[Lois]

http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2008/09/01/news/state/163572.txt

FARGO (AP) - A national trend of teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves on their cell phones and sending them to boyfriends and girlfriends is starting to show up in North Dakota, authorities say.

Fargo police have dealt with three such cases in the past month, Investigator Jim Shaw said. "It's just popped up all of sudden," he said.

Nude photos can find their way onto the Internet and plague teens well into adulthood, police Lt. Pat Claus said. Illicit photos also can result in criminal charges of possessing and disseminating child pornography or corruption of a minor.

"What kids don't understand is once you send something, it never goes away," Claus said.

In one case, a caregiver for a juvenile found naked pictures that the girl had taken of herself and stored on her cell phone.

"Looking at the phone, she's got contacts for Facebook and stuff like that, so who knows who she sent it to," Shaw said. "They don't understand that when they're 15 years old that at 25 the picture's going to be on the Internet."

Authorities struggle with how to enforce the law in such incidents, handling them on a case-by-case basis, Shaw said.

"We're going to have to adapt our laws, I think," he said. "Right now, if an 18-year-old wants to have sex with a 17-year-old, that's OK. But as soon as he takes a picture of her, that's child pornography."

Claus said it is unlikely that police would charge a minor with disseminating child porn for sending pictures of himself or herself.

"But the fact is there's a great deal of danger in putting images of yourself out electronically," he said.

Internet safety is part of the Fargo Public Schools curriculum for students in grades three through eight, spokesman Lowell Wolff said. Those lessons also pertain to text messaging, especially when it comes to cyber-bullying, he said.

"Increasingly, as the line between cell phones and the Internet blurs, so too does the conduct we're talking about," he said.

Claus said parents should know what their children are doing not only on the computer but also on their cell phones.

"Because a moment of indiscretion in a young person's life may lead to those photos and those things being out there forever," he said.

Fortunately, I have the solution.
Lower the "child pornography" age, to the "OK to consent to sex age."
AND, lower the "OK to consent to have sex age" to where Nature has already set the age:
Puberty.
Throughout the animal kingdom, HUMANS are the only animal that punishes consentual sex between members of it's species who are old enough to want to.
--Ray

[RopeFiend]

FARGO (AP) - A national trend of teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves on their cell phones and sending them to boyfriends and girlfriends is starting to show up in North Dakota, authorities say...

I always knew North Dakota was a little behind the times. 

Hell, kids everywhere else have been doing that since CAMERAS were invented!   

The camera cell phones just make that a little easier.

I didn't obey the guide that says "wait until you're 18" myself, so I can't blame anyone else for getting horny in their teens.    Why in hell is this making the news... did someone in Fargo just wake up out of their long slumber??

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Slightly off topic but related: the last company I worked for wanted some juicy military contracts, but part of the deal was that we had to post NO CAMERAS ALLOWED IN THIS FACILITY signs at every damned entrance.  It's an antique and laughable rule regarding anything that touches the crypto boxes.  For a while, they were TRYING to forbid camera phones and getting all shirty about it.  I had a sit-down with the president and pulled out my little thumb drive and my camera phone.  I asked him which one HE was more afraid of as far as security and secrecy.  A 4 gig thumb drive would have held a LOT of our detailed design documents from our Engineering server, which a MUCH larger risk than the cheezy & grainy photo you'd get off of a cell phone.  I even had the thumb drive loaded up with 4 or 5 of our complete design projects (absolutely EVERYTHING), as well as a couple of cell phone JPGs of the circuit boards.  I asked him to browse the thumbdrive at will...

He kinda smiled and agreed, and not long afterwards it became a "don't ask, don't tell" issue and nobody was harrassed any more.

[SoftGameHunter]

http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2008/09/01/news/state/163572.txt

Authorities struggle with how to enforce the law in such incidents, handling them on a case-by-case basis, Shaw said.

"We're going to have to adapt our laws, I think," he said. "Right now, if an 18-year-old wants to have sex with a 17-year-old, that's OK. But as soon as he takes a picture of her, that's child pornography."

Claus said it is unlikely that police would charge a minor with disseminating child porn for sending pictures of himself or herself.

That's good to know. I read about a case in Virginia a number of years ago of sixteen year old girls being charged with distribution of child pornography for exactly that sort of behavior.

In general, I just fucking hate prudes.

[Nero]

Yes, it's absolutely nutty that in most jurisdictions you can fuck a 16 year old, yet it's an offense to take a nude photograph of them.   I mean, if it's legal to fuck a 16 or 17 year old, then why can't you look at them naked?  It's not pedophilia if they are over the age of consent!

And I'm afraid that the USA has forced this law on the rest of the world...  For example, in the Netherlands until 1986 you could have magazines with nude 16 year olds, but the USA forced them to change the law.   It's just prohibition all over again, and we know how well that works.     

[PRED8HER]

My state is exactly one of those mentioned. I can legally have sex with a 16 year old girl. I would presume that would also entail looking at her naked body. If I took pictures of it though, I would be producing child porn. So legally I can fuck the real thing, but not look at pictures of it. 
This has even more interest with the recent Jamie Lynn problems. The fbi is looking into charging whoever made copies of her breastfeeding pictures with possession and possibly selling of child pornography. In order to do so, I would think they would need to charge her boyfriend who took the pictures with producing child pornography. Unless the pictures were able to change from one thing (perfectly normal pictures) to another (child porn) on the way to walmart.