House of Eratosthenes

That’s intentional on the part of the author, one “M. Savo.” What M. Savo did not intend, I think, is how thought-provoking the article becomes about halfway down. I’ll explain.

A 24-year-old computer-repair technician at Quidnunc�the bustling computer store on California Avenue Southwest at Alaska Junction�is used to seeing porn pop up on people’s computers. “Everything from beaver shots to weirder stuff like Japanese animation featuring tentacles and slime,” he says. “You get pretty desensitized.”

However, the file he saw last month while repairing one customer’s computer freaked him out. It was titled “5-year-old Girl” and it was a picture of a grown man having sex with a little girl. There were several other JPEG files with similar titles, he says.

Now, it would be illegal on the part of the computer repair shop to let this go and not report it. So…they reported it. And this is where the story mushrooms into a far more public issue. It’s an issue that, in the minds of some, has something to do with the War on Terror which affects us all:

Last week, in response to the Police Beat item, Quidnunc received the following anonymous letter: “Although I do believe child pornography is wrong, sick, disgusting, etc., I believe it is equally wrong what your employees did… I do not want to be concerned about some misguided do-gooder taking my private information and reporting it to ‘Big Brother.’ This is just one more example of the decay in civil rights in this country and you have chosen to contribute to it. I will not let this happen. I will no longer patronize your business… Just two days ago I referred a friend to your business to have his computer upgraded. I immediately called him and strongly advised him to go elsewhere. When I explained why, he agreed. We need to begin organizing boycotts against individuals who threaten our personal freedoms.” [emphasis mine]

Big Brother. Decay in civil rights. Threatening our personal freedoms. Sound familiar?

Just for the record, I don’t think there’s any correlation between babbling about civil rights & personal freedoms just because you can no longer make poorly-advised jokes about bombs at the airport metal detectors — and storing kiddie porn on your computer. That is not my point. Indeed, the people who have developed amnesia about the September 11 attacks, and just want things to be the way they used to be, far, far outnumber people like me. I think we’ve completely lost track of what “civil liberties” we’re trying to defend. I think some of the additional powers that have been legislated to the Justice Department, are long overdue. In short, I simply think you can’t have it both ways: When someone commits a crime or conspires to commit a crime, and that crime involves victims or potential victims, and the criminal ends up walking because of extravagant and tenuous “civil rights” that were never legislated and aren’t listed anywhere and that nobody can even coherently articulate what they are — if you cheer for that, when you know the bad guy was really in fact guilty, it’s like a slap in the face to the victim.

That, to me, seems just like common sense.

Savo, however, in an opinion no doubt shared by the vast majority, embarks on an argument that achieves a pinnacle of extravagance at the expense of soundness. He chooses to agree with the author of the anonymous letter on the War on Terror and associated issues, but disagree with him in the matter of child pornography.

Which doesn’t automatically make Savo wrong, or stupid, or nuts. But I do think the argument is left incomplete. We “sacrifice freedom for security” as the saying goes, in the area of pornography, but not with terrorist attacks. Why is that?

Civil Libertarians are rightfully on edge these days. Congress just reauthorized the constitutionally questionable USA PATRIOT Act, which allows “sneak-and-peeks” where law enforcement can search your home or office, take photos, and seize items without letting you know that a warrant was issued. A week later, the GOP majority in Congress lowered the bar on domestic surveillance guidelines, retroactively accommodating President Bush’s creepy spying program. However, skittishness about the right to be left alone, justified and righteous as it may be, seems way off point in this case where�if the pictures are authentic�young children are being sexually abused.

The skittishness is way off point because young people may be sexually abused.

As my old boss used to say: “Scooby Doo…Rrrrrr?!?!?”

Maybe this is a good lesson for me. Maybe I’m gaining new insight on the people who oppose the Patriot Act and are “skittish,” so to speak, about their civil liberties. If M. Savo speaks for them, they must be of the mind that our personal freedoms are being exchanged for nothing. It’s the old Michael Moore slogan about “there is no terrorist threat.”

I mean, I’m sure M. Savo would agree with me that if a little girl is in danger of being molested, or put to an agonizing death in a puddle of burning jet fuel with no escape except a nose-dive off a hundred-story skyscraper — it would probably be better for her to be molested. Yes that sounds awful, I know, but think about it.

The planes did crash.

The people did burn.

And jump, they did.

I’m not trying to be disrespectful or dismissive toward Savo’s argument. He’s just left it incomplete. A law fights terrorists who want to kill us to make some kind of sick political statement, and another law fights perverts who buy and sell pictures of little tiny kids engaged in sex acts. Both laws “cost us our freedoms,” so to speak…as nearly all laws do. Oh, how I wish we could have a knock-down drag-out debate about sacrificing-of-freedoms, with regard to every single law that comes along.

Why am I to automatically assume it’s a worthwhile exercise when we prosecute molesters (in which case, I do agree with Savo; many, many people disagree with the two of us, passionately) — and it is not a worthwhile exercise when we prosecute terrorists who we know beyond the shadow of any doubt are really out there? Why am I to think the former is on the up-and-up, and the latter is just a big flim-flam, with a huge crater remaining to this day smack in the middle of Manhattan?

I understand that I’m supposed to divine some kind of meaningful difference between those two. But I’m not going to lie. The difference entirely escapes me. Perhaps it’s because we’ve completely skipped over that part in our national debate…because certain noisy advocates wanted us to.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

That’s Different!Friday, March 17th, 2006

That’s Different!
Friday, March 17th, 2006