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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.