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Pentagon Workers Tied To Child Porn
finalcutmonstar tips a Boston Globe report on details released today of Operation Flicker (PDF), an investigation of subscribers to child porn websites, which seems to have implicated a number of government employees in sensitive positions. Quoting:
"Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports. The investigations have included employees of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which deal with some of the most sensitive work in intelligence and defense — among other organizations within the Defense Department. The number of offenders is a small percentage of the thousands of people working for sensitive Pentagon-related agencies. But the fact that offenders include people with access to government secrets puts national security agencies 'at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military installations,' according to one report by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service from late 2009."
Libertarians are all words. You'll never do anything, and you know it.
The NSA, NRO and DARPA don't investigate child porn.
...anything from a glamour shot of a naked 17-year-old girl to a child being sexually abused could be classified as "child porn". And whilst I don't consider either to be particularly healthy in a civilised society
That 17 year old, you know in most of the world you could legally be banging her right? Just don't take the glamour shot...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I know someone who is currently serving 15 years in Arizona State for picking up a 17 year old girl at a bar and doing some heavy petting.
I think there's reasonable evidence from a series of population surveys that around 0.5% of the population is attracted to kids, exclusively or primarily. That's about 1.5 million in the US, 35 million in the world.
Most manage to live a pretty normal life without doing illegal stuff, but even if 10% of those people do get porn at some point, that's still 150,000.
How many get caught? :-)
Thanks to all those private equity firms like the Blackstone Group, who have funded and/or bought up vile organizations such as Corrections Corporation of America, Prison Realty, Geo, etc., Korporate Amerika now has a ready supply of slave labor.
Especially with the thoroughly corrupt judicial "system" and the absolutely corrupt and degenerate Supreme Court!
He deleted the partition without first wiping the free space. All the files were there all you had to do was create a new partition and use a file recovery tool. Deleting a partition does not automatically scrub the drive clean of any files all it does is remove the entry in the MBR.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
http://blog.silive.com/weather/2008/08/coppertone.jpg
Oh noes! Does this mean everyone who ever saw this ad campaign from 50ish years ago should be shot?
The only thing that needs to have a bullet in the head is anyone with that kind of thinking (hypocrite alert!).
Child Porn is like toxic / nuclear waste. Once you touch it, you are contaminated forever.
There is a grandmother on the east coast who took pictures of her grandchild playing int he tub, a common occurrence. She was charged and convicted of child porn when she took the pictures to be developed. The DA didn't care about the details.
There is a girl in her early 20's who was caught sending naked pictures of her self to her boyfriends cell phone when she was 15 or 16. She was convicted of manufacturing and distributing child pornography and is now labeled as a sexual offender, was forced to drop out of school due to laws against sexual offenders and proximity to children and couldn't go to college (who would accept her?) and generally had her life fucked up because she took naked pictures of herself and shared them.
Child Porn and the zeal to which people combat it is zealotry at it's worst. All one would have to do is send such a picture to someone's phone or email and it doesn't matter how it got there, congratulations, your life is going to get ruined.
The problem with our Child Porn laws and pursuit of justice thereof, is that even Law Abiding citizens who do not deal with Child Porn fear even the accusation of it because whether actually guilty or not, merely having pictures of their children, other innocuous evidence such as porn with college teens in it, or no evidence at all, is enough to destroy their lives. In addition to the fact that jury's are completely ignorant and harsh against alleged perpetrators.
When you say "No story here", you should actually have said "no CHILD PORNOGRAPHY story here", because, if you (or anybody else) would have bothered to read the PDF of the case, it is evident that the government and law enforcement were not investigating child pornography, but SUSPECTED child pornography. This is evident by the fact that:
disclaimer: I've only so far read 25% of the PDF, but it seems to be rather redundant; going over several cases with the same criteria over and over again (in 94 pages). I certainly may have missed some more juicy and relevant information, but my point here is to point out my observations of the FUD of the article and investigation. What I think is more relevant and should be pursued is what one prosecutor stated as "extensive misuse of government time and resources" (like playing video games, downloading non-child pornography, and spending " three hours a day during his work day" playing online video games), etc, instead of perusing a moral panic issue.
Huh? Of the 3 Republicans you mentioned, there was one alleged gay and two men with women on the side. These are your examples of closted gays and "diaper wearers" in the Republican Party? Mark Sanford resigned. Larry Craig actually resigned, but took it back.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Mark Foley, but then, he did resign, so I guess that wouldn't fit with your theme.
