Let's say all the charges on that page are true, and on the other side, take even half the allegations in his letter seriously...still, why are we treating a prisoner like this? Is it helping something?
This is what decades of two parties trying to outdo each other on being "tough on crime" looks like. These punishments do act as a deterrent to whistleblowing but that's not really why they were instituted in the first place. Prisoners are a really easy demographic to throw under the bus for political gain(not like they can vote) so you get these sorts of barbaric conditions for an ever increasing subsection of the prison population.
It is a legitimate defense strategy - and one that actually has valid points, at least for stuff like anime "CSAM". IMO, societies should focus more on preventing the creation of real-life CSAM:
- teach children from a young age in an appropriate way about sex including what the names of genitalia are, so that in a court examination you don't have to argue about what "down there" means, and consent. Children can only report abuse if they have a third party telling them that what they experience is not normal.
- provide infrastructure for potential pedophiles to get help. In Germany, we have the campaign "Kein Täter werden" since 2005 and oh boy, that was a mess to get started due to the (justified) public stigma against pedophiles, but it ended up preventing thousands of crimes [1].
- for the US: ban home-schooling and force all children through the public or accredited private school system so that (religious) cults can't go and indoctrinate young children into being breeding mares or abuse them with virtual impunity
- provide teachers with enough resources (time and training) that they can spot signs of abuse (and not just sexual, but also physical and emotional!) early on
- provide get-help infrastructure nationwide: anonymous phone help lines, "safe houses" for people of all genders and ages attempting to flee domestic violence and sexual abuse, easy and equitable access to restraining orders, provide CPS with enough financial and staff resources to do their job properly...
Unfortunately, the first three measures are highly politically charged and so won't pass, and the last one is expensive so it won't pass either, and as a result children all over the country end up being abused with no way of getting help or worse, not even knowing that they could get help.
Director of the one and only known insitute to make trans people in Germany going through TSG (80's law to allow for name change / gender marker change) take a visual pedophile test. (Why? I'm presuming he just likes to acrew more data, no other reason in particular)
I listened to a few public talks and... let's say I have some red flags I'd raise.
I think you'll find more pedophiles in the public school system than the home. Biological fathers have very low incidence rates of child molestation and households have limited numbers of people in them. On the other hand you have a building where it is known that lots of children attend daily and is full of people who self selected for whatever reason to be around someone elses kids all day.
My high school pulled two pedophiles out over the last three years alone. During my time there I witnessed a lot of behavior that went right up against the line of what is acceptable by people in adult hindsight probably shouldn't have had access to children.
Those types are common in K12 -- they're used to interacting with folks with less mobility (no car, no job and/or literally disabled) and exploiting that.
It's my understanding my alma mater (is that the right phrasing for your former high school?) still employs at least one, but the two people who told me about her behavior don't seem interested in having her removed from her position and I can't do anything with hearsay.
They often prey on kids victimized by the other set of abusers, the one's who don't abuse kids sexually, but are utter sadists who jump in with the bullies to victimize and other kids who are geeky, queer, or just plain shy they whine cries of false concern that those kids might not just commit suicide.
It was a different time before Columbine -- you had more freedom, but you also would get attacked physically -- nowadays the model seems to be that folks have some kind of cold war until the other side loses their temper, and then the true abuser gets to cry victim.
For context, I actually spotted one of the paraprofessionals from a school I attended in the crowd on Jan 6th -- it's been a perpetual thing for kids of a certain age when Columbine happened that folks are forever fearful of what weird hacker bois like me will do -- but never enough to lift us out of precarity that would allow us to get away from them and their terrible views, because let's be frank: having everyone who's not in the Christian right from my shitty ass township move to Portland or Brooklyn or whatever isn't a sustainable life strategy :-)
> I think you'll find more pedophiles in the public school system than the home. Biological fathers have very low incidence rates of child molestation and households have limited numbers of people in them.
At least in Germany, evidence proves otherwise - almost half the cases in Germany are made by fathers, ten percent mothers, and of the rest a lot of different other degrees of relatives [1].
Preventing sexual abuse must focus on families, because that is where most shit happens.
As for pedophiles in schools, church and sports clubs: yes, these do exist, but are rare in numbers, and the same logic from my first point above applies: When children don't know that what they experience is not normal and that they can report this behavior, they won't.
I don't read German but I used biological fathers for a reason, does your data include stepfathers? I am familiar with studies like these[0] that indicates a child's lowest risk of abuse is in a household with both biological mother and father, lower even than biological mother alone.
> I don't read German but I used biological fathers for a reason, does your data include stepfathers?
It does, yes, but it doesn't matter. Abuse incidence from teachers and caretakers is ridiculously low, the utter majority of abuse comes from family members and so that is where efforts should be focused.
Ok, in some cases it's because the parents are religious or over controlling nutcases, but in many cases home schooling is the final choice of parents whose kid is not able to learn in the traditional school environment for many reasons.
