it will make almost anyone who has used the web much a criminal. "clothed teens in "lascivious" poses"? Look at a few MySpace pages and you'll stumble across many of these. I guess they'll have to increase the prison population from the 2+million to 200+million.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Impeach McCain!

RON PAUL for president!

[protagonistic]

RE: Why do people like McCain?

Say what you want, but the guy fought and was tortured for the
right to speak his mind. I can admire the man and still disagree
with what he is saying.

But then you could ask your question about any of our
politicians. I get the impression that as soon as a politician gets
elected they undergo a "commonsenseotomy" to remove any
common sense they may have arrived in Washington with.

[Too Old For IT]

He is a True American Hero

...and should have gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor for his war time actions against the North Vietnamese.

That said, it is sad that a man who has suffered abuse at the hands of a evil dictatorship wishes to create one here in America.

"So sad, different dreams."
Ronald F. Maxwell

[R Me]

confused

I think that many consider his military/POW background impressive when it comes to a quality that would make a good president. The truth is that his experiences have left hidden holes in him that hide unimaginable horrors that overlap into present portions of his psych. He is far from stable and completely unfit to be president.

[Fireweaver]

Stupid, and ultimately Frightening

Even if I didn't object with this on being a ridiculous burden on ISPs the language of this is way too broad. The cartoon images is just plain stupid!
"Clearly your cartoon, though it is a fictitious character, depicts a teen in a sexual manner"
Artist: "The person in the cartoon may look like a teen but I assure you that they are 21, here's my artist's statement"

And almost as bad, or maybe worse. The sidebar of the article noted:
What images must be reported? Illegal images of minors, which includes clothed teens in "lascivious" poses

Who gets to decide what constitutes Lascivious?
Police: "You're under arrest for indecent pictures"
Dad: "That's a family picture of us on vacation in Hawaii"
Police "The teenage girl in the bikini is in lascivious pose"
Dad: "That's ridiculous! We are all doing the same pose!"
Police: "Yes, but she's the only cute one"

[ComputerUser1024]

Speaking of Which

My father has somewhere a picture of my nephew running around with nothing on - taken several years ago when my nephew was just a toddler. My father keeps the picture not because my nephew is naked, but it is a picture of him as a child doing what children do, playing. It is family history. What is to stop someone from seeing that picture and shouting ...CHILD PORN... This country is getting on dangerous ground when it comes to some matters I feel.

[Central_office_tech]

if it makes thier penis stand up

They will call it overtly erotic. You are dealing with very repressed minds. First off, think about the move a few years ago to remove all porn. The is that movement re-grouped. They say child, but they want it all removed.

[tech_no_man]

Civics and Government

I feel this important to re-post on the main part of the board. If you want to know why the Senator McCain wants this law? It is a simple matter of corner the Kiddy Porn market and here why;

If you remember from your Civics or Government Classes from High School and or College, "The Senate is immune from any laws enacted by the Senate." What this means then is that you will have to get your pornography and or art (you know the non-existent model) from your good Senator!

Those that didn't know that the Senate was immune from prosecution. Sometime ago there was a young woman that went after a Senator for sexual harassment and lost because the Senate is immune from the laws that govern you and I!

[Sparky672]

You are so wrong.

You must be confusing U.S. Senators (Congress) with certain
Foreign Diplomats that enjoy total immunity. LOL

Shame on you... if you're going to lecture everyone at least
understand what you're talking about...

The following applies to the entire US Congress which includes
the US House of Representatives, not just the US Senators as you
mention.

Quoting Article 1, Section 6 - U.S. Constitution

"... They [Senators and Representatives] shall in all cases, except
treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from
arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective
Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for
any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be
questioned in any other place. ..."

This was written into the Constitution to prevent the Executive
branch from harassing the Legislative branch. i.e. separation of
powers, coequal branches of government, etc.

They [Senators and Representatives] are not immune from
prosecution for criminal activity.

Examples:

U.S. Senator William Blount arrested for failing to attend his
impeachment hearing.

U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney faced arrest for striking a
Police Officer.

U.S. Representative James Traficant is serving time for taking
bribes.

U.S. Representative Tom Delay was indicted for campaign
funding issues.

...of course the list goes on and on...

[HandGlad2]

MD5 sums?

So you're saying, if this becomes law, that I will be able to calculate or acquire the hash for one of the "protected" pictures (note: not the picture itself, just its numeric representation), generate a file with the same "unique" hash (there's no such thing as a unique hash, as any mathematician or computer scientist knows - it's trivial to make a file with the same hash / MD5 sum if you already have the sum in question), and have police knock down the door of anyone I send it to?

