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."

Comments

No Story here

[bobwrit]

So, the ones who are looking for child porn all day are keeping it/are attracted to it. Who would have thought...

Re:No Story here

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's an elaborate sting gone wrong. You've got someone in the pentagon doing cyber black ops and tracking down people who buy this stuff to take care of the problem in an "extra-legal way." It was just that Operation Flicker stumbled upon this black project and caught people who are already working a sting. It's the beat cop busting the undercover narc agent.

Re:No Story here

[repapetilto]

the government doesnt actually care about child porn

Re:No Story here

[TruthSauce]

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.

Re:No Story here

[Garridan]

Did you rtfa? The government loves child porn!

Re:No Story here

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

• investigators could not tell if the images involved were actual children (i.e. people under the age of 18. In the think-of-the-children moral panic that is on-going, teenagers are often referred to as children.
• it was noted that the images involved what, in the opinion of the investigators, were provocative poses (i.e. not preteens engaging in sexual intercourse)
• the PDF mentions "child pornography" and "child exploitation" a lot, but (conveniently) never defines these terms, or gives any verbal descriptions or pictorial examples. This is of course the usual propaganda tactic of Right Wing child advocacy evangelists: use loaded terms with obfuscated meanings.
• no images were found to be in the National Child Victim Identification Program (NCVIP). It is of course interesting that prosecutors need a third party (NCVIP) to establish if "child pornography" has taken place, which puts more FUD into the whole concept of "child pornography" that this whole story is about.

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.

Re:No Story here

[Golddess]

1) I think GP was being silly.

2) It won't surprise me if they try and spin it that way.

Re:No Story here

[rtb61]

What this proves is the US haw really twisted views about the subject for example http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/21/jeffrey-epstein-disgraced_n_654674.html. A convicted paedophile gets confined to his mansion for a year, WTF, the place where a lot of the crimes supposedly were committed.

Is this a whole far right scheme, your allowed to do what ever you want as long as you are rich of have political power and you stand up a cheer and victimise poor people and progressives upon the slightest accusation of anything.

Of course buying (with a credit card) and downloading illegal content using a government computer during work hours is to put it bluntly really, really stupid. These people should likely be sacked not for what they did but for a complete and total absence of common sense. Clearly because of their position they think they are above the law and this can be indicative of much worse practices with regard to national security. Do these people need to be blackmailed or is this a list of people that can quite readily and easily be corrupted ie bribed.

Re:No Story here

[TruthSauce]

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.

Re:No Story here

[AHuxley]

re elaborate sting gone wrong, they did that with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore in 1999.
Many names and CC details started to float up on databases.

Re:No Story here

[Hognoxious]

Well it's more convincing than claiming it was for research.

Re:No Story here

[h4rm0ny]

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.

Re:No Story here

[maxwell demon]

Hiding messages in child porn would be like smuggling cigarettes by hiding them between large containers of cocaine.

Re:No Story here

[erroneus]

Probably quite right in some ways, but it is interesting because just yesterday I was reflecting on the "Peewee Herman" incident where he was identified at an adult theater. Now whether or not he was touching himself was a detail I care little about... or even the fact that he was watching legal adult porn in a theater properly designated as such. What I found most astounding was that people were all over the fact that much of his work is for the entertainment of children.

How ODD is it that people who work with children or for children are somehow supposed to not have any sexual interests of their own? I guess we should all freak out if someone has more than one child! After all, after having a child they engaged in SEX! What perverts!

No, the realities here are still not quite sorted out because people don't know how to put them into perspective or rank them in terms of severity. So we see crimes where none exist and little to nothing where it does. We have contextual bubbles of stupidity all over... yet another point I was meditating over the other day. (How people can be very sensible and logical in their every day lives except when certain context comes into play... say their religion for example. Then exceptions galore come into play... no critical thinking, no questioning for truth.)

And yes, it is most definitely easier to condemn someone you don't know than it is to do it to someone you do. It's all relative... friends and relatives.

Re:No Story here

[adewolf]

Well put. Our tax $$ at work.

Re:No Story here

[adewolf]

Agreed. Our prison system is a commercial concern so now they want to keep the prisons 100% populated.

Re:No Story here

[slick7]

Did you rtfa? The government loves child porn!

The government loves NAZIS too. Ever hear of Operation Paperclip?

Re:No Story here

[TruthSauce]

Well, you are in the minority then. I am staggered by your ability to submarine your emapthy for both affected parties.

The reality is that most people disagree with you. This doesn't make them right, but it does give them some credence which you can't easily wash away with a snort and a wave of your hand.

Keep thinking really hard.

Re:No Story here

[Diantre]

Thought about it really hard and...you know what, death penalty. I wouldnt care who it was. If you get turned on by children, you deserve to die.

Thought about it really hard and...you know what, death penalty. I wouldnt care who it was. If you get turned on by men, you deserve to die.

Remember?

Re:No Story here

[hesaigo999ca]

Did you read the article?
It says people who had access to sensitive materials or information that could be at risk to get blackmailed etc...

If your telephone repairman and have the access codes to get through only the first gate, it is still the first gate...so guess what you are now at risk of being blackmailed to keep your job, just hand over the codes....

With all the video games out there and tvshows(24) that play this exact situation up so many times, you would think this common sense, no? It is not just about access to nuclear weapons blueprints, it's access to get into a section that has a hole into the next section, etc, etc...

Re:No Story here

[flyneye]

I've already had an active part in making this a better country and will continue. What do you do besides make comments you won't put your name with, anonymous cliche spouter?

Wow

[Renraku]

Wait, you mean people with high security clearances that work for the government can also be disgusting perverts??

Quick, we need to revise the process to make it to where only god fearing Christians that have sex for procreation only can get government clearances!

Re:Wow

[xaxa]

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.

Re:Wow

[cacba]

What should actually worry you is the intelligence of the people caught, there must be more anonymous ways of getting child porn other than AT WORK!

Re:Wow

[TheMeuge]

They were just thinking of the children. Isn't that what you want your government officials to do?

Re:Wow

[MozeeToby]

The problem isn't that people with security clearances are disgusting perverts, the problem is that people with security clearances are security risks. As an example, you'll find it difficult to get a clearance if you've declared bankruptcy or even just have a lot of unsecured debt because it makes you more susceptible to bribes. The same thing is true here. If a foreign interest were to find out you were downloading child porn, an offense where just being accused can cause your life to crumble around you, it would be trivial for them to blackmail you into revealing secrets.

Re:Wow

[cdrguru]

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.

Re:Wow

[Hatta]

disgusting perverts??

god fearing Christians that have sex for procreation only

What's the difference? The guy who claims not to be perverted is many times the biggest pervert of all.

Re:Wow

[HungryHobo]

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

Re:Wow

[Kjella]

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

Where this article and your story intersect, I don't quite believe the defence guy...

Re:Wow

[dgatwood]

If a foreign interest were to find out you were downloading child porn, an offense where just being accused can cause your life to crumble around you, it would be trivial for them to blackmail you into revealing secrets.

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.

Re:Wow

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Re:Wow

[chill]

Go pro and enter the priesthood?

