I can't sell you a hot dog without taking a course on food safety and undergoing health inspections. I have to have licenses and pay fees for all of this.
But, who trained the employees of that business in pornography detection?
We have mandatory-reporting training in Australia and many professions must attend it and be appropriately certified, just like with food safety. I'd not be surprised if lab operators were included. It's not porn-detection, but fine-tuning one's suspicion of abuse in all forms. You may not see the need for it, but it is there.
For example, I used to be an adjudicator for schools debating and as such was regularly in the same room with schoolkids so I had to do the training. Doctors, psychologists, anyone with assumed regular contact with children or authority-figure status as part of their profession, must do the training and be up-to-date.
How were these employees informed that they were responsible for detecting and reporting pornography? Did some government official send them a letter? Did they get a visit from the police? Did they just read about it in the newspaper? Who told them to interpret photographs in order to report them?
The mandatory-reporting training is generally an item in their contract of employment. And it's not "detecting pornography", it's "detecting mistreatment".
Who taught them the legal standards for judging photographs as pornography? Don't give me the, "I know it when I see it," argument. This is different. A man's liberty and property are at stake. It's not just a case of freedom of speech.
No, it's pretty well-defined. The issue is not the image, the issue is what the image documents as occurring. Obviously people report things all the time that amount to nothing, and it is expected that those accepting the reports will filter accordingly. Most people making reports have only very partial information and it is expected that multiple reports will be gathered before any action occurs. Having the police confiscate the photo and the customer even notified of the report is highly unusual.
Yes, it's very big-brother, which is a whole other political argument not to have here.
Which employees took a seminar in pornography detection? Are they lawyers? Are they criminal psychologists? Where are their degrees? Where are their certificates? Who paid the fees and secured the licenses? How can untrained, unlicensed and uneducated store employees be expected to know the law and act correctly? We're talking about the possibility of sending a man to jail, here!
Not on the basis of a report, no. Reports are not charges, let alone convictions.
I don't care if this happened in Adelaide or Albuquerque. If I owned a photo lab, I would instruct my employees to NOT report any photographs to the police unless it was absolutely, crystal clear that something illegal was taking place in the pictures.
I don't think the business owner was right, in any sense of the word, to do what he did.
You do that in Australia and you are opening yourself to criminal charges: "mandatory reporting" is exactly what it says on the tin. Again, the report is not a conviction, the report is merely information which in this case probably should've been ignored but was probably handled by the wrong police officers.
