Canada's new child porn laws--implications for ZKS?
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Wed Mar 14 14:10:39 PST 2001
While few countries are havens for child porn, and no one expected
Canada to suddenly become one, it is clear from legislation happening
in Canada that is about to become a very poor place to run an
anonymity service from.
Check the Reuters headlines, e.g., at Yahoo:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010314/wr/canada_porn_dc_1.html
--begin excerpt of article--
Wednesday March 14 3:52 PM ET
Canada to Criminalize Surfing for Child Porn
By Randall Palmer
OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Canadian government, apparently breaking new
ground internationally, introduced a bill on Wednesday to make it a
crime to surf for child pornography on the Internet, with penalties
of up to 10 years in jail.
Canadian officials said they were unaware of any other country with
similar legislation designed to crack down on child porn in an age
when it is just a mouse-click away.
...
In Canada, as in the United States and many other jurisdictions,
possession of child pornography downloaded from a computer is a
crime. But the bill would go further to ban knowingly bringing it up
on a computer screen.
...
It would create a new criminal offense of transmitting child
pornography, for example by e-mail, punishable by up to 10 years in
prison. Exporting it from Canada would also become criminal.
Importing it is already illegal.
--end excerpt of article--
Anonymity services like ZKS may be able to claim that they are not in
violation of the new law, or any existing law, because the suspected
child porn material was never visible to them or anyone in their
company.
A law holding ISPs or nym services responsible for the contents of
material flowing through their system would of course be a slam dunk
against ZKS and other such places. So far, this is not what the new
Canadian legislation has.
In Britain, the RIP bill which forces encryption keys to be turned
over is likely to have effects as well.
The Napster case, and others, show us that anonymity/piracy/porn
services are likely to come under heavy legal assault if their nexus
of operations is identifiable.
This was foreseeable many years ago and was discussed on this list
beginning in 1992-3. Any data haven or black market service with a
giant target painted on it is, well, a _target_.
I don't know what the current ZKS business model is...haven't
followed it for a while...but I would expect them to get a lot of
heat from this and similar laws.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May tcmay at got.net Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
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