Re:Wow

[straponego]

I think this explains the prevalence of closted gays (and diaper wearers) in the Republican Party. I think they're encouraged, because it's easy to keep them in line that way. You'll notice that when the Larry Craigs, David Vitters, and Mark Sanfords of the world are exposed by people outside of their own party, they are never forced to resign, and they rarely do. While the Dummies, when caught (Spitzer), almost always step down immediately (Clinton is the rare exception). Dems shouldn't be as vulnerable to criticism on this front, because they're not as hypocritical-- but they are pussies, and the media does apply different standards to them.

And yet the GOP purports to be hardcore family values... and maybe they are, in the raunchier sense of "hardcore". But when push comes to shove, it clearly means nothing to them. As long as they toed the party line up until then, they're fine.

Now, one wonders how this ties in with warrantless wiretapping. I said the Dems aren't as vulnerable on the sex front-- not that they're not blackmailed, extorted, or bribed in other ways. In all of Congress there are perhaps as many as three Senators and a handful of Representatives willing to seriously annoy the national security industry when it matters.

Re:Wow

[Kjella]

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.

Come on, this is nonsense. Every person that breaks the law fears being exposed, if we wanted to avoid that we'd have to either not have criminals or not have laws. What if one of the guys at Pentagon is secretly a murderer, wouldn't that be blackmail material? Would you like to strike that law too? Have a mistress/child on the side your wife doesn't know about? You just expect everyone to be cool about adultery? That quote is nothing but armchair-quarterback psychology, reality is that there's plenty people and things you should fear and defend yourself from, including war. It's been roughly 65 years since the last world war, the Romans pulled off 207 years of Pax Romana before decending into war and chaos. It's way, way too early to call off WWIII and that we'll all live happily forever after.

Re:Wow

[TruthSauce]

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!

Re:Wow

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

US folks who spy for foreign countries tend to do it for the money

And oddly enough - not very much money at all. For example, the Walker article says he was one of only a handful who got over a million, yet even that is doubtful with the NY Times estimating it to be more like $350K. Looks like Ames didn't even make half a mill either. Its like these guys are playing high-stakes games but only getting chump-change for it. Maybe there is something to the idea that people in government don't know how to run a business...

Re:Wow

[blai]

US folks who spy for foreign countries who get caught tend to do it for the money . . .

Re:Wow

[dgatwood]

Every person that breaks the law fears being exposed, if we wanted to avoid that we'd have to either not have criminals or not have laws.

You misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that being accused of having kiddie porn is so stigmatized that even people who DO NOT have kiddie porn could be blackmailed by the threat of being accused of having it. Unlike all those other crimes you mention, the burden of proof in the mind of the public when it comes to child porn is remarkably low. It pretty much boils down to "Somebody said he/she did, so he/she did". That degree of stigmatization is inherently dangerous. Period.

Re:Wow

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.'"

Re:Wow

[TruthSauce]

Agreed. Child porn is pretty unique in this regard. It's the cultural/legal equivalent of yelling "FIRE" in a crowded.... society.

Re:Wow

[Israfels]

Unless you're a famous movie director.

Heck, anyone famous will simply be written off as quirky, but everybody else is viewed as a soon-to-be violent rapist murderer.

Re:Wow

[HungryHobo]

I sometimes wonder when I hear about spies being deported... why?

A spy you know about is a hundred times more valuable than a deported spy or a replacement spy.

Once you know about a spy not only can you avoid them getting important data, they can be fed carefully flawed data.

Tweek a few numbers subtly in a secret algorithm for controlling a reactor before giving it to the spy and wait for the meltdown.
Report troops moving west rather than east and watch as your enemy deploys in the exact wrong place.
etc
etc
etc

Re:Wow

[Marful]

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.

Re:Wow

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:Wow

[N0Man74]

Even with no evidence? Even when the accusations are false?

Are you one of the masses that keeps their head up their ass, only to pop it out long enough to watch highly sensationalized news stories warnings us about all the pedophiles and terrorists out to get you and your children.

Maybe it's time that you actually become informed and apply some critical thinking. The person who said that it's the equivalent of yelling "fire" is dead wrong. It's more like yelling "witch!" Terrorists and pedophiles are our new boogeymen. The US has a long tradition of making "witches", whether they were legitimate concerns or not. Communists, homosexuals, socialists, satanists, drugs, illegal aliens, rock 'n' roll, and now the sex criminals and terrorists.

I hate to say it about my fellow Americans, but we're a bunch of paranoid, over-judgmental, overreacting, intolerant, lynch-mob forming loonies sometimes. In the names of protecting freedom and protecting our children, we're on a path of insanity.

Don't get me wrong here, I believe in protecting the children from abuse, but what I don't believe in is making this issue so emotionally charged that it becomes absolutely devastating for someone to even become *falsely* charged with it.

It's like "sex criminals" in general. Whenever you hear stories about sex offenders, the media always tries to blow it up to be that sex offenders are a bunch of child rapists. It's bullshit. They completely gloss over the fact that the whole sex criminal registry system is broken, and does not make any distinction between the real dangers and those guilty of minor offenses that should have never gotten them on the registry! Where are the sympathetic news reports about what a rough time sex offenders have in today's society? Nowhere, because people would revolt at such an idea. They'd have a hissy fit about sympathizing with the offenders, even when these are sex offenders who were put on the list for things like mooning someone during an argument, public urination when they were drunk, being nude in a place that they believed they were not being observed, having consensual sex with a minor who had misled them into believing they were older than they were, having consensual teen sex with someone 2 years younger than them or sexting eachother. We don't want to believe that though. We want to believe that they are a real danger that we've on the a leash. Now we can sleep soundly.

Sadly, similar things happen in the realm of child pornography. I've read of a grandmother who was prosecuted for creating child pornography when she took what she thought was a cute picture of her grandchild who happened to have been nude at the time. People have been prosecuted for having works that courts previously had determined was legal, based not on the legality of the work, but what the court *believed* the person was a pervert based on other legal behavior such as owning a copy of the novel Lolita.

And don't get me started with the fear of terrorists and prosecuting prankster kids for making "bottle bombs" now....

So, yes, some things are so horrible they deserve a stigma, but not everyone that has been a victim of this stigmatization has done something horrible. Did the people in this story do anything horrible, or could these cases be exaggerated and essentially be a witchhunt. Honestly, I suspect it's a little of each, but that really doesn't matter because our justice system likes to apply as much punishment as we can to people.

We seem to be stuck in the mindset that all of our problems can be solved if we just cast a bigger net.

Re:Wow

[ushering05401]

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."

Re:Wow

[Runaway1956]

Take another look at spy swaps. It isn't the spy swap that is important. It is the surrounding political scene. The spy swapping people are making a point, or they are gaining something else. The spies are pretty much unimportant, in and of themselves. Pawns in a massive chess game. A really important spy is still little more than a pawn.

This most recent spy swap still has me baffled, because I can't see who gained what. It looks like both sides have egg on their faces. But, one or both sides gained SOMETHING from the swap.

Re:Wow

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Re:Wow

[westlake]

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

There was a front page story on Slashdot this past week on what it is like to monitor the hard-core porn traffic online. To sum it up, quickly, child pornography is not what the geek in his sexual innocence imagines it to be.

