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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.
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?
Brought to you by a commission of Acronyms Sliding into Silliness through Halfwits Appending with Thesauruses Simple-mindedly (ASSHATS).
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.
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.
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?
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..)
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
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.