Current mood:

drained

Google are the good guys it seems
I’ve just been reading a NYTimes front page piece about Google’s struggle with the Justice Department. First off, before I forget to say it, let’s all pledge allegiance to Google, in honor of its allegiance to our freedom; Google has been the only one of the four major web search engines to put up any resistance to the invasion of our privacy being perpetrated by our government.
In the name of Protecting Children from Child Pornography, the Justice Department has demanded a massive disclosure of private information about Google users’ habits and identifying details. I’m not going to go into the obvious privacy concerns; that’s nothing we need to bleat helplessly about in a period of shameless governmental abuses and unapologetic assertions of unlimited power of the state as well as relentless diminishment of individual rights.
How can our leaders justify going to such ridiculous extremes in terms of constitutional violations with the proclaimed goal of protecting children from child porn, when the focus of their investigation targets only the end users, not the producers of the materials, and while the consumers of such a product are pretty clearly the scum of the earth, they’re not the ones engaging in the activities being filmed or photographed, so how exactly has a child been protected from the child porn industry in that situation? By the time the product is being sold, that ship of misery has sailed.
Child porn predates the Internet and would undoubtedly survive without that technology.
The production of child pornography is just a fragment of the larger wrong–the crimes of pedophiles are unequivocally evil, whether a camera is there or not, and yet the punishment for child molesters is relatively light, and more glaringly, the efforts to hunt down those who continue to pose a threat are somewhere between lackadaisical and nonexistent. Most of the time when a repeat offender violates parole or probation or ceases to register as required, they are not caught unless they happen to get pulled over for a traffic violation and show their ID. How is the Justice Department protecting children when they are letting the most dangerous known offenders slip through the cracks of their disinterest? Yet once they see this crusade as a way to invade the privacy of the multitudes without overwhelming objections because they’re flying the unassailable “Protecting the Children” banner, suddenly this is a vital area of concern? Maybe if they were making any sort of effort in the real world to improve the enforcement protocol, I’d be less dubious, but all things being the same, I think they give a fig about anyone’s kid only insofar as that kid isn’t sharing mp3s illegally, and they’re planning to raid home computers all over the country to find that out.

The issue, clearly, is financial. Crimes have been identified and prioritized, historically, by the mercenary concern. If any action can be perceived as motivated by a desire to gain wealth, it is a serious criminal offense to be punished with extreme prejudice. If any action that is harmful enough to merit legal intervention is not perceptibly motivated by financial gain, it earns a far less stringent penalty. This has two primary reasons.

The wealthy class needed to make it not worth the potential consequences to take any action against them, because they are very outnumbered. The government, similarly, needed to make it clear to the citizenry that only “an honest day’s work” was acceptable as a means of survival, to keep crime down and tax revenues up, but also to ensure that no prominent factions with ideologies contrary to their interests would easily come to power.
The wealthy and connected power elite is not likely to face the criminal charges for materially-motivated crime (traditionally, this is a reasonable assumption, and corruption in the justice system has largely protected the few exceptions in recent years). However, a crime committed for ANY other reason is as easily the action of a rich man as a poor one. It was vital to keep the penal standards for non-financial offenses much lower, because those were the crimes the upper class risked potentially facing trial for someday. A poor man robs a store or deals crack; any man can commit rape or murder. Any man can molest a child. The wealthy class needed to provide for the eventuality of one of their own getting caught, and they wanted to make sure he would have a chance to come home soon. That’s why our legal system has no rational consistency in terms of punishment fitting the crime. Most people are horrified to learn that a marijuana dealer can lose decades of their life in prison, while a repeat sex offender is freed quickly and continuously, despite a pattern of recidivism. Isn’t it time for the powers-that-be-oppressing-us to put their money where their shackles are and treat financially motivated crimes by nonviolent offenders as the desperate display of our country’s economic misery they are, offering first-time offenders a chance to receive job training or placement so they won’t be under such dire conditions of poverty in the future instead of corralling an entire generation of able-bodied individuals into a violent and corruptive cesspool which only nominally fails to be “cruel and unusual punishment,” and instead finally subject the most destructive and dangerous among us to the severe penalties their actions warrant?

Until such changes are made, how dare the Justice Department assert their commitment to protecting the children from harm? The children are not being protected from this sort of danger to such a wide extent that it could be argued as criminally negligent indifference on the part of the government. Yet when any lip service is paid to the children’s suffering, we all reflexively genuflect and rush forth to support the effort in question. What we need to be doing instead is demanding our leaders explain why they ignore all the children suffering without the perception of financial benefits to the offenders? Or why the most notable effort nominally intended to protect children is the tangentially related flood of subpoenas to monitor the internet usage of random citizens? What are they doing other than using the moral umbrella of an unassailably noble campaign to protect the innocent as the means to obtain information in violation of Constitutional restrictions? It’s nothing more than a cheap appeal to our emotions to get us to comply with a campaign to invade our civil rights. It’s criminal to trade on the legitimate outpouring of humanity in response to the suffering of innocents in order to wage an attack on the very populace that unwittingly compromised its freedom in the interest of its humanity.