Prometheus 6

This kind of advice being given on discovered child pornography, I guess we can give up on convincing folks to step up to the plate on racism.

The Boss’s Computer
By RANDY COHEN

I am an Internet technician. While installing software on my company’s computer network, I happened on a lot of pornographic pictures in the president’s personal directory, including some of young children — clearly less than 18, possibly early teens. It is probably illegal and is absolutely immoral. Must I call the police? I think so, but I need my job. S.M.N., Vancouver

It is a crime to possess child pornography, and understandably: the sexual exploitation of children is reprehensible. Yet you have no legal obligation to contact the police, nor should you. The situation is too fraught with uncertainty. These photographs might depict — legally — not children but young-looking adults. The images could be digitally altered. Your boss may have acquired free (albeit illegal) images rather than bought them and provided a financial incentive to those who harm children. Someone other than your boss may have downloaded the pictures.

In any case, while protecting your job should not forestall your calling the police, the consequences of doing so should. Even if your boss were acquitted of criminal charges, the accusation itself imperils his job, his reputation and the company. If convicted, he faces years in prison. (Arizona recently sentenced a man to 200 years on similar grounds.) Since you have no reason to believe your boss has had improper contact with children, you should not subject him to such ferocious repercussions for looking at forbidden pictures.

Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on sentencing, describes the rationale for these laws: “We punish the kind of possession many concede is not inherently harmful but which contributes to behavior which produces much harm.” That is, by stopping buyers, even those who have had no contact with an actual child, we hope to stop sellers, who do exploit children. Is this effective? Tough to prove.

Why not target child-porn producers directly, much as we differentiate drug dealers from drug users? We try, Berman explains, but it’s not easy: “A lot of these Web sites are offshore. And the domestic ones are good at covering their tracks.” But if the intent of the law is estimable, its effect in this case would be too destructive to your boss and too ineffectual in protecting children for you to abet.

You do have duties to your employer. Because this material is on its computer, the firm risks prosecution. But short of calling the cops, your options are few. Nor would deleting the pictures eliminate all legal risk; that could be seen as destroying evidence. Your best recourse? Alas, silence.