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Interesting that you assumed such a suggestion when I made none at all. I saw the discussion thread, have an extensive amount of experience in ONE of the areas relating to the debate, and merely submitted information that I felt would help broaden understanding for those attempting to determine a solution. A handly little step in resolving a problem is fully defining exactly what the problem is ;-)

Sorry, you're right. I shouldn't have made the assumption. But you stated the information in a way that made it seem like you thought that the posting of pictures on a porno or similar website was a bad thing. I naturally wondered what you would propose to alleviate such a bad thing.

Maybe it's because I belong to a military culture where a problem is never raised without a suggested solution. Not always a good thing.

You are right, too, I didn't make it clear in my posts whether I was siding with particular proposals and I probably should have said so. To answer your specific statement about posting images on porno websites, first we have to separate two issues... pictures of adults versus pictures of minors.

When it comes to images of children, I am very opposed to their being posted to any adult or sexually oriented site. As far as how to "alleviate such a bad thing", now we are getting into an enormously complicated issue which would really take a book ... hence my deliberate lack of suggestions earlier in this thread ;-)

For practical purposes alone, controlling images of children on the Internet is a logistical nightmare when it comes to jurisdictional matters... I'll give you a scenario that might help. A pedophile takes a picture of a child in Austria, loads it up on the PCU, then uses a dial-up account to an ISP in Germany to get on the Internet. He then uses an anonymous proxy server in Canada to log into a child porn website that is registered to an address in Russia and posts the image there. An American then can download the image from the Russian website, probably making use of an anonymous proxy server in Canada or otherwise himself. At each step of the way, the countries differ as far as what legally defines child porn, freedom of speech, requirements of ISP's to log Internet activity and what types of logging information the server is required to provide to local LE and/or other countries. Usenet is literal free-for-all as posters take advantage of high level encryption remailers to post just one image which is then flooded throughout the world and held on servers worldwide. Soooooo... you see my point? ;-)

As far as what we can do in our own individual countries is identify the dangers that arise from this situation and protect our children from becoming one of these images or being molested by someone who accesses them. One of the many issues involved is this one, the current topic regarding this particular photographer and the cheerleaders... and we slam right into two critical but competing types of values. The photographer has a right to freedom of expression, movement, presumption of innocence... the community has a right to protect the child's privacy and safety. How to go about finding a balance that satisfies everyone's rights in this situation is going to take our country a very, very long time. In the meantime, schools/police/parents navigate this situation as carefully as possible encountering landmines all along the way. If they infringe on the photographer's rights, they can be sued, harassed, condemned. If they allow the photographer to continue and he posts a picture entitled "Caitlin, St. Thomas Junior High, Freehold, New Jersey" and a cheerleader winds up exploited, molested or killed, we blame the school/police/parents for not doing their jobs properly...

I don't feel equipped to propose a solution because there isn't one that I know of that really can satisfy everyone's rights in this case. We have two competing values that we highly cherish but are diametrically opposed to each other.... that's what gets us every time ;-)