It is true that the internet has made it much easier to find illicit porn than it was even a decade ago. Anyone over the age of 30 might remember getting sweaty palms standing by the magazine counter at the local drugstore and trying to steal glimpses of the porn rags. Those days are gone. Want to ogle girls? It takes literally a nanosecond to find pictures and videos. Want to ogle little girls? Little girls fucking dogs? Dogs fucking grown men in the ass? Grown men fucking — well, whatever. It’s out there and you know it.

Of course, just because it’s out there doesn’t make it legal. You could make the argument that the existence of illicit porn demonstrates enough desire for it that societies ought to reevaluate what is or isn’t acceptable. Meanwhile, though, the fact remains that local laws govern what you can view on the internet. Many people break those laws with impunity. If you stumble on an illicit image accidentally, the federals probably won’t burst into your home and lead you away in handcuffs. But if you gather up sixteen thousand such images, it’s clearly no longer an accident. To collect demonstrates intent.

For that reason alone, it’s absurd for Mr. Dalgleish to blame search engines for his behavior. Add to that the fact that in 2001 he was convicted of indecent assault and it seems pretty obvious whom Mr. Dalgleish should blame for his porn habit. He certainly knew this himself because, weirdly, he had evidently tried to keep himself away from children. He made himself into a “recluse” because he “recognised he had a problem with young girls.” How noble of him. Given how ridiculous it is for him to blame search engines for his problem, it wouldn’t be surprising if his reclusion really had another motive. Far from protecting the local girls, he was probably just too busy downloading and jerking off to bother leaving the house.

Spam is to the internet what venereal disease is to promiscuity. At best it’s an annoyance and at worst it’s a danger that simply comes with the territory. And like disease, it is controllable in isolated cases but impossible to purge from the system as a whole. It’s like syphilis — just when you think you’ve managed to penicillin it out of existence, it starts to make a comeback.

As diseases mutate and evolve, so too does spam. The Srizbi botnet now blares that it has “caught you naked.” Incredibly, this will cause a percent or two of recipients to open the mail — and when there are billions of recipients, one percent is enough. The curious thing about this bit of “social engineering” is that people will (a) believe they could have been videotaped nude; (b) care that they’ve been videotaped nude. In the first case, you have to be pretty casual with your body to end up on somebody’s camera. In the second case, what’s the big fucking deal? Everyone has a body. Everyone gets naked. Is it really so frightening to think that somewhere in the world there is a video of your paunch or your ass? It should be more frightening to realize the number of surveillance cameras that have recorded your face. After all, an ass is an ass is an ass, but the face is unique, the neon sign of identity. That’s why mugshots exclude everything from the neck down.

It’s interesting to look at the recent fad for naked vlogging on YouTube in this light. It consists of vloggers (the video equivalent of bloggers) taping a message in the buff and posting it to YouTube. Usually these messages show the vloggers’ faces but not their “private” parts. What’s weird is that, from a certain perspective, their real nakedness consists in the fact that they’re already showing their faces, not to mention sometimes bearing their souls as well. Once you have the courage to do that, is it really such a big deal to expose a little cleavage or a hairy chest?

(Thanks to Peter for the link.)

Evidently this whole brouhaha stems from the passing of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. The purpose of the act — protection of children — is entirely noble, but like much of the Bush Administration’s legislation it has a “far-reaching scope and breadth” that can lead to absurd consequences. For example, there is the case of the homeless sex offender now facing life imprisonment because he couldn’t register a home address with Georgia officials. Another example is the application of this federal act to public urination, which lawmakers in New Hampshire are rightly trying to circumvent.

After all, how many of you have never taken a leak in a public place? Of course, a lot depends on how you define “public.” It’s one thing to wander up to an elementary school and urinate on a seesaw. It’s another thing to be out in the woods and water a tree. Both are potentially public places but in each the risk of being seen — and the consequences of being seen — are dramatically different. The first case might be a sex crime. The second suggests a koan more than a crime… If you pee in the woods but nobody is there to see it, have you exposed yourself?

