Wired News' War Correspondent on kiddie porn

[Rich Graves <llurch+spamfilter@stanford.edu>]

Full text:

 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html

   Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers
   by Steve Silberman

   2:32pm  13.Jun.97.PDT After 17 years in the hacker underground,
   Christian Valor - well known among old-school hackers and phone
   phreaks as "Se7en" - was convinced that most of what gets written in
   the papers about computers and hacking is sensationalistic jive. For
   years, Valor says, he sneered at reports of the incidence of child
   pornography on the Net as
   "exaggerated/over-hyped/fearmongered/bullshit."

   Now making his living as a lecturer on computer security, Se7en claims
   he combed the Net for child pornography for eight weeks last year
   without finding a single image.

   That changed a couple of weeks ago, he says, when a JPEG mailed by an
   anonymous prankster sent him on an odyssey through a different kind of
   underground: IRC chat rooms with names like #littlegirlsex, ftp
[...]
   On 8 June, Se7en vowed on a hacker's mailing list to deliver a dose of
   "genuine hacker terror" to those who upload and distribute such images
   on the Net. The debate over his methods has stirred up tough questions
   among his peers about civil liberties, property rights, and the ethics
   of vigilante justice.

[I was not aware that he'd sent it to DefCon first, with cypherpunks as a
secondary distribution. That explains the language barrier Lizard noticed.]

   Se7en claims to have already "taken down" a "major player" - an
   employee of Southwestern Bell who Se7en says was "posting ads all over
   the place." Se7en told Wired News that he covertly watched the man's
   activities for days, gathering evidence that he emailed to the
   president of Southwestern Bell. Pseudonymous remailers like
   hotmail.com and juno.com, Se7en insists, provide no security blanket
[...]
   A couple of days after submitting message headers and logs to the
   president and network administrators of Southwestern Bell, Se7en says,
   he got a letter saying the employee was "no longer on the payroll."

   The hacker search for acceptance

   Se7en's declaration of war received support on the original mailing
   list. "I am all for freedom of speech/expression," wrote one poster,
   "but there are some things that are just wrong.... I feel a certain
   moral obligation to the human race to do my part in cleaning up the
   evil."
[...]
   Pitching in to assist the Feds just isn't the hacker way. As one
   poster to the DefCon list put it, "The government can't enforce laws
   on the Internet. We all know that. We can enforce laws on the
   Internet. We all know that too."

   The DefCon list was not a unanimous chorus of praise for Se7en's plan
   to give the pornographers a taste of hacker terror, however. The most
   vocal dissenter has been Declan McCullagh, Washington correspondent
   for the Netly News. McCullagh is an outspoken champion of
   constitutional rights, and a former hacker himself.

[Wired forgot the (tm).]

   "Few people seem to realize that the long-standing federal child-porn
   law outlawed pictures of dancing girls wearing leotards," McCullagh
   wrote - alluding to the conviction of Stephen Knox, a graduate student
   sentenced to five years in prison for possession of three videotapes
   of young girls in bathing suits. The camera, the US attorney general
   pointed out, lingered on the girls' genitals, though they remained
   clothed. "The sexual implications of certain modes of dress, posture,
   or movement may readily put the genitals on exhibition in a lascivious
   manner, without revealing them in a nude display," the Feds argued -
   and won.

[Declan fails to recognize that everybody here already knows this, and
agrees that Knox was the victim of hysteria.]

   The menace of child porn is being exploited by "censor-happy"
   legislators to "rein in this unruly cyberspace," McCullagh says. The
   rush to revile child porn on the DefCon list, McCullagh told Wired
   News, reminded him of the "loyalty oaths" of the McCarthy era.

[With James Donald, on the other hand, no analogies are necessary.]

   But McCullagh is not alone. As the debate over Se7en's declaration
   spread to the cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks -
   frequented by an older crowd than the DefCon list - others expressed
   similar reservations over Se7en's plan.

   "Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network
   technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling"
   behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with
   pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them."

[ROFL. I insisted on not being identified because I didn't want any conflict
with Declan, and here he has me AGREEING with him. Cool! And in context, a
good addition to the story.]

   It's not JPEGs of clothed ballerinas that raise his ire, Se7en says.
   It's "the 4-year-olds being raped, the 6-year-old forced to have oral
   sex with cum running down themselves." Such images, Se7en admits, are
   very rare - even in online spaces dedicated to trading sexual imagery
   of children.

   "I know what I'm doing is wrong. I'm trampling on the rights of these
   guys," he says. "But somewhere in the chain, someone is putting these
   images on paper before they get uploaded. Your freedom ends when you
   start hurting other people."

[I.e., we ain't talking about Knox or Angeli, folks.]

-rich
 http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/