Prosecutions for Child Obscenity

Prosecutions for Child Obscenity

The fire chief of one of our local fire districts here in Boise County was just sentenced to five years for possession. (I'm not using the phrase for what he possessed because a lot of spam filters will then make this blog invisible.) According to the September 17, 2008 Idaho World, Fire Chief Larry Sherril was caught because he was using a credit to purchase downloads--and when they searched his home, they found "5,252 sexually explicit images of prepubescent minors."

Some years ago, there was a rather outspoken Libertarian at a gun rights conference I went to who went way out of his way to criticize laws about such things, making the claim that there were all sorts of ways that a person might unknowingly download this trash. For example, someone might mail it to you--and by simply opening your email, you would be breaking the law. Or you might download it on your computer without knowing it. For example, it is very easy to set up a page that has a full-sized picture, but scaled down so that it takes only a single pixel. The picture would be downloaded to your computer--but you would not even see. As an example, there's a picture of Sarah Palin with a rifle simulator at the end of this paragraph. But I have specified that the picture is only one pixel wide--so you probably can't even see it.

Just so that you can tell that I am not making this up, here's the same picture ten pixels wide.

Now you know that there's a picture there.

So the point is valid: it is conceivable that you could download illegal pictures and not even know it--but I notice that just about all the cases that I see for federal prosecution start out with credit card charges to download this evil trash--which somewhat takes it out of the, "I have no idea how that got there" category.

Now, if the federal government were prosecuting cases simply based on finding pictures on someone's computer, I would regard that they don't have a very strong case. There are a lot of ways that this can happen. The example above. Or because you have failed to adequately secure your computer system against viruses or attacks through your firewall. And oddly enough, it appears that the federal government knows well enough not to pursue cases this weak.