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Child Porn Probe Uses Live Internet Wiretap
rrkap writes "The Sacramento Bee is reporting
that Jason Heath Morgan, a suspect in a child porn case was subject to the first 'live internet wiretap.' According to the story, 'Technology used in the surveillance is very similar to a phone tap. Agents attached a monitoring device to Morgan's phone line, then tracked his Internet activity from remote computers.' This packet sniffing was authorized by the PROTECT Act - officially Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act, which authorizes such tapping of internet connections."
Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today
Will these forced acronyms never end?
It sounds like when they investigated him the act was not in force yet and they had to actually get a judge to agree to the tap; that makes this not a particularly interesting or scary story -- judges have had the ability to approve taps to compromise our privacy for a long, long time now.
It looks like PROTECT might make this at the discretion of the prosecutor which is, obviously a Very Bad Thing[tm], but it's not all that relevant in this case, it seems.
now if I can only set one of these babies up at echelon I'll know everything :)
This issue doesn't seem to be a big deal, for the privacy issue - the authorities did have to go to a judge and get a warrant first, just like they would for a phone tap or for an in house search.
When Sacramento agents made their request in August 2003, the wiretap provision had not yet been used, and authorities had to convince a federal judge to grant the authority.
The court order was granted, with a requirement that two groups of agents be involved in monitoring Morgan. The first scrutinized his computer use and culled out everything not related to the investigation. The rest was turned over to the second team.
Everything was by the book here. Now, it's just that computer users aren't invulnerable to using the Internet to commit crimes, the Feds have caught up.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
I believe this is exactly how the RCMP and the Montreal Urban Community Police (MUC) caught Mafia Boy back in 2000....
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Just curious, I realize a lot of slashdotters have jobs where you have to help with implementing some of these things, how do you feel when asked to assist?
This is one of the more rational and intelligent responses I have seen to address what is a hugely emotive issue.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...first off it's approved by a court order, so no problems there. Second, what's the big deal about "live" as opposed to "near-real" time? I mean computer logs are kinda like a tape of a regular wiretap. Yes, you might have an officer to listen in "live", but unless that's about something going down in the next few minutes, does that matter?
What's more surprising is that they haven't been able to do this before. drop a LOG line in iptables and you can have a complete log of every packet, live. Somehow I fail to see the big difficulty in this...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Brought to you by a commission of Acronyms Sliding into Silliness through Halfwits Appending with Thesauruses Simple-mindedly (ASSHATS).
So what hardware and software do they use to do this. Do they need the isp to be involved?
Maybe they'll introduce the PITA act for all the criminals they catch?
With technology like this in place, it becomes harder for the government to justify the need for less discriminate and more easily abused capablities like Carnivore/DCS-1000 or their demands that VoIP wiretapping capability be built into ISP networking gear. If they can tap someone's net connection like their phone line, they don't need to have things installed in every ISP to be able to track what someone does.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
SLASHDOT act?
PLAYFUL Act - Parents Legitimately Against Young Fellahs Using LSD Act
FUCKEDUP Act - Firemen Uneased by Cocker-spaniels Killing Effeminate Dandies Using Pot Act
More thought went into the acronym than the law itself.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
You're gettin' a CELL!
bau bau chicka chicka mau mau
you still need a judge to ok something like this, and who *really* wants to bother supporting child porno slime.
These guys followed the letter of the law, and im glad they caught the guy. Case closed.
internet wiretapping can be useful but the pointless-to-society-that-only-benefits-higher-ups type of wiretapping (such as spying on everyone at all times to get info on them (such as spyware) and to just get people on anything, and to get them on anything corporations feel they can get them on, etc) is bad.
certain things can be good, as long as people use them for the right reasons (as we know, doesnt happen) but it doesnt matter anyways, the FBI taps people all the time without them knowing it, but they dont need to get that evidence approved, since all they need is it proving to them someone's not being a cooperative american and bam, you go to prison and get interrogated.
Significant Linux Advocating Site Housing Dozens Of Trolls?
^_^
It's not far fetched to assume an overly zealous agent might consider planting evidence on a computer either. They already do this in a variety of other cases. Sometimes they are caught at it, a lot of times they aren't, and you can't tell. And there's a lot of prior cases to prove the point, the miami cops busted planting guns on suspects, trying to clear themselves of murder. the texas prosecutiors and cops who "flaked" (that's the cop slang term for it, it's so common, taken originally from gold mining and planting gold flakes I think to make a mine look better)) hundreds of people in this small town with drugs that weren't drugs, getting convictions, sending people to jail.
There's just something spooky about it. Child porn is a real problem, but we can't deny government lying isn't a problem as well. It's a serious major problem, ongoing, chronic. Just now on drudge headlines they are investigating a secret service guy for falsifying evidence/perjury in the martha stewart case. And remember the FBI "crime lab" tests scandals of a couple of years ago.
The bad guys commit crimes, but we have a much harder time exposing the "good guys" who really aren't. Look at all the controversy about iraq now, the weird circumstances around 9-11, prisoner abuse, etc.
I'm glad to see that the Feds are pursuing predators online by using methods that will stand up in court, rather than the questionable tactics used by the vigilantes of Perverted Justice
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
I don't know about you, but I hate this invasion of privacy the gouvenment is doing.
I have nothing to hide, and most people don't, but in a few years, everybody will be scared to click links because of fear of what might load, and the cops thinking they went there on purpose.
And yes, it will happen, and it pretty much already is (with cellphones and other methods of telecommunication).