In local prosecutions there have three distinct and memorable themes: recklessness, arrogance and obsession. The tenured grade school teacher with a wife and kids who routes his porn through the district's network.

It is never a single image - more like tens of thousands.

Your state or county's registry of sex offenders can be an instructive read: Who they are and why you do not want them in a position of trust.
   

Re:Wow

[JordanH]

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.

Re:Wow

[sjames]

Dirty secrets are a real problem for a security clearance. In theory, if a person is completely open about their 'perversion' it isn't a problem since you can't blackmail someone with public information.

A dark secret that is both illegal and powerfully stigmatizing is a problem to be sure.

Re:Wow

[sjames]

Unlike the other crimes and indiscretions you mention, child porn is "contagious". Nobody wants to even appear to possibly have any sympathy for it lest they be stigmatized themselves. Get accused of murder and a bunch of people gossip behind your back. Some say you did it, others say it isn't possible. None of the latter fear being ostracized.

Moral panic is the problem.

Re:Wow

[lwsimon]

We swapped Russians for Russians, which is kinda funny when you think about it :)

Still, we both gained. We gained by recovering Russian-born agents, giving the CIA the future ability to point at the and say "See? We take care of our own. If you come work for us, and get caught, we'll bring you to America.". Russia's benefit was more obvious, in that they got their spies back - with the same sort of marketing ploy for future agents.

Re:Wow

[colinrichardday]

Mark Sanford resigned.

As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, not as Governor of South Carolina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sanford

Re:Wow

[ushering05401]

Appearing invulnerable would be a nightmare - the enemy would not have high yield insertion techniques mapped for them and they would have to get creative.

So long as there is an attractive option to execute a plan that reveals no innovation it will be chosen over the plan that requires innovation...

My impression is that spying is mostly a game of patiently outlasting your opponents. Let the majority of your enemies be stupid and they will gladly be stupid > 90% of the time. It's a survival technique.

Re:Wow

[perpetual pessimist]

I hate to say it about my fellow Americans, but we're a bunch of paranoid, over-judgmental, overreacting, intolerant, lynch-mob forming loonies sometimes.

Just like all the other humans on the planet are?

Re:Wow

[makomk]

It is never a single image - more like tens of thousands.

Try tracking down the number of images involved in cases where the media choose not to report it.

Re:Wow

[drsmithy]

And oddly enough - not very much money at all.You should probably recalculate allowing for a) inflation and b) taxes.

Re:Wow

[Artifakt]

The point is, every person who doesn't break the law fears being falsely 'exposed' when it comes to child pornography. *
What if one of the guys at Pentagon isn't secretly a murderer, but any accusation of murder in the press would be taken as automatically true by many regardless of the evidence? What if you didn't have a mistress/child on the side, so there was nothing for your wife to know about, but the simple accusation meant thousands of people would be assuming where there's smoke, there's fire, and posting here about how you doubtless could never be reformed and wishing for you to get a quickee rubber stamp trial so you could be raped by your fellow convicts faster.
      The parent poster criticised stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does, not in having laws against it. A good example of this is that there have been some well done, high quality studies on the rate for long term repeat offenses after child molesters were released from prison. One Canadian study, for example, followed whether released molesters were arrested again after a full 20 years after end of sentence. It showed both that the rate of repeat offenses could be greatly reduced by therapy, and that even without therapy, the repeat offender rate was lower than for quite a few other crimes. Yet it's common for people to claim that all these paedophiles can't be cured and will always reoffend. That's stigmatization, when social forces such as the press constantly parrot a falsehood about something and ignore the actual facts.

* You're throwing around those universals such as every, everyone, etc. That really should be a strong clue you're overstating your case in a simplistic fashion. I'm using your remarks to frame my counter-argument, but I doubt strongly that it's really a matter of 'every'.

Re:Wow

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Still, its at least an order of magnitude too low for the risks they took. Maybe they just don't value their own lives all that highly.

Re:Wow

[Golddess]

Wow.

It's called "showing someone the ridiculousness of something being so stigmatizing, you're guilty until proven innocent", not "flamebait".

Re:Wow

[nbauman]

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.

Spitzer's escorts had nothing to do with bribery or misuse of campaign funds. He used his own money on his own credit card.

He was investigated by a Republican attorney general. Republicans have an extensive history of using their investigative and prosecutorial powers for political purposes. Which is what this was. After they achieved their real goal, Spitzer's resignation, they dropped the prosecution -- because it wouldn't have succeeded. Nobody has been convicted on charges like that.

I couldn't understand why Spitzer resigned. His own wife (a lawyer) didn't want him to resign. I wish he had fought back, like Bill Clinton did. I guess he figured that with all his money, he didn't have to put up with this.

Now we have a governor, David Patterson, who was good when his job was to get along with everybody but now in the face of Republican obstruction can't get anything done, and who replaced a liberal Senator with a Blue Dog Democrat who used to work for the tobacco companies.

Re:Wow

[TruthSauce]

Heh... you did SORTA accuse some random coward that he was into kiddie porn with no evidence.

I recognize the aim of your post, but that seems rather baiting to me :-)

Re:Wow

[TruthSauce]

LOL, I just read it with less beer in my system and I see what you were doing. Need a +1 ActuallySarcasm tag.

Re:Wow

[drinkypoo]

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.

And all the UK had to do to stop this from happening was stop stigmatizing queers. Seriously, this exploit was 100% caused by British homophobia. What was done to Turing, for example, was inexcusable by any standard.

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.

Which duly whipped the public up into a further furor of homophobia rather than pointing out how the citizens of the UK were directly responsible for every such failure. When you alienate and attack people, yes, they will look for comfort.

Re:Wow

[Chowderbags]

Paterson came out and admitted the affair pretty much as soon as he became governor (because if he tried to keep it under wraps, he'd have been totally fucked). He still got plenty of jokes cracked at him (why would a blind man need to cheat, etc, etc). Of course, Patterson ended up being powerless in his time in office. I lived in New York till recently, and as much as the Spitzer scandals pissed me off (more for the hypocrisy of Hookergate than anything), the state probably would've been better off keeping him as governor.

Re:Wow

[kevinNCSU]

The difference is guilty people respond with fear and shame whereas innocent people are more likely to respond with fear and outrage and then go call their Facility Security Officer or local FBI branch about the attempted slander/blackmail.

Unsubstantiated porn allegations carry a fear of a stigma, but blackmailing someone for state secrets while working for a foreign government carry a fear of a wall and a firing squad or a dark room and a bucket of water so when the risks of an asset turning on you goes up appreciably it tends not to be worth it.

How they did it

[russotto]

NSA just copied the child porn whenever anyone sent it over the net. The NRO took the pictures themselves, as the original pornographers were setting up the shots. And DARPA set up a contest in which they got teams from the best universities in the country to compete to make child porn meeting their criteria.

Re:How they did it

[Kjella]

And DARPA set up a contest in which they got teams from the best universities in the country to compete to make child porn meeting their criteria.

Ah, the lesser known XXX-prize.

Re:How they did it

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't xxx-prize be more appropriate?

