Why doesn&#39;t the FBI crack down on websites allowing cartoon child pornography? I was inspired to make this based off of a previous post. In the United States, visual depictions (such as drawings) of child abuse images is illegal provided they are ruled as obscene. This would make things like lolicon/shotacon (a type of cartoon child pornography) illegal in the United States (provided they are considered obscene), yet there are plenty of websites hosted in the United States that permit it to be posted in their website explicitly in their rules (4chan comes to mind), or just simply forbid real child pornography and say nothing about obscene cartoons. Yet, the FBI has never seized the servers of these sites, nor collected and disseminated to other countries IP addresses of those accessing such content, to arrest them like in Operation Avalanche. Why is that? The Dept of Homeland Security has even worked alongside 4chan before and described having a &quot;working relationship&quot; with them. There will surely be a lot of content that could be ruled as obscene in a court of law -- couldn't search warrants for the servers be granted and prosecutions made to those who downloaded/viewed the obscene content? There's surely a legal recourse to actually do this. I understand Section 230 is a thing, but surely the websites have to comply with US law, so if they permit material that could be ruled obscene that wouldn't be the case, surely? Not only that, but some countries outright consider, obscene or not, cartoon child pornography illegal. What's stopping them from asking the US's assistance in raiding the servers like the US literally did in the case of shutting down Megaupload? Is it a matter of &quot;this is possible but will not be considered worth the effort and taxpayer money&quot;? Do you think that will ever change?
The ruling that allows the ban on child pornography is based on two SCOTUS decisions: Miller v. Califorina, which legally defined &quot;obscene&quot; and declared obscenities to be beyond the protection of the First Amendment (just an fyi, the definition includes that the material is lacking in &quot;serious scientific, literary, artistic, or political value&quot; which the courts usually don't hold a high threshold of quality above. Obscenity laws are also, per Miller, to be in the power of the most local levels of governance among a body of people (so while the U.S. cannot ban content on a web forum, the forum's own rules may). The other case is law is New York v. Furber which held that there is a compeling government interest in protecting the physical and mental health and well being of a child and that the manufacture and sale of child porn leads to the abuse of children and tramautic memories of the experience that last for much of their lifetime that overrides any protection offered by the First Amendment, thus the material need not be legally obscene to make illegal. It's that compelling government interest that forms the basis of the answer. Because that is the justification for the illegalization of child porn and as such it would not always fall to obscenity laws without the interest, there is a bit of a loop hole. To be illegal, the pictures in question must have a real child featured in the porn in question. Thus pictures depicting fictional characters in their entirety (such as cartoon depictions of children) and erotica (literature featuring sexual content) are not illegal under Ferber and must fall to Miller to determine if it is illegal. Because Miller leaves the rules to the lowest level of community law possible, these pictures can be against the rules of many websites, 4chan is (in)famous for having next to no standards, this kind of material is perfectly legal on this site as far as higher levels of government are concerned and it falls to the moderation team of 4chan (such as they are) to limit the offensive content. It is because these materials do not depict actual real children that they are legal. This is due to the fact that these works can just barely qualify as having an artistic or literary value (the bar is very very low as to what qualifies as &quot;merit&quot; under Miller). It's also acceptable to make pictures of a real child portraying a fictional character who in the story is a victim of child pornography, regardless of the work's depiction so long as you aren't actually having the child actor strip on camera. This can be done by giving the child flesh colored clothing that covers the areas deemed obscene and using shoot angles that depict the child's skin that is legally allowed to be exposed (to hid the fact that for legal reasons the child is legally dressed on the set. Other production tricks are to hire actors who are older than 18 years old, but look younger than they are and can play a kid.). So long as you are not actually making child porn (showing the &quot;no-no areas&quot; on a real child), you can make fiction works that depict fictional characters involved in such activities in artistic ways to make any statement you want on the subject matter. In your two examples, Operation Avalance targeted sites that had materials such as pictures and videos that depicted actual children in pornographic situations. In the case of the Megaupload, the U.S. was requesting extradition for money laundering and racketeering in connection with the legal seizure of Megaupload following investigations into the site concerning digital piracy. I'm unaware of actual instances of child porn involved, but not saying it's not impossible. Extradition only works if the country requested (Here New Zealand) chooses to honor the request (the U.S. and New Zealand have an extradition treaty and very similar laws so extradition is both required per treaty when requested AND the accused person would face similar charges if the crime was committed in the requested country.).
