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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).
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 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.
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.