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
Why didn't this guy use encryption, good encryption techniques would defeat the cops, them being the man in the middle.
Pedophiles are not smart enough to use encryption?
Do the feds ever actually bust the guys making the porn in the first place i.e. doing the real explotation. Or do they always just bust some sorry shlub who tried to download some old .jpeg and never touched a kid in his life?
You can't ALWAYS do that, besides, it would look suspicous, and maybe they'd cease his computer...
He'd also have to use a proxy (so they can't tell where he's connecting to).
Not every service hass SSL (Maybe he used KaZaA or LimeWire???)
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
I encrypt everything. I think some cops like to make shit up to prove their case (anyone remember Richard Jewel?). Encryption is the solution to this.
Also cops, like people, can be assholes. How many assholes did you know who might be cops now. If its >1 then you could be screwed.
"Look here, how much we can do when we wiretap one person. Imagine what it'd be like if we could retroactively monitor everyone like this with a system like Carnivore. We could simply look up their logs and put them away!"
Of course, you could say the same about pretty much everything. Let's log all phone calls so they can go back and listen to everyone that chatted up or SMSed a kid, and track all our movements so we can see who flew/drove in to meet a kid, or track all money so we can see who gave a kid money for a bj and so on.
Of course, the US is going to be magically different than any other country throughout history and nobody would abuse total information and total control in any way. And in communism you'd "give according to ability and receive according to need". Yeah, noone would abuse that either.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One of the advantages (assuming they use it this way) is a real-time wiretap lets them confirm who is actually *at* the computer when something's happening. A log, unless combined with large amounts of surveillance, can not necessarily be correlated back to an individual. But now, they can see illegal activity and go look at who's doing it while it's happening.
(Hopefully they are, and aren't just assuming the owner of a computer is the one breaking the law..)
i don't really understand this child porn thing..
of course i understand that child porn is wrong and so on..
what i don't completely understand is what qualifies as crime? because imho there can be a lot of other scenes which show violence or show someone inflicting pain to an other human... let's say
example1:
i have a jpeg where an adult is having sex with a 6years old girl. is this crime?
example2:
i have a video of an adult guy who is cutting an another living adult into small pieces with a chainsaw. is this crime?
example3:
i have a video of an adult guy who is cutting a 6years old living girl into small pieces with a chainsaw. is this crime?
In the netherlands somewhere in the nineties law was developed forcing isp`s to make their networks tappable. The first plan was based on the idea that this would be just as easy as with previously goverment owned telephone compnies wich always cooparated with police investigations. Internet providers howevery are many *many* small buisnesses that operate on much tighter margins and are owned by an entire diffren kind of people. And the goverment wanted to listen in on all of them. This became a big conflict. The conflict even gave rise to a very small group of people that figured that in order to meet these requirements cheaply, scaleable and securely an opensource implementation of the goverment proposed protocols should be made. The site is still alive and contains a world of information on goverment imposed eavesdropping in all sorts of networks. (read the cyberpunks collection of standards and documentation, Or better yet get the more recent docs for free at etsi.org and the osi sites. Goverment acces is developed into standards nowadays which is ofcourse much cheaper then adding it when networks are up and running. This was demonstrated when german celluar phone users where billed for having their phones listened into ;-). This also includes some information on the biometric/rfid passport ideas that politicians think are a great idea becouse... you know terrorist and stuff, let pump millions in this and get on our way kissing babies and doing TV interviews okey?)
Currently, most big providers (I think mostly the ones owned by kpn including XS4ALL???) have machines in their network permanently to sniff traffic when a warrant arrives. This can`t be that hard, people keep saying the netherlands taps more phones then the US but real numbers that are reliable are very hard to come by (dutch link). These machines then tunnel the sniffed traffic to central collection machines. For this the "ITO" is peering with all major isp`s. The dutch internet service provider association has a couple of the sniffing machines provider can borrow if they dont have their own. I havent actually read the current version of these laws but in preivous version webhosters to should sniff traffic when asked to.
Ofcourse noone knows when this network is used, but it is safe to guess that the title of the first internet connection litened in to life by goverment snoops goes to the "hacking at large 2001" event (Lots of tents in a field, big network, lots of visitors and speakers on many topics and a big internet pipe). The then public traffic graph of the ASN of the goverment collection facility spiked really high during the days of that event ;-). I dont recal if it was this event or another one like it where people found out the police claimed to be dealing with "subversive anachist". When people found out about this T-shirts where sold with the text "staatsgevaarlijke anarchist", these where quite populair. OFcourse If this was the event the police was looking at then it would make sense that visitors where called dangerous, there needed to be a reasing for listening in.... what better reason then being anarchist-ish, terrorist-ish or terrorist-ish people releated, with a bit of pirate flavour to finish the mix.
Ofcourse, we can all look ahead at another fantastic episode in this series. Unlike other epic sagas (starwars) these episodes get not only bigger but also better and more exciting every time ;-) You see the European union has been buzzing with the idea of mandating the storage of traffic data of not only telephone providers but also internet providers (and hosters?) for years. But a new proposol for this idea has recently been introduced by Britan, France, Ireland and Sweden... Imagene being forced to store terrabytes of logs on 99.999999
In the Macarthy (sp) era you only had to point someone and scream "red", "pinko", "commie" and that individual's life was done for. Down the drain for good...
What tell us that in the near future someone won't cry "pedophile" "child abuser" "terrorist" and your life goes down the drain. And nowadays evidence is soooooo easy to fake, and juries tend to be so damned illitare...
