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Germany Searches Credit Cards For Child Porn Payments
narramissic writes "According to an ITworld article, police in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt have teamed with credit card companies to sift through the transactions of over 22 million customers looking for those who may have purchased child pornography online. To date they have identified 322 suspects." From the article: "German data privacy laws allow police to ask financial institutions to provide data about individuals but only if the investigators meet certain conditions, including a concrete suspicion of illegal behavior and narrowly defined search criteria, according to Johann Bizer, deputy director of the Independent Center for Privacy Protection... In the case under investigation, police were aware of a child pornography Web site outside of Germany that was attracting users inside the country. And they asked the credit-card companies to conduct a database search narrowed to three criteria: a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account."
Do they mean "grep"?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Why the hell do people pay for *any* porn, and especially why would you pay for porn that's *already illegal*?!
People make my head hurt.
Well, I gotta say that somebody using a credit card to buy kiddie porn is a fine example of natural selection. Honestly, I had no idea that there were people that stupid out there. I mean really, if you're going to do something that is universally both illegal and reviled, why in the hell would you use a credit card?!?! Hell, I don't even use a credit card to buy incense at my local head shop!
Just to check, would mentioning parallels to the Nazi era be considered invoking Goodwin's Law?
We're in a sad state of affairs. Germany here is no longer protecting its own citizens, it's preventing it's citizens from viewing things online elsewhere. Who are they protecting?
The children are likely not German, so they're not protecting the german children.
The servers are not in Germany, so they are not policing they're own internet.
They are telling people what they cannot do.
What is the reason for banning viewing these things? The usual reason is protecting children from being exploited, but one, these are not German children, and two, there is no proof they were even exploited.
They are literally telling people what they cannot do in their own homes even when it doesn't hurt anyone.
I know, i know, thinkofthechildren.
It's only a matter of time before children are carted away and a young age to be protected from the evils of the world. The Calvinists were just a couple centuries ahead of their time.
Have you read my journal today?
Amazing!
POLIZE) Sir, ve haff found zis gepayment vot is obviously for die kidipornen. Ve vill haff to ask you to commen mit us to die polizestation.
MANN) Nein, nein, das ist nicht ein kidipornen! Dis ist die regular wholesome scheisse videos mit conzenting aldulten gefichen mit die turdenpoopen.
POLIZE) Ach! Ve are mischtaken. Zo zorry for gewasten du timen, proud zitizen. Gutenhaben, unt enjoy die turdenpoopen!
If the site were in-country with in-country bank accounts, the authorities would just search those records directly. This gets them the exact same information. No more, no less. The parameters are narrowly-defined, reasonable, and the activity in question clearly illegal. The risk to innocents is at least as low as going at it from the other direction (looking at the records on the receiving end).
I suppose we could put these people forward for a Darwin Award. After all, they will be locked up with the key thrown away, so they are out of the gene pool?
Thinking saner thoughts, it is highly unlikely that these bills will prove that they have been buying child porn. It will only prove that they paid this company something. If some of the punters were really interested in goats in stockings hanging from chandeliers, it will be tough on them because they will still be charged and convicted with the rest.
We had some of this in the UK. If a company is fingered for selling child porn (or anything the authorities think might be) and the authorities get hold of the billing data for that company, everyone they can get hold of goes down! Looking at what gets reported, it seems an interesting set of cases - you can't see what you're charged with and there is no way of responding to the police assertions.
Much like the RIAA, in fact,
I cant comment on why people pay for child porn as that is not my cup of tea but as for paying for porn in general, I have done so.
Why, well first is convenience. I am busy and would rather be able to go to one website, enter in my search (usually redhead, teen and anal) and get the movies they have right there without having to sift through the results to see what is good. I feel my time is worth more then the money it costs to pay for the porn.
The second is guaranteed quality. I never wonder if I am getting garbage resolution, a misnamed video, or some other piece of crap. That is why I pay, the company takes care of all that.
The final reason is guaranteed download speed. I want my porn fast, regardless of how many other people are willing to share it.
Also it is not illegal, I am supporting the "artists" by paying for it, and lets face it, these people are getting fucked all the time (pun intended).
So there you do, those are the reason I have paid for porn.
Let's do it again. Now please grep for donations to the ACLU...
