Interesting. Freedom Hosting had been a target of Anonymous' Operation Darknet from the beginning--they're well-known for refusing to take down exploitative sites. Operation Darknet is, itself, a pretty interesting phenomenon: Anonymous hacks onion sites, then hands over user information to the FBI for investigation. Anonymous does what the FBI legally can't, and in exchange they're not prosecuted for it. I can't find the article now, but I recall reading an interview with an FBI agent in Wired or Ars or some such where he described the anons as "Internet Superheroes". (sic)
That, in and of itself, is kind of curious. Curiouser? One of the original Op Darknet principals was Sabu. You may remember him as the hacker the FBI rolled and got to bust up LulzSec. Sabu was turned by the FBI on June 7th, 2011.[1] Operation Darknet began several months later, in October, 2011.[2]
The obvious question, then, is this: Did the FBI use Sabu to entice Anons into attacking child porn networks, thereby evading the laws against them doing it themselves? Did they use the fact they turned a well-known hacktivist to help them deal with criminals they lacked the legal tools to go after? Is this arrest the culmination of those efforts?
I'm interested in knowing how evidence obtained via Anonymous can be submitted in a court of law. When I did evidence collecting work as part of infosec work there are very strict criteria if the evidence is going to be used in a police case[1].
We have to sign off on everything and record how we obtained the information and have been told by a number of lawyers that in no way are we allowed to break the law when collecting evidence that could be forwarded to police or prosecutors.
Private detectives go through the same thing as well. If they are carrying out a private investigation for a corporate client they can't submit evidence that has been obtained illegally to be used at trial. For eg. you can submit evidence from public surveillance, but you can't submit anything that you obtain by hacking email accounts or placing a recording device on private property.
From what I understand, there are very very strict rules about both gathering evidence and then chain of custody. The person who collects the evidence has to sign off on it and then be prepared to testify in a court to back up what they found. I know for certain that this applies in the USA, UK and Australia.
I wonder how the FBI are able to use evidence collected by Anonymous, or if they just use that work as a basis for their own investigations which start from scratch. I can't imagine a judge would be impressed when told that key evidence was obtained via an illegal breakin perpetrated by a group of hackers.
Re: Sabu. I've read everything there is on that case and don't recall a reference to his handlers prompting him on Operation Darknet. The timing also doesn't seem to work - Sabu was taken offline last March while this arrest is the culmination of a 12-month investigation, which would suggest it started around 5 months after Sabu's work with the FBI was completed.
[1] Just a note - I was usually against prosecuting the defacement style hackers or guys who were just poking around for fun. In all my work i've only ever been involved in two cases where evidence I collected (IP addresses, email addresses etc.) ended up being used in an investigation and in both cases it was phishing attacks from Russia.
Interesting fact: How evidence was obtained is only important in the US. For example, in Austria where I live, it doesn't matter how the evidence was obtained.
In Austria, if someone illegally spies on you, the information they collect can be freely used in court. It is not important where the evidence comes from, it is only important if the evidence is credible or not.
This doesn't mean that the police can do whatever they want; if they torture someone, a potential confession would be worthless because it wouldn't be credible. And if the police used illegal means, that would bring about a separate trial (in theory).
But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.
It may not be important everywhere, but there are other places where the origin of evidence is indeed important (e.g. Spain, in the EU). Just because in Austria it isn't you can't conclude that it's only important in the US.
>But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.
Those restrictions are important to safeguard people's rights. The US since its founding has always had a bias for protecting individual civil rights, in theory at least. I rather this way of doing things.
Presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the US constitution. Some local jurisdictions purposefully relax it for the sake of balance. (For example, it is done in places where it is seen as much too hard to convict for rape.)
My understanding (and really, I was just a curious observer occasionally in irc at the time) is that the anons would submit the information anonymously, then the FBI would pass it on to LEAs in the appropriate countries or use the anonymous tip to get a search warrant in the US. I doubt anything grabbed by Anon would ever be used directly in court.
As for the timing, you may well be right. I simply remember Freedom Hosting being a target back in the day. While this case may not have anything to do with Op Darknet, it did ring some bells for me and arouse my suspicions of Op Darknet in general.
This might be a very naive question (I know nothing about these things) but is it possible that a piece of information obtained by such illegal means could be used to aid an investigation without using it as evidence in a court?
That is what I think they must be doing, but practically it must be difficult to work.
For eg. Anonymous hack a child porn site and dump the database, which they send to police. I can't see an easy way how the police can use that information without it coming up in court as to how they got the lead in the first place. If they were to subpoena that persons email account or apply for a search warrant, the probable cause would need to be something that the police discovered independently.
The database would be a good source of leads, which would have to be worked separately.
It is very possible for something to go wrong. Everybody needs to know about Operation Ore:
US feds sent a database of users of an online payments service that was servicing child porn sites to police in the UK. What was lost in the communication, or what the US feds didn't know, was that the same payment service was also being used by legal or legitimate adult sites.
The UK police treated each user as a child pornographer, and made 3,700+ arrests out of the 7,000+ suspects. Most of these people were innocent, and the dragnet caught up teachers, lawyers, police officers, etc. and resulted in 33 suicides. It took these people a very long time to have their names cleared, and most have never recovered.
> Most of these people were innocent, and the dragnet caught up teachers, lawyers, police officers, etc. and resulted in 33 suicides. It took these people a very long time to have their names cleared, and most have never recovered.
I'll bet some of them even had nothing to hide. If you just take into account the fall-out from this particular incident (which should have led to a few more heads to roll) then that alone is an excellent reason why dragnet style surveillance is a really bad thing. It leads to a large number of false positives and those in turn will have very negative real world consequences for innocent people that would have otherwise been able to just continue to live their lives.
Law enforcement should be done with the scalpel, not with the blunt end of an axe.
But the fact that, centuries ago, non-whites and women weren't considered Persons with a capital P still doesn't negate the fact that the USA has abandoned its most important foundational principles (rule of law, fundamental and inalienable civil rights, freedom of speech) over the past 12 years.
12 years, you say? Where was the rule of law and fundamental civil rights when 80 000 citizens where sent to internment camps based solely on the nationality of their parents?
Well, sadly absent, sure. That was a tragic wartime clusterfuck -- but bad as it was, it was still a far cry from the current disappearing people (including citizens) and interning and torturing them for years on end. And the Japanese interment camps were later officially repudiated by the government, and reparations were paid to the victimized families in the Reagan era. Not that reparations are sufficient to make it right, but it it still qualitatively different than the current situation.
I'm not claiming that the USA unhypocritically perfectly adhered to its stated values in the past. We broke the law and tortured people in WWII, in Vietnam, and in the guerrilla wars of South America, too. But you had to do those things below the radar. There were eventually consequences, if it was found out.