This is not the whole thing, though, with worms and virus and spywares doing the gods know what to your computer, using your storage for the gods know what purposes, who can assure us that we won't wake up some day to the sound of the police storming our door and the press cameras getting us labeled as "worse than scum" for the rest of our life...
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
Obviously I have no objection to getting another vile kiddie-porn peddler off the streets, that's not what I'm trying to get at, it's the way this case could be used by the powers that be to get permission for more cases, possibly monitoring any of the poor bastards they deem to have a high Terrorist Quotient?
Invasions of privacy are justified in cases like these, but all it takes is one loud squeal of 'terrorism' and they'll be monitoring totally innocent people just in case they turn into Islamic extremists overnight. I don't think it's the case me or anyone else are objecting to, it's the principle.
--
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
1) Internet wiretapping has been going on for years, this does not surprise me. /. community.
2) It will be very difficult to garner any sympathy for these sickos from myself or the
Or any community for that matter.
I hate sigs.
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There is plenty of porn out there that depicts 18 - 19 year olds as being much younger (or so I here), are these kind of images also illegal and considered child porn?
Meh.
On face value, there appears to be nothing wrong with increased police powers, for example, the ability to detain somebody for significant periods of time if they are suspected of something, without allowing the detainee to contact their lawyer or make a phone call to the outside world. Law enforcement officials would only detain bad guys, right ?
The problem with this is that it is based on the assumption that the everybody within the law enforcement organisations involved are totally and 100% honest. Of course, this isn't the case.
Judicial oversight of things such as wire taps is there to try to ensure that these mechanisms aren't abused by corrupt, dishonest or overzealous law enforcement officials.
Sadly, it seems that, since 911, George W. Bush's adgenda is to minimise or remove Judicial oversight in the name of "security". I can only suggest that he believes that law enforment officials are 100% honest.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
"i don't really understand this child porn thing..
of course i understand that child porn is wrong and so on..
what i don't completely understand is what qualifies as crime? because imho there can be a lot of other scenes which show violence or show someone inflicting pain to an other human... let's say
example1:
i have a jpeg where an adult is having sex with a 6years old girl. is this crime?
example2:
i have a video of an adult guy who is cutting an another living adult into small pieces with a chainsaw. is this crime?
example3:
i have a video of an adult guy who is cutting a 6years old living girl into small pieces with a chainsaw. is this crime?"
ANSWER:In the USA : Possetion of violent images is no crime and possetion of images of mere nudity of anyone is no crime but mere possetion of images of under 18 year old humans engaged in sexual behavior (even if not nude!) can put you in jail.
Examples:
1: possetion of a pic of a nude 6 year old human dead or mutilated or just posing at a nudist camp (full body shot, NOT CONCENTRATING on the genitals) is legal
2: possetion of a pic of 17 year old Traci Lords in a beaver shot is ILLEGAL (but no one will procecute)
3: possetion of a pic of your OWN penis if you are 16 can get you a life time label of sexual offender (THIS HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!)
4: DO NOT DISTRIBUTE ANY NUDITY (EVEN YOUR OWN)WITHOUT PROPER LEGAL COUNCEL
Other nations are different, different parts of the US are more or less strict, and the US changes over time - so next year the rules could be different.(example: beastiality is not prosecuted in NY NY but is prosecuted in Alabama.)
Than going after the consumers versus going after the producers(I'm not defending consumers in any way though). All this will do is ensure that the consumers use better cryptography etc to protect what they are doing. Just like they started to use the internet after the government went after the people who would order it by mail.
There is a different, and better way to catch these people. Most of these scumbags who make this stuff are quite proud of what they do, and often put both their faces and the faces of their victims in the picture. Canadian and US authorities have recently been using these faces to track down both the people commiting the acts and the victims. Going after the producers is a lot easier, and probably a lot more effective at stopping future abuse than going after consumers(esp. ones who don't pay any money), since the producers will probably continue to abuse new children regardless of whether or not they share the photos.
That if someone wiretaps the Pentagon phone lines in order to protect Iraqi children from being bombed by the US it would be considered legal.
Or maybe only american children deserve protection?
But: why not just sniff on the router at the ISP ? ... .. but if that device sniffs data from the phoneline, it's no safe either ..
:)
if they had the warrant they could sniff traffic there
I thought BBS-type dial up services would be on the rise again
so all you pr0n/warez/hakzor/3l33t freaks prepare your encrypted vpn tunnels and continue downloading/watching your crap safely
The farther you get from an endpoint, the harder it is to actually reassemble the stream. This is because packets can take multiple routes to their destination -- if not through load balancing, then through asymmetric routes (i.e. the packets from the client to the server are taking a wildly different network route from the path taken from server to client.)
Asymmetric routing always seems to confuse people. It shouldn't -- the traffic on the freeways isn't symmetrical in each direction, and sometimes it makes sense to take one highway to work and another back.
Upshot of all this is that, while all the long haul fiber lines actually are probably tapped by someone or other, it's an enormously tricky problem to integrate the data accurately, and you ultimately still don't get as good results as having a direct feed a hop or two up from the endpoint being monitored.
Now, there have been tools for quite some time to do realtime stream monitoring -- Driftnet is a cheap (and occasionally very scary) one, but there have been solutions floating around the corporate space that basically reassemble a browser screen in realtime. I imagine the gov space has even nicer stuff.
You know, "tcpbust" (a sniffer with integrated safe reassembly, third party cryptographically signed timestamps, and a pony) would probably be a really interesting thing to write...