I wonder how many cards will now be reported stolen
A specific search would be "We have sound suspicions that a bloke called Wolfgang has been accessing this list of kiddie porn websites. Could you provide us with a list of transactions Wolfgang has made to them please."
So, to date, they have 322 suspects out of 22 million scans...that's a hit rate of .00146 percent. That's a lot of people who had their personal data plowed through for a nearly zero yield.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
One reason might be that it's stolen?
Someone steals your number, buys kiddie porn, and now you're the suspect.
the ones with any sense will be using stolen identities... so how would you explain things if your credit card number comes up in this search then???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Don't forget ineffective, once some very simple steps are taken by site operators to defeat these "narrowly defined" search criteria. For example, lots of different promo prices, multiple charges, deferred billing, and a few dozen other things that might take me more than the two seconds to think of than it took me to come up with these.
No, it proves that someone paid this company something using a credit card with the suspect's name on it. Could be a stolen credit card, or possibly just a stolen number. Could even be a stolen identity used to obtain a credit card.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
There has been at least one case where there has been a big bust of omgpedos! based upon people who gave their money to an "age verification service."
Most websites in the ring that used the service were purely adult porn, but there were one or two that weren't.
Apparently, they weren't all linked together, so someone wouldn't necessarily know that when they paid to access hotcollegegirlswithgrits, they were also supporting chinesebabiespeeingongrits.
But of course everyone who gave money to the service was accused of belonging to the one or two pedo sites, because the websites didn't have records.
So be a little cynical when you read something like this, even though it's all for the sake of the children, of course.
this shouldn't be news because they've conceivably been able to do this forever, but finally people (even b_eu_rocrats) are using their head.
And yes, the subject is just an attention getter
The terrorists win.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
> it is likely that children are being exploited in one way or another
Really? You mean kids don't like being kidnapped, enslaved, and raped?
Get a clue, dude. Child Pornography is the most vile and evil industry hell has concocted. Maybe there's a cure for pedophiles; if so, please cure them. But until then, the children's needs trump the pedophiles', and most certainly trump their exploiters. Those who'd rape a child for profit deserve the most severe justice.
Every civil society feels this very strongly, and rightly so. Unfortunately, that's why societies tolerate their government eroding civil rights - in the name of fighting child porn.
I am not quite sure I appreciate your honesty.
Please, this is Slashdot.
People with recently stolen identities :)
Gays do not have rights.
Muslims do not have rights.
Jews do not have rights.
You do not have rights.
Where does it end? Where's the cutoff? Everyone has rights. That's what makes things a "right", rather than a privilege. Those who break the law should be punished appropriately and measures should be taken to prevent reoccurance, but that does not negate that person's rights.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I exploit my knowledge and skill every day. If you have anything, so do you. People exploit the natural resources around them - cut trees for firewood, fish in their ponds, etc. It seems you've been confused by the mass delusion spread by the politically correct.
We live in a world now where parents have scant real freedom to raise their kids as they deem fit. How I raise my kids - how I let them dress, what beliefs I teach them, how they are educated - is not your business, not george bush's business, and not the business of the school board... well, at least it wasn't before the feds decided to bend over for the feminist left in the 1980s and make a whole new set of crimes for this shit... never mind those existing laws pretty much covered any REAL sex crimes against americans regardless of age.
I'm more or less all for the police just posting a list of those who bought the child porn and let society takes its normal course of false morality and prejudice against them.
Oh yes indeed, that would work perfectly.. it certainly worked well in the south for folks like Emmet Till. While we're at it, how about posting the names of all those folks breaking the other laws, too? Like the whites who married blacks, the ones who buy marital aids, the ones who practice the vile arts like sodomy and cunnilingus and felatio...
And what about the guy who beats his wife? No chance someone like that might be fucking his daughter or even his son, huh? Or beating them? Where are the calls to castrate these folks?
The "civilized west" has gone abso-fucking-lutely batshit. How apt you should be deemed a "troll" by another of those "critical thinkers" spawned from this completely perverted society.
This sucks, Germany's catching up with us in the UK ...
....
.... :-(
We need a strategy for staying in front. How about forcing all citizens to work in the mines while chanting "Politicians are God" over and over
Oh wait minute, peeps in the UK aren't citizens at all, just Subjects of HM the Queen. Maybe we are still ahead after all!
I wonder how many cards will now be reported stolen
That excuse only works on your wife, or your girlfriend.
