See also: "FBI misled, deceived judges in online child porn investigations" http://www.politechbot.com/p-04528.html --- From: lawfirmat_private To: declanat_private Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 09:00:40 +0100 Subject: A young man suicided for being suspected to exchange child pornography Hallo Declan, a sad news that should make (certain) people think. Hope you'll share this mail on the list. Best. Andrea Monti ---- Today the italian newspapers report the news of the suicide of a young man living near Asti, in the north of Italy. When the Carabinieri (one of the several italian law enforcement body) knocked at his door, he "dive" out the window, smashing on the ground after a five-floor jump. He was suspected to be part of a online exchange of child pornography. Not to be a slaughter or a monster, just, maybe, a lurker. This the "cold" news. Now a short commentary. The "child pornography" issue became a major topic for lawmakers and politicians when most of them "discovered" the internet. So a true crusade full of hypocrisy has been started against the "illegal content" and in favour of the "moralisation" of the net especially by the most conservative parts of right wing politicians and roman catholic priests. That (the latter) even started a sort of "online vigilantism", hiring "hackers"(???) to shut down "immoral" websites (please remark that in Italy these kind of things are forbidden by criminal law, but no criminal investigation has been started). The result is a poorly conceived law that - instead of allowing to hunt down the true monstes - has been enforced only againt people that, even occasionally, just downloaded a few images (often not pornographic, and not apparently realised through the enslaving of an under legal age person, as instead required by law). The result is a substantial breach in the civil right and free speech protection. That are threatened and damaged thanks to the use of child-pornography as trojan. Only a few voices rose up against this status quo (for a summary in english see "Another "witchhunt" in Italy" http://gandalf.it/netmark/netmar49.htm#heading03 wrote by Giancarlo Livraghi, founder and former chairman, while more stuff in italian has been published on ALCEI website (http://www.alcei.org). What is worse, is that the memory of the death of this young man will disappear in a few days. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Mar 13 2003 - 00:17:13 PST