--Dan
"Everything is wrong with that!"
Where does the harm come from again? Lets assume he does not physically hurt her.
"Think about it.. first off she's 6 years old. "
Yes.
"Even if she didn't wanna have sex with anyone, theres no way she could get out of it, which would then turn it into rape."
Well, the adult could always ask I suppose. If it were an ethical adult he/she would not force his/her self on people, any people.
"Secondly they are called sexual consent laws. Is she over 18? I don't think so.. "
Children do not consent to many things, including the 'harm' of surgery and vaccene injections. It all depends if the harm is greater then the benefit.
How do we prevent child pornography, how do we report it? I would suggest that plugins be provided to automatically scan for these items and forward significant results to the FBI or the ISP that the user is coming from. At the very least we have a moral responsibility to create software that prevents child pornographers from proliferating on the Internet.
...first off, how do you identify it? "Umm yeah I was just doing one-handed investigative work for the police, looking at those pics" Or are they going to deliver us a list of files we're not supposed to find?
Never mind that the best P2P programs I know (DC++, eMule) are both open source. There's no way to force them to include any backdoors, plug-ins, logs or other such things. It'd be trivial to compile without.
Besides, you'll quickly run into the "becoming an agent of law enforcement" problem. The police can't create a civilian "police force" using their lists or plug-ins to get around their own restrictions.
And on a principal level, I disagree with you. Everything from ink printers to digicams to web browsers have been used for kiddie porn. It's not Epson or Canon or Microsoft's responsibility to do the impossible. The police have to handle those that misuse software just as the guy using a kitchen knife as a murder weapon.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That article is very disturbing. It admits that the old system worked while glorifying the newfound ability of police to wiretap anyone they feel like. It's hard for me to understand how the reporters, Stanton and Walsh, were able to twist their brains into missing the big picture.
How on Earth can this case be seen a triumph of ghastly new police powers? This creep was caught despite the inconvenience of judicial oversite and due process. The issue is a simply put in the US Bill of Rights, amendment 4 to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That is, your house will not be violated unless reasonable evidence presented and sworn too in a public court of law.
"Terrorism" and kiddie porn are declared serious enough to remove this protection but the removal for some crimes eliminates the protection for everyone. Without that public record and oversight, anyone can be tapped as a "suspect". The potential for abuse is enormous. PROTECT is a perverse name indeed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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If I ran an illegal site, or rather a site that was illegal in a country where lots of my customers were, I'd listen to my customers. I'd run everything with strong encryption.
Strong encryption in and of itself doesn't look suspicious. I run my own blog and I use SSL so people can sign in and look at entries I don't want to be publically visible. I use SSH for a ton of stuff. I use it to log in to my server when I'm at home on my LAN because it's conveniant. The first thing I do when I get to work is log in to my server with SSH so I can do e-mail and blog without anyone worrying about it.
Apart from the SSL blog stuff, this is pretty normal behavior for a lot of tech people. SSH is just too damn convenient.
And if I had anything illegal, I'd probably keep it on an encrypted partition that automatically unmounts if I don't log in for a while. And I'd probably make sure the unmount system call makes sure to overwrite the memory where the key is stored.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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After I read the article, despite it not being about the Patriot Act, it reminded me that I need to get on the bandwagon about writing to my rent-a-legislators (state/federal) about opposing any attempts to extend the USA PATRIOT Act Provisions That Expire on December 31, 2005. I'll definately be boning up at EPIC's The USA PATRIOT Act page.
Another good reference source that came my way via the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy"Secrecy News Newsletter" was their archive of Congressional Research Service reports on Secrecy and Security.
The one I will reference in my correspondences will be the report:
Here's the summary with section listed:
Summary
Several sections of Title II of the USA PATRIOT Act (the Act) relating to enhanced foreign intelligence and law enforcement surveillance authority expire on December 31, 2005. Thereafter, the authority remains in effect only as it relates to foreign intelligence investigations begun before sunset or to offenses or potential offense begun or occurring before that date. There may be some disagreement of whether a "potential offense" is a suspected crime, an incomplete crime, or both.
The consequences of sunset are not the same for every expiring section. In some instances the temporary provision has been replaced with a permanent one; in some, other provisions have been made temporarybyattached to an expiring section; in still others, the apparent impact of termination has been mitigated by related provisions either in the Act or elsewhere.
The temporary provisions are: sections 201 (wiretapping in terrorism cases), 202 (wiretapping in computer fraud and abuse felony cases), 203(b) (sharing wiretap information), 203(d) (sharing foreign intelligence information), 204 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) pen register/trap & trace exceptions), 206 (roving FISA wiretaps), 207 (duration of FISA surveillance of non-United States persons who are agents of a foreign power), 209 (seizure of voice-mail messages pursuant to warrants), 212 (emergency disclosure of electronic surveillance), 214 (FISApen register/ trap and trace authority), 215 (FISAaccess to tangible items), 217 (interception of computer trespasser communications), 218 (purpose for FISA orders), 220 (nationwide service of search warrants for electronic evidence), 223 (civil liability and discipline for privacy violations), and 225 (provider immunity for FISA wiretap assistance).
The unimpaired provisions of Title II are: section
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Knives have legitimate (non-violent) uses, whereas guns don't.
I'm surprised that the issue of the lack of encrypted communication in this case hasn't been brought up. Pretty much limits law enforcement into only catching the more idiotic cleartext perverts. Begs the question of gov't access to encrypted communications. I wonder how many privacy-loving Slashdotters would flip on this issue if they had young children. Teenage girls spend hours chatting online these days...