Re:How they did it

[srodden]

*chuckle*

What percentage of the workforace?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way that this would really be interesting is if the number of people caught, as a percentage of those employed at said facilities, was greater than that for the greater population of the country.

We should grant them amnesty

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We should grant them amnesty

[h4rm0ny]

Well that was one of the arguments that piracy proponents used to use to say piracy should be legalised. :)

New angle

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not that I want the gory details but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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 (if it's consenting adults doing stuff to each other that other adults look at then let them get on with it), there's clearly a great difference between the two extremes.

Re:Not that I want the gory details but...

[Kjella]

...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...

Re:Not that I want the gory details but...

[Diantre]

i.e. Every fucking man on this planet. Some are vocal about it, and some are in denial, but the truth is, girls at this age ARE attractive.

Re:Not that I want the gory details but...

[Chowderbags]

In most of the United States you could bang her. Yes, that's right, you can fuck a 16 year olds brains out (consensually), but heaven help you if you take a picture of your completely legal action.

Re:Not that I want the gory details but...

[alexo]

...anything from a glamour shot of a naked 17-year-old girl to a child being sexually abused could be classified as "child porn".

Don't forget cartoons and stick drawings.

Well,

[Reilaos]

I suppose this isn't quite as bad as being tied in child porn.

Re:Child porn laws

[HungryHobo]

Unless they actually abused children that is.

Anything that is forbidden/taboo/illegal/embarrassing is blackmail fodder.
Even if it was made legal it would still be socially unacceptable and almost as good for blackmail.

there are arguments to be made but that's a weak one.

Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[linzeal]

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.

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[linzeal]

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.

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[linzeal]

Well, the shell script the head IT guy insisted we use would only scan the C: D:\ and A: looking for violations of our company's policies for copyright infringement etc, so a lot of people in the company partitioned their disks and named the partitions like X: or something to get around us bitching to them about Mp3s or running unsupported programs. This was not the first guy who handed us a laptop with ( if I remember ) 20 gig hard drive with a few gigs unallocated which we recovered files off of, mostly mp3s and Napster installations. He, however, was the first we turned over to the FBI.

I got paid back than to enforce the company's IT policies, we were getting our technical sales and engineers poaches back than, we were under strict orders to take all infringements seriously and report them and no one owned any of the machines I performed analysis on. I was doing my fucking job and I'm glad I caught him, even if busting the half a dozen tech support guys who got canned for trivial crap like mp3s sorta of sucked, it was my job, and I did what the company needed to reduce its liabilities.

IT are the police in a corporation, respect them. The fat security guards checking badges are a joke, the people that protect the place from hacking, espionage and legal liability are the boys in the server room.

   

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[IndustrialComplex]

IT are the police in a corporation, respect them. The fat security guards checking badges are a joke, the people that protect the place from hacking, espionage and legal liability are the boys in the server room.

Not a hint of arrogance there. Why, that fat security guard should bow down and kiss your feet every time you walk into the door.

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[linzeal]

Security guards can be replaced in less than 24 hours with a phone call, it took them 3 months to find my replacement when I left and I was just a neophyte sysadmin in my early 20's at the time with less than 3 years under my belt.

The only time we needed the security guards there was when one of the EE techs went batshit insane in one of the labs and started punching his supervisor and they were worthless. Since the lab was on the 4th floor and there was only 2 elevators on that side of the building the guard ran up 5 flights of stairs from the basement, burst into the room, pepper sprayed everyone and than almost had a heart attack and had to be treated by EMTs at the scene along with everyone who had been pepper sprayed. An old ex-marine sales manager in his 60's wrestled the dude to the ground.

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[linzeal]

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.

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[Artifakt]

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.
 

Re:Is it endemic to a certain type of person?

[IndustrialComplex]

it took them 3 months to find my replacement when I left and I was just a neophyte sysadmin in my early 20's at the time with less than 3 years under my belt.

Not to rain on your parade, but 3 months is about how long it takes the paperwork to go through in most mid to large corporations. It took my previous employer 3 months to transfer me to another position on the same program.

Besides, I've seen companies raided time and again. Either for the copper, or the computers themselves. Don't kid yourself into thinking that physical security isn't important just because your company had low standards and got lucky.

Idiots

[md65536]

Whether or not it's acceptable to have the criminally perverted working in the pentagon, I think it's discouraging to have people that dumb working in critical positions. How can people in high-security positions be that clueless about what information is available about them?

Re:Idiots

[codepunk]

It is obvious you have never worked in a govt job.

Re:Idiots

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is about sex. People's IQ points just drain away in proximity to that subject. Your garden-variety heterosexual is bad enough, they are liable to do transparently stupid things even though their sexual partners of choice are widely available and often legal. If somebody's sexual tastes can only be satisfied illegally, the odds are quite good that they will, eventually, get themselves caught trying to satisfy them.

Why?

[ceraphis]

Can someone explain why child pornographers can't just limit their porn consumption to those that are 18 or older? It seems to just reek of actually having committed an offense in the past and needing the obvious images of someone underage in order to relive that fantasy.

I feel as if I'm asking a stupid question but it's always bothered me, there's so much legal porn out there, why do some people feel the urge to look at shit that was more likely than not the product of abuse? Are there any studies that have unmistakably proven it's a disorder instead of a natural response?

Re:Why?

[ceraphis]

Funny. I'm rather sure child pornography/abuse is completely unrelated to the sexual orientation choices of mature adults. I'm also rather sure videos/pictures of two consenting adults having sex is a different product than a videotape of a 10 year old being abused by someone in his thirties.

Re:Why?

[ceraphis]

Well, OK. I can understand the idea that a pedophile's sexual preference could be "underage" as opposed to "male" or "female", but isn't it a more natural human trait to take care of or protect the immature of our species rather than exploit or abuse them?

Or for that matter, self preservation, as being a pedophile must be one of the quickest/easiest ways to be put in jail, and consequently, be tortured in said jail and even after being released.

Anyways, I suppose a lot of the reason why pedophiles might take the risks they do could be their lack of understanding of the consequences and/or technology in general, why else would these government workers have actually surfed child porn at work of all places? (notwithstanding the possibility of being involved with some sort of undercover/sting operation)

Re:Why?

[hoggoth]

> shit that was more likely than not the product of abuse

I hate to blur your black and white understanding of this, but what about a 17 year old girl who takes a picture of herself nude and sends it to her 17 year old boyfriend, who thinks it's a good idea to post it on 4chan after they break up?

The guy is a jerk, but there was no child abuse.

Re:Why?

[hoggoth]

Yeah, and I'm rather sure that people who steal bread are completely unrelated to having hunger. They just like to do illegal things.

Re:Why?

[TruthSauce]

I'm rather sure child pornography/abuse is completely unrelated to the sexual orientation choices of mature adults.

Well, research shows that you're an idiot. :-)

Just because you want it to be different doesn't mean it is. Simply accepting the fact that pedophilia is a sexual orientation like many others doesn't automatically make it acceptible and justified. It simply underscores the fact that humans who find themselves attracted to kids aren't "fundamentally broken". Research doesn't back that up at all. In fact, research indicates that the majority of them are profoundly normal in almost every way.