Now the US government disappears its citizens, or kills them (and whatever men, women and children that happen to be nearby) right out in the open, and the President goes on TV to talk about what a weighty thing it is on his conscience for him to approve all these murder lists in advance.
It's true, as some point out, that unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral things have always been done by the US government (and pretty much any government). However, it seems to me a fundamentally different thing when it is done without even pretending to adhere to the law or the constitution, in any more meaningful way than Nixon's claim that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal"[1][2].
Rules have exceptions. Nobody can argue that the US government has never done anything wrong, but there is a difference between failing to uphold your principles and outright abandoning them.
We shouldn't let past abuses excuse future abuses.
And today they would also hang some of the slaves that didn't flee under the assumption that they might try to escape at some point as well... (and it's possible that they did in the past - the cited passage wasn't law)
Slavery was a grave error of that time. But it doesn't devalue the other, unrelated principles of yore as presented in that Ben Franklin quote of the GP.
> or if they just use that work as a basis for their own investigations which start from scratch.
That's a tough argument for them to make because even a 'from scratch' investigation needs to start somewhere and I can't see how they're going to do that short of anonymously tipping themselves about who to investigate.
Consider the following: there is a masked hero who breaks into crackhouses and drug dens, obtains evidence that the authorities were unable to legally acquire, and then promptly hands this evidence over to authorities. The identity of the masked hero is unauditable.
I have a vague recollection that admissibility of evidence gathered by anonymous super-heros was discussed in depth somewhere at the "Law and the Multiverse" blog [1] but I can't find the article now.
No accident that the third film starts with a CIA rendition sequence (the state has devolved into a vigilante actor on the same moral level as Batman or Bane -- "no lawyers [and] no due process"). Meanwhile, we see politicians govern by lying on television ("theatricality and deception") while the justice system has become a monster under the Dent law ("a law with teeth", "based on a lie", etc.).
Batman being a "political liability" characterized as a villain and threat by the government and authorities is not exactly an invention of Nolan's... it's one of the central concepts to the Batman character, has been for decades.
Sabu still works for the FBI I'm pretty sure. I doubt it was a grand scheme by the FBI/Snitchbu to convince them to go after Freedom Hosting in 2011 there were already plenty of moral police anons white knighting way before he showed up to rat the entire internet. Remember, anybody can call themselves anonymous and attempt to raise a personal electronic army to assist them in whatever causes they're promoting. Not difficult to create pastebins, spam your call to arms in the usual places and contact the media.
There's no real info about the bust in the press, so I'm going to assume it was simple social engineering and payment tracking "Hey, I'll pay you $30k to set up private hosting <make up excuse not to use bitcoins> and I need it asap".
I don't know the details but media making FH out ot be an illegal porn factory or something. All I know of it is that it was free hosting with no rules, and hosted hackbb plus dozens of other forums none of them kiddy diddler related. The one's that were got hacked and defaced repeatedly
If the FBI directed or encouraged Anon to illegally collect information, such information might run afoul of the Fourth Amendment if introduced as evidence in court.
No. This thread refers to something different, called the "silver platter doctrine." It says that if law enforcement is the beneficiary of evidence received independently from third parties this evidence can be used in court against the perpetrator. Why? Because law enforcement did not violate any laws in gathering the evidence, though the third parties may have done so. Of course, law enforcement cannot act illegally through agents and those against whom such evidence is used claim that the third parties were not acting independently of law enforcement.
Anon can be any group of anonymous people, though. They aren't a singular collective - any "branch" so to speak can work on what they please.
The fact that they're targeting child exploitation shows that there are really talented members of Anonymous who are willing to do the unthinkable for proper morals.
It could go either way, but the fact that FH did little to stop child exploitation being hosted on its services, and combined with what members of Anonymous said, I don't think it's being friendly to the government that's caused this.
Slightly off-topic, but I never understood the obsession of legal enforcement with child pornography. Don't get me wrong, the idea of pre-pubescent children being exploited by pornographers horrifies me as much as anyone, but it always felt so ... random.
Maybe I'm wrong and the problem is a lot more widespread that I think it is, but I think that there are so many more crimes committed online. Yet, almost every time some morally righteous politician talks about regulating the Internet, he or she mentions "Child Pornography". I can see how the words would have the desired effect in a political speech, but is it really THAT common a problem?
Where did that come from? Call me paranoid, but it feels like this term came out of an orchestrated propaganda campaign to scare uptight puritan Americans from the Evils of the Internet, similar to the propaganda movies we can see about marijuana in the sixties.[1]
> The court also heard that a search of Mr Marques's computer revealed he had made inquires about how to get a visa and entry into Russia.
And it's valid to consider this suspicious? I've queried how to get entry into Russia before, I hope that didn't trigger any kind of alarm.
>Yet, almost every time some morally righteous politician talks about regulating the Internet, he or she mentions "Child Pornography". I can see how the words would have the desired effect in a political speech, but is it really THAT common a problem?
Yes, it is, but no, it isn't. I present, for your consideration, the most depressing number in the world:
"female and male child sexual abuse prevalence estimates [...] were 14.5% and 7.2%"
That's one in seven girls, one in fourteen boys. CSA is quite honestly the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none. And decades of crackdowns, teacher-initiated interventions, and, well, spying on every phone call in the country have failed to make a real difference.
So we target child pornography. We target child pornography because child sexual abuse is the biggest social problem in the modern era, and we don't know what else to do about it. I don't, honestly, know of any real evidence that there is much to be accomplished this way. Porn isn't correlated with rape and even though in this case there's no way that the porn could be made ethically it's a bit like stomping termites in a sinking boat.
The thinking is really that by damaging pedophiles' online support network they will be discouraged from engaging in such repulsive acts. Unfortunately, while I'd like to see it work, it doesn't make sense to me: people were raping children long before fiber optics got involved.
I don't really have a good answer. I hope this guy rots in jail.
I am frankly baffled that there is a jurisprudential theory under which the viewing of a particular arrangement of bits is, in itself, a punishable crime, let alone by such draconian measures as these.
Exploiting children? Absolutely should be prosecuted. Paying for CP (and thereby directly contributing, economically, to its production)? Definitely. But just downloading and viewing an image? I'm no fan of the idea of CP, nor a radical libertarian, but I just can't grok this idea.
I've heard many justifications for it. The most substantial of these seek to establish some connection between demand for this content (by non-paying/free viewers) and the economic motive to create it. I think many people in this thread--and numerous investigations--have found this link to be tenuous/nonexistent. What, are child porn producers running a charity or something? They're in it for the money. If you download pirated/free CP, they don't get paid, and they'll never get paid.
The more ridiculous explanations, frequently deployed by Jesus politicians and law enforcement lobbies, have to do with a link between consumption of CP and real-life sexual abuse/assault/molestation/rape of minors. Even if we assume, for a moment, that there is some connection and that the causality is intelligible[1], how is that compatible with the spirit of hundreds of years of Anglo-American liberal intellectual history and legal theory? Since when is it okay (or constitutional, etc.) to prosecute someone for something they might do, but haven't actually done? Is this possible in any other area of law, or is CP that special? Why's it so special?