Spitzer resigned, true. He had lots of powerful enemies on Wall Street, he was seriously weakened by "Troopergate" and was under investigation for financial misdeeds surrounding the prostitutes (bribery, misuse of campaign funds) he was procuring that it's hardly surprising that he had to go. Note that Patterson suffered not a bit when he admitted to infidelity.
It's pretty surprising, actually, that Clinton survived. He was caught in a clear case of harassment, it doesn't matter a whit if it's consensual, the difference in power between a President and an Intern would have been harassment in a reasonable world. There was also that little matter of lying in open court. Martha Stewart goes to Prison for lying to an investigator and Clinton skates on lying in open court?
What other Democrat had to resign? Are you saying the Democrats are pure on this account and Spitzer and Clinton are the only examples?
I agree that the media applies different standards to Democrats when it comes to scandal. Like the blackout on the stories about Gore that have been known to reporters for years and are just now coming out.
Corporate laptops, not their property, and why so mad? You do realize that this was far less invasive than what happens nowadays? Now there are turn key solutions that allow them to look into every email you send not only through the corporate email server but any unencrypted web-based email service as well to see if you are talking to competitors, headhunters etc.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I agree that the whole story sounds very fishy, but some parts could make sense. In a government or corporate mono-culture environment, there are cases where everybody in a particular group has exactly the same sized hard drive. There are also cases where the executable software that should be on the machine is a pretty well known list, and the size of the individual files shouldn't vary much, so how much unused drive space should be there is a pretty reliable value. And you get cases where a large deviation from that value is supposed to be suspicious of something - i.e. it's office policy at a law firm or medical office only currently active caseload records should be stored on the machine, and IT guys are expected to remind users to delete unnecessary records.
For a more specific example, I was once in a military unit where technical support manuals and diagnostics were stored on what were basically ruggedised olive drab PCs for field maintenence use. Hardware was almost always identical for several dozen users stationed with many different military unit types. Software/Data was supposed to match the whole units TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment). So, the amount of space used and left on the drive always varied in certain ways by type of unit. If someone brought in a machine that was supporting a military police unit (which had a pretty simple list of vehicles and weapons), and the drive space used or free looked out of range, the first thing techs were supposed to do was look for obvious reasons, i.e. someone loaned the equipment to a very different military outfit, or stuffed it full of higher level maintenance manuals (and was trying to do depot level or send it back to the manufacturer level maintenance in the field). It wasn't paranoia about everyone being up to something actively criminal that would trigger more detailed exams, so much as institutional reasons, initially. Of course, if the situation kept looking stranger and stranger with digging, someone might eventually suspect not just personal use of the machine, but criminal activity.
Who is John Cabal?
Is that sets of images are purchased or downloaded. There may be many THOUSANDS of images in these sets. And if even *ONE* is what the courts consider child pornography, or is found in the innocent images archive, then the individual is said to have been downloading child porn and charged and prosecuted as such. Even if 1) they never looked at the image/image (possibly buried in the thousands of others) and 2) even if they can't prove it was that individual who was at the computer and not a secretary, visitor, or other person who had access to the machine.
The same thing happens with sex offenders. *KIDS* are being charged as sex offenders if they have a picture of their girlfriend on their cell phone. If Either party (or even BOTH parties) are under the age of consent then one of them is getting charged with sex offenses, including child pornography, usually the one with the image, even if they had no desire to have the image, and it was simply given to them.
C'mon, a LOT of kids played "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" -- difference is now we charge them as sex offenders and child pornographers, especially if a digital device is used.
But back to the original post. Whatever your feelings on pornography, looking at pictures of other naked humans isn't a crime in itself. Child porn is because the children are unwilling, or unable, to consent due to not knowing what they're consenting to etc. But just because a thorough investigation found child porn on a persons computer, doesn't mean a damned thing. It doesn't mean they're a child porno freak, or anything like that. It means that the computer they use had child porn on it, thats IT. PERIOD. And prosecutors should not even be allowed to bring a case up based on utter crap like that. It is NOT evidence of a person being a child pornographer. It *IS* evidence of the child porn existing and spreading, but just finding images on a machine does not prove that 1) the user of the machine put them there 2) the user of the machine wanted them there, 3) the user of the machine ever even looked at them or had ANY knowledge they were there.
It would be like the police arresting you for being the unabomber because you received a package from the unabomber, even if you hadn't even opened the package.
I'm not saying these people aren't, but it's a LOT less likely than the inflammatory prosecution and media makes it out to be. The presence (or absence) of child porn images doesn't mean crap by itself. And all to often it's being used atleast by the media as the standard of proof, and even, much more frighteningly, by the courts.