The image of a drooling pervert with low self-esteem and poor impulse control is based on studies out of the 1970s and 1980s that used population samples from high-security prisons and mental institutions. When you take people out of prisons and mental hospitals, wouldn't you expect them to be a tad off, from the norm?

There is shockingly little study on non-offending pedophiles, because of the social stigma of the topic, but what research there is indicates that something over 70% of exclusive pedophiles claim to have never abused a child and within that group, MMPI inventories and other social adjustment standards seem to lead us to believe that these people are very normal, well adjusted people, many of whom indicate they would remove those sexual feelings if they could, but they can't, so they have to learn to live with them.

I would also point out that the most common kind of child porn, according to a talk I heard a few years ago, are images and videos of teens that they take of themselves, alone in their bedroom, often on a webcam. These apparently outnumber other types of images by a notable factor.

But then again, feel free to continue to believe what makes you comfortable.

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Why?

[c6gunner]

Well, OK. I can understand the idea that a pedophile's sexual preference could be "underage" as opposed to "male" or "female", but isn't it a more natural human trait to take care of or protect the immature of our species rather than exploit or abuse them?

Yuhuh. And isn't is a more natural human trait to have sex with the opposite sex, rather than with your own?

Nature .... evolution ... they're all about variety. Rule 34 exists for a reason, you know.

Re:Why?

[icebraining]

It depends on what you mean by "abused". By most people's opinion, a 10-year-old is unable to give consent because (s)he lack maturity to make that decision for himself, but if you read pedophilia advocacy, they don't agree - they believe a child's consent is as valid as an adult's.

Personally, I think most people are right, although I find the age of consent in the UK (16) to be more sensible than 18.

Re:Why?

[TruthSauce]

Let me point out one thing that you might be partially correct about.

More than half (the FBI estimated around 60% in a paper in 1999) of child abuse that goes to trial IS, in fact, situational. It is an otherwise normal person doing something bad that they normally wouldn't do, under unusual circumstances.

However, the group "pedophiles" and the group "child molesters", while overlapping, are not equal. Many pedophiles never abuse children. Many who abuse children are not pedophiles (by a strict diagnostic criteria). Some pedophiles view child porn, some do not and keep their thoughts to themselves.

I'll leave the rest of the conclusions to you.

Re:Why?

[jd]

There is apparently some evidence of a difference in brain structure that shows up on MRI and where there is a difference in brain response showing up on fMRI. One of the problems with this subject is that it would be almost impossible to come up with a test that is both convincing and legal. The other problem is that although high-resolution MRI scanners exist (9.4 T, as opposed to the usual medical 2.5 T), they are unimaginably rare - only three such high-res scanners exist - and they exceed FDA limits on magnetic radiation exposure. There are about 25-30 other ways to scan brain activity, and it is arguable that to produce definitive results you'd need to carry out a meaningful number of tests using each method.

Even then, it is unclear whether you'd be able to absolutely tell the difference between a conscious choice, a subconscious choice or an imposition due to a neurological or biochemical quirk.

But let us say that there were examples of all three, or even examples in which all three variables were present to some degree. What do you plan to do about it? America has adopted the philosophy of standardizing the punishment according to written law. It has no capacity to handle multi-variable situations and very little capacity for handling anything other than a pure binary guilty/not guilty. (In cases where the statute has an automatic fixed penalty - and there are some - then it is pure binary.)

I believe the question of "why" is perhaps the most important - and least-asked - question the legal system could concern itself with. I do not advocate treating people with (or without) leniency according to cause, but I believe the magnitude and not the form of punishment should be what is fixed. I also do not think a fixed form is necessarily useful - stage it so that there is a clear distinction between punishment and therapy/rehabilitation. In cases where therapy/rehabilitation is impossible at the present time, treat as best you can. Further, in no case should punishment be permitted to worsen the mental state of the person, as that risks aggravating whatever caused them to offend in the first place - at best doing nothing of any good or value, and at worst punishing society for the criminal's acts.

There will always be criminals and there will always be people who merely enjoy crimes for no reason other than that they do. But it comes down to divide and conquer. If we can treat that component which is treatable (even in those who otherwise willingly broke the law), you automatically reduce the problem in future. If we can identify that component which is untreatable using existing methods, we know more about where we need to improve. If we can identify unambiguously those who lack the capacity to choose between "right" and "wrong" (whether or not they can distinguish between them), then we can more reliably segregate such cases and not rely on people paid to hold specific opinions. (What possible value is a test for distinguishing between right and wrong? It makes those who intuitively respond correctly but cannot say why Criminally Insane, and makes those who know the difference but cannot act on that knowledge Evil Vermin. What kind of logic is that?)

Re:Why?

[Sir_Lewk]

FYI: The term "child pornographers" (or more generally, the term "pornographers") refers to people who produce, not to those who simply consume. Similarly, I enjoy photography, but I am not a photographer (and don't even own a camera).

Child pornographers who limit themselves to people who are over 18 would, by definition, not be child pornographers.

If we rephrase this as: "why do people who are attracted to child pornography view child pornography?"... well I think that is relatively obvious.

Re:Why?

[Windwraith]

You seem to assume a pedophile is inherently evil and in control of their urges. Not even regular heterosexual people can control their urges reliably.
It happens to be kids for them, which sucks. Imagine if you could only get a boner from kids, with the world persecuting you, and being unable to just switch. So much pressure on pedos will surely make them go insane faster, meaning more potential danger for real kids.

Re:Why?

[russotto]

Can someone explain why child pornographers can't just limit their porn consumption to those that are 18 or older? It seems to just reek of actually having committed an offense in the past and needing the obvious images of someone underage in order to relive that fantasy.

Seems like a nonsense pop-psych answer. If we consider more societally acceptable imagery, namely killing and murder, lots of people like to watch it but very few have actually done it. As for why they can't stick to 18 and older... I suppose it's like asking why heterosexuals can't limit porn consumption to porn of those of the same sex.

Are there any studies that have unmistakably proven it's a disorder instead of a natural response?

How could you? First you'd have to have a way of distinguishing between a mental disorder and a natural response.

Re:Why?

[arth1]

Simply accepting the fact that pedophilia is a sexual orientation like many others doesn't automatically make it acceptible and justified.

No, but it doesn't make it a punishable crime either. No-one should ever get punished for their thoughts, whether their thoughts are taboo desires or not.
If someone harms someone, then call in Justitia on top of their heads, but this witch hunt of people who are different must stop, no matter how loathsome we find it.

No, I wouldn't like it if someone were fantasizing over my teenage daughter or oogled pictures of her, but hell, it's not a crime -- it's thought.

Re:Why?

