Manitoba Province is considering drawing up a law mandating that computer repair shops call police if they think they have found child porn on a client’s computer, according to a published report.
A committee formed four years ago by Justice Minister Gord Mackintosh to examine how to keep Manitoban children from being exploited is said to be researching and writing a law that would treat child porn the way Manitoba treats child abuse.
"If you look at child abuse, mandatory reporting is the law,” Child Find Manitoba Executive Lianna McDonald told the Winnipeg Sun. “We want to see whether that could be applicable to child pornography."
American municipalities have requirements that photo shops report suspected child pornography, but very few now have similar requirements for computer repair shops. Illinois has such a state law on the books, and other states are considering similar statutes.
Requiring computer repair shops to report child porn found on customers’ machines has support from at least one influential child protection presence in cyberspace: Parry Aftab, the attorney who also founded WiredSafety.org and WiredKids.org. She told AVNOnline.com that she has consulted on the Manitoba computer repair shop reporting question and has no problem with such laws taking effect in Manitoba or in more U.S. states.
"I think that a computer repair shop is the equivalent of photo processing," she says, "and if [computer technicians] see it, they're going to know a lot more about it. People have come to me who work for computer repair shops in states that don't have [such laws], and they ask me what to do to report it, and the manager says don't and they could lose their jobs [if they do]."
Aftab also said that such laws must be accompanied by proper explanations as to what should or should not be reported. She cited a number of cases in which photo shops reported nonchild-porn image to authorities as child porn, such as those taken by doting parents of their infants or very young children bathing.
"If we do it in the U.S., you can't just say 'report child pornography,’ because you don't know what to report yet,” Aftab says of requiring computer repair shops to report suspicious images. “We need to explain what to report and how they're supposed to report it.
"Canada has different laws about child porn than we do," Aftab continues, "and although possession itself is not illegal in Canada, receiving it or giving it to anyone else is a crime. And that's part of the problem. The last thing you want is a witch hunt, or a person put in a position that they don't know what they're supposed to report."
Australia – wracked by a child-porn scandal beginning in the summer of 2004 – enacted a law requiring Internet service providers, but not computer repair shops, to report suspected child porn.