[1] Does CP cause sexual abusers of children to go do that? Or is it something they take an interest in it because they're already sexual abusers?
"Paying for CP (and thereby directly contributing, economically, to its production)?"
You can contribute to its production without paying money. It's like people cracking copy-protected software for status, rather than for money. They get 'paid' in other things they value.
Can you illuminate in greater detail the mechanism by which this might take place with CP? How does one contribute to the production of CP without paying for it?
(Obviously, by "paying" I don't mean strictly "paying with fiat currency". I mean paying in any tender, or barter arrangement.)
So your implication is that going after child pornography is a wasted effort ?
Because I would argue that sharing of child pornography encourages people to create it. In the same way every other discussion board encourages people to contribute content.
Like any other content industry, exploitative pornography (which includes child pornography, rape and forced bestiality pornography, hidden-camera pornography at brothels or stuck in toilets, etc.) has both a primary market and a secondary market. (I'm going to speak in these economic terms in the rest of this, because it's kind of disgusting to be more concrete.)
The original producers are part of the primary market, and only pay attention to the consumers that participate in the primary market. The secondary market--where open sharing of "used" content goes on--is ignored by the primary market.
The primary-market producers for exploitative pornography consist mainly of two types: individuals who film their own acts of exploitation to use as currency in trade for the films of exploitation-acts of others; and professionals, usually members of a crime syndicate that has humman trafficking business, who sell their content on the black market in less reputable countries. In both of these cases, the produced works are scarce goods: as few people will see them as can be managed.
Leaks to the secondary market are bad for the producers in the primary market; not only do they increase supply for the consumers in the primary market (and thereby drive down demand), but they also make it much more likely that law-enforcement will get their hands on the offending media, and be able to analyze it for clues to the individual or group's whereabouts, or just as proof in a trial. Thus, the producers in the primary market tend to enforce a loan-shark-like "you break my trust, I break your knuckles" policy on the redistribution of their content.
The incentives are basically just entirely missing for anyone in the primary market to specifically release content to the secondary market. Anyone who "just wants the attention" and releases multiple videos will soon be tracked down and arrested.
Picture it like someone who is manufacturing some form of illegal-but-sought-after drug, like MDMA. Have you ever heard of someone who makes MDMA--not a redistributor, but an originator--giving away large quantities of it to people they don't know, just for the attention? That's just throwing away your assets, your safety, and your profitable business all at the same time, isn't it?
So if I could summarize that: Given that producing child pornography is illegal, making its distribution illegal acts as a sort of de facto extraordinarily draconian copyright law in favor of the unlawful producers. Which increases the market incentive to violate the law against production because many of the non-producing "pirate" distributors are driven out of the distribution market by law enforcement, reducing competition and thereby increasing profitability for the producers.
No: "many of the non-producing 'pirate' distributors are driven out of the distribution market by law enforcement" is exactly the opposite of the case. Law-enforcement has the smallest impact on the secondary-market distributors.
Producers, whose content get leaked to the secondary market, get caught by law-enforcement, because each video available to law-enforcement is one more piece of evidence that can be used to track and trap them.
The consumers in the primary market will get in trouble with the producers for their leaking to the secondary market--much in the same way that Microsoft will get mad at you for leaking your company's Windows/Office MAK key. If a producer has only given copies of a video to five primary-market consumers, it's quite easy to figure out which of those consumers is responsible for the leak. The law doesn't have a good way to catch these people; but the producers do. (In a lot of cases, this amounts to literally being "in trouble with the mob.") Note that this knocks a consumer out of the primary market--but increases the amount of free content available in the secondary market. Since producers and consumers are taken out of the primary market in equal numbers when this happens, supply/demand stays constant.
The "pirate" re-distributors in the secondary market--the people these primary consumers leak to--don't care about any of this. They have no personal relationships with the primary market, and are not personally involved in it, other than in consuming and sharing the content produced there. They also don't have to share any personally-identifying details about themselves to participate in the secondary market (they can just be a TORified IP address, unlike the primary market which operates more through established contacts.)
However, by and large, the secondary market is overwhelmingly larger than the primary market--and so, when a Best Buy repair tech finds exploitative pornography on someone's hard disk, that person will likely be a member of the secondary market. Catching anyone from the primary market requires these social-engineering-based busts that you hear about--where someone infiltrates a primary market--precisely because there's no social "path" from the secondary market back into the primary market.
> Producers, whose content get leaked to the secondary market, get caught by law-enforcement, because each video available to law-enforcement is one more piece of evidence that can be used to track and trap them.
It seems to me that the same materials (or even more) would be available for discovery by law enforcement in the secondary market if the secondary market (i.e. redistribution) didn't carry large criminal penalties.
> The consumers in the primary market will get in trouble for their leaking to the secondary market--much in the same way that Microsoft will get mad at you for leaking your company's Windows/Office MAK key--because, if a producer has only given copies of a video to five primary-market consumers, it's quite easy to figure out which of those consumers is responsible for the leak.
The ability to punish leakers is somewhat irrelevant unless there is near 100% success in doing so and the secondary market is entirely eliminated, which seems implausible.
> Since producers and consumers are taken out of the primary market in equal numbers when this happens, supply/demand stays constant.
Are you assuming a 1:1 relationship between suppliers and consumers for some reason?
> The "pirate" re-distributors in the secondary market--the people these primary consumers leak to--don't care about any of this.
Regardless of whether they care, changing availability in the secondary market will affect demand in the primary market because would-be participants in the primary market may satisfy their demand in the secondary market.
> Picture it like someone who is manufacturing some form of illegal-but-sought-after drug, like MDMA. Have you ever heard of someone who makes MDMA--not a redistributor, but an originator--giving away large quantities of it to people they don't know, just for the attention?
Well actually yes, but not for the attention. It happens with less serious drugs (and amphetamines to a lesser extent) in some of the more social communities which are open minded to drugs (eg randoms in a dance music club or hippies back during the summer of love). The drug sharing happens from there because of the way how those communities are united (eg through music or ideals).
You also see free harder drugs pushed as a way for dealer to get new customers (ie get them hooked and then you have their custom). So even there, it's not about the attention, but about future profit in the long term.
But I do get your point, it's less common for what you say to happen; it's certainly not the norm. But it does happen.
Er, no, you missed the emphasized word in my point. The people doing that are redistributors. You will see dealers distributing "free samples"--after all, they're loss-leaders--but "dealers" are part of the secondary market. You don't see drug chemists going out and freely distributing drugs; they're in it for the money.
The economics of producing child porn and the economics of producing actual physical drugs are wildly different, so I'm not sure how that's even relevant.