Or, if I'm a child pornographer, generate 100,000 files with the same hash (=an afternoon's work) and put them on a P2P network, posting them on public sites (YouTube, Flickr etc), or spamming them along with some Viagra emails, thus invalidating the entire system since law enforcement can't keep up chasing after my fake child porn?

The only reason such a system would be put in place is to pave the way for a censored US Internet - once the legislation and system has been in place for a while, pass a new law that makes it illegal for ISPs to transmit files matching the hash, thus blocking the American public from viewing "inappropriate" content. A national firewall a la China can't work, as has been shown - but legislating that all ISPs do content matching and selective delivery might.

Too bad, I thought McCain had half a brain before this.

[Central_office_tech]

I agree with you completely

Even is they used SHA1 for the hashes or some longer hash values. Maybe some new government created algarythym with 256 character stings you can still easily get collisions(a collision is a exact matching hash that you get from a different file). To you guys who do not know what a hash is, it is just a computer/math formula used to create some text. This formula takes info from a file and adds it to its formula. The longer the string of text generated the less likely your chance for a collision. The problem is there is always a limit to the number of characters in the string. Now if you think about images and all the images out there, there are more images on the net than combinations in a 32 character string of text. After a while you would run out of combinations, but through the power of computers they would just repeat.

MD5 is only 32 characters. Here is a URL to wikipedia on MD5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

Now SHA1 gives us a 40 chrater Hexidecimal number. This would allow us quite a bit more combinations than MD5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha1

However it is still limited to just 40 characters. The number of combinations are still limited and would repeat.

If you read the MD5 Wikipedia page you will see what I mean about collisions. Many web sites use hashes to encrypt their user passwords. Hackers will often aim for collisions while doing brute force attacks.

The people drafting this legislation must know these facts therefore must have another motive or one hell of a hash algarythym.

[alegr]

MD5 collision? Non-trivial, sorry

Generating MD5 collision is VERY VERY nontrivial task and requires MANY MANY (in order of millions, though I may be underestimating that) CPU-hours of computing. It's only feasible for some "weak" cases.

[ralfthedog]

X10 the server power.

Look at this from the practical standpoint. If you compare every attachment to every email against a large list of known hashes, you will bog down every mail server in the US.

I guess you could graft this on to the virus scanners that most (Not all, some can't afford to do it) ISPs run. If you do this, they will have to cut quite a bit out of the virus database.

Even if you scan for hashes, all a bad guy would have to do is make a very small change to the file, and they will completely change the hash.

Having a known list of child porn, with known hashes is a good thing. It should help with prosecution. Scanning every email, PM and FTP in the US for these hashes is a bit overboard.

[Hoser McMoose]

MUCH worse then just that

I'm sure we've all heard of cases of some seriously sick pervs being arrested with 20,000+ images of child pron on their computer. Now, just figure for a second that 20,000 is probably only the tip of the iceberg for the total REAL child porn out there, and that DOESN'T include any of the "lascivious" clothed minors or cartoons or famous works by internationally renowned artists that would all be covered by this law. A while back I heard it suggested that over 100,000 children in the world were involved in the production of "exploitive" material.

At a quick guess I would say that the number of UNIQUE images and videos that would be covered by this law would easily number in the hundreds of millions, and as you correctly state, a simple change (or even single-bit corruption) in these images would result in a new hash.

This would bring up a few problems. First, have you tried running a simple search against a 100M+ records? Even a good database is going to choke big time! We're talking about AT LEAST a 10,000-fold increase in server requirements. Second, if your search is too simple then you're going to hit a LOT of false positives. Third, how many billion dollars a year is it going to cost to maintain this list?


Of course, this is all a totally moot point. The law is so completely moronic that even if, by some not altogether unreasonable chance, both Congress and the Senate are full of idiots and they pass it then the Supreme Court will shoot it down in about 15 seconds.

[ComputerUser1024]

Still very bad

I still think this is a very bad thing to happen in the United States, talk about erosion of freedoms.

[ComputerUser1024]

oops

I meant to reply to the reply to my comment. I think I must have hit the wrong button --- reply to story.

[Olrm]

Finally some body is doing something

I support 100% Senator John McCain. Corruption is going rampant, and HAS TO BE STOP! Our children, and Youth need to be protected by these predators.
Perhaps $300,000 is too small amount. How about Jail? 30 years?

[NoVista]

with friends like you, Olrm ...

Predators ...

As a f'rinstance, I like anime [some call it Japanimation? like nDCC-not Disney cartoon crap?] ya know? I guess not ...

anyhows, take Armitage III [google it, there's a Clue] and the McCain edict ... some government rent-a-thug would look at her and say ... 'ohmigawd, a lascivious teen etc. blah blah woof woof' ... only she's an android ...

oh, but that makes her not real and makes me a predator. Yeah, of whom? So Armitage wears kinky clothes, is petite, could be mistaken for a real teenager, well there ya are, fits all the requirements for putting me and thousands of other anime fans in the slammer.