[Artifakt]

Some people fixate more strongly than others from their first sexual experiences. (This includes solo experiences, i.e. masturbation, not just their first experiences with others). So, somebody becomes aroused at 13 by the cleavage of a cute redhead who is developmentally ahead of them in Social studies class, and if they are a strong fixator, they may have a thing for busty readheads all their lives. Extreme fixators may get obsessive in lots of ways that damage relationships, for example pushing their partner to get breast augmentation surgery even though the partner doesn't want to. While the examples I've just mentioned are for hetero men, there's also common examples for all sorts of orientations, for example, the women who have Florence Nightingale Syndrome or a thing for 'bad boys'. People can become more devoted to there fixations during periods of stress, and sometimes fixations can transfer - for example a person could become fixated on prostitutes by their early sexual experiences, and gradually, this could transfer to a real fetish for related clothing. You have people who have such a thing for fishnets or high heels that they don't really see the person wearing them anymore.
      Now what happens if the person fixates on the apparent age of the stimulus? There are people fixated on underage types, but surprisingly, there are equally people who have problems despite the partner being of perfectly legal age. Picture a strong fixater, who has some good sexual experiences with a woman of about his own age, at about age 22, and sooner or later marries her. As she ages along with him, he finds sex increasingly disappointing, and by the time he's about 30, he dumps her for a younger woman. When he's 45, he's on his fourth marriage, each time to a woman in her early 20's.
      Extreme paedophilia may involve experiences at very young ages, which makes it difficult for the individual to remember the early triggers. It also involves the human weakness for wanting to be the one with all the power in a relationship, and means that some people might eventually become paedophiles by starting with a dominating position in relationships and trying to find relationships that exaggerate that dominance.(Power and dominance issues and government workers that seem clueless to consequences - could their be a pattern there?)
        There definitely is a natural human trait to protect the young, but it takes some training to develop it, and it can be warped or, in exceptional cases, absent. Many paedophiles have a long set of internal justifications for how their behavior supposedly doesn't actually harm their victims. Real treatment to cure paedophiles is, in part, helping them see why these are rationalizations. It may also involve helping them develop skills that give them better options, either helping them fixate less, or to still fixate but on a more appropriate subject.
        As you point out for the government types, there's a certain stupidity here. You mentioned lack of understanding of consequences and technology - I'd say there's also a lack of understanding of internal motivations and interpersonal dynamics. That suggests therapy for such people can be hard - dumber than average plus multiple issues that need worked on adds up to challenging. It also costs a bit to do it well enough to see real progress, and if any of these people have actually victimized children, the victims themselves could probably use some help too, and should come first in society's priorities.

Re:Why?

[ceraphis]

I don't have a black and white understanding of it, the situation you described is exactly why I said "more likely than not" in the case of child porn. I suppose the disconnect is I don't see the situation you described as being actual child porn, but I know my view of it is not the legally accepted criteria.

Re:Why?

[ceraphis]

I understand your logic, and being what I suppose you could consider a "normal" person, I wish I understood why there are people who, as you say, "could only get a boner from kids".

Completely not understanding why this is natural, assuming it is, I would just as soon believe that this person has such a completely twisted mental state that he/she has caused him/herself over a long time to believe this is the case.

In that case, it would seem to me that it was not a natural, unique thing for this person, but rather a case of mental conditioning over a long period of time. The natural thing would, to me, not be the urge (at least in the case of *only* being able to "get off" on pictures of kids), but rather the ability to, as a human, twist your own thoughts through your own mental conditioning.

Re:Why?

[ceraphis]

I think the problem lies in the fact that every person, even pedophiles or murderers etc, understands the need for a society to protect itself. If a person commits a crime, whether willingly or unwillingly (insane, can't control it, etc.), then society at least generally agrees they have to do something to keep this person from harming anyone else.

The problem is that sticking someone in jail where they could get abused "but we didn't cause it" is not a perfectly fitting punishment. Sticking them in jail or a hospital for an arbitrary amount of time decided by an arbitrary judge and jury (in US) is the best we can do.

I don't know the solution to those problems, but at the very least, something needs to be done to those who commit these crimes. It's too bad (and yet arguably good) that a child pornography crime can come down to a possibly innocent act as just having copy-able data on a hard drive (unless it's evidence of a physical crime by the person). It's definitely too bad that apparently the law is such that even obvious reasonable doubt (that some images weren't downloaded willingly) isn't taken as seriously, as it can still go to court, and e.g.: a jury of all moms with young daughters will still convict the guy in spite of the law.

Anyways, regardless of all that, even if we knew the exact reason why someone committed the crime, either consciously, subconsciously or due to a quirk, they are clearly a menace to society if they commit a heinous physical crime. It's just unfortunate that the solution is sometimes too extreme, too tame, or ineffective for many crimes.

Re:Why?

[ceraphis]

Yes, but that's exactly what I don't understand. I'm not sure if anyone even has the answer, so it is likely pointless to ask, but why, in a society that punishes child pornographers so severely, do some people still take that risk of possessing pornography (not that that should be right or wrong, legal or illegal) or act on their unaccepted fantasies with such risky possible outcomes?

It just screams a lack of self preservation or understanding the consequences of one's actions, whether or not the act itself is "right" or "wrong".

I may be extremely pissed at something someone did to me, but choosing to try and get away with murder unless I'm saving someone else's life (and possibly trading my own for it) would be idiotic in a normal society.

Re:Why?

[Sir_Lewk]

It's not a terribly meaningful or interesting question. All sorts of people do stupid things every day, generally because they didn't think a situation through, bother to consider the consequences, or miss-estimated the risk. Doesn't matter if it doesn't logically make sense to you. Welcome to the real world, where people do stupid shit for no apparent reason.

I think you are looking for deeper meaning than there most likely is.

Solution

[z-j-y]

Pentagon should have an internal porn library with all kinds of flavors, so the employees won't be subject to blackmails from outside.

What surprises me

[Black Parrot]

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.

Re:What surprises me

[Hadery]

The population of the USA is roughly 300,000,000. You thought that only 1 in 300,000 would look at cp?

Re:What surprises me

[Anonymous Coward]

The population of the USA is roughly 300,000,000. You thought that only 1 in 300,000 would look at cp?

That would make 4chan full of exceedingly rare people...

Re:What surprises me

[Monolith1]

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.

I agree, there are either a lot of normal people getting screwed over (pardon the pun) thinking "honestly, I thought she was 18 your honour", or there are a lot of dumb people who don't realise how little privacy they have left on the internets when they go hunting for the blatantly underage stuff.

Re:What surprises me

[SpeZek]

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.

Re:What surprises me

[Black Parrot]

The population of the USA is roughly 300,000,000. You thought that only 1 in 300,000 would look at cp?

Yes.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I assume that this isn't merely a vice - that there's something seriously wrong with the way these people are wired. Like serial killers, who I likewise assume are quite rare.

Re:What surprises me

[TruthSauce]

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? :-)

Re:What surprises me

[TruthSauce]

OR, there is an extremely large number of closeted pedophiles and it IS, IN FACT, a very small percentage of them that are dumb enough to get caught.

To be honest, I think that is the most likely case. There is nothing about being a pedophile that would make someone stupid or ignorant of the law and stigma, or the risks, and there is nothing to indicate that this is some sort of government conspiracy to screw over innocent people.

Research indicates there are likely approx 1.5 million pedophiles in the US (around 0.5% of the population based on several recent studies). That's about the same number of people as there are Muslims in the United States and about twice as many as all Buddhists in the US.

Food for thought.

Re:What surprises me

[icebraining]

CP probably includes nude jailbait. I'd say at least 10% of men with internet access.

Re:What surprises me

[JesseMcDonald]

I assume that this isn't merely a vice - that there's something seriously wrong with the way these people are wired. Like serial killers, who I likewise assume are quite rare.