Or here is another conundrum. Though New Hampshire lawmakers may be doing the reasaonable thing by crafting a law that separates public urination from sex crime, do they not thereby open up a new loophole for creeps? Imagine a flasher who approaches a little old lady, whips open his trench coat, reveals his penis, and urinates on the sidewalk in front of her. Is he a sex offender? Or just a man who could no longer control his bladder?

(Thanks to Furpo and James for links.)

Second Life is an online virtual world where users can interact using surrogate characters called avatars. It is wrong to compare it to a video game, since there are no points, scores, losers or winners. It is more like a costume party. You create an account, download the proprietary software necessary to access the world, and then romp around in the imaginary world, which is pretty much like the real one: you can interact with other people, buy and sell goods, and so on. Second Life is not the only such virtual world, since these online “metaverses” have been around pretty much as long as networked computers. But it is one of the most prominent.

Like any community, Second Life has developed a seedy side. There are strippers. Prostitution is rampant, with one Second Life employee venturing that some 30% of transactions in the world relate to sex and gambling. A well-publicized “rape” has caused (real) Belgian police to begin monitoring Second Life. There are all sorts of “furries,” people who dress up like animals and engage in pseudo-bestiality. And now there is child porn and child sex, which has caused all sorts of perplexity ranging from the technical (how’d somebody hack the system to do it?) to the legal (is it ok to engage in illegal sexual behavior in a make-believe world?).

The issues raised by this illicit behavior are as predictable as they are intractable. On one hand, it seems wrong to assume that acts carried out in fantasy will necessarily spill over into reality. People aren’t simians acting out monkey-see-monkey-do sex crimes. What’s next — Nabokov’s great novel Lolita will be censored for fear it will make pedophiles out of English majors? And yet, on the other hand, it is equally disturbing to assume that acts carried out in fantasy won’t spill over into reality. Aren’t these role-playing worlds like flight simulators where deviants will hone the desires and skills they can apply to real-life sex crimes? If you rape a thousand children in cyberspace, will it be so inconceivable to rape one in reality?

Ugh. You could drive yourself crazy arguing these issues back and forth. In fact, people have already been engaging the debate since Julian Dibbell published his now classic article “A Rape in Cyberspace” in 1993.

However, no matter where you stand on the issues, there are two certainties here. First is that, given the incredible proliferation of deviant behavior online, it is safe to assume that people need their pathologies. Whether it is a confirmation of the most pessimistic view of mankind (we’re all evil!) or an expression of deep psychological truths (we’re all sick!) is difficult to say. Either way, deviance is here to stay. Second, it seems equally likely that virtual communities will learn to police themselves. Just as sites like Craigslist and Digg enable users to monitor content, so too will these virtual worlds do the same. It’s the only practical way they can deal with issues of online malfeasance — and you wouldn’t have to be a betting man to wager that, sometime very soon, you will see a news meme about the residents of some virtual world committing acts of online vigilantism against some perv who goes one step too far over the line.

He asks to see my computer (a small Sony Vaio). I oblige. He spent a couple of minutes looking at it, rotating it, studying it, turning it around, flipping it over, looking it all up and down. I finally asked “are you looking for something?”. He said “the latch, to open it”. There is no latch, just lift the lid. “Ahhhh, got it”.

So, we have the laptop open now — he wants to turn it on. Before doing that — he asks “is it password protected?”. I said “some of it is”. This perplexed him — I don’t think he’s ever heard that before. So we turn it on. We are presented with a logon screen…

He asks me how to proceed. I was a bit dumbfounded at that point — what do you mean? “Well, what should I click on to log in”. I tried to explain what the three accounts were — Administrator used to, well, administer the machine. Family — used by, well, my kids to play games. Tkyte — used by, well “me”. He asked me to pick one. So I said let’s use tkyte, I know that one best.

He clicks on it and it asks for a password. He looks surprised and says “it needs a password”. I was like — that is OK, I have it, here you go… Now he is logged in. But — my desktop looks a tad different from most — there is no IE on the desktop, just the recycle bin and a folder called programs — nothing else.

He really doesn’t know what to do now. No special searching software, nothing. He looks at me and says “you know what we are doing here right?”. I said — not really (I knew what we were doing, I read the news and all, but just said “no”). “Well” he says “we are looking for pornography”. Ahh I say… Ok, no problem.