The way to stop childporn has nothing to do with P2P or the internet. We have to stop the producers of it and these people are all offline.
Police can stop SOME child pornographers who are stupid enough to share stuff on Kazaa or something but thats about it. It's extremely difficult to figure out who created what picture so unless we change digital cameras so they trace back to individuals somehow, its going ot be extremely difficult to ever know who created it.
If we really are going to go after child pornographers we need a network of spy agents, we need to put chips in every digital camera to allow police to figure out who owns what pictures, every picture uploaded to a computer should have information attached to it showing which computer it came from.
Only then can we begin to stop childporn, however the current methods seem like a waste of time. It's like a joke. You don't stop child pornographers by arresting people on Kazaa, its more complicated than this.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
"we get to have fun doing forensics"
A.K.A. you yourself getting to look though the piles of child porno for 'evidence'. Your erect penis is just incidental: Ya right.
This is why citizens aren't police.
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"I'm only answering this absurd response to clarify."
What is absurd is when people are pressed to express exactly what harm comes from child sexual activity, with or without adults, they hmmm and haaaaw but I've never seen it answered yet.
Go ahead mod me down, but dont forget to mod up the person that actually answers the question of harm.
It all seems like bible thumpery, with regular sex the next to be outlawed.
Just reporting files to the FBI does nothing. The name of the file does not tell you it is or isnt child porn. The file itself might be on the computer but this does not tell you that the owner of this computer is the child pornographer who created the file.
So it's more complicated than simply arresting random people who have files with the wrong names or who have kiddie porn files. This does absolutely nothing to stop the creation of these files and you only are arresting the people who share it.
To me it seems to be more of an attack on P2P and internet freedom than an attack on childporn. Everyone knows the childporn is produced offline yet everyone is focused on the internet? This would be equal to going to the ghettos and trailer parks to arrest drug addicts. Yes of course you will find drug addicts if you look for them but arresting them does absolutely nothing because the drug dealers will continue producing more drugs.
In this situation we have to remove the producers of child porn and by doing so, the child porn will eventually become too rare to find and won't be floating around on kazaa. I don't really see how tapping peoples internet connections has anything to do with stopping childporn, it seems more like invading peoples privacy. If there is a wiretap used it should be to monitor the activity of the computer, not monitor internet activity.
Anyone who produces childporn most likely uses Windows and one of the digital camera programs. Shouldnt law enforcement work with the makers of this software and hardware to allow them to tap just that software or access JUST the pictures on a computer? Or movies if movies are the problem could still be handled in such a way so that it does not require a wiretap.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
That does nothing to stop child porn. That just stops people who are looking for it from finding it.
What does this accomplish if the producers are still creating and uploading the porn? stopping the spread of childporn is not the same as stopping the creation.
What is the goal?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
This may be the first time all traffic was sniffed (thanks to the recent advent of P2P :)... but I've known ISPs to capture squid logfiles for specific users on police request.
Two other things I've seen done are preserving a dedicated multi-gig cache for specific users, and using connection-tracking to intercept and copy DCC connections. Again, on police request.
This is different from simply handing over logs, as its deliberate after-request tracking and tapping of connections.
I've been involved in setting up what we call 'spider pits' at former largish-isp employers for police investigations (mostly kiddy porn) for at least 4 years. This is in Australia, mind you.
Put the backdoors in the Camera and in the picture formats themselves so that they become traceable. Any picture should have information about the computer it originated from.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
It can happen once in a great while but it doesnt happen all the time.
Childporn is a problem but people are making it seem like its such a big problem just to have an excuse to attack P2P and remove our privacy.
I know theres millions using filesharing networks. Thats just my point its impossible to stop childporn on these networks using traditional law enforcement. It's too many people sharing it.
You don't outlaw the gun to prevent murder, you go after the people who commit murders using the gun. In this situation it seems we are trying to outlaw the gun.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I made the mistake in college of choosing this subject for a study/report. Once I got a few days into the research, and found things like the 1979 Calvin Klien ad for "designer jeans for kids" was being hammered by conservative groups as being kiddy porn because the fully clothed 12 year olds in the ad - wearing the designer jeans - were in a standard collegiate wrestling starting position. The girl was on her hands and knees, with the boy leaning over with one arm underneath her, and the other grasping her arm. The conservative group determined this looked too much like doggie style sex, so therefore was pornographic - since they were kids - child porn. Calvin Klien pulled the ads under pressure from this group. Personally, I think it was a far cry from what I'd consider child porn. Things like this made that report the most difficult thing I've ever written. Focusing my position on what I thought was (in)appropriate use of children in advertising rather than the general "end child porn" paper it was supposed to be.
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Why didn't this guy use encryption, good encryption techniques would defeat the cops, them being the man in the middle.
Pedophiles are not smart enough to use encryption?
Dude, don't you have anything better to do on a Saturday than to think up ways for child molesters to hide their activities to they can keep on molesting or paying for the abuse of children?
Why don't you leave it for them to figure out? Save those comments for democracy or peace activists, not the child molesters.
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I'm sorry, but porn and probe are just two words that should never follow one another in a sentence.
Significant Linux Advocating Site Housing Dozens Of Trolls?
I would flip that to:
Significant Linux Advocacy Site Hosting Demented Off-putting Trolls
I certainly wouldn't limit the number to dozens.
