Stop protecting the children!!

It seems that almost every week a new story comes out about a company trying to 'protect the children', and in nearly ever instance, their protection is misguided, self-serving, redundant, useless or all of the above. In the past few weeks we have seen quite a few, such as cable companies blocking child porn and google maps is used by child predators. Of course each time a technopanic arises, someone is there to 'protect the children' by enacting measures against it, and each time the tech community is up in arms about how pointless and counterproductive these measures really are.

Sure, it's nothing new to use fear tactics and create solutions to fake problems to bolster your reputation, but if these measures are allowed to take hold in greater numbers, we risk losing all of what the internet means. No sane person in the tech community advocates keeping child porn online, and anyone out there to 'protect the children' who thinks we do is quite mistaken. All we are suggesting is that these measures focus on eliminating the problem, rather than a symptom, or worse yet, making those problems harder to find.

Not too long ago, New York considered making it illegal to incriminate yourself online. Such a law is not only pointless, but actually makes law enforcement more difficult. As Techdirt noted in their commentary on this incident, by making it illegal to incriminate yourself, the NYPD is making it harder to prosecute crimes. Blocking child porn is the same concept. If you make it more difficult for everyone to access it, you only make it more difficult to track down and eliminate.

All of these illegal activities will still be happening, whether they are blocked or not, but by blocking access, you leave the only people likely to find it as those actively seeking it. If someone who wasn't not seeking child porn came across some, they would be more likely than a non law enforcement agent who was seeking it out to contact law enforcement.

The whole 'protect the children' call to arms is merely a self serving tool of organizations and individuals who want to advance their career through short sighted policies that serve no true purpose. If they want to protect the children, they would be concerned with finding those who create child porn and bringing them to justice, rather than simply making it harder to find the child porn.