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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."
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?
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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.
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.
The way to stop childporn has nothing to do with P2P or the internet.
The real way to stop child porn is to sit back and wait for Moore's Law.
Within 10 years tops, computer graphics will have gotten so good that there is no longer any reason to use actual human actors in porn- whether children or adults. Criminal's won't take the risk of using real children when they can just buy "3d Poser 2015" for $199 and crank out 100% fake pics.
Remember that in the USA, illegal child porn is only pictures whose production actually involved the sexual abuse of children- not just ones that look that way.
How about A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. "Meta-analyses [based on 59 studies based on college samples] revealed that students with [child sexual abuse] (CSA) were, on average, slightly less well adjusted than controls. However, this poorer adjustment could not be attributed to CSA because family environment (FE) was consistently confounded with CSA, FE explained considerably more adjustment variance than CSA, and CSA-adjustment relations generally became nonsignificant when studies controlled for FE."
And could you elaborate on what exactly "validated scientific research" proves that pedophelia (sic) is abhorrent.
Not to mention that P2P child porn downloading is an entirely different issue. So despite damage to kids from child abuse being minor, despite not all sex being abuse and despite porn downloading being mostly unrelated to real sex with kids, having one questionable image on your PC is a crime in the US. If this is not "biblical bible thumping", it's just stupidity of general public, sensationalism of the media and opportunism of the politicians.
Child porn is not bad. Real scientific research (as opposed to some mythical studies about "abhorrence" - sound like something a preacher would say) showed that about 25% of adult men can be sexually aroused by children (Freund & Costell 1970, Hall et al. 1995, Quinsey et al. 1975, references from Wikipedia). It is perfectly normal to jerk off to images of naked kids or kids having sex. No harm, no foul. Just keep in mind the difference between your sexual fantasies and the real world and you'll be fine. Just like with videogames.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.