I know it works on my wife, and my girlfriend.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
SUSPECTED "pedos." Or are we dispensing with trials in Germany now also?
It's not about the rights of the pedophiles, it's about the rights of normal people to not have the police scrutinize their personal financial records simply because some pedophile uses the same credit card company. The police knew that a few people had used credit cards to buy the porn, so they examined the records of all 22 million people.
I have problems with this. I'll give the German police some slack and assume they are reasonable enough to only look for people who purchased materials that any reasonable person would look at and say "That's obviously vile child abuse." We cannot, however, trust the police everywhere to be as reasonable.
In the U.S., people are being prosecuted right now for making and selling child porn even though the prosecution agrees that no nudity or sexual activity is depicted. In the U.S., at least one 16 year old girl has been charged with child abuse and child porn production for taking a cell phone picture of herself nude and sending it to a boyfriend. (Yes, the child she was charged with abusing was herself. Think on that a while, but don't blame me if your head explodes.) In the U.S., we have people sitting in jail convicted of possessing child porn for, among other things, having cartoons of young-looking characters having sex. (I'm at work, so filtering prevents me from searching for links; you can google them as easily as I can, though. For the first case, look for "Pierson" who's being prosecuted in Alabama.)
Yes, everyone is probably right that in the instant case this is a reasonable way to proceed. But I'm still not comfortable with it. I don't trust LEOs to not be idiots, to not be grinding political axes. Dangerous stuff, this. If it's backed up with searches that find people in possession, great. But be warned - due to identity theft or whatever reason, there will be some false positives. The people who are the victims of those false positives are just a short distance away from having their lives utterly ruined without adequate justification.
There must be better ways of investigating this sort of thing.
Except that they did no such thing.
The police had no access whatsoever to records of any transactions that didn't match their specific criteria. The didn't "examine" these records in any sense, and know nothing about them except that they don't match these specific criteria. There was absolutely no violation of the privacy of anyone who's not now a suspect.
Now, you may be able to argue that it's not the intent of the privacy law to allow the police to say "we have an unknown number of anonymous suspects whose identities we can get through this specific request for information" rather than "we suspect this specific individual of committing this specific crime, and we'd like this specific information to prove that", and you might have a reasonable case there, but that's a whole other issue. I'm not a lawyer and I can't read German, so I'm not about to try to parse their law to form an opinion on that.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Or better 90% of them. The Spiegel says that 90% of the
322 suspects are not punished before, so they'll receive
fines instead of prison. It's unusual in germany to go
to prison for your first misdeed. Except really hard crimes
like homicide, second degree murder, forays, raping of course.
German law on child pornography is universial, as long as a German is involved, it is the business of the attorney. So a German tourist fucking a little girl somewhere on holiday can be prosecuted in Germany. The law was changed like this after it showed that especially Thailand would not do anything to protect its own children. So the law was changed to be able to do something about it here (yes, I am German).
Therefore it is completely irrelevant, if the child was German or if the server was located in Germany. All what is relevant was that Germans were buying child porn, something which is very clearly forbidden here. Also what the headline doesn't tell, there are 20 teachers under the suspects and quite a lot of repeat offenders.
I am not happy about this either, as my credit cards were probably among those that were checked. But it really seems as if everything was done to the letter of the law. The law enforcment officers never saw the CC records, the CC companies were doing the searches for an exact sum, to a fishy Phillipene billing company in a two month time frame. Sadly the trail stopps at the billing company for now, because much better than going after the buyers would have been to get the sellers.
But to repeat, according to German law it is completely irrelevant where the child was, where the pictures were made and where the servers are located. And I think it was a good idea to change the law like this, because honestly I don't see why child porn from a German child should be prosecuted differently.
Let me give you a simple test of logic. You presented three options:
1) You're a troll
2) You don't know how a database works
3) You don't know how to read
Using only your innate powers of deduction, which of these three options can you eliminate right now?
My point being that, who's the troll here? The guy who asked about the effectiveness of going through 22 million records only to obtain 322 viable hits? or the guy who decided to take personal shots at the original post?
Well, obviously a database search to limited criteria is cost-effective and non-invasive. Hell, "ploughed through" might have even been a poor choice of words.
But at least I wasn't a dick about it.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I meant that I "hear" that about free porn on the net, not kiddie porn...
On first blush - I thought "hmmm, that's not too bad. a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account to search for purchasers of kiddie porn."
