Yesterday, there was news that a manga translator who had downloaded Japanese comics for use in his work was found guilty of possessing child pornography. His case will surely not be the last and the RIAA, IFPI et al are having a field day with it. Why? Because when you can’t get legislators to understand your stance, just use child pornography. It’s been like that since the dawn of the computer age. No really, it has. Here are some examples of the debate in Sweden during the early 90s, when teenagers traded warez with 14.4k modems on BBS:s and the parents were at a total loss of understanding the scene culture of the day.
I spent most of my teenage years sitting at home, in front of my Amiga, logged on to a BBS, a Bulletin Board System. Those were places that you dialed up with your modem to write on forums, upload/download files or just hang out and chat with someone on another node. Because yeah, some of the better boards, like “Guru’s Dream” where Snuskis was sysop, had multiple phone lines so more than one user could be online at the same time. Sometimes as many as six, but more often two or three. In the early 90s, the busy tone was king.
Anyway. My parents had no clue what happened on the bulletin boards and my mum was a bit shocked when national TV ran a piece on the evening news where they showed a post from a forum on one of the boards: “For sale: 800 gallons of fuel (truck included)”.
Of course, the bulletin board systems were like websites are today. You can go to Facebook, Slashdot or 4chan without being able to tell what the internet is just by looking at one of them. The difference here was that no one over 25 years of age understood the online world, unless they were computer experts.
Things kicked off after that news piece ran. Here’s from a story in “Aftonbladet”, Sweden’s largest daily, on June 13, 1994:
FOR SALE: WEAPONS, DRUGS AND CHILD PORN – VIA COMPUTER
Enter the computer world and you end up in an electronic Wild West. Here there are no laws, no police. Thousands of teenagers sit day in and day out in front of their screens, trying to outdo eachother in committing crimes.
This is just the headline and three first sentences in a full spread story. They are interviewing some guy with the handle Shadow, whom they portray:
“In the computer world, Shadow has made himself a reputation of being a cool bomb expert and hardcore racist. In reality, he’s a jobless, lost and beer-drinking 22-year-old that has been found guily of several petty crimes: fencing, bomb threats and illegal bomb experiments. The crimes are actually the only things he’s proud of.”
From this character, they paint a picture of a shadowy (no pun intended) sub-culture, where seemingly harmless young men (“most of them wouldn’t handle real criminal life, many are bullied and with social problems”) sit in their rooms, conspiring.
“Many bulletin board systems offer copyrighted computer games and software. Some of them are in eternal competition of offering the latest releases. Through insider contacts, games can show up in Swedish pirate systems only hours after coding is complete in USA. The pirate operation undermines the whole market. One example is the computer giant Amiga that recently went bankrupt – in spite of their games being sold all over the world.”
OK. Amiga was a computer manufacturer, not a game developer. They crashed because PCs became increasingly suitable for home use and Amiga couldn’t keep up. Ah, anyway. Let’s get to the point:
“Some of the bulletin board systems only have a dozen or so users. Others have hundreds. The rule is that the more edgy content in the BBS, the more users it has. Since child pornography is some of the worst content there is, one would think there is a lot of that.”
So, one would think that? Well, if you weren’t in the scene, it was ridiculously hard to get accounts at the elite boards. And once in, the ratios were killers. Getting invites to cool webstartups or obscure torrent sites is a walk in the park compared to getting into a top notch BBS unless you knew the sysop.
What is interesting is that the child porn card has been played with these very same arguments several times over the last few years, against sites like The Pirate Bay and filesharing in general.
Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party writes on his blog about what Johan Schlüter, head of the legal department at Danish Anti Pirate Group said during a speech in May 2007:
“We need to filter the internet in order to solve the problem of filesharing. But politicians don’t understand filesharing and that’s a problem for us. That’s why we must associate filesharing with child pornography. That, politicians understand.”
But let’s go back to the early 90s. In Swedish morning daily “Svenska Dagbladet”, there’s an interesting story from January 1, 1994. It’s about the problem of teenagers using fake AT&T calling cards to connect to the boards (a common practice, since normal call rates applied to data traffic too and it was expensive trading warez with 14.4k modems). Hans Wranghult, chief of police in Malmö (“who has worked with computer security for 20 years”) said that the problem was soon to be over:
“The problem is that decades of neglected security has resulted in ridiculously simple passwords and ID verifiers that intruders easily can get through. Hackers meet increasingly tougher security in form of biometric protection that is now becoming common for high level computer systems. The user’s identity can be confirmed by fingerprints, voiceprints, retina scans and other identities that are difficult to fake.”
An unknown, digital force lures in the darkness and will ruin the world as we know it – unless we boost the security. I don’t know how Wanghult, with his 20 years of experience, could make such a terrible prediction that biometric security would be commonplace in a few years after 1994.
But I do know his contemporaries still believe it’s possible to protect onself against the faceless enemy by increasing control when the solution is something different entirely.
Oh yes, there is a solution. On November 26, 1993, the “Arbetet” newspaper ran a story on the same problem. The readers were told about the weapons’ market and how you had to hack Swedish telco Telia in order to get access. Stefan Kronqvist, electronic detective at the Swedish Police, was asked what parents would do if their kid had wished a PC and a modem for Christmas.
“A computer is ok, but I wouldn’t recommend a modem.”
That’s it! Let’s everyone go offline now. Case closed.
