Forum: General

Thread (Discussion): Sex Crime!

Sex Crime

By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted March 18, 2003.

In the Feds' new child-porn crackdown, you can go to prison for five years for just visiting a child porn site by accident, through the magic of spam.

As I know from personal experience, it's very easy for a nonpedophile to get child porn images in her browser cache: Just visit a child porn site by accident, get weirded out, and leave. The images you glanced at in disgust remain in your cache like accusatory digital ghosts. There are also easy ways for a nonpedophiliac, porn-loving person like myself to find child porn images on her hard drive. If you want a bunch of sexy pictures, it's common to run one of many "spider" programs that are designed to browse newsgroups and automatically suck all images down to your hard drive for, erm, inspection later. If I'm looking for hot lesbian porn, I'll set my spidering software to download all of the images from the newsgroup alt.sex.lesbian. It's possible I may get one or two sick images from a jerk who posted them randomly. When I find those images later, I'll delete them. But even after deletion, the image files remain on my hard drive until the memory overwrites them. This may take years, or never happen. A forensic analyst could look at my hard drive, find those deleted images, and call me a pedophile.

Sure, there are ways for me to scour my hard drive and remove all traces of my deleted files: on Sourceforge there's a free software program for Windows called Eraser, and if you search for "wipe" there, you'll find a version of this program for Linux, too. But for people who don't know about these programs, there is always the danger that an image that crossed their desktop on the way to the trash or recycle bin can and will be used against them in court.

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