Alberto “Gonzo” Gonzales Wants to See More Child Pornography

My already low opinion of Alberto “Torture’s Okay If I’m Scared Enough” Gonzales took another blow when reading about his desire to make ‘mandatory data retention’ part of the government’s attempt to fight child pornography.

He seems to have lost the plot, and the logic, when it comes to fighting child porn – that the greater crime is the child abuse required to make the material. Though its consumers are sick and reprehensible, targeting them is like trying to stop cocaine smuggling by arresting people babbling their way out of nightclub bathrooms. In making the fight against child porn about stemming its distribution online, Gonzales is saying the official policy is not to protect children from abuse, but to find abusers via evidence of their crimes.

It’s not crime-fighting at all, it’s clean-up. Child porn is evidence of failed policing, not something we should be happy to chase in favor of more difficult, more effective and more rewarding pre-emptive criminal investigation.

Of course, fighting child porn like any other criminal activity doesn’t require additional government power. When the FBI need to know what someone’s looking at on their PC, they can already go to a judge and get authorization for a wire-tap. A need to log every event at every computer is as unnecessary as a drive to open and scan every piece of mail.

However the difficult approach, of trying to save children before they’re harmed by attacking the organizations which produce child porn, not the sites that distribute it (like Yahoo! and Google) doesn’t allow for more comprehensive monitoring of the law-abiding majority and doesn’t allow failures to be blamed on inadequate legislation.

Gonzales is driving for laws that will lessen liberty and cement a view that we can’t prevent organized child abuse, but can only incarcerate offenders and put the victims through therapy. It requires the public to believe that child pornographers aren’t using the mail system, in-person meeting and the phone to avoid the ease with which data can be tapped and stored online. We’re not that stupid and Gonzales clearly is. I’d rather have the original Muppet as Attorney General.