You can make child porn with point-and-shoot camera, a memory card, and any location that is available for ten minutes. Mobility is high. Distribution is cheap.
From what I'd heard, Freedom Hosting was knowingly hosting websites for what you refer to as the primary market - groups where people can trade their own videos of children being sexually abused for other members' videos.
>Because I would argue that sharing of child pornography encourages people to create it.
Suppose that's true. Does that mean that sharing of child pornography increases the incidence of child abuse itself? I would argue probably not, or at least that the increase is fairly small compared to the resources that go into combating it. Public forums do encourage sharing, but that doesn't mean that what's being shared wouldn't have been done in the absence of the forum. It just wouldn't have been shared.
The main questions that need to be answered are these:
1. Does viewing child pornography actually encourage child abuse?
2. Does viewing child pornography discourage child abuse by giving pedophiles a sexual outlet that doesn't involve harming additional children.
3. How much more does it cost to catch and prosecute someone who produces CP than someone who merely views it?
It seems likely to me that, at best, we're wasting a lot of money reducing a factor that has a small negative impact on actual child welfare (people who view child pornography), when that money would be better directed at a factor that has a much larger negative impact (people who abuse children). At worst, we may be spending money going after a part of the problem which actually mitigates harm.
Whether or not it is the latter is unfortunately a very difficult question to answer. Most common wisdom about "sexual repression" and "outlets" is pretty much without scientific basis, as is the opposite wisdom that pornography encourages sexual behavior. The one correlation that can be drawn is that the results of studies on these matters tend to align strongly with the politics of their authors.
But in any case, yes I think it's safe to say that the focus specifically on pornography is wasted effort.
You cannot state either (1) or (2). It seems you're trying to believe the latter, and it might be true for some wrong-doers; however common sense suggests that not viewing such videos should contribute to lower abuse rates.
Even if it is too costly to catch the viewers first, there's no better way to find the producers after.
Nature has proven again and again that common sense is unreliable and incorrect in nearly every scientific context. This one (statistics and psychology) should be no different.
I believe studies exist which demonstrate that suppressing deviant behavior results in it manifesting itself more violently, not less. I wish I had a specific source to cite.
Mind you, there are also studies that actively "venting" emotions like rage will keep you angry longer than just ignoring them. (And then there are many social-science statistical surveys correlating the drop in violent crime over the past century with the rise in "things for bored, testosterone-filled adolescents to do that don't harm anybody", like video-games. (And then...))
This isn't one of those things where all the evidence just says something general and simple, and then can be specialized to infer what happens for a case like this; it's really one of those times where we need to test what happens in this case in particular.
>I believe studies exist which demonstrate that suppressing deviant behavior results in it manifesting itself more violently, not less. I wish I had a specific source to cite.
If you search for sources on that, I think you will find that the evidence is pretty divided. I actually had taken this as fact for a long time, but when I looked for sources to back it up, I found that it's not nearly so clear cut.
What does seem to be the case is that making someone feel ashamed over things they can't control is psychologically damaging. For example, shame seems to be a very strong predictor of whether PTSD symptoms will emerge, both in sex crime victims and in war veterans.
This problem of shame causing psychological problems, I think, may be where the idea of sexual repression being harmful came from. Suppression of sexual urges without shame may be completely harmless, but that's not usually how it happens unless you're doing a controlled study.
As a society, we are completely dropping the ball in this respect. We make victims feel ashamed and broken, which is incredibly unfair, and likely exacerbates considerably the psychological harm that they have to deal with.
And I think we're probably doing a lot of harm by making people who have sexual attraction to children feel ashamed. Given two people who are attracted to children, one of whom is relatively stable and secure, and one of whom has huge mental health issues, which one do you think is more likely to hurt a child?
Moreover, if we teach people that having an urge is already wrong, then what is the moral incentive not to act on that urge? Instead, we should be teaching people that attraction toward children is actually pretty common, and that there's no reason to be ashamed of anything that happens inside your head, but that there are some urges and fantasies that you must not act on (or at least must not act out directly; there are some alternatives like role-play and simulated pornography).
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that evidence is lacking? Because that was my whole point.
>It seems you're trying to believe the latter
I'm not trying to believe anything. That would be a mortal sin. I am saying that we don't have evidence to rule out either 1 or 2, and both seem about equally plausible. It would certainly be convenient for 2 to be true, since it would give us a pretty easy option for deterring child abuse (high quality simulated CP). That's why I think it's important that we find answers those questions.
If 1 is true, I want to believe 1. If 2 is true, I want to believe 2.
Even if 2. were true, you can also easily argue that the prevelance of child pornography is going to increase the amount of people attracted to this "fetish", so can still increase the risk of child abuse. The problem is not one-dimensional
Not to mention that considering viewing to be socially acceptable , in itself, damages society (by lowering social norms). And I'd say it's gotten to a strange level in "internet" society. Think of all child porn jokes out there. Replace it with something else (say, necrophilia), and it's just weird.
>you can also easily argue that the prevelance of child pornography is going to increase the amount of people attracted to this "fetish"
Can you argue that so easily? Because I see the claim made very often. I have seen zero strong arguments supporting it. If you think you can argue for this position effectively, I invite you to try.
>Not to mention that considering viewing to be socially acceptable , in itself, damages society (by lowering social norms)
First of all, there's a gigantic difference between switching enforcement efforts away from people who view CP, and making the viewing of CP socially acceptable.
But if you're saying that it harms society to make having sexual attraction to children socially acceptable, I couldn't disagree more. I think the only plausible hope we have for significantly reducing child sexual abuse is a revolution in how our culture understands morality as it applies to internal mental states. If you want to teach someone not to act on urges to harmful behavior, you aren't going to get very far by telling them that they're evil for having the urge in the first place.
So your implication is that going after child pornography is a wasted effort?
The article linked earlier in this thread concludes: "after adjustment for response rates and definitions, the prevalence of child sexual abuse was not found to vary significantly over the three decades reviewed".
If that conclusion is indeed correct, then apparently our efforts to put a halt to it haven't worked. There are then two possible conclusions:
1) We haven't done enough yet. Doubling the available budget will improve the situation.
2) Our current methods are pointless. No amount of effort will do the trick, and going after child porn is indeed a wasted effort.
Personally, I think it's a combination of the two. The advent of the internet has made sharing illegal content orders of magnitude easier. Even if our efforts at curtailing child porn are effective, those efforts have largely been outpaced by technological development. In this it's similar to general internet piracy.
On the other hand, it is questionable whether going after child pornography is the right way to combat child sexual abuse at all. The jury is still out on the question whether watching porn increases one's likelihood of committing sexual assault, though recent studies seem to conclude this is not the case, even for violent porn, and that there might even be an inverse relation.[0]
If that is indeed the case, then child pornography is not a trigger for child sexual abuse, merely a result thereof. Then going after child porn is justified to prevent the abuse of the children involved, but no more important than preventing the abuse of children whose abuse is not recorded and distributed: we should be focusing on preventing child abuse altogether, and place less emphasis on whether there's a camera present or not.
