Child porn is illegal because its creation damages the child. Its continued distribution is not the primary problem, the fact that it was created in the first place is. So the solution to child porn is to find it, use good-old-fashioned police work to find who made it, and use the legal system to remove that person's access to children.
No need to break the Internet and restrict free speech for this very-special case. Let's spend the money we want to spend on censoring the Internet on more detectives, so that child abuse can be eliminated!
The same goes for "counterfeit goods" or whatever the DHS used as rationale for seizing domain names. Don't break the Internet; just buy one of the fake watches, ask UPS where it was shipped from, get a warrant, and bust the guys! Right?
(I fear that in the US, though, the problem with child porn is not that children were abused, but that people like something in a sexual way. Consider the person who was mailed a box of comic books that depicted "under-age" children in a sexual context. The government wanted to put him in prison for 15 years. For receiving a box of books.
"Sexting" is another example. It's doubtful that one can abuse one's self, but the government still wants to put people in prison for it.
What I find most amusing is that all people look pretty much alike when naked. I don't understand why naked pictures are such a hot-button political issue. It seems like the government just doesn't really want any depictions of sex [children, adults, tentacles, or otherwise] around at all.
To go even further - by driving the distribution further and further underground it becomes harder to track down the originator and prevent the actual abuse. The police/politicians attack distribution because its easier and makes them look like they're doing something.
Exactly. Remember when file-sharing first became popular? Everyone used Napster, which had one centralized indexing server. If someone wanted content removed, they could just ask Napster and it would be gone.
This wasn't good enough for the RIAA, which shut Napster down completely. This caused the programming community to come up with an un-blockable alternative, and now everyone uses un-blockable encrypted BiTorrent with DHT. If you want something gone, there is nothing you can do short of shutting down the entire Internet.
(It wasn't un-blockable initially, but some greedy ISPs tried to block it, so now it's encrypted UDP instead of cleartext TCP. Now the ISPs can't block it reliably, and they waste their own bandwidth because UDP has no concept of a window size.)
So oops... now it's super-easy for people to distribute child porn, all because the music industry got greedy.
I should note, and I make this comment most of the time that someone mentions encrypted BitTorrent, that "encrypted" BitTorrent is not really encrypted. As you mentioned, attempts are made to fudge the protocol and make it hard to recognize that the BitTorrent protocol is being used.
It does not, however, provide any encryption or anonymity for your traffic. All packets are sent in the clear, your real IP address is still shown to all connected peers, etc.; do not rely on an "encrypted" BitTorrent connection to save you from a packet-sniffing fiend because the content you're downloading is not given any extra encryption by an encrypted BT connection, because the connection is not really encrypted in the classical sense, it's just obfuscated so that ISPs can't automatically detect BT traffic and disconnect/throttle/filter. "Encryption" was a bad thing to call BT encryption.
The IP address is an interesting issue; there is really no need to attach it the data that you send out, which is the illegal part. I guess too many ISPs use egress filtering to prevent clients from forging the source address? (Also, tit-for-tat would be harder without any verification of who's actually sending you packets.)