But he is stuck. There is nothing familiar. So he clicks on the start menu and finds “My Pictures”. You know, if I was into that — that is precisely where I would stick all of my porn — right there in “My Pictures”. He goes into it — and sees all of my folders. And all of my pictures, which we looked at. He said “wow, you travel a lot”, I said “yup”.

Now, after about 15 minutes of looking at my pictures (I have to resist the urge to point him to my favorites :) he shuts down my computer and says “Ok sir, thank you very much, have a nice trip”.

What an utter and complete waste of time. His, mine, all of it.

I have three accounts, tens of thousands of files. Each account sees a different set of files. I seriously doubt I would keep in “My Pictures” a folder full of “not good stuff”. Heck, I might encrypt the data, I might hide the file name, I might put it somewhere not obvious, I might use an account not visible on the logon window by default. I might do a lot of stuff.

The person doing the search — they were afraid of the computer. They did not use one. They did not know what they were looking for. They did not know how to look for it. I felt like giving him POINTERS as we were going through this. I had to bite my tongue and refrain from giving him tips. The reason — the last person on the planet you want to annoy — the customs people at a border crossing. They can really ruin your day if they want to.

It’s clear what the “not good stuff” was. Customs officials were searching for child pornography. But as the technologist and numerous commenters have pointed out, this customs official plainly had not undergone the least bit of training in forensic computing. He had no idea how to open the laptop, let alone search it for the thousand different ways a person could conceal illicit pornography. The technologist goes on to point out that he even had a USB drive with him that the agent did not bother to look at.

You can draw several conclusions from this absurd, wasteful episode. First, without disparaging the probably overworked agent, he had obviously been given a mandate — “Check all suspicious laptops” — that he could not fulfill. What’s more, the Canadian government is not likely to enable the mandate to be fulfilled by training its agents or hiring forensic examiners to work its borders. As a result, customs agents are struggling to enforce a protocol that will have little or no efficacy.

Second, this situation is probably not unique to Canada. Every politician will want to be the one to enact legislation fighting such evils as child pornography, but the same politicians will be hard-pressed to allocate funds to staff physical borders with cyber-agents.

Third, this means that child pornographers — and terrorists and ID thieves and scammers and fraudsters and so on — need only practice the barest minimum of security. If an episode such as this is the norm, you only need to hide, disguise, or encrypt a file, and you’ll cross the border unmolested.

Fourth, in spite of the ease with which you could evade these procedures, there will remain complete retards — such as this guy — who practically make desktop backgrounds of their kiddie porn, throw themselves into the arms of law enforcement, and thus convince the government that its anti-c.p. program is working just fine.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

Every day, numerous men across the country fall into this trap. Cops say it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Log on, pretend to be a nymphet looking for love, arrange a meeting, shoot the fish.

What you don’t see every day, however, is a father bringing his own adult daughter — and her husband — to what he thinks is a pedo love tryst. It’s so curious that PervScan actually sat on this story for a few days in the hopes that additional information would become available. Unfortunately, none did, leaving not much choice but to speculate about the whole setup. How did the daughter and her husband end up tagging along? Was the daughter just a driver, or did she really know what her deviant dad was up to? How come cops arrested the daughter but not the husband?

Here is a picture of the daugher and her dad. Here is a picture of the daughter by herself. Their faces don’t tell you much. Dad looks unkempt and he’s got that “bald in front but long hair in the back” thing going on. In the first picture the daughter looks knowing, perhaps even devious. In the second picture she looks like a dope. She looks a bit like her dad. Perhaps the resemblance goes beyond appearances?

It’s not uncommon for sexual predators to enlist the aid of a female in order to make their victims feel at ease. But why do the females help? And in this case, why would a daughter help her own dad? Sometimes you do see kids encourage a parent to remarry after a death or a divorce. Maybe this was some twisted version of the same impulse. Or maybe her father had lied to her about the age of the girl they were going to meet. Then again, she seemed to be in on the plan about driving back to Longview while dad and his Lolita watched a porno video in the back seat. Even if the daughter did not know the girl was underage, this itself suggests that darker forces were at work. Think about it. Would you want to be driving around with your dad (or mom) watching porn in your backseat?