And don't get me started about what I think of the political views I see expressed here. May God save us from being governed by the "technical elite" if what I see here is anything close to representative.
As a civilian employee who does computer support for a police department for a living, I get involved with these kinds of things too often. How do I feel about it? It's a job. It's my job. It makes me sick to know what kind of disgusting filth is out there. Most of the time there is no real need for any special technical trickery, these crooks usually are total morons and the evidence is blatantly obvious all over their machines. The detectives generally need no special tech help to gather and present the evidence for a prosecution case.
Probably the worst case I've ever had to deal with was a murder investigation. The victim had met the killer online in a certain chat room. We already knew who the killer was for sure, just wanted some more evidence to help bolster the case. We obtained the victim's computer, cloned it, extracted her chat logs and buddy list and then placed the clone online for a day under her usual logon account. 100% of everyone on her buddy list, with the sole exception of the suspected killer himself (because he was the only member of this list who knew she was dead), saw her name come online and tried to chat with her, repeatedly asking if she were there and why no response. Of course there was no response. Seeing all her online penpals trying to reach out and talk to her, since they had not heard from her in days and were undoubtedly wondering and worrying why (they had no idea she was now dead), and getting no reponse back, made me want to cry like a baby.
Trojan horse found responsible for child porn
Munir Kotadia | ZDNet UK | August 01, 2003
Excerpt:
your head explodes and splatters everyone's data promiscuously about the room...
:)
2) It will be very difficult to garner any sympathy for these sickos from myself or the /. community. Or any community for that matter.
The government always starts with the most unpopular scum when establishing precedent for a new denial of civil rights.
Once the precedent is established, it applies to applications of the law in question in ALL circumstances, regardless of the scumminess of the accused. But the government will normally work outward from the scumbag community gradually, getting the machinery of repression well-greased before applying it to more ordinary people.
So you need to disconnect your consideration of such laws and procedures from your opinion of the accused. OF COURSE the first few are scum. But that's no reason to give the government a green light when railroading them.
Runaway government is ENORMOUSLY more dangerous than even the worst of the crooks. That's why even obvious murderers must be let off when the police and/or prosecution doesn't follow the rules when going after them. Better a few retail-level murderers on the street than wholesale, institutionalized tyrrany, leading eventually to civil war.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Some states have laws banning obscene materials. While this has generally been applied to pornography, it could technically also apply to those examples you enumerated if it meets the Supreme Court's definition:
1) it is prurient in nature
2) it is completely devoid of scientific, political, educational, or social value
3) and it violates the local community standards
Does this program give the policy a few false positives? Actually these are wanted by the police: regular pictures that share enough properties with the known kiddie porn may actually be from the child pornographer's home or from the location where actual child pornography was made. The innocent picture is likely to less cropped than the kiddie porn picture and might contain information that will help the police to identify the location, this often leads to the perps arrest.
But it only detects known pictures? This works because most child porn on the net is shared and recirculated. Most child pornographers do not create their own material (thank god). Even those who do would still start by sharing "old" pictures, thus they can be found and arrested even before the new pictures were put into circulation; that's a good thing.
You too can help!
If you find child porn on the internet, please contact SAVE THE CHILDREN at http://www.rb.se/hotline/
You are geeks, you can traceroute. Help make the world a better, safer place for children!
Stopping the junkie does nothing to stop the creation of childporn. Why does it matter if we stop the spread of child porn vs the creation?
Stopping the creation of childporn is very obvious, we know why we must do this, children are being hurt by this. Childporn thats already created and being spread around Kazaa by millions or thousands of people, what do you gain by arresting each person?
Same goes with nuclear weapons, we have no right to tell other people they cannot create them if we have them. This also goes for the internet, when we start with censorship and start invading privacy in the end we lose our ability to tell China they are backwards if we are trying to outlaw P2P to stop kiddie porn.
Kiddie porn is bad, but its not like the whole internet is flooded with kiddie porn, I don't see the point in creating new laws and suddenly cracking down on a problem which has always existed. What is the goal? If its to stop children from being hurt then we need to go after the producers and this has little to nothing to do with Kazaa. If the goal is to stop the spread of childporn, we can use the filter systems built into these P2P programs and perhaps make them more advanced.
I don't see however the point in chasing every single person who has a copy of file X in their shared folder. It's a slippery slope.
I'm all for stopping the production of kiddie porn, I'm against censorship. If censorship is the only way to stop the distrubition then its not worth it. The distribution is not whats doing the harm, those are the pawns of the producers.
This would be like arresting everyone who is infected by the worm instead of the creator.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bouguereau/cu pidon.jpg
This beats that ugly horse face any day. Go art!
You too can help!
If you find child porn on the internet, please contact SAVE THE CHILDREN at http://www.rb.se/hotline/
You are geeks, you can traceroute. Help make the world a better, safer place for children!
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Trust me, child porn is not difficult to recognize. It is not a glamour model shot, it is when a 45 year old man is shooting a load of cum over a 3-year old baby. Sick shit.
Child porn hurts children. It's a business with two sides: vendors and subscribers. If only one side is present there is no transaction and children will not be exploited because it won't be profitable.
So...viewing child porn is a part of the problem. Children must be protected against exploitation by adults - its why we have child labor laws in most first-world countries.
In the United States there is a Supreme Court decision that clearly allows for the definition of child porn as prohibited speech.
What to DO with those who both use and create child pornography is a more complex problem. The last time I looked there is no known way to cure a pedophile. It is how their sexuality is wired. Many will want to find and use children. Many will not. For the pornographers themselves - toss them in jail and go after their assets as if they were drug dealers (they are).
