Big Brother Has A Sick Mind

The story I just read about criminal prosecutions for "sexting" raised some interesting legal questions ... at least initially. The furor over teens' use of cell phones and SMS messaging to transmit homemade kiddie porn isn't new. The traditional concern -- that recipients of risqué photos taken by kids of themselves for the benefit of their romantic interests would redistribute sensitive pictures without permission -- is fairly serious in that it impacts kids by intruding on what they (foolishly) expected to be a private communication. Ahh, to be young.

The lead paragraph's suggestion that a girl was being prosecuted in Wyoming for sending a picture of herself was a new twist: were kids being prosecuted for victimizing themselves?

One can imagine law enforcement effort, however, to prevent such foreseeable evils as the development of porn businesses based on buying pics from "consenting" minors too young to give legal consent. So this isn't utterly crazy, is it? But it gets worse: pictures taken at a slumber party, mostly of kids dressed more thoroughly than one would expect in a G-rated underwear advertisement, were the purported evil in the supposed self-promotion of child porn.

Prosecutors who insist that kids consent to a pretrial sentence to a re-education program on child porn (with a curriculum designed for what age group, one wonders?) or else face criminal prosecution have too much time on their hands. If the images of all the prosecutor-threatened kids were plausibly sexual in nature, one would expect that at least third parties who transmitted the images would be in trouble under draconian kiddie porn laws. One wonders what is wrong with the mind of an adult male prosecutor that he can't see images of teens wearing an amount of clothing comparable to that ordinarily seen at a beach without being driven mad with unquenchable erotic nervous energy of the sort that would persuade him the images would lead to prosecutable evil. This turkey needs therapy.

On the other hand, one of the girls was topless. She had apparently just stepped out of a shower and was wearing a towel like a skirt. I haven't seen the photo, though. It might be pornography, and it might be performance art. v It can be tricky to tell the difference.

But I know it when I see it.