Thursday, June 05, 2008

Whack-a-Mole

The R. Kelly underage-sex-video trial has taken a strange turn.

Now they're arguing about a mole that's on Kelly's back.

If the guy on the tape is back-mole-free, then it can't be R. Kelly. The state's expert says you can see the mole, now and then, on the grainy old video.

The Kelly expert says it's not
a mole at all, just a shadowy spot
that fades in and out of view
which a big ole mole wouldn't do.

Of course, we're not allowed to see the tape and judge for ourselves - it's child porn! At least, the prosecution claims it is. Anyway, no one can see it. Unless you're sitting in the courtroom. Then it's okay.

I gather that looking at child porn isn't a crime, as such, but that owning some, or copying some, must be against the law. You may have noticed that they always charge people with "downloading" it to their computers. But... technically... every time you "just look" at an image on the internet, it in fact gets "downloaded" to your computer. These laws seem to have been written in the age of online bulletin boards.

Meanwhile, technology marches on, and now teenagers are taking naked photos of themselves with their cell phones and sending the pics along to special friends. Some of these pics end up on the net.
The images are complicating the work of investigators whose job is to find exploited children. Authorities trying to identify youngsters in naked photos are increasingly discovering that the teens themselves took the shots, said John Shehan, a director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Part of the problem seems to be
that full-blown cases of puberty
arrive before they're legally free
to swim the deep end of the sea.

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