[edit] In my comment, I implicitly assume that (violent) legal pornography is to sexual abuse as child porn is to child sexual abuse. That may not be entirely accurate. See derefr's post[1], which discusses some of the differences in economic incentives between the creation and distribution of normal porn and those of child porn.
They are apparently a pedophile, and they give an account of what life is like for a pedophile and on darknets. They also assert that there were little to no rapists / people selling CP on Freedom Hosting.
>CSA is quite honestly the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none
I'm not sure why you're singling out Western society. Erotic child-adult relationships seem to have been fairly common throughout history and throughout the world. Both in ancient Greece and feudal Japan, pederasty was common and accepted. Muhammad's youngest wife was nine years old when he consummated their marriage, and this wasn't really seen as notable until the 20th century.
The psychological impact on children notwithstanding, the stigmatization of pedophilia seems to be a pretty modern phenomenon.
Im not sure if that is the most depressing number in the world, or the fact that double that amount of children are physical abused (beaten) in the US. Sexual abuse declined 62% from 1992 to 2009, while the long-term trend for physical abuse went down by 56% since 1992. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse#Prevalence)
What percent of US males is the subject of genital mutilation?
What percent of childeren in Africa suffer from malnutrition?
How many people die simple for the lack of the basic medical help?
Somehow I think your view on biggest social problems is distorted. And I am not sure how jailing teens for sending self pics to other teens helps to solve it.
I would mostly agree with your position - that prosecuting child porn users doesn't achieve much and a lot of it is a scare campaign.
But i'll tell you the argument from the police and prosecutor side. I spent some time speaking to a high-level police officer about this some years ago. They aggressively prosecute downloaders of child porn for a number of reasons:
a) No matter how far down the chain somebody is, demand for child porn necessitates child abuse somewhere up the line. Someone is taking these photos to supply a demand. By taking out users you suck up the supply of child porn.
b) Unlike with drugs, which are used by a much larger portion of the population, it is feasible to cut down child porn supply by arresting people on the demand side. Child porn addicts, on average, spend a lot of money and resources on obtaining material, so even the arrest of a small hub can have an impact on demand and break up trading networks.
c) The approach to stopping child porn is to find the publishers and distributors by taking out users. Again unlike the drug market most users of child porn are also distributors - trading is very common. If you find one person in possession you can very quickly map out the network that person is within, which often results in the big and wide busts you hear about on the news
d) This police officer told me that in a majority of cases the child porn user treats the arrest as an intervention. Most know that they have a problem but can't stop and in many of his arrests the child porn users were thankful and became co-operative. It took an arrest to "snap them out of it".
It convinced me (I think - still undecided) that you can't legalize or be soft on child porn possession, as all that demand is going to lead to a child being abused somewhere in order to satisfy it.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I wasn't exactly asking about child pornography prosecution (which quite frankly, I know nothing about and am probably the least qualified person on Earth to have an opinion about), but about its automatic mention every time "online crimes" are mentioned.
I mean, I've been practically living online for too many years, stumbled upon some dark corners of the web and I can honestly say that I never came across CP (I mean inadvertently. I never actually targeted anything like that, so I don't know how easy it is to find if you actually want to. And I wish I could try it out to validate my claims, but the whole paranoia about the subject makes me afraid of having "underage porn images" in my search history).
My point is that if you listen to politicians, you'd think that the Web is ridden with kids exploited for porn. I can think of so many crimes I come across quasi-daily on the web: Credit card fraud, identity theft, copyright infringement, banking scams, stalking, harassment, ... I suspect, although I don't have the data to back it up, that these are more prevalent by several orders of magnitude, yet in our collective mind: "online crime == child pornography".
I honestly didn't mean to start a debate whether we should or should not prosecute offenders and how. I just find it weird that we mention it so much, and the slightly paranoid conspiracy-theory-loving voice in my head can't help but think that someone is spreading deliberate FUD by amplifying actual events.
>all that demand is going to lead to a child being abused somewhere in order to satisfy it.
At the "all or nothing" level, this is perhaps true. But where is the evidence that aggressively going after CP consumers has a significant marginal impact on child abuse? If you arrest 10% of CP consumers (a ludicrously optimistic goal), will that reduce child abuse by even 1%?
It's a big deal because child abuse is rampant in our country, and in most other places, it's even worse.
I can't recall the source (I'll try to find it tomorrow), but allegedly the amount of child pornography on the darknet is equivalent to a quarter of the legal pornography on the internet. That's a shocking amount of children being abused.
Law enforcement makes such an effort to go after people who view child pornography because many of them are members of underground communities. In any such network, someone is providing the material, as in, someone is raping children and posting it to the darknet. It might sound stupid, but their mentality is often similar to that of serial killers. They want evidence of their crimes to keep as "trophies", and they want recognition from their peers for their "achievements." If you find some random sick fuck who downloads that kind of thing, chances are that he would rather dime out his buddies than feel the full force of the DOJ come crashing down on him. This is how you find the actual abusers.
I for one think that the DOJ needs to stop fucking worrying about how many people downloaded an episode of GOT without paying for it and start using all of those wasted resources to find more pedophiles.
Every time this topic comes up on HN, someone feels the need to litigate its importance, or even its validity. The resulting threads are repellent. I downvoted this comment and hope others will too, rather than dignifying the idea that we should be debating the whole concept of child pornography on Hacker News.
Are you saying that the audience is too immature to discuss the issue responsibly, or that there can be no reasonable discussion on the topic of child porn?
I had no idea it was a $10b industry, and if not for HN discussion then I probably wouldn't have learned that.
EDIT: after re-reading, tptacek seems to be saying "threads questioning whether child porn is valid to be hysterical about result in useless discussion." That's probably reasonable.
I've noticed over the years that any mention of child porn on an internet forum usually leads to a few posters making arguments that take the side of people with pedophilia. First, it's not easy to overcome, like any paraphilia or fetish, and if you don't hurt children you aren't a criminal. Second, merely distributing images doesn't directly harm anyone or conclusively promote harm. Third, not having access to images might increase acting out in the real world. Fourth, animated simulations could be tolerable substitutes.
At any rate, I find pedophilia so abhorrent that these kinds of arguments never really crossed my mind before I started reading forums. Which means I don't think they're entirely useless. I could probably tolerate legal simulations.
I have had nearly the exact same experiences as you on this issue. I came around on my thoughts on CP -- I as well now think that CG CP should be legalized.