But thinking about it more - why was it necessary to search thru 22M accounts? If you know who the receiver account is - why not just pull all the transactions from that account only? IIRC, the sender is associated with the receiver in the credit transactions...
Second, the authorities in Germany state that everything was done legally and that it's not a case of 'dragnet investigation', since neither prosecution nor police had access to all the data but instead the search was conducted by the CC companies. It was just "standard investigation procedure", even though it has never been done before.
Third, the majority of CCs were apparently not stolen; one of the porn "consumers" was a secondary school teacher (still living in his moms basement btw); huge amounts of kiddie porn were found on his computers. Most of the 322 persons that turned up in the search have a criminal record related to child porn. The whole investigation is sold as a major success throughout the big media outlets in Germany.
The owners of the transaction server are still unknown and will probably remain so (not as stupid as their customers, operating from the Philippines).
My thoughts: whatever data there is out there, it will be used - by governments, corporations and individuals. You do not have any control over your data in a post-9/11-world. The more data there is, the greater the risk you will end up as a match in someones DB query. Now, when it comes to child porn, many people don't care any longer if a search was warranted or illegal, they will only see the results. Along with rising amounts of data being collected, the risk of being targeted as an innocent person rises exponentially. This is why we should all be worried, no matter how glad we are that a few more sick child abusers end up in jail. Seeing how much data we generate each day, I'm increasingly glad I have neither a CC nor a cell phone.
On a somewhat related note: European institutions and governments seem to have no problem with handing out whatever data there is; along with the flight passenger data, the US still has full access to the SWIFT transaction data as well, even though there's no legal backing for such practices in the EU.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
You drive down the highway, and a police officer checks your speed by radar. You're not speeding, so he doesn't stop you. Have your rights been violated? Do you complain that they are checking everyone's speed instead of just the speeders? It's more of a leap to say that the search of credit card records described above is a violation of your rights.
Let's put you for, say, 2 hours into a tank, preferably in toasty warm weather, and then tell me again that you don't want to have that juice!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
underage != pedophilia
pedophilia is attraction to prepubescent children. these guys are not sleeping with the 17 year old, more like her 7 year old sister (or brother)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
totally. some 16 year old girls look 20 and some 25 year old girls look 16. how in the heavens do we figure this out - oh, i forgot 2257 is bulletproof. if the page has a "2257" link on it, then she is definitely over 18, no doubt about it.
The children are likely not German, so they're not protecting the german children.
The servers are not in Germany, so they are not policing they're own internet.
They are telling people what they cannot do
While I'm by no stretch a fan of the government (any government, even though this one isn't my own) simply diving into private records, there is a certain line between reasonable and unreasonable. Swap the actions with the above arguements, for example:
What if they were ordering illegal merchandise? Perhaps ivory or pelts from an endangered animal. If they're ordering from a country where such is legal, does that mean that it's OK since no German elephants were killed (nevermind the lack of elephants in Germany). Why is it OK to harm kids from other coutries. Now if there were a case of drawn/animated material you might have a case for patrolling against "thoughtcrime", but no such distinction is made. Certainly if someone were in Germany and arranged a "hit" against somebody out-of-country, I would still expect that person to be arrested on murder charges.
The children are likely not German, so they're not protecting the german children.
Yeah, right, so if some kids are touring from another country it should be just fine to abuse/murder/etc them just because they're not citizens. Or they just shouldn't give a damn about non-citizens in other countries? Good logic.
Now, a lot of this depends on how the records are being checked. But personally, if they have an automated programs checking for payments of $13.50 to IllegalPerve.com between January and March 2005 (an example registration cost, site, and date of operation), I find it hard to object. Perhaps if this were the entire basis for arresting and jailing somebody, yes (stolen CC #'s and various other issues), but it's plenty of grounds for further investigation and I'm surprised that this is even news (I would have *expected* them to investigate such things).
And it all changes miraculously in that one nanosecond when she turns 18.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"And they asked the credit-card companies to conduct a database search narrowed to three criteria: a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account."
So I just pay up $11.32 instead of $9.99 and I am home free?
Why can't they just monitor the whole account, since it clearly used for distributing child porn? Why do you have to set these limits?
... allows the federal government to do exactly what the Germans are doing as long as the government specifies that the records they are requesting relate to a counter-terrorism investigation.