Are there actual laws written, or de facto situations (e.g. let's say another law specifies that a child can't be physically forced to go anywhere without causing abuse) where the child can refuse to attend? Are there "tiers" to the age; Is it true that a temper tantrum of a 5 year old would be seen as such, but the refusal of a 17 year would be legally accepted? This is a hard question to answer that doesn't have a neat resolution. Very little pertaining to the authority of a parent over a child is codified in statutory law and there is not a clear cut age at which a child has "freedom of conscience" vis-a-vis a parent. Most of the law related to children concerns allocation of parenting time and parental decision making between divorced, separated or unmarried parents; abuse and neglect; and juvenile delinquency. There is also usually a snippet of criminal law stating that certain kinds of uses of force to discipline children do not constitute crimes. But, part of why it doesn't come up very much is that older children are usually socialized in a manner that causes them to show a certain amount of respect for the wishes of their parents. It also doesn't come up much for children who aren't in their late teens, because the complete economic dependence of children on their parents or guardians gives the parents considerable power of their children that doesn't require the exercise of physical force. Also, it is quite dependent upon how the issue presents itself. No law enforcement agency is going to aid a parent in forcibly dragging a kid to church against their will. But, no social services agency is going to remove a kid from a home because his birthday party will be cancelled if he doesn't go to the church of his parents' choice the Sunday before his birthday. There are also some subtle but important distinctions between states on the issue of emancipation. In Colorado, emancipation is a statement about the empirical reality. If a child is self-supporting and lives apart from parents or guardians then the child is an emancipated minor. It is not a status granted by a court, it is a status acknowledged by courts when evaluating other issues. In California, a child is not emancipated unless a court grants a child that status and a child who is de facto emancipated without the leave of a court is guilty of a "status offense" (the New York State term for someone in this state is PINS for "person in need of supervision"). Basically, if a parent can force a child to go to church by means that don't constitute abuse or neglect and don't exceed the level of force authorize for child discipline in the criminal code, then they can do it, and if they can't manage that, then they can't do it. Many states have a "status offense" that allows government intervention with the cooperation of a parent or guardian in cases where an "uncontrollable" child is defiant and simply will not give any heed to the parent or guardian's instructions. In practice, the older a child is, the less likely someone viewing a parent's conduct forcing a child to do something is to be viewed as acceptable or legally justified. The legal rights of children in a school setting are also age dependent under the case law, although not always in a really well defined way. Controls on student expression that would be uncontroversial for elementary school students may be looked upon by the law with disfavor for high school students and clearly prohibited for adults. Perhaps one useful way to conceptualize it is that trying to make a child attend a particular kind of religious service is not considered an improper purposes for a parent of any minor to utilize the resources available to the parent to do so, but the range of resources available to a parent with regard to an adult child is much narrower.
No, it is not illegal in UK to use proxies. No, it is not like the tor concept. No, the ISP does not slow you down (they mostly throttle detectable p2p connections), but if you use public proxies, many of them will be unacceptably slow. Note: for things like facebook, a proxy is utterly useless. You already donated your private data to them, there's nothing to hide.
You can't, in general, know whether a distributor of a work has permission to distribute, or is a pirate site. I verified that they have posted an illegal copy of a work that I created, and I know that I did not grant permission to them (or anyone) to infringe my copyright. Both hosting and downloading works without permission is a violation of copyright law, so both parties are liable. Downloaders may erroneously rely on the "I didn't know!" defense, which in the US carries no legal weight. Even so, if you download my book, it will probably cost me vastly more to sue you for infringement than the damages that I might be awarded over your infringement. Usually, copyright holders go after the pirate sites, and only rarely go after particularly egregious serial downloaders.
This has some basis in law. You need permission from a person to commercially exploit their likeness especially in California, and a waiver is a way of staving off future lawsuit over right of publicity. YT has a privacy policy whereby a person who have been filmed can request removal of the video (see also this, because they don't explain the policy in a single place). Because YT is commercially exploiting people's personalities, this is necessary.
If I were a DA (District Attorney) looking out "stamp out" statutory rape, I would make the rounds of the hospitals, identify women who gave birth, or were impregnated when underaged, and go from there. But few, if any DAs, do this. No, you wouldn't. First, you have neither the time nor the budget to do this. Second hospitals are not public property, you would need a warrant which the court won't give you because you don't have probable cause to believe a crime has or is being committed. As a DA, I would of course, follow up on any complaints lodged by the victim, or even by her/his parents. And maybe I would prosecute a case where people were "caught in the act, or there were nude pictures, etc. May even an especially egregious PDA (public display of affection). No, you wouldn't. You would follow up on complaints to the extent that you have the time, budget and manpower to do so and you would prosecute cases where you believe that you have a reasonable prospect of getting a conviction and where prosecution is, in your opinion, in the public interest. In the real world, that means where the police hand you a brief of evidence that is a lay-down misere and (for statutory rape) where there is a real power imbalance between the perpetrator and the victim - giving 2 willing 15 year old kids the label of 'sex offender' for life is probably not in the public interest. But suppose there were no complaints or smoking guns. Could someone investigate based on something like a teenager "holding hands" with someone much older? To make the question objective, what has historically caused DAs to prosecute people outside of the above parameters? With some exceptions, it is not the role of the DA to initiate or conduct investigations of criminal actions - that is the role of law enforcement officers, usually for this particular crime, police officers. Notwithstanding, the general rule in western, liberal democracies (which the United States, with a certain generosity of spirit, can still be considered) is that citizens are allowed to get on with their lives without day-to-day interference from the state. That is, law enforcement officers do not 'go fishing' for crimes, they investigate crimes that they have a probable cause to believe have actually happened, either because they themselves saw it happen or someone has reported it to them as having happened. The term for having a law enforcement officer following you around waiting for you to break the law is 'harassment' and may itself be illegal. A law enforcement officer can initiate an investigation based on anything but as no law enforcement agency has unlimited resources, they tend to follow only those investigations that might lead somewhere. For example, it has been known for parents to hold the hands of their children and even to publicly display affection towards them and parents are often "much older" then their children - this would not generally be grounds for initiating a statutory rape investigation.
Note that what is being bought or sold here is actually information about the exploit. Attempting to criminally penalize the transmission of information in the US often runs into First Amendment issues. If a person has good reason to know that information is going to be used to commit a crime, or is likely to be so used, and there is no plausible legitimate use for the information, that person might be charged with complicity or conspiracy for distributing the information. But where there are legitimate uses, that is much less likely. Here the information could be used to defend against the exploit, or to identify and remove software subject to the exploit, or for research into such exploits generally. There may be other legit uses as well. Some years ago the Federal government attempted to prosecute a person for exporting a book describing how to create an encryption program. The courts eventually ruled that this was protected speech. I suspect a similar ruling would be made in the sort of case described in the question, but the details would matter.
Because in some jurisdictions it is While sexting underage subjects is pretty much a crime universally, sexting of anyone is illegal in many jurisdictions, For example, in most countries that follow Sharia law.