Computer technicians would be required to report child porn found on any computers they repair, under a bill passed overwhelmingly by the state House of Representatives on April 8. The bill would also make it a crime to file a false child porn report.
But could this bill, if it becomes law, present more problems than solutions to the child porn problem?
Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine sees more than one possible problem with the bill - including a lack of proper identification training for computer techs and repairmen, and the possibility of a computer owner having child porn on his computer that he never knew was on his machine in the first place.
"They really want to do something about such a horrible thing," Irvine said of the lower house lawmakers who passed the new bill. "It's horrible that people are abusing children in this way. Everybody wants to do something about it. But it's a matter of not overreacting, and not doing something that you cannot easily enforce."
"I don't know how you'd police that," said Free Speech Coalition executive director Bill Lyon, who added that child porn, while deplorable, isn't as widespread in the United States as people often enough believe. "They're caught up in this thing that child porn is a huge thing going on in the country. I think it's a lot less so than the common guy thinks it is, because it's been hyped so much in the publicity and in the news," he said.
Irvine said enough child porn makers are unscrupulous enough to find ways of unloading child porn onto unsuspecting users' computers - including such spam scams as luring users with ways to clean out adult porn, only to have the users download child porn unwittingly when opening the spam, then sending follow-up spams threatening that the user would be reported as a child porn collector unless he or she joined a site or sent money.
Irvine said fighting child porn should not be turned into a license to ruin an innocent life. "It's a nice idea to try to get rid of [child porn]," she said, "but I think they're going about this in the wrong direction. If someone has thousands of pictures of child porn, that's one thing. But that's usually not going to happen unless [someone's] out looking for it in the first place."
The bill would slap a misdemeanor charge and a $500 fine on computer techs who don't report files or images showing sex acts involving those younger than 18. But Irvine said that doesn't account for adult entertainers and models who are older than 18 but still look like teenagers - and for how to train computer techs and repairmen to distinguish between those adult entertainers and models and actual under-18 children.
"Most people really do not know about how to identify real child porn," she said. "So many of the reports we get here are people who are reporting actual adult entertainment, but they're against adult entertainment. So they report it. And there's a chance of ruining someone's life, therefore, because they have legitimate adult entertainment on their computer."
Irvine and Lyon both applauded that portion of the bill making it a crime to file false child porn reports. But they also said that only makes the training necessity even more acute. "If they make it a crime to file a false [report]," Irvine said, "how are they going to train those people to identify what is really child pornography? It's very difficult to split the difference. They have the best intentions. But it's just that the logistics of this won't work."
The training question could also prove critical when considering a factor Lyon said isn't often noted among those who watch out for and aim to stop child porn - an abundance of the same files, the same images, making the rounds of different places. "I truly think there's a lot of repeat business, if you will, people getting a lot of the same files," he said. "I don't think there are hundreds and hundreds of people in the U.S. abusing children and taking pictures of it. The great majority of it is stemming from overseas."
