Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Sociable
The benfit for the community is that access to their harddrives would allow further investigation of others in the chain.
|
Thinking about this some more, there are, unfortunately, a couple of drawbacks that come to mind:
1) Just "handing over your hard drive" is not as simple as it sounds. Even if the authorities were to take a perfect copy and return it with the offending material deleted, such things tend to take a *very* long time and, in the mean time, the user is effectively without a computer.
Given that computers are becoming more and more used (or even required) in day to day activities, this would not be an option, for instance were I to hand over my HDD (NB all the porn on my computer involves adults, thank you very much!) it would cripple my business because I do all my invoicing, billing, stock control etc on it and, even if I had an entirely separate business computer, the authorities would undoubtedly demand to see *all* my drives, CDs, floppies etc to make sure I'm not keeping a stash whilst ostensibly putting my hands up and asking for help.
2) The "further investigation of others in the chain" sounds very much like a "Prisoners Dilemma" situation whereby if nobody says *anything*, everyone gets away with it.
Ok, yes, they should go after those who actually run the websites etc that *distribute* the material and try to find those who actually commit the abuse, but I'm not sure that chasing the "small fry" would either be a good idea or a good usage of resources.
PS thanks for the positive Rep point, Sociable!