Your comparison is flawed, in that you're comparing people who look at CP—not actual child-molesters—with people who actively go out and commit murder. Better comparisons would be child-molesters vs. serial killers, or CP consumers vs. consumers of violent media (e.g. books and/or movies about serial killers—a very common theme in certain genres). The former compares crimes; the latter compares the associated vices. In both cases the number of otherwise normal individuals eager to simply watch is both higher than most people would like to admit, and far greater than the number of individuals to ever likely to act on such an impulse in real life.

Re:What surprises me

[Alsee]

CP probably includes nude jailbait.

Yep. Well, except for the nude part. And the jaibait part.

An ordinary photo of a fully clothed married 17 year old involved in a routine public soccer game is criminal "child porn" if the court interprets the image as sexually suggestive and deems it to lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".

Actually I'm not even quite sure if there is any upper age limit on "child porn". There was a big fuss over the difficulty of getting convictions when the people in the photos were unidentified and they ages could not be absolutely established. They drafted some legislation to saying something like "or appearing to be under 18". The law explicitly would allow prosecuting people for "child porn" involving ADULT actors. I'm not sure if that law is currently on the books or if it was struck down or whatever happened with it, but I definitely do recall a big fuss over it.

-

Re:What surprises me

[treeves]

Well, there are other places in the world like that. Take people with PhDs in high energy physics. Exceedingly rare, I'd say. Yet I can think of a place (or two or three) that is full of them. It's not hard to imagine.

Re:What surprises me

[icebraining]

Not in this case. Quoting from the article:

Others have not led to criminal prosecutions, such as the 2007 case involving an employee at the Defense Contract Management Agency in Hartford who had about 40 images believed to constitute child pornography on a government-issued computer. The individual was not prosecuted because the ages of the individuals depicted in the images could not be determined or positively identified as known child victims, according to the reports.

Besides, just because it could also include non-identified adults, doesn't mean the definition of CP doesn't include nude jailbait.

Re:What surprises me

[Kjella]

Try putting up a list of every fetish and sexual preference you can come up with, then add "have sex with budding 12 year old" to the list. Now without considering legality and punishments, make up own deviancy ranking in terms of questions like "would I rather do scat sex or have a woman fuck me with a strap-on?". If the 12 year old is at the bottom of the list when you're done then you got really odd tastes, lack imagination or is great at lying to yourself. Now take a look around and see how many people do the legal but fucked up kinds of sex that ended up below on your list - voluntarily, as their preference. That will not be an exception. It is only "extreme" because minors have a limited ability to consent, as an age fetish it's quite minor compared to much else. And that doesn't even include jailbait porn, girls who look adult but happen to be under 18...

Re:What surprises me

[N0Man74]

It's possible that you also might be making assumptions as to what constitutes this. There are some things that fall into this category that you might even be surprised by (I couldn't *quickly* find the links to examples of all the stories I've heard of in the past, but did include some)

I've heard stories of people being prosecuted under cp laws for:
- Cartoon porn (such as sexually explicit Simpsons images). Hey, technically, isn't Maggie over 18 by now? I kid!
-
- Photos by parents or a grandmother of their kid running around nude or taking a bath.
- Photos of legal over 18 women, who look like (or are portrayed as) being under 18.
- Teen girls taking pictures of themselves in their bras.
- Legal images of minors held by people that prosecutors convinced the courts that they had the images to fuel their perverse fantasies (thought crime).
- Probably some other dumb things that I'm not even aware of.

I have no idea how many are involved in images that involve real abuse of real kids their are out there. I wish I could be as optimistic as you and believe it was that rare... but I don't. I expect it's far more common, even if for the curiosity factor.

However, the thing is you bring up an interesting comparison with serial killers. Could there be people who have had "killing fantasies", maybe even had materials (books, movies, magazines) that related to the subject, but never actually harm a living person? Does this ever happen? Could it happen with other crimes too? I honestly don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a far fetched idea.

I'm in favor of protecting our children from actual predators, but I'm not so crazy about catching innocents in the overly large net and ruining lives with overzealous prosecution.

Re:What surprises me

[hitmark]

iirc, there was some story a while back that border guards could actually look for file names, as the number of real child porn photos and videos where so small that the same ones showed up nearly everywhere.

and while one could rename them to get around this, it would probably make it harder to keep track of what one have if one was to set up a online swap meet.

Re:What surprises me

[hitmark]

question is, what defines a kid. Someone prepubescent, or someone just starting to develop forms (lolita complex anyone?)?

if its the latter, we are looking at society disagreeing with our genes.

the funny thing is that mammals are most likely rigged so that a female will want a older male, as that indicates survivability (makes one wonder why human males shave, as balding and beard are indications of age), while a male will want a young female as she is more likely to survive giving birth (and plenty of them). this to make sure that the genes have a higher chance of survival in some variant or other.

but then we carry around all kinds of social rules that makes no practical sense these days. The idea of a female staying a virgin until marriage? Makes sense in a world where inheritance follows the patriarch line, as its a way to ensure that the first male child is of true blood. But in this age of dna testing, and birth control, whats the point?

Re:What surprises me

[tbird81]

"serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".

Is this why someone is arrested for looking a a poorly drawn "get out bart im piss", but a convicted paedophile rapist gets defended by half of Hollywood, and the country of Switzerland?

I'm sick of weirdo artists getting away with whatever crime they like.

Re:What surprises me

[icebraining]

Except he probably would be convicted in the US regardless of "Hollywood support", and a guy "looking a a poorly drawn "get out bart im piss"" wouldn't be convicted in Switzerland - there's no double standard, simply different legislations. The US is much harsher on such crimes (not that I think that's a bad thing).

By the way, in my opinion the girl's mother should be convicted too for negligence. Leaving her 13 year old daughter alone with a 30 year old men for a photoshoot is completely inexcusable (again, this doesn't excuse his behavior in any way).

Re:What surprises me

[shutdown -p now]

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I assume that this isn't merely a vice - that there's something seriously wrong with the way these people are wired.

First of all, you need to clarify what your definition of "CP" is.

If it's the legal one - anyone below 18 - then I don't see why you sound all that surprised. Keep in mind that, as far as Mother Nature is concerned, it's perfectly normal for a male of species to view any sexually mature (i.e. capable of reproduction) female of the same species as arousing; humans are no exception. The other way around (female -> male) is a bit more tricky, but, most certainly, a 15yro is not a "child" sexually in any reasonable way, whether male or female. The fact that so many of them happily fuck each other these days is proof positive of that (but God forbid they make photos of themselves while doing that... and keep in mind that teens doing that and caught also get counted as "CP perverts"!).

So, no, there's nothing "wrong with the way they're wired" for the majority of people convicted under CP offenses. Whether it's even a vice is debatable, and is largely defined by societal norms. It's especially obvious in those jurisdictions in which age of consent is significantly below age at which it is legal to record - so you can have sex with a 16 year old in Canada, but not make photos (nor can they).

Now, the people who get sexually aroused by prepubescent children are wrong in the head, but how many of those are there in the total number? For that category, your expectation of 1 in 100,000 might actually be quite reasonable and close to reality.

