For those of who you regularly receive my newsletters, you know that I typically talk about developments that affect the adult industry. But I also find it important to report on issues that affect free speech rights.
On March 16, 2009, the New Jersey Assembly passed a bill which requires that information technology professionals and employees of public entities who know, or have reason to believe that child pornography on computers while engaging in their professional duties must report their finding to law enforcement.
My hunch is that this bill will become enacted into law in New Jersey. If it hasn't happened already, I would expect that similar laws may be passed in other states.
While we can all agree that preventing child pornography is a good thing, I have deep concerns about this act. If this becomes law, it now requires IT professionals to try to determine whether adult content is child pornography - not always an easy thing to do with the prevalence of legal teen content readily available.
Note that I underlined the word "must" above, which creates a legal obligation on the part of the IT professional to guess on the legality of the content. And if the guess is wrong, law enforcement would still presumably be obligated to seize the computer equipment with your legal content on it to conduct their investigation.
We should be encouraging law enforcement to stop the creation and distribution of child pornography. But requiring laypersons who work in the technology field to act as experts in spotting child pornography, at the possible expense of Constitutional rights, is not the way to achieve it.
