Some search engines have already introduced a «splash page» warning computer users if they are close to
viewing illegal images.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which has cut images of child abuse hosted in the UK from 18 % of the global total in 1996 to under one per cent today, is to be given powers to create a national database of
illegal images of children.
The ban was done by putting the page on a blacklist that IWF updates twice a day to help British ISPs avoid making
potentially illegal images available.
He equated the requirement for a production order or search warrant as being similar to what police must do to search a computer hard drive, for example, to see if it
contains illegal images.
Statement from Stephen Balkam, CEO, Family Online Safety Institute in Response to UK Government Announcement Regarding
Tackling Illegal Images Online
The Art Newspaper: «Lost Keith Vaughan photographs go on show in London, capturing illicit love at a time when homosexuality was
still illegal Images, to be shown at Austin Desmond Fine Art, depict British artist with group of male friends on holiday at Pagham Beach in West Sussex» Article by Anna Brady in the Art Newspaper.
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Every illegal image is a crime scene but law enforcement agencies do not have the resources to identify, locate and protect every victim, nor to identify, and charge every abuser.
Plante does not say how
the illegal images were discovered.
But the information has to reside somewhere, and if you have a cryptography program that turns the text of Moby - Dick into
an illegal image, then that program did not arise by chance; it was designed to do this.
In short, if your defence is that
the illegal image (assuming that we are talking about something like a photograph and not something like a password) appeared on your computer by chance as the result of harmless computer activity, then your defence is a lie (or at best an honest mistake about what was done with your computer).
For example, your stored password manager file happens to store data identical to
an illegal image.
Do we want to live in a world where developers are forced to rewrite history repeatedly because someone snuck
an illegal image into a git repo, in a way that's difficult to detect?»
If images find their way online there is nearly always a way to remove them, especially children under 18 as these are
illegal images.