Personally I'm in favor of real asylums for those whose desires are incompatible with the world. They do not need to be punished, they need to be isolated. Which means decent living accomodations, a setting that is more campus-like - except it is isolated - protecting society from them AND them from society.
...they fired up Ettercap on a switch and watched the packets?
Network administrators in corporations have been doing that for many years now (at least where I work), although they tend to use it to debug and track down virii.
Here.
If they need customers to make their business viable and people can get it for free now through P2P isnt that a good thing?
I don't see how your arguement makes sense when people on P2P programs sharing files arent paying for them. I don't think going after the consumer is reasonable because the consumer isnt paying anything for this. The consumer is just a nameless person who happened to download the file and by default they arent really guilty of anything besides downloading the file and letting others download it.
So yeah they are a distributor, but I don't see a way in which you can stop internet distribution. You can make it so that its not profitable for the producer and P2P does that by default. You can also make it harder to distribute but I don't think arresting people is the way to do it. Filters work best.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
While child porn in itself is not bad, the abuse is bad. Once the abuse has occured, people exchanging pictures of it or movies of it generally has nothing to do with it.
The person who put these pictures on the internet should go to jail, the person who did the abuse should be punished, however the people who just SEE the abuse being arrested and put in jail is a bit pointless.
Arresting anyone who has some illegal picture on their computer in my opinion is just pointless, there could be millions of people who have child porn and you simply cannot arrest them all.
In my opinion people can have whatever fantasies they want, and in my opinion virtual child porn should be made legal. I think the fact that virtual child porn is illegal might actually cause more children to be harmed due to increased demand. I don't like the idea of censorship even though I'm not into kiddie porn. I'm against children being hurt and I do think pedophiles should be locked up.
Censorship does nothing to prevent children from being hurt.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
So the next step was to criminalize pure possession of child pornography. (Molesting children was already illegal, but having pictures of it wasn't until the Reagan years.) This made it much easier for law enforcement to make arrests, and, significantly, provided much broader reasons for search and seizure.
Then came the child porno entrapment industry. Law enforcement started sending out child pornography and seeing who'd bite. This is far less work than finding real child abusers, but generates cases.
As with most forms of self-generating police activity, there's a tendency to lose touch with reality in such operations. In the complaint-driven end of law enforcement, performance is measureable - how many murders were solved, how many stolen cars were recovered. There are "customers" (people who report crimes) to be satisfied.
Self-generated law enforcement activity (drugs, porno, "red hunting" in the 1930s and 1950s, and today "terrorism") doesn't have "customers", so there's a strong tendency for it to get out of control.
The worst abuses come when self-generated law enforcement activity becomes self-financing through seizures. So far, child pornography and terrorism enforcement haven't reached that level. The "war on drugs" reached that level about fifteen years ago. For some law enforcement organizations, it's a profit center.
wHoOt this is great.
It should be mandated that politicians, police, and all other authorities have this done to all their phone lines first!
That way... we can be sure that our "leaders" are on the up and up as well.
Lets do it!
you reap what you sow, twit. you think i'm (or we, i guess by now) in any way related to microsoft? heh. you have no idea, dear twit. no idea at all. you'd be seriously distressed if you figured out who your fans are.
to be honest, i'd love nothing more than to see you go away and stop posting your toxic rants. you see, i like slashdot. but i cringe every time i see you (or someone like you) spew your crap like it's the gospel.
to repeat what i said a few months ago: we do not need your "help". just go away.
and the worst part? These people don't PAY for kiddie pr0n, no more than anyone else pays for the sex movies coming down Freenet, Kazaa, or Gnutella. So, they may look, but they're not hurting anyone, nor helping those that do the porn making.
On the other hand, what psychological effects do porn vids have on people? Is it possible that once the 32 year old perv watching the vids realize that he might get caught, he'll stop with the downloads and start with his 11 year old niece? The hard truth is that, whether they get the content or not, they're paedophiles either way. You can't just lock them up for wanting to bang children, unless maybe they have an honest intent to. It's just like any other sexual deviation: you're made that way, and you don't turn it off, you just control it.
As someone that has been on the receiving end of child sexual abuse (not someone in my family, just some sicko that lied about his age and another sicko "friend" that lured me in) I can say that you are mostly correct. As with anything of this nature my initial reaction was bad. I've given my testimony to the police and don't feel nearly as bad about it anymore. It was not a violent sex crime, but despite the fact that the guy is still apparently not in jail, still going around and soliciting police plants online, I still don't feel any more changed (for better or worse) than I have been by any other 'normal' relationship. It hasn't really affected me in any way, less perhaps making me a bit more wary of people that seem less-than-truthful. Anyway, my $0.02. Your milage may vary.
How stupidly pathetic and pompous. I bet you wiggle your ass and giggle before posting like that.
I'm not going to defend pedophiles. The reason it's wrong to have sex with children should be obvious.
1. You can physically injure them for obvious reasons.
2. They may not be emotionally prepared.(This can cause emotional injuries)
3. You are older and manipulating them into having sex with you is wrong.
Now those are the main 3 reasons, in rare situations where its legal and normal in other countries for children to marry each other or for say young adults to marry teenagers, thats a different situation than kiddie porn as is defined in most peoples minds (children being raped by adults)
Despite what you might believe, most children (I'm not talking teenagers here) aren't physically or emotionally ready for sexual intercourse.