On top of that, the orders are granted in ex-parte hearings and entities who are served with a Section 215 order (i.e. a library, phone company, etc.) are sworn to secrecy by law, which means that targets may never even know they are being investigated.
Governments seem to believe that seizing the records of X people who match a certain criteria is no different than seizing the records of X people they knew about a priori, which is total bullshit.
If anyone's more interested in this topic, I strongly recommend "Terrorism and the Constitution" by David Cole and James X. Dempsey.
You're talking about Germany here. Mounir El Motassadeq has just been found guilty of aiding and abetting murder in 246 cases (passengers and crew of the 9/11 flights) and membership in a terrorist organization, and has been sentenced to the maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
While I don't have the faintest idea what the maximum penalty for owning child porn is in Germany, they certainly won't get any more than that. Some of them will - as I heard in the news today - get away with fines.
(I'm not saying that the penalties should be worse, nor am I saying that they shouldn't. Just disputing the darwin award nomination.)
The police raided the houses of those people and presumably found more evidence. At least that's what they said on the news, showing policemen sifting through a bunch of photos.
I think we can safely assume that each one will get their own trial and that those will be reasonably fair.
Of course that doesn't mean that innocent people's lifes won't be ruined by people unable to fathom that someone might be arrested or even tried for something that he didn't actually do, but you can't possibly prevent that as long as you have any kind of juridical system.
Free as in mason.
So that would mean that the investigation has a success rate of 0.001463636%
Disclaimer: IMO anybody who hurts a child should be exterminated.
What % of children die from disease or other 'preventable' causes in Germany?
Would efforts be better spent helping them?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Pardon my mistake. I seem to be confused. Were these guys downloading porn or sleeping with 7 year olds? Was the porn involved only of children age 7 and younger?
Honestly, being German and all, child porn is probably one of the more positive things they turned up.
when you get free porn, well, lets just assume if you wanted to hack millions of computers, putting a virus in a porn video is the easiest way.
That would be a good argument except for the fact that your analogy is invalid. Cars traveling on the public highway are not at all like private credit card transactions.
Transactions are supposed to be private information unless there is probable cause to grant a request to look at those records, with judicial oversight.
Why would anyone with a conscience support the kiddie porn industry at all?
It's CHILD PORN, it's wrong, everyone knows it's wrong, what kinda person would actually pay money to support the creation of more of this garbage?!
You are right, they'd have to be damn stupid to pay with a credit card, but they'd have to be damn immoral to pay at all. It's a completely pedophile market that should be destroyed. The entire industry should be destroyed. This means you should track the money, but also why the hell are there sites like that allowed to be on the internet at all?
I can't believe we don't have a global law on child porn to prevent people from creating more of it, I mean the way people fight it now it's never going to end, it's like a waste of time to keep going after "pictures" of child porn, or "movies" or 1s and 0s, when the child pornographers, and website designers, and those who pay for and fund it, continue to create more of it.
The best thing that can be done, is to create a global law that outlaws any type of profit from child pornography. Then you can outlaw any child porn website. Once you get rid of the websites and the ability to profit, a lot less child porn will be created because it won't have the economics behind it.
As far as dealing with pedophiles, thats another issue, but child pornography is easy to stop and prevent and we just aren't focusing on it enough.
The law makes no such distinction.
A couple hundred kids are stripped naked and photographed by
child pornographers every year. Some are traumatized
by rape and other degrading sexual acts. For the most part
however they are fed and live to see adulthood.
On the other hand _thousands_(!) of children are maimed or die
from such mundane causes such as traffic and wars each year.
'Guess how many Iraqi children died in the last years at the hands
of US and our "allies", how many died from the arial bombing, land
mines, scarcity of food and medical supplies?
Get a clue, moron
Thanks for the information. Can you please provide us with links to all the laws around the world that show that there's no distinction between age 17 and age 7 with respect to capacity for consent to sex acts? I'd be particularly interested in you showing us the "no such distinction" laws from countries with ages of consent under 17. Thanks.
Don't forget, there's whole BUNCHES of countries... the world is practically FILLED with them. And (surprise, surprise) many of them actually have the nerve to have laws that are DIFFERENT from other countries'... imagine that!
P.S. I'm not in favor of child pornography or "underage" pornography, it just bugs me when people make ludicrous statements that are obviously false.
Most of the people who haven't RTFA are just screaming their fool heads off, but please, RTFA.
