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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.
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.
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.