A year or so ago Supervert (creator of PervScan) registered a MySpace account. The intent was not really to use the service, since Supervert has enough web presence that it doesn’t need “my” space much, but rather to prevent others from causing confusion by using Supervert’s name. However, some people stumbled on Supervert’s account, submitted friend requests, and the thing took off from there. Gradually Supervert came to see that, though MySpace is technologically a crappy site, its popularity alone gives it value. People who wouldn’t normally send you an email will befriend you on MySpace, seemingly just because you’re there.

Not long after accumulating a good number of friends, Supervert’s account suddenly disappeared. Poof! Gone! There were no warnings or communications from MySpace, who also ignored several tech support requests. It was possible the site was hacked somehow, but odds were that MySpace, taking note of words like sex, fetish, perversion, and necrophilia in Supervert’s profile, simply decided to cancel the account without warning. And in Supervert’s case, it was easy to be phlegmatic about it: when you traffic in perversion, you get used to this sort of thing. Besides, MySpace did not prevent Supervert from re-registering.

It does not take Nostradamus to predict that such acts of censorship will be happening with greater frequency. In the first place, MySpace is owned by the notoriously conservative Fox News. In the second place, it’s a private service and therefore has no obligation to allow everybody in the world to be a member. In the third place, sex crime — particularly involving minors — is a hot-button topic today, and MySpace is not wrong in principle for wanting to minimize the opportunities for predators to find their prey via its service.

However, it remains disturbing to think that an immensely popular and therefore powerful service can develop its own sex offender database. Can a private company have a private definition of the meaning of “sex offender?” Who, according to Fox News, is a sex criminal? Will they draw their information exclusively from court records? Or will they decide that the thousands and thousands of users who write about any “alternative” form of sexuality are also “offenders?”

On one hand, you might think that this is no big deal. Real sex offenders will continue to use the site by masking their identity, and law-abiding perverts will simply migrate to some other service that allows them to rant about their kinks. On the other hand, though, you have to wonder about the consequences for a person if he is dubbed a “sex offender” even by a private company. For example, suppose that MySpace decides it would be a public service to share its sex offender registry freely. How would you like your potential employer or landlord to know that a major American corporation considers you a sex offender or deviant?

You quickly begin to realize that MySpace / Fox could wield a lot of power with this information. Certainly they recognize this too. Why else would they be lobbying for a law that would make it illegal for a sex offender to use an anonymous email address? Setting aside the fact that this law would have zero efficacy, it still represents a disturbing desire on the corporate level: to tie virtual identities to real people is to extend power from cyberspace to society. It’s one thing to be banned from a web site. But to have this ban spill over into your “real” life? Sound scary?

None of this is to say that MySpace is wrong to combat the illicit use of its services by sexual predators. Cross-checking its registrations with established sex-offender registries will weed out the few criminal dopes stupid enough to register on the site using their real names. But it will also encourage sex offenders to use other identities, anonymous email addresses and ad-hoc names that will be impossible to police. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on age verification? This is a more objective measure — either you’re 18 or you’re not — with less potential for censorship or slander. You’re not supposed to be able to get into a bar without showing identification, and perhaps MySpace will need to institute the same regulations. This will enable them to keep children in virtual playgrounds and leave the adults to fend for themselves, as they should.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

The internet has certainly given a new twist to a lot of old crimes. Sometimes the new twist even results in something approaching a paradox, like the story of the man convicted for abusing a girl he never actually met in person. Similarly, these three men in England have been convicted of conspiring to rape a girl, and yet they’ve never met in person either. What sort of conspiracy is that? One claimed he was just fantasizing aloud in adult chat rooms, another claimed he was trying to get evidence on the others, and the third simply “denied any wrongdoing.” And you do have to give some thought to that last guy’s position. Did he really do anything? Is a speech act tantamount to a real act? How do you differentiate between bullshit and a plan of action?

The theoretical questions are difficult, but in practical terms these guys weren’t saints. Prior to their conviction on conspiracy charges, all three pled guilty to possession, distribution, and production of child pornography. Grok that. The possession charges are incriminating but they don’t necessarily mean these guys were rapists. The distribution charges probably arose from the fact that they were sharing pictures with each other. But the production charge? No newspaper account clearly explained why the three were charged with this. If they were making kiddie porn, it implies they were victimizing real live children. That’s not just fantasy or cybercrime.

