Information does not want anything, even to be free. But most of us want to be free and most of us want information of any kind to be free - even if it's of the most terrible content. Unpleasant footage from Watch People Die to 9-11 to modern day wars of terror under Western and US military forces should be free for people to witness and criticize and share.

With hard drives full of death and destruction news one could consider me a twisted soul - or an activist with evidence of a corrupt Western Empire. Or consider me whatever you want - that freedom is yours. HOWEVER, regardless of what information I have or do not have - there will never be any proof that I was ever involved with the ghastly crimes in all that media.

So too with child porn. For the creepy people who seek and possess it, there may never be any proof that they were ever involved with the making or selling of that vile content - and IMO it should not be illegal as they did not commit the actual crimes. However, it's just not that simple.

On the plus side, decriminalizing child porn would remove the restrictive wall to allow crowdsourced investigations and make it much easier to actually look at the crimes, find clues, and track down the evil scum who did perform, record, and/or sell the content.

Just because the content is decriminalized doesn't mean the creeps with it are off the hook. IMO, the police should pursue every lead (with far more vigor than pursuing movie pirates), and in this way "harass" those in possession pursuing the responsible criminal sources of the content. This means looking into the possessor's lives, investigating their families, their finances, etc etc etc. The fall out of such an investigation would be a terrible social stigma to be sure, but not as bad as a prison sentence. (Profiting from or selling child porn should still be a crime.) Most importantly, the creeps' online histories could lead back to the actual sources, especially with surveillance tools that could be freely developed.

I'm not in favour of going easy on the creeps, but jail won't help their problems. Perhaps with decriminalization there might be better services to help them (that could also be infiltrated/monitored).

I'm not in favour of giving police more power. Honestly, I don't know if there'd be much different. Cops can basically do what they want now anyway. And of course evidence can be planted. Further, there's an overwhelming abundance of accounts where the police were covering up the pedophiles and their rings. So ultimately without political will to actually crack down on the child abusers then nothing would change.

I'm not in favour of spreading child porn. Maybe decriminalizing it is a terrible idea. Perhaps it would support and grow a much worse black market. It might spread it far and wide and if we changed our minds there'd be no way to get the toothpaste back in the tube. (Like common porn now.)

I am in favour of finding alternative solutions and helping stop child abuse. Maybe this is worth discussing.

There are other pros and cons to be sure. One most worth mentioning is the actual victims that are too young to consent to anything, much less be the center of global investigations, etc. To make them anonymous and blurred then obviously you lose half the chance of eventually finding half the parties involved. Further, they are still exploited - and perhaps years later, they won't want to relive or deal with any of such an investigation. It gets very complicated very quickly.

However bad child abuses are, it's not remotely as bad as the illegal global Wars of Terror unleashed by our governments.