The police knew the specific account number of the kiddie porn site. They knew the specific cost. And they knew the specific time range that the site was operational.
So, instead of saying "Here is one person, give me everything they've ever done on their CC", they said "here is one receiving account, tell me everyone who paid into it for 24.99 between June 1 and Aug 30" (amount and dates pulled out of my ass)
I would construe that as a fairly specific search. They're not getting a list of everyone who's every paid 24.99 to anyone, nor are they getting a list of all CC activity from June 1 to Aug 30. Their specific starting point is the kiddieporn CC account, filtered by date and amount. I think that's pretty fair, even, doesn't give the cops access to stuff they shouldn't see or too much info, and does give them a list of directly associated transactions.
Who couldn't find that fair?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
in many parts of the US it does
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
A friend was telling me that in parts of india they have people whose sole jobs are to look at frequently accessed IP addresses and shut them down if they are objectionable. The same method would probably work for credit card accounts, it's just the question of how open we want our transactions to be. What is the level of traffic required before the government should be allowed to audit your business account to see if transactions are the result of smuggling?
ever heard of fraud?, now along your identity and money being stolen anybody can order a some child porn, and if they dont get caught it's your ass.
Isn't that how they get into trouble in the first place?
The important bit is that the law enforcement agencies never got their hands on the records of the 22 Million innocent people (including mine, as I own a German credit card). I don't mind the fact that the banks did a search on their own database.
Really? That's great!! Because our next search is going to be on all accounts that have ever purchased anything from allofmp3.com. You know, that legal in Russia but illegal in Germany website that sells MP3s from RIAA artists without consent or royalty payments. You wouldn't happen to be a previous customer of theirs... would you? Don't worry, we'll know soon enough. Besides, two years jail time isn't really all that bad.
I may not have seen a street drug dealer sell aspirin, but I have seen a doctor get busted for giving out bogus prescriptions.
There are PLENTY of cases of people ruining a perfectly good legal method of making money by dabbling in a related illegal way of making money. It's not smart, I personally don't think it's rational - but it is done.
It's childishly simple to find hundreds of gigabytes of that stuff for free on the Internet if you have the right tools and cultural background at your disposal.
Use WinMX or one of the secure, anonymous alternatives like Winny, and input Japanese terms in kana/kanji: roriita, mushuusei, youzyo, anaru. Youjo is my personal favourite. Torrent search never worked for me. The key here is being able to input multibyte characters, which bypasses filters and log checks of all kinds.
And remember:
Four thousand hungry children
leave us per hour from starvation
while billions are spent on bombs
creating death showers.
So please, think of the children. Not of some pervert who happens to enjoy duplicating a particular arrangement of pixels for his/her own personal enjoyment.
asked the DMV who owns a blue Audi A4 1995-model, and they ran the query against the whole DB
The DMV a department of the state, so the state is searching their own records for information that you provided to them. And in most states, DMV records are considered public information - virtually anybody can file some paperwork to find out what cars you may own.
Credit card companies are private enterprises and your credit card charges are private information.
But, that's why the state needs a warrant to search credit card records but does not need a warrant to search DMV records.
paintball
Who is "they" ? Read the article. "They" are the credit card companies. The police or other authorities never had a look at all of these transactions.
It seems to me that those darn Germans are going to do it by considering half the adult population as suspects.
No. The 22 million people were never considered suspects, and the police doesn't know what most of them did. Only those who actually transferred that exact amount to that exact account are on the list of suspects that was handed to the police. And that number is only a tiny fraction of 22 million.
The German equivalent of the SSN isn't as widely misused as a personal tracking number as the US SSN is. It's used for Social Security purposes only. Also, it's a fairly unwieldy chunk of a number (too many digits to memorize, and it's got letters in it, too), printed on a fairly unwieldy piece of paper (too stubborn to fit in a wallet), so on the rare occasions that you actually need it, you'll dig out the folder that has said piece of paper in it and copy it.
Section 184b StGB (German Criminal Law):
Up to 2 years of prison sentence or a fine (paragraph 4 sentence 2). In practice that means in most cases they will indeed get away with a fine especially if they don't have a criminal record. Culprits can also be banned from their profession if their jobs involve work with children (e.g. teachers).
But with this kind of crime social stigmatization (think: public trial) can be much harder than the criminal sentence itself.
