Slashdot Mirror
Major UK Child Porn Investigation Flawed
Oxygen99 writes "The Guardian (UK) is carrying a story on Operation Ore, a major police investigation aimed at catching online pedophiles. This has resulted in several high-profile arrests, such as those of Pete Townshend and Robert Del Naja (both falsely accused), while attracting significant press attention. Yet, the reality of the investigation is one of stolen credit cards, wrongful accusations, and ignorance leading to a significant number of the 7,292 people on the list being wrongfully accused of a very emotionally charged crime. There have been 39 suicides and a number of other people on the list will probably never be investigated. It seems to me this case highlights flaws inherent in the way law enforcement agencies handle evidence that only a small minority of front-line officers fully understand."
cameras watching your every move, laws designed to control your behaviour [asbo and the like]. Congrats, you live in a nanny-police state.
If only they could actually do anything meaningful with all this "order" they're creating.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
First Pedophile? Get the fuck off my Slashdot you pervert.
The government has no interest in prosecuting child porn offenders. They have found the perfect way to get rid of someone without anyone protesting. Simply accuse them of child porn possession and you've pretty much got an open and shut case. Judges are in on the system and juries have been trained to see anyone accused of such a crime as guilty until proven innocent.
Who would seriously by Child Porn on their own credit card? You'd have to be a really dumb person. If that's all these cops are going on, then the investigations should be shut down. It should be expected that the people purchasing are using stolen credit cards.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Thoughtcrime.
Absolutely. It seems to me that the rash of pedophiles is very similar to the rash of cases of 'satanic abuse' and 'daycare abuse'. I don't doubt that there are pedophiles out there, and I agree that they need to have, at the bare minimum, psychological help. However, the hysteria around this issue is nearly unbelieveable.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
It's almost always shoddy investigations that lead to these sort of wrongful accusations (and in some cases wrongful convictions). Cops looking to boost their careers by charging people with heinous crimes (and in particular aiming at some fairly well-known people as this operation did), prosecutors looking to get a few scalps on their own belts and politicians wanting to be seen getting tough on crime all feed into a system that is incapable of cautious consideration.
Accusing someone of accessing child pornography is just about one of the worst that one can come up with right now. It's the vogue crime-to-catch, and whether it's some prime time news magazine setting up these guys or cops running out to find every one of them that they can on the Internet, it's all about public paranoia. But once you've been labeled, I'm not sure there is a way out. Sure the judge might toss it out with prejudice if the case was particularly bad, but you're likely to be stuck with the stigma forever (He just got away with it, got off on a technicality.) and that sort of thing.
I think the proper way to handle this in the future is for prosecutors to be threatened with disbarment and cops be demoted or outright fired if they institute "operations" like this that go as wrong as this one has. Making the people who actually have the power personally responsible is the only way to assure that in the future they think long and hard before they make public accusations that they can never really take back.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
if pedophilia is the desire to have sex with children, are there cases when people download child pornography with no intention of having sex with a child?
Strike the 'child' part, and re-evaluate for legal adult porn. Does the downloader intend he'll be having sex with a porn star?
and if so, are they still pedophiles?
Repeat the above process - does the adult *wish* he were having sex with a porn star? I'd guess both cases are true - some of those folks really do think that, some would rather be happily married. Unless you go in for the whole 'adultry of the mind' or 'adultry against God' theories (then they're all going to hell, but don't suffer legal consequences).
So, if the test is to capture all pervs who think little children are sexy, then it's a fair net. If the test is to capture all pervs who are likely to commit a crime, it's probably too wide a net. I'm not sure anybody has defined the requirements adequately. But to equate viewing pictures with intent to commit a real world crime - that's a big leap.
That's not to say that they're not in possession of contraband or that they're not enabling the commission of crimes (they are) but that's a separate issue. Due to the high emotional impact of the various crimes they're often conflated, but that's not helpful for proper legal prosecution of the actual crimes.
The case of CGI versions of the above really gets to the heart of the issue, because the contraband and creation crimes aspect is factored out, leaving the original question to stand alone.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Oh, there are defiantly people who want to have sex with kids out there. They are rare however and the chances of having your kid abducted for sex are absolutely minuscule. Still, the chance is nonzero and because it's such a sensational and heinous crime you can be assured that there will be parents clamoring for the authorities to do something about those people.
The worst part is all of the people who are more than willing to give up liberties a-plenty to only slightly improve the safety of their children. The worst part is that they'll insist that you give up the same liberties and yet still their children aren't much (if at all) safer.
IMHO, this situation is likely to get out of hand if we keep going on the same path. For instance, poorly thought out legislation in Miami forces "sex offenders" (which can be a very broad term these days), to sleep under bridges because they literally cannot buy a home that is not in some form of restricted zone (too close to a daycare, school, playground, mall, etc...). As a result you have people who may have had some minor mental problems before being forced into vagrancy and the myriad of problems associated with that. Not to mention the difficulty in keeping track on someone who lives under a bridge. The very laws designed to make the children safer can in fact make them less safe because they've gone too far.
I read the internet for the articles.
"
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.
As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children,
the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
"
-- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, Publ. Houghton Miflin, 1943, Page 403
captcha: are you swayed by these arguments yet?