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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."
Wait, you mean people with high security clearances that work for the government can also be disgusting perverts??
They try and avoid this. A friend-of-a-friend recently applied for full UK security clearance (or whatever it's called). A man in a smart suit visited my friend for a "background check". Every other question was about the guy's sex life -- number of girlfriends, whether he ever cheated, if he looked at porn, what kind, and so on. The defence guy said he didn't care what the answers were, but they needed to know whether someone might try and blackmail the friend into revealing secret details. A person with many partners but who's open about it is fine, someone with a very secret hidden relationship isn't.
Clearly as so many people are violating the law, even the Government officials charged with enforcing it, that we might as well give up and just let them take over. In fact, we should pass laws encouraging such behavior.
Since ordinary child porn stories don't capture the public's attention as much as they used to, sensationalists must now seek a fresh new angle: Child porn is so prevalent it can even be found at the highest branches of our government! Never mind that it's only a small number of employees, and that being a government employee doesn't make you an inherently good person. Just look in this direction... this is what we want you to see.
Certainly appropriate for the UK, who has been burned many times by closeted gays that are hooking up on the side. All Russia had to do was get a nice pretty boy to sit next to their target and they had a solid lock on the target. You would be surprised the lengths these folks went to in an effort to try to keep their secret live a secret.
Not sure how much the US has been burned by this sort of blackmail, but several UK incidents managed to make it out into the tabloid press.
After reading the article, I'm left in a lurch on whether I should be concerned or not. On the one hand, there are some personality types who work in those 3-letter agencies being associated ostensibly with some pretty shady business but without more information on the positions these people had, we will be left making fallacious assumptions. From the 2 instances I have had to turn in people for child porn on their computers to the FBI, I noticed that both seemed normal and likable enough most of the time, but gave off a secretive vibe when they brought their laptops down for repairs, or we had to do a manual upgrade.
One got caught when he forgot to bypass the VPN login when he was away on a business trip. I got paged at 3 am after a long night partying at a rave and it kept going off till I got up 20 minutes later and I was still receiving pages when I arrived on site along with the CIO of the company. The FBI arrested him when he flew back into Phoenix the next morning.
The other one was less dramatic, we were getting ready to partition all of our laptops to dual boot W98 and 2000 because we could not get some legacy software for our inventory system to work in 2000. When we wrested it physically from his hands after him telling us as HR he did not need to check inventory we discovered 5 Gigs of unallocated space that shouldn't be there because we used Norton Ghost, suspicious we made a FAT partition in the space non-destructively and proceeded to recover 10's of thousands of images of child porn.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Have a read of "The leaky establishment" it's got some entertaining musings on the subject.
essentially anything secret can be used as blackmail fodder.
In fact there should be no set list of things which forbid security clearance since anything on the list automatically adds a risk.
lets say ... drinking Russian vodka was considered grounds to loose security clearance tomorrow.
Some foreign agent gets a photo of you with a bottle... well now they have blackmail material.
etc
What surprises me about all these child-porn-bust stories is how many people are looking at it. I would have figured less than a thousand in the whole country.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
On the other hand, if, as you say, merely being accused could cause your life to crumble around you, all someone has to do is threaten to accuse any random person. It isn't really relevant whether that person actually committed the crime in question if the mere threat of an accusation is enough to cause someone to turn traitor.
Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not sure how much the US has been burned by this sort of blackmail, but several UK incidents managed to make it out into the tabloid press.
US folks who spy for foreign countries tend to do it for the money . . . see Aldrich Ames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_ames, John Anthony Walker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Wouldn't xxx-prize be more appropriate?
I was just thinking this.
The GP said "even an accusation" and I was thinking "someone doesn't have to be guilty in order to accuse them!!!"
So the problem isn't the people downloading it, so much as the way that it's perceived.
I recall India is currently voting on legislation to make child sexual abuse the only crime in the country that sets a "guilty until proven innocent" precedent.
Frightening!
As best research has been able to determine, pedophila(in the sense of sexual interest in prepubescent individuals by postpubescent ones, particularly those with a significant age delta) behaves pretty much the same as any other sexual orientation. It is substantially more problematic than most; because virtually all outlets for its satisfaction involve either raping children or employing material with a very problematic production history; but structurally it works about the same.
Given the pretty severe legal risks that pedophiles run(not only can they go to jail, they won't exactly receive a warm welcome on the inside, and if they survive, they will face extremely severe residency and employment restrictions post release), there is strong reason to suspect that the legal options don't do it for them.
This probably does not apply to those people who are commonly called "pedophiles"; but who are actually interested in post-pubescent individuals. This population includes people who are arguably victims of witch hunts(your 18-19/16-17 no evidence of any coercion types); and also includes much nastier opportunists(teens tend to be comparatively naive, economically and socially powerless, and otherwise very convenient victims) who are either hetero or homosexual; but who have a taste for easy targets. In terms of strictly sexual taste, they are much closer to the norm, post-pubescent but youthful partners being desirable almost across the board; but they presumably have other psychological abnormalities that make them target children rather than associate with peers. I suspect(admittedly without statistical evidence) that this class is much less likely to be caught in internet porn sweeps(since, visually, it isn't going to be hard to find perfectly legal 18 year olds who function for the fantasy purposes of somebody who prefers a couple of years younger, and possessing illegal porn where legal porn would do is unbelievably idiotic); but probably a bit more likely to be caught in real-world law-enforcement situations.
