The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Unintended consequences of outlawing common sense

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

New scanners break child porn laws | Politics | The Guardian

Ooooh, I just love unintended consequences, or as jwz said when he posted this: “What happens when the immovable object of terrorism meets the unstoppable force of kiddie porn?” I can see this playing out thusly: those under 18 are exempt, so terrorists now use kids to smuggle the bomb materials aboard. Once that is discovered, the next step is to force parents and kids to separate sections of the planes, so now the terrorist kids are trained to trigger the explosions themselves. Kids are then banned from flying (not that I would argue with such an outcome).

The other scenario—pedophiles attempt en mass to become security screeners.

Speaking of unintended consequences and pedophiles, comes this story of a grandmother charged with kiddie porn because she took the obligatory grandkids in the bathtub photo. I swear, given the level of hysteria here (and it's not even limited to the United States) that one would think pedophiles by now would know to develop their own film, but I guess common sense has been legislated out of existence.

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