But I've been thinking recently: if pedophilia is truly something as legitimate as homosexuality, for example. Or, more specifically, if it should be recognized as an acceptable state of man. I emigrated to United States about 12 years ago, and I've observed a marked change in my sexual preferences (from dark skinned females to lighter skinned ones; I suspect mostly due to western media's influence), so, I'm compelled to think pedophilia is definitely something that could be controlled given that one is in accommodating conditions[1].
I'm these days entertaining the idea that pedophilia is usually a result to childhood issues -- mistreatment by parents, other kids, etc. I'll see if I can find any research that corroborates this.
In any event, I think one thing is for sure: the current mob-lynching fest is the worst imaginable scenario. A more soft approach that encourages paedophiles to consider cognitive behavioral therapy instead of hiding in forced isolation would probably yield the best overall results to society.
I agree that people who have been sexually abused as children often harbour sexual fantasies involving elements of their abuse. I've read numerous case studies supporting this and heard personal accounts.
For example, a friend of mine was molested by her uncle between an age of 7 to 11 years old. The thing that sexually arouses her the most, but also creates in her the strongest feelings of guilt and revulsion after orgasm, is the thought of children of that age being sexually abused by middle-aged men. Except that in her fantasies, the children are actually enjoying and wanting it.
Child sexual abuse can imprint the abusee for life.
2 years ago I read a book about understanding and trying to control the brain, as I was trying to solve my untreated ADHD.
This book was written by a experienced neuro-scientist/psychologist. She had treated a patient that suffered a stroke and suffered some brain damage, which apparently caused them to become a pedophile. The patient was given ADHD medication and the pedophilia had disappeared.
Debateable. It's apparently a significant burden upon those who are depicted in such images, which are traded for years after the abuse occurred.
Fourth, animated simulations could be tolerable substitutes.
I believe there is some research to this effect, but can't provide a reference offhand. This would obviously be preferable to images of real people being abused, however long ago.
Agreed. Not even considering the opposing sides, this debate always comes down to a bunch of people arguing a point they have absolutely no experience with.
Honestly, I have to say I don't think this is an appropriate comment for a forum like this. It opens up a possibly disgusting debate.
That said...it's an incredibly common problem. I'm not going to point you where to look for proof, but you could easily find it if you wanted to. And that's horrific.
The reason why it's so bad is because it's exploitation of children, who could not have led themselves into a vulnerable situation of their own accord.
There's no reason to get into it any further, it's vile. And I want to reiterate...this really isn't the place for questioning why it shows up so much.
You missed the more important part of my comment - that this shouldn't be up for discussion. That has nothing to do with whether or not I'm right.
I think I'm right in my view, and if you think I'm wrong that's okay. But let's not argue that kind of point here on Hacker News. That's not to say you can't question my view; I was answering a question. But I'm not going to engage in debate about it because I find it abhorrent to do so.
So basically, you stated your side of the argument, and then preemptively disqualify anybody who may disagree with you by calling that abhorrent. Had you simply limited your comment to "this is inappropriate to discuss here" then that would be one thing, but right now it's very hypocritical.
>The reason why it's so bad is because it's exploitation of children, who could not have led themselves into a vulnerable situation of their own accord.
Yikes, the flip side of that is that adult rape victims are at least partially at fault because they put themselves in a "vulnerable situation". Is that really a position you agree with?
You see, this is why I had said it shouldn't be discussed on a forum like this. I believe an honest human response would be more empathic and simply take something like CP being important without requiring extensive rationalization.
Your response, nit-picking my words as a form of debate, is counter to an empathic response, and entirely what I had hoped to avoid. I'm not going to engage in that line of thought because, honestly, there are a multitude of reasons why child pornography should be a priority. I won't argue them, and I understand that might be unpopular, but will you really debate someone on this?
I was by no means "nit-picking your words". I was asking you a question about a specific position you seemed to be implying. You can backtrack and say that you hadn't considered those implications. There's no shame in that. Or you could stand your ground and say that yes, you think that adult rape victims bear a small amount of responsibility relative to child victims. Those are both productive lines of discussion.
Accusing people of dishonesty when they disagree with you or ask uncomfortable questions is not an acceptable way to conduct yourself.
Not so. Any sexual activity between a child (under the age of consent) and an adult is statutory rape because children are deemed legally incapable of giving consent in this context. By contrast, most adult sexual activity is consensual.
dylangs1030 seemed to be talking about morality, not legality, in talking about "the reason why it's so bad". Legal definitions are irrelevant to discussions of morality.
It's never been about child pornography. That's a nuclear option that immediately invokes every American's maternal/paternal fears. It's a scare tactic used to manipulate and justify attacks.
>Human trafficking is a ~$10b market in just the United States. You realize that kiddie porn is part of that industry, right?
I in fact haven't seen articles talk about that part of human trafficking before. So what amount of that money is being made specifically through the creation of child pornography? And do you know if piracy increases or decreases the demand for paid child porn?
most common figures on human trafficking are horrifically inaccurate, due to either A. grossly inaccurate sampling or B. efforts on behalf of parts of the evangelical & feminist communities to expand the definition, e.g. to define anyone involved w/ helping someone illegally enter a state as a "human trafficker", even if they're a family member/friend of the traveller in question, or to define anyone who illegally crosses a border to engage in sex work as a "victim"
Here are some quick sources from the almighty Google:
$9.5 billion in US claimed by the Covering House; link to source at UN is old and I can't verify their number (not unreasonable given the other sources listed):
The trouble with sex trafficking stats is that a lot of them are misrepresented or even have no basis in fact whatsoever - even ones from supposedly-reputable sources like the United Nations and the Department of Justice - and it's very difficult to figure this out since they're usually not properly cited.
For example, that 9.5 billion figure isn't anywhere in the UN page it's cited to. So far I've traced it as far as a DoJ report from 2004 which claims: "According to the UN, human trafficking is the third largest criminal enterprise worldwide, generating an estimated 9.5 billion USD in annual revenue according to the U.S. intelligence community." No specific citation for that claim, naturally, but it looks like originally it was just a guess that some unnamed intelligence community pulled out of their ass.
Politicians almost always have kids. It changes your perspective on things. Suddenly they're number one and you'll do anything you believe is right for them. Including outlawing soft drugs and filtering the internets.
another word for that is 'selfish' - they are making laws, enacting rules and enforcing behaviour which their constituents did not really want, simply because it's something they wanted for themselves.
I don't want my politicians to have a perspective which only includes themselves. Unforutnately, its all far too common.
Most of their constituents have kids do, and want similar things. Your assumption that politicians are unilaterally imposing this on others is wrong. There are a lot of people out there who want the state to aid them in protecting their children from what they consider to be malign influences, and they vote.
> Slightly off-topic, but I never understood the obsession of legal enforcement with child pornography.
It polls well with the sort of people who think lottery tickets are good value for money. Ditto for the war on drugs, jailbait laws, TSA shoe searches, and so forth. You didn't seriously think this madness was bad luck, did you?
