Several months ago, I outraged several people by wondering aloud whether video voyeurism should really be illegal. Sure, it’s perverted and wrong, but I’m skeptical of making perverted acts illegal in the absence of harm to an identified person. Non-harmful perversion is probably better left to moral opprobrium. After all, if everyone got to express their moral outrage through law, where would we be?
Perhaps Virginia.
Legislators there are working on a law to ban ‘upskirting’ And ‘downblousing.’ Taking surreptitious pictures of people’s private areas could subject Virginians to a year in jail or a $2,500 fine.
Clearly, this is a response to the advance of technology and the development of miniaturized cameras. But why should technology get the blame? Why aren’t scantily clad people regarded as causing all the problem? I don’t think there’s much to distinguish ‘upskirters’ and ‘downblousers’ from ‘exhibitionists.’ It’s just that, in this case, the exhibitionists were there first.
Amusingly, the story about the Virginia law is accompanied by a picture of a young woman’s mid-section, as if they were half-way to diagramming how ‘upskirting’ is done.
That reminded me of an article I read this morning deriding Fox News for interviewing moralist right-wingers and also doing a disproportionate number of stories about babes and their babeishness. I was amused (and kept interested) by all the screen captures in the Fox-critical piece. I think the tut-tutters were taking a page from the Fox media playbook.
I wonder how many Virginia legislators are looking at upskirt snaps on the Internet ‘for research.’
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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