It's 14 years or younger: Sections 184b and 176 StGB (German Criminal Law)
Oh come on, didn't you read all those posts mentioning CC? That's Creative Commons....
Transactions are supposed to be private information unless there is probable cause to grant a request to look at those records, with judicial oversight.
And you don't consider paying a kiddie porn side "probable cause"?
WE need to pick an age, and make that age the global age limit. The reason it's so complicated now is because of the weird age of consent laws, and all the different ages all around the globe, and all around the country, to the point where no one knows whats legal and whats not.
To be safe, assume under 18 is in risky territory. I'm not in the pornography industry, but if I were, I would not even waste my time with ladies or males or whatever, who could not prove they are over 18.
So I'm saying we need a global age of consent.This way the line is drawn in the sand and anyone who crosses it, knows it was illegal.
On 1 Jan 1983, the British Nationalities Act (1981) came into force, abolishing the term and status of "subject" with respect to citizens of the United Kingdom, and since 30 April 2003 the term has been legally extinct.
Although the Court Circulars may occasionally refer to "subjects of HM the Queen in Right of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (or "subjects of HM the Queen in RIght of Canada" (or Australia or New Zealand)), these terms have somewhere between zero legal weight and mildly offensive connotations, and so have fallen out of use by the Royal Household since early 1998. (The final use of the term "subject" or "subjects" with respect to a citizen of a country in which The Queen is also the head of state in the palace circular is dated 21 January of that year, and was shortly after that commented upon in the House of Commons in a somewhat negative fashion).
In a non-legal sense, one could say that people in the UK, Canada, or New Zealand are the Queen's subjects, but that is likely to be seen as belabouring a point for either romantic or republican purposes.
That's how I read your comment, incidentally.
The fact that there is a woman with a hereditary political job with an income paid by the state, whose various children are also paid by the state, and who is expected to be succeeded in the job by a (male) child or (male) grandchild, independent of qualifications, is not entirely unique: there are still hereditary peers sitting in the House of Lords as legislators, and as full members of Parliament with an ability to vote as they wish, they have more real political power than The Queen, who is obliged to take the advice of the Prime MInister and First Lord of the Treasury (with respect to the UK), and her Governors-General or Lieutenant-Governors (with respect to essentially everywhere else), notwithstanding her own wishes.
In other words, while I agree that it's backwards and annoying that there is still someone as head of state who is rich and daily made richer through special treatment by the state, the rump of hereditary peers in Parliament is much more backwards and annoying, and easier to fix without public outcry.
would beg to be raped for something to eat. You on the other hand are merely
regurgitating something you saw on TV. But that's one of the ways you are
duped by making you focus on a detail ("think of the children" while they move
the big picture around (take away your freedom).
The technical definition of paedophilia is one who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. People who this applies to need to be kept away from children.
Someone who is sexually attracted to children who have reached puberty (so have breasts, pubic hair, widened hips, get erections etc), but not yet reached the age of majority (depending on country/state) is actually an ephibophile. This isn't really "wrong" as such, as puberty is the point of reaching sexual maturity!
Right here: Canadian Criminal Code, section 163.1. The age of consent for actual sex is lower, but pictures of a person who looks under 18 == child porn, even if they only look a day younger, even if no actual person under 18 was involved in the creation of the picture, and in some cases, even if the acts depicted would be legal.
Yes, it's amazing that we villify people for both have sex contrary to nature's intentions (sodomy) and having sex with individuals who have just reached sexual maturity as nature intended (statutory rape.)
So basically you can't tie a 14 year old girl up for one night, but you sure as hell can marry her and tie her up for life.
Here, the term "Gestapo" appears to be used as a shorthand for any organization that fills the role of geheime Staatspolizei, that is, secret state police. There were many such organizations outside Nazi Germany, such as the Soviet KGB. Some are still in operation, allegedly including the US Department of Homeland Security.
Is that so much different from what happens on CNN and Fox News?
"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." -- attributed to William Randolph Hearst
Did you RTFA? The cops did NOT, have access to 20 million records. They gave the SELECT query criteria to the card company who fired the query against the DB and produced 80-90 rows.
If your database has 20 million rows, and you as a person search for one select criteria which returns , say, 10 records, does it mean You, as a person looked through 20 million rows and got 10 records??
No, the DB Query Processor, the DB Manager went through those rows and gave YOU 10.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer