[LINK] child porn laws -- more silliness

[rene]

On Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:26:21 +1100, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> Tough new child porn rules (5 February 2010)
> http://www.theage.com.au/national/tough-new-child-porn-rules-20100204-
> ng7d.html http://snipurl.com/u9zqg JONATHAN PEARLMAN February 5, 2010
>
> POLICE will be able to destroy computers carrying suspected child
> pornography even where the material is highly encrypted and
> impossible to access, under a tightening of federal sex offence laws.

Fwiw, the above media claim is imo a gross exaggeration, arguably 
completely false, of the provisions of the:
Crimes Legislation Amendment (Sexual Offences Against Children) Bill 2010
http://tinyurl.com/ygml3cu

The claim appears to me to arise from failure to read about the proposed 
new 'forfeiture' scheme, which the EM to the Bill claims is an improvement 
on the existing forfeiture situation, and imo probably is. The Bill does 
not even mention 'encrypt/ion' and it certainly does not give police a 
right, of their own volition, to destroy all/any data/equipment they want 
to, whether or not it is encrypted. Generally it requires police to notify 
previous possessor and/or other person with an interest in the data thereon 
of intention to destroy, and if they object, to seek to get court 
authorisation to destroy etc etc - far to complicated to briefly explain 
all the details.

The general 'mainstream media' increasingly irritate me because they 
publish poorly researched claims about things such as proposed legislation.

The Bill in question contains a number of extensions to existing criminal 
law which imo are of legitimate and serious concern/risk to persons who aim 
to abide by the law, but will most probably not get any attention/mention 
by mainstream, or probably any other, media outlets.

Things like criminalising publishing/'making available' links/URLs. An open 
question is how many levels deep could be applicable, and also how does the 
person who publishes a link to something on someone else's site know that 
forever after whatever was at that link at the time they published it will 
still be there. Conroy wants people to believe the 'Russian mafia' put 
horrid/illegal stuff on a dentist's site (and I don't doubt that someone 
did) - so if anyone had linked to that page of the dentist's site before, 
are they to prosecuted for 'making available' 'cp' material ?? And so on.

I'm not going into any of the issues in any detail, because the Bill is far 
too long, and complicated to do so.

Irene

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