Fine. And who is protected, what does this nonsense accomplish?

About as much expensive security as TSA.

[rcrusoe]

The problem with this kind of legislation . . .

is that it is unenforceable and everyone in Washington should know that. The Internet is international so any law passed by Washington will have zero effect on files hosted offshore.

And just how is anyone supposed to identify these "illegal" files? Scan my email and look for files that had a specific checksum? Something as simple as zipping the files would defeat that approach.

And utilizing more sophisticated technology such as encrypted peer to peer would render most efforts at driftnet surveillance useless.

I once had a lot of respect for John McCain and supported him in his previous Presidential bid. But his continued attacks on the First Amendment (McCain-Feingold, etc.) has destroyed all my confidence in the man.

This, IMO, is just electioneering hype and would only serve to further destroy the privacy rights of law abiding citizens while doing absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

Want to keep your children safe? Don't let them have a computer in their room. Keep it in a public area and supervise them while they are using it. Installing monitoring software would probably be a good idea in some situation.

Technology cannot protect children online. The only thing that can is parental supervision.

[fred dunn]

Your computer gets malware, you go to jail..

I don't support McCain but do support the prosecution of child pornographers. McCain's approach is unrealistic and dangerous, even to you.
Right now there is a case of a substitute Teacher being prosecuted for having illicit pictures on it, why? Malware and it's subsequent pop-ups.
So before you go on this campaign you'd better do your homework or you may be the one in jail or paying fines and having a stigma attached to you because your computer was subject to a "zero-Day" attack of a downloader.

Right now your system could be a part of a "bot-net" serving up just such pictures without your knowledge. But don't worry I'm sure your spouse will wait for you while you're in prison for 10-30 years and had to sell the house to pay the fine.

[Too Old For IT]

We should have followed Justice Ginsberg

.. and made 12 the age of consent for coast to coast, border to border, in Alaska, Hawaii and all the US Posessions.

Then the police could get back to work on [b]real[/b] crime, of which there is more than enough to keep them busy on any given day.

("The Legal Status of Women under Federal Law," Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Feigen Fasteau, 1974. )

[tannerpower97]

Amen.

We need to do whatever is necessary to put an end to child pornography and the terrible abuse of children that it is a result of (and that it encourages). How could someone say that they are not going to "snitch" on someone involved in that, as an earlier post said? How terribly irresponsible and selfish. The internet is awash in this type of filth that contributes nothing positive to society, and it needs to be regulated, BECAUSE IT IS ILLEGAL.

[HandGlad2]

You have to be blind not to see this is a growing problem

Especially considering today's news that Austrian authorities uncovered a major child-pornography ring involving at least 2,360 suspects from 77 countries.

[alphtoo]

Doing... Something?

I agree our children need to be protected from perverts. However this type of law does absolutely nothing to protect them. All it will do is cost a ton of money... from taxpayers, ISPs, etc. and all of those costs will hit We, The People, where we eat. Oh, and it will drive one more stake into the heart of our Constitution, bleeding yet more of the life from our Republic.
John McCain *was* a war hero and I respect him for that. *Now* he's just another politician, bent on gutting our Bill of Rights and Constitution, and for that he should be tried for treason and shot.

[poorgarby]

LOL at this post

The children have to be protected BY the predators? I guess I'll hire a fox to guard my chicken coop! Meanwhile, it's the parents' DUTY to protect their children. You wanna bring 'em into the world, great. Just don't expect the rest of us to pay for them. Because breeders can't do their job we have turned education into babysitting. In the name of safety what First Amendment rights are YOU willing to give up?

[murkywater]

What is the line?

I'm all for protecting children from predation on the net. Needs to be done in a big way.

But as with all forms of controversial art, where is the defining line? What characteristics separate a photographers "art form" from a "pornagraphic image"? Who makes the decision that an image is "too provacative"? What about the boundary where the "model" in the photograph has reached 18, a legal consenting adult?

With any of these types of bills that get passed into law, where are a definitive set of rules to prevent personal beliefs, views and biases from entering into the mix? The law cannot be something to viewed from a single individual perspective. It must be something that is applicable to everyone, everywhere, equally.

Free speech has both freedoms and limits. Unpopular, controversial speech must be protected under the First Amendment. At the same time, you can't walk into a crowded theater and scream "FIRE".

[NerdPatrolAJ]

Not everyone that has kiddy porn on their PC is aware of it

What about the the thousands of infected PCs with hidden folders serving illegal websites? This is commonplace in a world where people have been suckered by anti-virus solutions like Norton's and McAfee that claim to offer protection, but in reality do not. These poor schmucks do not even know these files exist or are even possible, but does that indemnify them from this law?