OneAndOneIs2

I feel quite faint: There's an intelligent and thoughtful article on The Register.

:o)

It's about the girl & her mother who are suing the popular website MySpace. The summary that they would like you to know about is "Young teenage girl raped by man she met on MySpace". The summary that's more accurate but less likely to get them money in the courtroom is "Girl too young to use MySpace lies about her age to get an account, makes contact with a 19 year old man, speaks to him on the phone, meets him in person, has a meal with him, goes to a movie with him, goes home with him, and is then sexually assaulted. And then her mom sues MySpace, claiming it's all their fault."

The first version probably made you more sympathetic to the lawsuit than the second, I'm guessing. . .

El Reg makes the point that the problem in either case is that people need to stop acting as thought the Internet, unlike the entire rest of the world, is a perfectly safe and wholesome place, that's sadly suffering from a few nasty people who can be legislated or innovated away from the web. The simple truth is that the Internet is no different from any other place where people can interact with people.

I made a similar argument before, about people constantly attacking effects and ignoring causes.

Another anti-paedophile measure that's been in the headlines lately is a huge database of child porn to be compiled for ISP use, so ISPs can automatically scan their users' data for such images.

Sounds great in theory. After all, it's just an electronic equivalent of opening everybody's mail and looking at what photographs are in the envelopes, right?

Right... the real world as a metaphor for the virtual one. Here's a few ways any halfway-savvy internet user could get around such a 'filter' as thought it weren't there:

• Change the filename extension so the filter can't access the file properly
• Zip the file before sending
• Crop the edges of the picture, or tint it slightly, so it's different enough that a computer can't recognise it as a copy
• Encrypt it

And of course, that last one is a very popular example of people, far from expecting total safety from the Internet, react rather with "Ban this, it's used by paedophiles!" cries.

It's quite true that anybody with illegal files he doesn't want people to know about can use encryption to hide them, either through simple, PGP/GPG-like encryption, or through such elegant measures as TrueCrypt, which not only encrypts information, it does so so effectively it's near-impossible to prove that there's anything other than empty space where the encrypted files are.

So, sure, making encryption impossible to use would be a bit of a blow to paedophiles. If it were possible, which it isn't. But if it were, they couldn't email encrypted images, or use encrypted P2P networks (darknets), or hide files on encrypted filesystems.

The problem is, of course, that encryption is used in other places. If you've ever bought something from Ebay or Amazon.com, or done any internet banking, then you've used encryption: Without encryption, your account name, password, address, and credit card details, would all have been visible to anybody who was looking.

Whnever you see a webpage where that little "locked padlock" icon on your browser tells you the link is secure, do you know what that means? It means the link is encrypted.

Got a laptop? Got personal or corporate information on it that you don't want other people to be able to access? Know how all the effective security software makes your hard drive unreadable? Yep, it encrypts it - I believe Microsoft had a bit of an argument with the US on the topic, when they stated that they were releasing an encrypted filesystem that wouldn't have any backdoors for the security forces to bypass it. . .

Ever needed to send or receive an email that you could gaurantee really was from a particular person, or was only read by a particular person? That's what PGP and the GPG derivative were created to do: If you can use somebody's public key to unencrypt an email, you know it must have encrypted by their private key; if you encrypt an email with their public key, you know only their private key can decrypt it.

I could go on. But I think the point is made: Encryption is used by people who want or need privacy. That could mean the ability to stop people buying stuff with your credit card, or it could mean somebody trading illegal data untraceably.

To the technology, there isn't a difference: Encrypting data so others can't access it is encrypting data so others can't access it, whether it's passwords or porn.

People have set up P2P networks that are encrypted, so nobody can tell who is sharing what. I'm sure there are a lot of people using them to download MP3s and pornography illegally. That doesn't make the network itself immoral or undesireable. People use email and IM clients to trade those same things, does that mean we should ban email?

That's the thing about Free Speech: It's Free. So long as people have the ability to communicate, there exists not just the possibility, but the certainty, that people will communicate things that other people don't want them to. The press printed stuff governments didn't want them to (Clinton & Lewinsky leaps to mind); blogs print stuff that corporations don't want them to (Gorklaw leaps to mind); and the Internet allows people to transfer data that other people don't want them to. That includes music piracy, movie piracy, and child pornography.

All those things have been made possible by the Internet. That isn't the fault of the Internet, nor is it some kind of design flaw that can be fixed or removed. The Internet, in this respect, is flawless.

The flaw lies in the people who are using it. They're the cause of the problems, so they're what the solutions should be targetting. Any measure that tries to solve the problem by targetting the Internet is inescapably doomed to fail: How can you hit the mark if you're not even aiming at the target?