As far as the rest of your comment goes, sure theres people who are attracted to kids, I don't care about those people. Arrest the people who abuse kids.
Perhaps what is needed is a clear definition of what child abuse is, and a way to define a child abusing pedophile from just a normal person who has some odd fetish.
People with some odd fetish should watch japanese hentai porn or the regular legal teen porn.
I'm not sure why virtual child porn was outlawed, but i'd recommend that even. What I do not recommend is abusing children.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
"You must be new here."
Score: -1 Played Out
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, however when we examine media of a man being killed, say as an action movie, it is simulated and acted out. Child porn, which I am not familiar with, would seem to imply that the "crime" is not simulated, but in fact actually commited and recorded.
A small difference, and not true in all cases...
-Mikey P
God will roast ICANN stomachs in hell at the hands of Verisign. They'll commiy suicide at our firewalls.
"commiy"?
Can't you at least get the spelling right in your sig?
Or is that some new word I've never heard of?
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It was not debunked - it was condemned by Spiegel, denounced by Congress - hardly a way to do science. Science by consensus always makes me suspicious and in this case the suspicion is valid.
Rind, Bauserman and Tromovitch have responded to their critics (or, shall I say "accusers") several times. Here is a link to one of such articles, The Condemned Meta-Analysis on Child Sexual Abuse Good Science and Long-Overdue Skepticism (via FindArticles):
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
How is that "debunked"?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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I think their point was the exact opposite:
Why is the mutilation NOT illegal?
You must have the "believe what I want to at all costs" gene (yes, one that seems to be unique to such people has been found). Plese do not breed. Think of YOUR children!
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"I don't know about you, but I hate this invasion of privacy the gouvenment is doing."
I agree, the government is going a little too far. And the idea that viewing a nude child(which is found even in university art text books, as examples of modern shocking photography of war.) is a punishable offense sickens me. If you don't find it ridiculous, then I guess you think alot of parents are going to have to stop changing diapers now, eh? Paying for it, assuming it's not a nudist vacational video here, is wrong and should be punished, as is making and selling distributing it(assuming it's of someone else or one or someone was forced into it.). But if a person takes pictures of themselves on their own accord while young, and on their own volition distribute them after growing up... WHY THE F#K IS THAT ILLEGAL, EH? I guess some of you think it's illegal to even possess it, eh? They should be sent to jail for possessing photos of themselves, eh?
Heh, pure BS. If you think so, then know that those are the ideas of a bunch of Far right, insecure people, who think sexuality itself is a crime. Again to repeat myself, to force or take advantage of someone in order to create porn, is an offense that should be punished, even adults can get, not just stds, but emotional scars from being involved in that cr*p. Now to purchase, sell, and/or distribute it assuming it was under such circumstances, should be punishable. But say if it was out of one's own volition that one did so, say a couple has a vid of their first time, and decide to distribute it... Why should that be freaking illegal? Tell me why? Is it an offense? An offense to whom? Ponder on that for a while now... and you'll see that what you're saying is irrational and inhuman. That an action or interchange between two consenting adults involving their sexuality should be a crime, is a laughable pathetic statement with no moral standing.
Heh, I actually think, some here would probably be happy if a parent was arrested due to his child viewing such porn without his permission in his parent's computer. After all even peeking at one of his schoolmate girls, is obsene, and irrational, according to some here it seems(guess they were never that age, or weren't attracted to them.).
PS( You think all that hormone filled fast food crap ain't doing anything. I was once many a decades ago, in school, as early as fifth grade, kids couldn't stop speaking about sex, mastrbtn, and the like 24-7... they were horny as hell, I'm pretty sure many more social ones were having it too... non-stop... and maybe even taping it too... guess it was obsecene, unnatural, and abominable for them to do so, right? Does their very nature sicken some of you? Guess the whole of society is screwed up right, it was cause teens have been having sex for eons, nothing to do with parenting right? )
PPS I guess a nudist family can't even have any home videos now can they? Why is it wrong? Why is it sick? Are you not the sick one if you find them repulsive just for whom they are? The real irony is the sick ones are those who act like they've moral All-mighty rights to censor, whatever it is they've been brainwashed into thinking is wrong. Pathetic.
"One of the things that makes us human is that we do not accept that it is "right" just because we can."
Who decides what is right? There are 17yr olds more mature than any 30yr olds would ever be... and the inverse is also true, there are 30yr olds that are as immature as 12yr olds. Is it illegal for teens to possess pictures of themselves or of their partners just cause it upsets some of ye? Why is that, eh? Intellect and capability vary, there are 16-17yr olds who're more mature than most adults, and the inverse is true also. My grandmother said she had always been a mature person, and thus had trouble relating to other kids when she was young, I too have been quite mature since forever. It was tough back then, being surrounded by immature horny people who could only talk about sex for years, and wher
My blog Judgement
The post anonymously option you are [not] attempting to use is one that isn't available to your user.
Can't you at least get the spelling right in your sig?
:-P
Thank's for notifying me. I'm sure it was CowboyNeal who changed it in the database, just to torment me
Seriously, I copied it from a post by another user. It was so funny that I forgot to spell check it.
GQuon, posting as AC.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
For example, in this recent post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own.
More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?
FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, offtopic FUD, and more FUD. This guy is like the Monty Python SPAM skit, but with FUD and more FUD instead of canned meat. Amazed
Does that mean Joe is ok because he doesn't pay any money to anyone exploiting children (or exploiting children himself)?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Not that you're involved in it. You just have delusions of grandeur and a big obnoxious mouth.