I'd suggest that in most of these cases the parents would far prefer that their child attend traditional schooling so they can get on with their lives, but the payoff of calmer home life and a kid who is actually getting an education.
Ok, case study of one, but in our experience we've gone from a family subject to daily arguments about getting to school and seeing absolutely no value achieved when actually getting the kid through the school gate, to a happy well adjusted (call it normal) kid who is achieving decent educational outcomes and having a rich social life.
home school does not always equal nutcase parents. Thanks you, rant off.
You're possibly right on some of those points, but it would be sad to ruin home schooling for everyone. There are a number of very legitimate cases where home schooling can help kids who are having a rough time at school.
> There are a number of very legitimate cases where home schooling can help kids who are having a rough time at school.
In almost all cases where kids end up homeschooled due to having a "rough time", it's because of bullying and teachers and parents not putting a stop to that crap, the rest is stuff like autistic or disabled children who don't get the resources and assistance they need.
I'd rather like to improve the conditions at school, so that all children, no matter their background and (dis)abilities, are well taken care of, and abusive behavior (outside of self-defense, obviously, which is the big problem with modern "zero tolerance" crap) is not tolerated. That is how equitable societies get created.
Well, that's certainly an ideal. In practice of course it's difficult to prevent certain kids from falling outside the system. Kids and circumstances are pretty variable.
[
For reasons, in my own ideal world, the biggest experts on a particular child (their parents) would be more involved in their education to begin with. Long story I won't get into here.
But in that particular scenario, one would frankly still need (some) schools. This is for the same reason as before: some kids would end up falling outside that system too.
]
>I'd probably ignore the child porn allegations - that's a common way to smear folks.
Excuse me, but what the fuck kind of logic is that? Do you have a citation?
Maybe back in the days of WinMX, Kazaa, and anonymous FTP servers folks would abuse the spirit of the strict liability nature of CSAM paired with the fact it's difficult to truly erase terrible things you accidentally encounter... but nowadays it's REALLY easy to stick to sources of porn that are legal.
But to be clear... that's not at all what happened here. He didn't spider file sharing sites and get more than he bargained for or something mislabeled.
>the government found that Schulte had "neatly organized" this material "according to his preferences, and stored it for a period of years."[31] In the government's view, there was "no set of circumstances that can confidently assure the Court that he's not going to continue to try to download child pornography, encourage others to download it and share it and just generally engage in very dangerous sexual activity."... When the government searched Schulte's phone, they found a photograph taken inside the bathroom of his old home.[35] The picture showed an unconscious woman whose underwear had been removed and whose genitals were being touched. She was not publicly named, but was identified as Schulte's roommate at the time. She informed investigators that she passed out one night with no memory of what happened, and that the photograph was not consensual.[2] She was unable to identify the person who took the picture and molested her, prosecutors in Loudoun County said an analysis of Schulte's hands confirmed they were his hands in the picture.
When you recite talking points like that, you're telling on yourself because I assure you most hackers are not running around downloading CSAM and uploading
(And we call it "child sex abuse material", not child porn, to emphasize the folks are victims of abuse... children cannot consent, full stop, and you tell on yourself when you want to ride the lightning of when that consent should start in your porn habits.)
You'd have to apply the same skeptical eye to his letter as well, I'd think.
If the charges that he was using a smuggled phone and directly subverting the courts orders, then these could be seen as reasonable consequences of those decisions; if you assume this person is in full control of their mental health.
If the charges are entirely true, then I think the fair assumption is that this person is not.
> why are we treating a prisoner like this? Is it helping something?
Yes. It is deterring whistleblowers. The government has an interest in spying and torturing people who expose how they do that deters whistleblowing.
> In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving a thirty-month term in federal prison for publicly identifying an intelligence operative involved in torture. It’s a pattern: the whistleblowers are punished, sometimes severely, while the perpetrators of the crimes they expose remain free.
Not sure if I would classify Schulte as a "whistleblower" - the CIA is an espionage agency, and the stuff he leaked contains details on how the CIA performs electronic espionage, i.e. how it does its job. So AFAIK it's not as if he exposed some illegal activity on the CIA's side?
Hacking people and steal their data is pretty much illegal, especially if done on non-US (or other in case of other spyers) soil.
There is no difference between some drug cartel mercenary and CIA agent from both legal and moral perspective of any other country citizen, and humanity and human rights are much more important than business of any particular country.
At least mercenaries do that for some real value, and not some vague abstract and undefined bullshit like "national interests".
Whistleblowers of any spy agencies as well organised crime organisations are heroes, if their whistles help to defend humanity from each of those criminals.
Agreed, and the other thing to keep in mind is that he leaked all this stuff because of a personal grievance, not to expose any sort of wrongdoing.
Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning had similarly corrupt motives, despite popular but misguided opinion that they are noble whistleblowers of government evil.