Furthermore, a group fantasy in an adult chat room might take the form of imagining the rape of a young girl. It might even associate a real person with that act — say, a celebrity. Lots of people fantasize about celebrities anyway. But when this group fantasy focuses on a specific individual and it grows specific in its details, then it does indeed enter into dangerous terrain. How would you feel if you knew three random guys were talking about assaulting you on the path you walk every day? Uncomfortable, right? Plainly that speech act edges over into something more tangible and malefic.

In sending the link, Furpo wondered whether this conviction would have greater consequences — perhaps crackdowns on other groups where people engage in illicit talk but without intent to harm anyone. Certainly it’s possible. But in this particular case the conviction appears warranted, and in general it is difficult to imagine the internet ever being purged of zones for free conversation. Crackdowns online would be like prostitution busts offline. They might inconvenience a few hookers or johns, but they’ll never do away with prostitution. So too online — be aware of what you say because you don’t want to be one of those whom the authorities make an example of, but odds are you’ll always have a place online to say whatever it is you want to say, however illicit.

The guy who claims that “people are going to be having sex with robots within five years” must not spend much time online. Has he missed the whole fucking machines phenomenon? Maybe he’d retort that these aren’t “robots,” but then there are sex machines around that you can program. There’s the Je Joue Programmable Vibrator. There’s this computer program for controlling the Magic Motion fuck machine. Surely there are all sorts of other programmable devices. Machine + software = robot, no? If so, people are already fucking plenty of robots.

The real ethical problem emerges when machines have the capacity to learn. If machines can learn and can change in response to their learning, then they become capable of unpredictable behavior. What if one of these fucking machines learns that, rather than pleasure her, it prefers to beat some bitch in the head with its blunt dildo? Or to look at it another way, what if it fails to learn that when an orifice spurts blood it’s usually time to cease and desist with the humping? That is sure to be one huge area of concern when having sex with robots. A bug or glitch could cause it to fuck you to death.

And finally, another interesting area of ethical concern will arise when fucking machines meet the sophisticated visual simulation of state-of-the-art fuck dolls. Suppose that, using advanced robotics on one hand and realistic simulation on the other, a bestialist makes himself a dog doll or a pedophile makes himself a child doll. Such devices would push right to the edge of acceptable behavior. After all, if they look and act like the “real” thing, it would seem to point the way toward having sex with the real thing. Conversely, where’s the harm in fucking a robot of whatever sort? You can’t inflict pain or humiliation on it — or can you? Might the ability to experience pain and humiliation be a part of the cyber future as well?

Here’s the pertinent excerpt of the email chain in question. It’s hard not to feel disappointed reading it. There’s not much in the way of juicy detail, and it’s hardly as outrageous as some of the other email scandals that have gotten people fired. In fact, it’s hard to understand why the outrage focuses on Mr. Imlah and not on the guy in the chain who admits to meeting “this Rach tonight for a few” because he’s “so bored being ‘committed.’” That guy’s actually cheating on somebody, which you’d think would be more egregious than Mr. Imlah’s mere mention of “banging Lauren.”

That being said, the real issue is not Mr. Imlah’s sex habits but rather his use or rather abuse of his work email account. Face it. Lots of guys write emails like this. Lots of guys write emails like this at work. But that is what Yahoo and Gmail and Hotmail are for — to provide personal accounts that you can (probably) access through your corporate firewall so that you can gab about the broads or the dudes or the whatevers that you’re banging.

On an individual level, it’s reckless to use your work email to discuss your sex habits — partly because it could get you fired, but partly also because those emails belong to your employer. On a corporate level, a company is right to reprimand employees who transgress these policies. Why? Well, think about it. Suppose you’re saving all your hard-earned money for college, or to buy a house, or to prepare for retirement. You take all that money and invest it with JP Morgan. Do you really want decisions about your finances interspersed with jokes about banging Lauren and getting a few off Rach? Of course not. It’s unprofessional. It shows a lack of focus on the matter to hand, which is your money. If a banker wants to combine business with pleasure, he should go invest in a porn film or a whorehouse. Otherwise keep it out of the workplace.