Brilliant! Here's your prize, a gem quote in The Economist from Vladimir Putin about not deporting British spies from his country, when they were caught, "using a transmitter hidden in a rock":
"Mr Putin argued there was no need to extradite them: 'If these spies are sent out, others will be sent in. Maybe they'll send some clever ones that will be hard for us to find.'"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the government?
Did you read the case studies in the linked PDF? I didn't think so.
These people had clearance because of the rooms they needed to walk through but didn't have any real access to data. One was a telephone repairman at a military base. Others were mid-level office workers who had to be in secured areas for office work.
These weren't high level operatives. Just the low-hanging-fruit of the justice system.
All this proves is that there are A LOT of pedophiles in the country, and some of them tend to get caught now and then. Nothing else to see here, move along.
Actually, it's due to over-zealous child protection laws. All the girl had to do was cry to the judge; intent, misrepresentation, none of that ever entered the court. The fact that she lied about her age (obviously, since she was in a bar drinking) meant nothing. It had nothing to do with private prisons, but everything to do with "Think of the children!" types.
if you include teenagers in the mix, it jumps to... well, pretty much every adult male I've ever met who isn't lying.
You probably mean ephebophilia is more common. It's a bit saddening that there are people out there who would literally equate a 40 year old man that wants to nail Miley Cyrus with a 40 year old man that wants to nail a 5 year old.
;)
Either way, I imagine that it's a bit of a Gaussian type of curve instead of something like a 1 in 25 figure. Through my late teens and early twenties, I've had different friends of different ages that all had their upper and lower limits, and each was different. It's kinda neat how after they all hit 23 or so, the upper limit rises dramatically
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In "The Atrocity Archives" by Charlie Stross, a top-secret British agency solves this problem by allowing gays but only if they are open about it. So in order to keep their security clearance gays are required to publicly attend at least one Pride parade a year. And that's one of the less weird things in the book.
They don't get paid much because after they accept the first envelope they have lost all negotiating power... This isn't like working for the mob where you can take your chances turning the baddies over.
Also, we are talking about spies. I can envision the conversation now:
"Yes, comrade, I promise not to do anything ostentatious or out of the ordinary for a low paid government employee such as myself.. It's just that I need at least ten million dollars to stuff beneath my floorboards so they will stop squeaking when I walk."
The tactic you are describing was used very successfully by the Allies during World War II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Cross_System
Operation Fortitude convinced the Germans that another invasion army was about to attack in Pas de Calais shortly after D-Day.
The V-weapons deception steered the rockets away from central London, by reporting false impact locations.
Even Hannibal used such tactics (false campfires) when campaigning against the Romans. It's actually amazing how old these tactics are . . . and that folks still fall for them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
According to a document posted by Wikileaks, a company from eastern Europe that sold subscriptions to child erotica (nudity, but no sex) around 2003 was getting 15 million unique visitors to its main page per month.
It is hard to know the actual numbers, as research in this area is suppressed, but it would appear that among men:
90% are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls.
20% to 30% are attracted to girls at least as much as to women.
3% to 10% are exclusively attracted to girls.
Figuring approximately 300 million in the USA, and roughly 50% male, this means:
120 million sometimes attracted to girls.
30 million to 45 million attracted to girls as much as or more than to women.
4.5 million to 15 million are exclusively attracted to girls.
This does not include boy lovers or female pedophiles, so the true numbers are larger.
You've got to stop believing the media and the government. They lie.
Personally, I think the issue with celebrities is not one of some sort of conspiracy cabal of rich and powerful, but one of human nature.
Someone who is famous and well known is a HUMAN. Their fans and friends identify with them and recognize their humanity.
Some guy from the news doing exactly the same thing is very very easy to dismiss as "DISGUSTING MONSTER".
It's a simple fact that in child sex cases, the family of the offender often feels the trial and sentencing are too harsh, but it is much less known that the victim often feels the same way.
Some people file this under something strange like Stockholm Syndrome, but in my opinion, it's simply the fact that the victim almost always knows the offender and sees him as a human. It is then hard to demonize him to the extent that society at large is capable of doing.
Think about it, if your brother/cousin/bestfriend were found tomorrow with 600 images of naked children on his computer, could you really feel the world was a better place if he was given 18 years in prison?
No, you would probably like to see him punished, but in a humane and justifiable way... say... with a year's house arrest.
In my opinion, that's what's happening here, not some right-wing conspiracy junk.
Has it been clarified exactly what was meant by "child porn"? The laws have been so politicized recently that the term is starting to cover all sorts of things, right up to and including models who are just a shade under 18.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.