> the idea of pre-pubescent children being exploited by pornographers horrifies me as much as anyone
It doesn't horrify me. In a world with billions of people, there have to be quite a number of prepubescent 10 year olds who are eager and happy to be porn stars. In fact they barely move the needle on the weird-kid-o-meter, when you consider the autists, schizos, animal torturing junior psychopaths, etc.
Assuming that all children in child porn actually say that they want to appear in child porn (and this is a huge assumption), the reason it's exploitation is that children are unable to consent. For example, an infant will happily suck on a man until he comes in its mouth, and there are films of such acts. For better or for worse, we've decided that you have to be 18 years old to be able to consent.
In other news oxygen has been banned from distribution due to child pornographers utilizing it while producing child pornography. Environmentalists across the world cry foul as vast swaths of forests are slashed and burned in an effort to control oxygen production.
Conservationists have been branded "supporters" of child pornography, and incidentally the logging industry has seen its largest growth ever and jobs are plentiful.
Your analogy is shit. The circumstances under which a "getaway driver" can be charged are not nearly as generous as you make them to be. If you genuinely had nothing to do with the crime other than unwittingly being the getaway driver (say, if your job was transporting around many people at once... a bus driver), then you would not be held accountable.
Should bus drivers have to ensure they don't drive anyone committing crimes? Of course not, that is patently ridiculous.
Do yourself a favor and exercise a few brain cells before you blindly suck up bullshit reddit is spewing.
Actual knowledge meaning what, precisely? Had he seen it himself? Had a court told him it existed? Had someone he trusted told him it existed? Had someone he didn't trust told him it existed? Had an anonymous comment called him a pedo host without even specifying a domain?
Exactly, we don't know enough to make strong statements about this, though it is nevertheless clear that the analogy of the poster "calling out" the quality of another analogy is itself utter shit.
What can you do about content exiting your tor node? Ifit's external requests you can block certain targets etc... But what else besides shutting down?
You either choose to operate an exit node or a relay (not sure what the terminology is). If you are not dealing with exit stuff, you can do fuck all. Operating an internal service is functionally the same as an exit node (except you allow access to a server running locally, not on the internet at large.)
Then the analogy is still shit. If your friend shared his bank-robbing plans and you don't do anything to stop him then you're guilty of conspiracy, and being a getaway driver is orthogonal.
Your analogy is far worse, and your post is too condescending.
This is a hosting service, it's like a taxi. A taxi driver would not get in trouble here. The reason a normal driver would get in trouble is because it's assumed that the people you give rides to are people you know.
And if I provide a hosting service why would I have to listen to some guy off the street claiming that a site breaks TOS? If thoroughly checking such things was standard I'd probably be inundated with useless troll reports.
But that's why the alledged driver of Ben Laden is apparently in Guantanmo. In the US a Taxi driver can apparently be sentenced for many tens of years in prison. This is why my impression is that USA is going wako! Now that the US is exporting its none sense by requesting extraditions I start to be worried.
On the otherhand, although it is not clear in the article and probably for good reason, I do have the impression the guy was active in the pedophile business with it's romanian connections. If this is the case some action is required. But I don't understand the extradition and why ireland could not take care of the problem by itself.
Something is really fishy about this story anyway you take it.
It's about intent and knowledge. Bin Laden's personal driver knows he is helping a fugitive. A taxi driver in the exact same situation, unless he instantly recognizes the guy, isn't going to get convicted of anything.
Please don't blindly copy paste from reddit without at least making it applicable to what the parent comment actually said. They didn't say anything about camera makers.
The article is indeed very confusing about the charges aginst that person. Is he directly actively involved in child porn or is he only the owner of a tor hosting site ?
So wait. Is this guy actually a child pornographer, or does he simply run an anonymizing service which is incidentally used to distribute child porn? The first would appear to me to be just, the second would be a perversion of justice with a good pretext.
If Freedom Hosting was compromised by the Feds, why is he still arrested? That points to his cooperation, when the alternative would be that the Feds did this themselves, but certainly thats not legal, now is it?
Yes, the NSA revelations have officially rendered all pretense at American jurispridence null and void. There is only Obama with his murder squads, which have been clearly established.
Slightly off-topic. I often read about how non-americans are extradited to US for legal reasons. How often does US citizens get extradited to non-US countries? I honestly never read of any such incident.
It's reasonably common for U.S. citizens to be extradited for crimes they're alleged to have committed while on a trip to another country [1]. I would be interested to know if any have been extradited for "virtual" offenses, however, i.e. to a country they have not visited, but which argues they violated that country's laws via the internet, or some other indirect mechanism.
And Irish citizenship, which means that for nearly all purposes, his US citizenship will be irrelevant to how he is treated under Irish law. Dual citizenship complications are more an issue in third countries. If you are a citizen of the country you happen to be in, that usually trumps everything else.
It's up to the judiciary and not the government.
And if he doesn't like the courts' decisions (presuming he goes to the supreme court) he can then take his case to Europe, afaik.
The article is vague on whether or not he made, or just distributed the videos. Will this open the doors to be able to catch the monsters abusing young children, or is this just a game of whack-a-mole?
Denying file hosting to abusers is valuable even if no abusers are caught. Impeding the ability to sell child porn makes it harder to make money off it, which reduces the impetus to create new material.
But yeah, the article is hideously vague. The Reddit link implies that the guy knowingly allowed kiddie-porn purveyors to host with him even after being alerted. If that's true, fuck 'im, let him rot. I'd like to get some more solid sources, though.
> Denying file hosting to abusers is valuable even if no abusers are caught.
Yeah. It works so well for drugs. They give out harsh punishments to the drug users to reduce the market for drugs.
This just raises the price and number of providers grows because with elevated price as a provider you can earn much more per unit and your risk and cost of providing unit haven't changed.
If they were actually serious about fighting child abuse they'd make distribution of child abuse photos legal, drive down the price of it to the bottom and use supple info to track the people who actually abuse children instead of the people who are just sick in the head in a way that makes them like looking at abused children.
I definitely don't think laisser faire strategy is the right strategy. A back pressure is required for educational purpose. The problem is that the back pressure in US is in general far too much for demagogic purpose. The educational purpose is totally smashed under it.
Not at all, I don't support what happened in any way.
The parent comment was stating that making a resource scare only makes it more valuable... my point was that the market for child porn is so small that using the scarcity argument is not a great comparison.
That's the problem. So long as there is a channel for distribution of images depicting child sexual exploitation, there will always be someone abusing even more children to produce more material for profit. Widening that channel is opening the figurative floodgates and possibly encouraging a 'dormant' pedophile to act on his/her urges when they normally wouldn't have.
Stopping the distribution of photos of children being raped -> less children being raped so that photos can be distributed for profit.
