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."

Comments

Before You People Start Ranting

[Pave Low]

From the article:
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.

Re:Before You People Start Ranting

[Anonymous Coward]

During this time, a paediatrician was hounded out of her home and forced to move because people incorrectly associated her job title with paedophilia.

Well, in the states, we've had people lose their jobs over the use of the word niggardly.

Not the first...

[JohnnyCannuk]

I believe this is exactly how the RCMP and the Montreal Urban Community Police (MUC) caught Mafia Boy back in 2000....

Good Idea

[Timesprout]

This is one of the more rational and intelligent responses I have seen to address what is a hugely emotive issue.

Re:Implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

Have they done anything to remove this child porn from the internet? They take great care to track offenders but not the files themselves (and even less care to look for the childs...)

Re:Well, this doesn't bother me on privacy-wise

[KoriaDesevis]

This shouldn't be a problem with privacy concerns. First, they had a judge willing to authorize the tap. Second, phone taps have been in use a long time. The biggest difference here is that they were tracking data, not voice. It's not a revolutionary change to the way things are done, it's just a technology being used in a very slightly different way.

Re:Implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

"You've got to remove the people, that's the only way to fight this problem. "

Get rid of the people?

Child 'abuse' has been around for thousands of years and probably thousands more. Ask the year 0 Greeks if they enjoyed sex with children (someone below the age of 18). Their clay pots seem to suggest they did.

A more sensible approach seems to be needed to solve the harm, if any harm exists, with regards to sexual relationships between children and adults or children and children.

Thats nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

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

and then there's the "Trojan" defense

[scupper]

Remember this story for the UK:
Trojan horse found responsible for child porn
Munir Kotadia | ZDNet UK | August 01, 2003
Excerpt:

This is thought to be the second case in the UK where a "Trojan defence" has been used to clear someone of such an accusation. In April, a man from Reading was found not guilty of the crime after experts testified that a Trojan could have been responsible for the presence of 14 child porn images on his PC.

Help catch the bastards!

[Xemu]

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!

Child porn, a history

[Anonymous Coward]

The child pornography "problem" was invented by the Meese Commission back in the Reagan years, as a way around the Constitutional limitations on censoring pornography generally. If you actually read the 1985 Meese Commission report, they're quite clear about their intent. (There's quite a bit of material on line about the Meese Commission report, most of it critical, but the report itself is hard to find.)

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.

Story of politics, pressure, and social hysteria

[danila]

This "study" by Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman has been debunked. It is junk science, although it seems to be quite popular, in a self-serving way, among pedophiles.
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):

In July 1999, the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin published our review of fifty-nine studies that had examined psychological correlates of child sexual abuse (CSA) (Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman 1998). We soon achieved an unexpected honor: our paper was unanimously condemned by Congress. In the aftermath, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER has published two commentaries, one denouncing Congress (Berry and Berry 2000), and the other denouncing our study (Hagen 2001). We would like to offer our own thoughts about this astonishing story of politics, pressure, and social hysteria--the antitheses of critical and skeptical thought.

We conducted our research in the spirit of scientific skepticism, an attitude sadly missing in the CSA panic that arose throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Beginning in 1984, sensational cases of satanic ritual abuse in daycare centers proliferated in the U.S., from McMartin in the West, to Fells Acres in the Northeast, to Little Rascals in the South. Staff workers were accused of such things as assaulting four-year-olds with swords and curling irons, forcing them in ritualistic style to consume feces and drink the blood of sacrificed babies, and molesting them in outer space or on ships at sea surrounded by sharks trained to prevent them from escaping. Meanwhile, by the late 1980s, a billion-dollar recovered memory movement had developed, and diagnoses of multiple personality disorder (MPD) mushroomed. All over the country, women were entering therapy with vague complaints such as feeling unhappy without knowing why, then emerging with "recovered memories" of bizarre childhood victimization--such as being sexually assaulted with hardware tools or vegetables--sometimes for many years, even decades, without "remembering." Often, these women were led to believe that this purported victimization had fragmented their personalities into a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand alters.

Yet, over time, skeptics emerged-- social scientists, lawyers, and others who questioned the stories coming from daycare cases and therapists' offices. They provided empirical evidence showing how even bizarre memories can be implanted, how children can be manipulated and coerced into telling preposterous stories, how people can be induced to believe they have thousands of "personalities." Daycare cases ceased; convictions were overturned; some of the more egregious practitioners of MPD therapy were successfully sued for malpractice. But few people were willing to critically examine the core assumptions that led to these hysterical epidemics: that child sexual abuse is distinctively horrible (more horrible than any other traumatic experience or than family pathology), inevitably leaving scars that last throughout life (at least, without therapy). It was time to examine those assumptions.

Freud was the first to formalize a relation between CSA and psychological maladjustment. In his "seduction theory," he claimed that all adult neuroses are traceable to premature sex with an older person. He based this notion on a dozen or so patients, whom he pressured to recall seduction episodes using the same discredited techniques that would later be used in modern recovered memory therapy. He soon abandoned his