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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."
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.
Uh, doubt it. Perhaps "query".
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!
Amazing!
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 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."
One reason might be that it's stolen?
Someone steals your number, buys kiddie porn, and now you're the suspect.
Right, those non-suspects records were "ploughed through" in the same sense that if the police requested one record with a specific transaction ID from the creit card company's database, all of the records were "ploughed through" when the query to retrieve that record was run. You're either a troll, have no idea how a database works, or don't know how to read.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I am not quite sure I appreciate your honesty.
Please, this is Slashdot.
Agreed. Now, If they were manually sorting through the records rather than running a db query, that'd be a different story. The fact of the matter is they're getting only what they searched for and nothing else. The only people having their records "ploughed through" are those who are suspects. So assuming no false positives (which shouldn't happen with a well written query), and no records are missed (which also shouldn't happen with a well written query), they're getting a 100% success rate. The hit rate of .00146% as put forth by the GP would only be correct assuming all 22 million of those people were guilty and they were only finding .00146%. Or at least that's the way I see it.
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
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.
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.
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.
Decrease the demand for illicit content and hopefully less supply is created to meet the diminished demand.
But you're just guessing as to what the contents of the site(s) in question were - all you know is that some LEA said it was illegal. The actual content may have been much tamer than you're thinking (or even completely fictional) - we'll never know. And (regardless of the country in which you live, apparently) it's against the law for you or I even to look and find out if we agree that it is illegal (or should be). I beleive I read somewhere that Canada even made it against the law to find out how to find out (that is, just to find out what the name of the website was). One would presume that, if these folks go to trial (if they even get trials for these cases any more), then at least the jury will have a chance to take a look at what the accused was looking at and say, "yep, that's illegal alright"... but I'm afraid I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they didn't even let the jury look.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
S&W already invented a cure for p[a]edophilia
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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?
They are protecting the basic principle of Article 1 of the German constitution AKA Basic Law AKA Grundgesetz.
The children are likely not German, so they're not protecting the german children.
What is your point? That foreign children are less to be protected from abuse? The first sentence of Article 1 of the Grundgesetz reads "Human dignity shall be inviolable.", not "German dignity shall be inviolable."
The servers are not in Germany, so they are not policing they're own internet.
Again, what is your point? That Germans shall be able to behave in illegal activities as long as these are taking place on foreign servers?
They are telling people what they cannot do.
Which is basicly encouraging child abuse by exerting demand for child pornography.
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.
Regarding the children not being German read what I wrote above. Regarding point two: It is common sense that children can not give informed consent to pornography, so child pornography is in its nature exploiting children, wether they are being forced or by other pressure.
They are literally telling people what they cannot do in their own homes even when it doesn't hurt anyone.
If you think that children are not hurt by degrading appearances of themselves in pictures or films, or even worse, by being photographed or filmed while being subjected to degrading or painful or injuring acts by others you seriously need to take a reality check.
I know, i know, thinkofthechildren.
Yeah, little people with extra need of protection. Think about it.
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.
There is no need to that. Instead, there are laws and law enforcement doing that job.
And crap like this is getting modded "interesting", now even the mods are trolling.
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)
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