I'll even argue that legalizing distribution of such images will normalize the behavior in sick individuals. Remember the jailbait/gonewild reddit, and the hoards of neckbeards claiming that there is nothing wrong with looking at suggestive or actually explicitly illegal pictures of underage kids? That was a community in which that kind of disgusting behavior was normalized and encouraged. You could tell that most of them thought it was perfectly fine.
It's ludicrous to suggest that making the distribution of the pictures of children being raped legal is a serious attempt at fighting child abuse.
The 'legalize it' attitude works for the drug argument, where there really isn't a victim from one's choice to consume whatever substance they please.
There is and always will be victims when child pornography is being distributed or produced. Taking a laissez-faire approach just because ALL distribution channels can't be destroyed ignores the real and lasting repercussions the phenomenon has on children.
Edit: I'm still kind of shocked that you are advocating what amounts to a child abuse economy. It isn't the price that is the problem, it is that children are suffering BECAUSE sick individuals feel the need to look at pictures of exploited children.
> possibly encouraging a 'dormant' pedophile to act on his/her urges when they normally wouldn't have.
Like how the violent computer games obviously encourage 'dormant' murderers? You could argue exactly opposite way. It could help potential abusers channel their urges.
> Stopping the distribution of photos of children being raped -> less children being raped so that photos can be distributed for profit.
That "->" sign in your statement for me comes with huge "?" inside. Profit from distribution comes mostly from copyright. And I would never dream to grant anyone a copyright on images of child abuse. My point is that suppression of distribution and possession is not necessarily best tool, not that we should destigmatize images of child abuse somehow and repackage it into commercially tradable commodity.
Higher availability of existing material might cause less demand for production of new material. Production would be as illegal as always or even more so and more dangerous as there is wider number of people trying to track those bastards down.
Many people expect rise in the demand when such sick material becomes widely available and that this rise in the demand will increase the number of children being abused. That, I think comes from belief which I don't share that lots of people (given opportunity) are potential pedophiles.
When internet became popular, availability of images of human corpses massacred in different ways massively increased. Some people already liked looking at such pictures, others discovered that they like them, some liked to look at a few of them but fed up or seen something so horrible that they reached their limit and found them disgusting altogether.
And yet we didn't notice any sudden spike of people maiming others in order to create such pictures.
> I'll even argue that legalizing distribution of such images will normalize the behavior in sick individuals.
Yes. Probably. Some of them might live less disturbed lives. Some might even seek help. The only harm I could imagine that could come from watching pictures of abused child (if you personally can bear it) is that some people will strive to produce new such for fame in the community (no copyright so I believe financial motivation will drop not raise). But such sick fame could only be attached to a nick not the real person. And such fame would be very dangerous. I could compare such fame to fame of the crackers. But some of them do get caught even though at least 60% of internet user love them, or at least love the job they do. I think this would never be the case with child abusers. I think even some people who can look at such images and even find pleasure in looking at them would gladly out someone who hurts children to the police.
I'm sorry for disturbing your peace with my thoughts but I don't advocate encouraging any kind of child abuse economy. There's some economy in all human activity. Even in abusing children. This economy is already actively influenced by people who want to reduce how much of it is going on (and that amounts to pretty much almost everybody). I'm just not sure if common sense attempts to influence this economy are best for the goal in mind. People tend to make mistakes when they act intuitively instead of scientifically and there is very little data when it comes to such grave social issues.
As for why children are suffering child abuse... In my opinion is that it mostly because there are sick people who like abusing children. And also in my opinion that's a very small subset of people who like to watch images of child abuse. I think that producing images of child abuse is sort of a sideshow to actual child abuse. There are probably some people who exploit children strictly for profit but I suspect most of imagery is produced by pedophiles who would exploit children anyways but they also like taking pictures.
Instead of comparing the market for child porn with the market for drugs, let's compare it with the market for porn.
Free availability of legal pornography featuring adults on the internet (apparently over 10% of all web pages) hasn't exactly discouraged people from making porn for profit motives (it's a $5bn dollar industry, and growing).
Moreover, it seems to have encouraged an avalanche of people making and distributing porn for non-profit motives, often successfully preserving their anonymity whilst doing so. It's not merely conjecture that people make and distribute pornographic videos for "fame in the community", it's well-established fact.
I think you would find that no one is actually paying for CP on Tor services. Any kind of money transaction that can be facilitated over the internet tends to make moot the benefits of Tor.
The article is vague as to whether the accused had any direct connection to any content; it names him as a "facilitator" and alleges a few search queries that are in no way illegal. For all we know, the FBI may consider one a "facilitator" for the mere act of operating a TOR exit node.
When news papers write articles about legal matters, I wish they stop combining different terms and concept as if they were synonymous.
The title says he is a dealer. The subtitle says he is a facilitator. The text says he is a allegedly involved in distributing. Lastly, The warrant says he is a distributor and promoter.
Most of those are quotes, but it confuses the matter to the point of ridiculous. I know what a distributor is. I can guess dealer is a synonym to it. Everything else is just wage hint of "wrongness" with no solid legal ground.
So let me get this straight: someone defending freedom of speech is criminalized to the point where the US will use their political influence to hunt him down worldwide.
I was actually under the impression prior to seeing this that the TOR website used "freedom hosting" and was compromised. Nice to see this unintentional clarification.
This is a terrible article - not enough background information. I'm assuming this has to do with some Tor exit node thing, like all the other people who get charged with this?
The US is going to do what the US is going to do. Whether or not he is guilty or innocent, the US will ensure that it is inconvenient for him to do anything until such time as it is impossible for him to do anything.
In the thread on the apparent code injection portion of this topic[1], I heavily suggested governments with the US at the least being responsible for the deed[2]. With a corporation like Endgame Systems being a probable contractor for the act[3].
Something I've brought up a few times with my commentary previously and mentioned by some here is governments using tactics they prosecute others for:
"There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year."
Sometimes using the very tools made by those hunted, prosecuted, renditioned:
"The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million."
How long can citizens of nations involved in enabling and hiring these mercenaries keep faith in the law of the land, let alone those tasked to uphold it? How long can the tiered system of the monitored/hunted/renditioned and the legally immune last, with the legally immune being paid by the former?
Stop attempting to code around this human issue. Please.
That, in and of itself, is kind of curious. Curiouser? One of the original Op Darknet principals was Sabu. You may remember him as the hacker the FBI rolled and got to bust up LulzSec. Sabu was turned by the FBI on June 7th, 2011.[1] Operation Darknet began several months later, in October, 2011.[2]
The obvious question, then, is this: Did the FBI use Sabu to entice Anons into attacking child porn networks, thereby evading the laws against them doing it themselves? Did they use the fact they turned a well-known hacktivist to help them deal with criminals they lacked the legal tools to go after? Is this arrest the culmination of those efforts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(hacktivist)
[2] http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/anonymous-at...