So two news stories have crossed my Internet surfing paths in the past 24 hours, and may sound familiar to some of you as well…
The first is the legalization of Child Pornography in New York… Yeah you read that right.
Unless you only use the Internet for checking email and Facebook(and even then) you probably have stumbled across some form of pornography at least once. Now whether or not it was intentional, once a porn site(or any site for that matter) is opened up, there’s something like a virtual paper trail that can be traced back to your IP address that states that you accessed that particular site.
In a nutshell, this legalization means that if you, the upstanding and wholesome American citizen, were to come across child pornography on the Internet, you could not be criminally prosecuted off of your browser history. In other words, no download no cell hole.
While the overall concept of this makes sense and will probably be passed on to other states, I can definitely see potential tweaks and revisions to this legal decision in the very near future.
You can pretty much get away with looking at child porn on a technicality, a technicality that comes even more into play if you’re not exactly tech savvy. Like I said before, your computer(and Internet browser) pretty much creates virtual paper trails of everything you do on the Internet and occasionally creates history to sites that you have not necessarily chosen to visit thanks to the wonderful world of pop ups both hidden and visible. So if you were to come across child pornography, a simple wiping of your history doesn’t mean that the site is erased from your TRUE history, if that makes sense, and New York feels like you should not possibly face jail time for what could just be an accident and that’s great.
But if there’s a lot of child porn in your browser history? I mean to the point where it just seems like you pretty much just logged into child porn dot com or whatever it would be called? As long as it isn’t downloaded/saved to your computer, you still can’t be sent to jail.
The argument could be made that if one was intentionally looking for child porn, that there would be a lot more evidence than just browser history that shows the person’s intent, and more often than not, there probably is.
However we live in an age where you really don’t have to download a single file to your computer in order to view it. You can stream just about anything and everything through the right media source, So if “downloading” is the criteria for me possibly getting into serious trouble, as long as I don’t ever “save file to computer” I’m technically in the clear.
Now I’m sure the powers that be will eventually realize this little loophole and adjust accordingly to correct it once it becomes an issue, but what do you all think? Is the law good enough as it is or is the legal system in New York(and probably everywhere else) not technologically up to date?
But while you ponder those questions…
I bring you Exhibit B.
Now obviously, Time Magazine designed this cover with the intent of selling more copies than usual just based off of the shock value. I mean how often are you at the check out line in Publix and in the magazine section you find a cover featuring a woman breast feeding a child who’s a little too old to still be attached to the nipple? Yes they probably could’ve gone with a more tasteful cover that conveys the same point, but if they did I, along with masses of others, would not be blogging/talking about it right now.
Even still though, WHO CARES?
This is the same country in which mothers in each state could whip out a tit in the middle of a children’s playground to feed their baby and nobody will bat an eye or have them arrested for indecent exposure (although in some cases…. never mind)
Now is the sight of a mom giving breast milk to a kid who would probably prefer a Sunny Delight kind of disturbing? a little. Do we know that situations like that exist and probably happen much more frequently than we would like to think? Yes, and if you say no, you probably would say yes after reading the article.
It’s obviously not illegal, and is actually a lot more modest than a plethora of other material that gets published with absolutely no backlash, so again I personally don’t see a problem with it. What do you all think?
