12 November 2010

Understanding Kiwi Judge lets Canberra pervert off with a fine

| johnboy
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The SMH has the intriguing news that a court in Wellington New Zealand has decided to let a Canberra man caught with 40k child pornography images on his hard drive off with a fine.

Judge Bruce Davidson said that as the man had been recalled to Australia and was due to leave on Friday, the realistic way to deal with the offending was by way of a fine.

He was ordered to pay $NZ11,200 ($A8,759.24) – $NZ700 ($A547.45) for each of the charges.

Won’t that be a happy homecoming?

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I always sit on the fence on what the charges should be with Child Pornography.
Yes it is pretty goddamn screwed up to have such images on one such harddrive, it is not really like this person though committed the crime, do you charge someone for murder if they have seen a video of the murder taking place? I also find the argument “as long as there is a market for it, it will exist” flawed, I think as long as people are diddling kids and have a camera, there will always be pictures on the Internet, TOR, P2P networks and such (the fact that they are on FREE networks, shows that there is no monetary market behind it).
That being said.. It is pretty goddamn screwed up.

creative_canberran said :

Most of this content is shared on very sophisticated private networks a step below the “mainstream internet”.

I guess you could call various public-service networks ‘sophisticated’, but I dont know about ‘private’. It seems like most of these stories seem to involve public servants using their work machines.

Funny how a thread about Joel Monaghan encouraging a dog to lick his nuts can generate a couple of hundred posts from angry rednecks, while a thread about a genuine sicko from Canberra only gets four.

Priorities, eh?

Tetranitrate4:57 pm 12 Nov 10

creative_canberran said :

I would hope that part of receiving such a lenient penalty was an agreement for him to let police know where he got the images.
Most of this content is shared on very sophisticated private networks a step below the “mainstream internet”. That is why police find it so difficult to track the content and the people behind it. They need someone who can get them in in the first place.

err I’m sure there are some, but there’s also secure privacy oriented networks like Freenet and Tor (Tor is what wikileaks uses to receive digital documents in such a way that even they don’t know for sure who sent them). The Police know about them, and can freely access them but there isn’t much they can do because they’re decentralized and designed to allow for communication without revealing any party’s IP.

-and there are many morally legitimate uses aside from wikileaks – eg tor is used by people in less free countries to allow them to use the internet without fear of being traced and punished due to political or other banned communications.

creative_canberran3:13 pm 12 Nov 10

I would hope that part of receiving such a lenient penalty was an agreement for him to let police know where he got the images.
Most of this content is shared on very sophisticated private networks a step below the “mainstream internet”. That is why police find it so difficult to track the content and the people behind it. They need someone who can get them in in the first place.

colourful sydney racing identity3:06 pm 12 Nov 10

I suspect that the AFP will have a warrant to search his premises here in aus.

so instead of losing money by locking him up. They gain x amount and get rid of him knowing that his PC will be raided in aus. And then locked up.

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