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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?
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 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.
I have to agree with your sentiment... to a point. The government IMO has no business telling anyone what to think or fantasize about. On the other hand, it is likely that children are being exploited in one way or another. The existence of the childporn website, and the fact that German citizens are paying for this only helps promote its existence.
I also feel that spending the money working with the appropriate foreign government to arrest the purveyors of the child porn for sale is the better course of action.
Without buyers, it would not be up for sale. Without sellers it would not be purchased. Neither options stops child exploitation and pornography, so I think it is more effective to stop those who are selling it.
They may have the buyers on an 'importing child pornography' type charge, but I still don't think that is wrong... at least not the act of buying. Yes, I know there are those that will disagree. 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. Lets spend the money stopping the source of the child porn rather than try to choke off a small portion of their income and punish people that more than likely represent no harm to society at large.
Perhaps, in a lenient society, the list of buyers might be used to offer them counseling? That's probably a bit optimistic though.
With all the medical discoveries regarding genetic contribution to other human circumstances, perhaps they will one day find a cure for pedophiles? Oh, wait, we should probably cure other non-normal traits too... homosexuality, people who like country and western music, and things like that. Yes, sarcasm, but this whole thought police thing is moronic.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
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?
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 :)
Hmmmm, let's put every single father on the suspect list. You know, they have access to children, even german children, and they might even see them naked.
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
Decrease the demand for illicit content and hopefully less supply is created to meet the diminished demand.
I meant that I "hear" that about free porn on the net, not kiddie porn...
There are companies that just do billing for a bunch of sites... that is probably why they specified a certain purchase amount along with other criteria.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
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.
S&W already invented a cure for p[a]edophilia
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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)
Most likely the 22 million accounts being searched line was added by some idiot journalist with no clue how a database works. In his defense, he was probably parroting information from some talking head, who was also clueless as to the internal working of the databases. Said spokes-hole probably heard that there were 22 million or so transactions in the year, and that the system would need a bit to do the search, so he just threw that number out there to sound like he knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
Assuming that the credit card database uses some sort of SQL type language, the DBA probably just put together a query along the likes of:
SELECT a.CustomerName, a.CustomerSSN, b.TransactionDateTime, b.TransactionAmount FROM tblCustomers a, tblTransactions b WHERE b.TransactionDateTime >l= @StartDate AND b.TransactionDateTime =< @EndDate AND b.TransactionAmount = @KnownAmount AND b.RecipientAccount = @KnownAccount
Or something akin to that. (by the by, what is the German equivalent of the US's Social Security Number? I assume that all countries have some sort of citizen tracking number.)
The end result would be that the DBA would get back a result set which only included those accounts which had made a purchase of this specific amount in this time period to this specific account. And, with good indexes, most of those 22 million records would not have even been scanned at all. Also, I suspect that any DBA at a major credit card company is far better at what he does than I am, so they will probably have an even better way to go about this than what I just whipped up.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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.
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.
So if I drive a few miles to the Austrian-German border (I'm Austrian, btw.), whip out my RPG launcher and lob a few rockets over to the Piefkes, it would be wrong of Austrian law enforcement to stop me and/or prosecute me? After all, I'm not hurting any Austrians, am I?
That's the whole point of having laws.
First of all, AFAIK, viewing isn't banned, it's possession that's banned.
Of course for someone to view/possess child porn, someone else will have to produce it, which - ignoring the issue of "virtual" child porn - presumably involves raping children, and maybe a little kidnapping beforehand (unless the parents are involved), murdering afterwards (if they don't die from the damage done by the raping anyways).
One might reasonably argue that for viewing child porn, assuming you can't be bothered to produce it yourself, you first have to obtain child porn - directly or indirectly - from someone who produces said child porn for you and is willing to give it to you.
Humans being selfish beasts (especially humans selfish enough to rape children for their own fun/profit), they won't exactly pay you to take it, it might even be the other way round (i.e. you pay THEM to sell you the child porn, in lawyerese also called "buying it from them").
Now, the funny thing is, money can be used to buy stuff. People need some stuff (e.g. food), and want some other stuff (e.g. a pimped out ride) so people usually do shit to get money to buy said stuff.
Now if there are people that offer money for child porn (the "buying" thingamajig described above), those who are offered the money might think about the shit they can buy with said money and might decide that raping some kids might be a reasonable effort to get said money to buy said shit.
This is called an "economic incentive", and by buying child porn you create such an "economic incentive" to produce child porn.
Now some cultures see raping children as something that should be avoided if possible, even threatening sanctions againts people who act against that convention. Said cultures might conclude that it would be reasonable to threaten sanctions againts creating economic incentives to rape children, too.
They also put a guy in prison for cutting off another guy's dick, eating it, killing the other guy and putting him in the freezer to eat later, even though the other guy actually wanted the first guy to do exactly that. Not only that, they also have gun control laws, drug laws and a metric shitload of other laws that tell people what they cannot do, anywhere on german soil including their own homes, even if it doesn't hurt anyone. Damn fascists.
Free as in mason.
Okay, how would you suggest to decrease the demand for child porn? I can only think of two potential methods, curing those who would seek CP, and executing them. Both have plenty of problems.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
Um... dude? I wasn't looking for detailed instructions on finding child porn. I don't think anybody else here was either. That's really just foul.
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