Re:What surprises me

[TruthSauce]

I'm pretty sure the study was actually investigating "pedophilia" which the DSM-IV defines as "under 13".

I imagine if you expand that to 16 or 17, the number goes from 0.5% to about 95%. :-)

From the Declaration of Independence

[copponex]

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good...

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance...

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures...

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power...

For protecting [troops], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States...

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences...

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation...

For everything else, VISA

[RenHoek]

A lot of times you read in the paper that they rounded up a large number of pedophiles due to the fact that they paid with a credit card. How can people be so stupid to think that this is in some way untraceable?

To be honest, I see this as pure Darwinism. Disregarding the fact that they are pedophiles, I strongly believe that people who do such stupid things should not be in a job of consequence.

Wrong

[riker1384]

The NSA, NRO and DARPA don't investigate child porn.

TMI

[BancBoy]

we will be left making fallacious assumptions

Hey man, they didn't say what kind of pictures they found.
Oh fallacious, sorry.

Re:Summary snipping

[dsoltesz]

(2) So the government should employ every single person required to do any high security level work it requires? That's practical and completely feasible.

(3) As AC notes, this is a standard term used to discuss people suspected or charged with a crime. To state a person is guilty before the result of a trial proves that guilt leaves the author open to a defamation suit, particularly if the person is found innocent.

(4) Yeah. People are that fucking stupid. And not high school drop-outs either... Ph.D.'s are really that stupid. It boggles the mind.

It's unbelievable how can this be?

[s4ltyd0g]

Several dozen contractors and high level officials at the pentagon? It hardly seems credible. What if it's a frame up?

Re:It's unbelievable how can this be?

[Shark]

I don't know about these specific departments, but a bit of research might yield surprising results when it comes to CPS. I remember several cases in Florida alone... Don't take my word for it though, it's more believable when you find out for yourself.

Authority likely makes one believe they are above the law... And while I wouldn't assume there are more pervs in these areas than anywhere else, those that are pervs have a tendency to think they can get away with it. Because more often than not, they can.

Remember, we don't have civil servants anymore, we have officials and authorities.

Re:It's unbelievable how can this be?

[s4ltyd0g]

Those are good points, but they scare the cr*p out of me.

This implies that the pentagon gives out high level security clearance to dumb mouth breathers (doing that at the pentagon no less).

Do these people not get any training on proxies, What not to do with email and all that stuff that goes along with a high level security clearance?

No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up )-:

Re:Child porn laws

[dgatwood]

Maybe, maybe not. I rather suspect that the taboo is predominantly because people naively believe that pedophilia is rare. It isn't. Roughly one in twenty-five people in the U.S. show some predisposition to pedophilia, and if you include teenagers in the mix, it jumps to... well, pretty much every adult male I've ever met who isn't lying. Given those numbers, I think it's likely that the social stigma would diminish significantly if people did not fear going to prison if found to be part of that one in twenty-five.

That said, doing anything that harms children is a particularly horrible abomination, so it's possible that the taboo won't ever go away under the (mistaken) assumption that pedophiles are a ticking timebomb just waiting to molest kids. In much the same way that every heterosexual male is a ticking timebomb waiting to rape or abuse an adult female, I suppose that is true.... I haven't raped anybody today. Have you?

And getting pedophilia out into the open would cut down on child molestation. Historically, statistically, there has been a strong correlation between repression of sexual desires and rates of sexual crime/violence. There's certainly no reason any sane person would believe pedophilia to be different in that regard.

Like I've said before, banning possession of anything is almost certainly a sign that somebody didn't think things through, whether it's kiddie porn, pot, handguns, knives, or even munitions. It's better for it to be out in the open so that you know where everyone stands than to be shrouded in secrecy so that everyone is always watching their neighbors in fear.

Not news - just the law of large numbers

[davidwr]

I would be surprised if there were zero such people in any large organization outside of a police-state or hive-mind environment.

If you have hundreds of thousands of employees with top-secret clearances, and you draw them from the general population of technically qualified people, you are going to get some with undetected personal issues. You are also going to get some who were fine the day you hired them but something happened along the way.

The choices outside of a police state is either to be 10x or 100x as selective as you are now, which is impractical, or only draw people from a group that has been groomed for years for the task. Even then, you just reduce the odds you don't eliminate them. Personally, I think the status quo is better than the alternatives I listed.

Re:Summary snipping

[SydShamino]

2) The next thing - is Contractors with high level security. I know they meant officials included in that, but why on Earth would you give a Contractor high level security clearance? I wouldn't trust them further than broom closet.

So you propose nationalizing Boeing, Bell, Lockheed Martin or indeed every one of the 200+ companies on this list?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_contractors

Any and every one of them likely has high level clearance for some employees for some field.

Re:Sounds like a great way

[TruthSauce]

Frankly, the people in the linked PDF were folks like telephone repairmen and low level office workers. I doubt this was some sort of big publicity stunt. We're talking a dozen or so people here, nobody who really means anything to the organizations they represented....

I think you are talking a different subject

[sgt_doom]

When that occurs (and it is a horrible abomination of the law) it is due to all this privatization of prisons and the use of prison labor by corporations, etc. (Just check out BP and prison labor.)

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!

Re:I think you are talking a different subject

[SpeZek]

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.

Re:I think you are talking a different subject

[sgt_doom]

Sorry, SpeZek, but you missed the item in the lead comment that it occurred in Arizona.

This is crucially important, big guy.

Re:I think you are talking a different subject

[SpeZek]

Really? I missed my own comment?

Thanks for pointing that out!

Re:Deja Vu

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In terms of arguments founded upon rights, the two cases could hardly be more different(which is why homosexuals are doing better these days, while pedophiles are, if anything, at lower stock than ever(pedophiles have not, in recent history, ever enjoyed approval; but society's willingness to care about the rights of some kid, rather than respect the privilege of an adult, especially a socially powerful one, as increased markedly); but in terms of emotional appeals, the rhetoric surrounding homosexuals and the rhetoric surrounding pedophiles has always been strikingly similar(in fact, to this day, some people make a habit of casually equating the two, when it suits them, ie. when the catholic church responded to their pedophilia problem by doubling down on keeping homosexuals out of seminaries...)

Re:Take care of this problem quickly

[Shikaku]

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!).

Frame!

[ProfanityHead]

This is just so ridiculous it has to be a frame or a setup.

Read a news article earlier about a guy in the Midwest that went to the post office to pick up a package and got arrested because it was 7lbs. of pot. So now we can mail illegal stuff to people we hate and get them arrested and ruined for life? Also, there's an article on Fark today that links to a newpaper report about a guy who had his wallet stolen, years later is seems a registered sex offender was using his identity. Now the guy is F'ed because the police cannot remove the alias from the real offender because "the concern is that if authorities delete the alias, the criminal could go back to using it again." The guy is now getting arrested for not registering as a sex offender.

Is law enforcement and people in general really this stupid?

http://www.king5.com/home/Innocent-man-may-be-linked-to-sex-offender-for-rest-of-his-life-98943394.html

Re:Child porn laws

[HungryHobo]

oh the real shit's gonna hit the fan when the Japanese perfect sex-bots and shortly thereafter someone produces a line designed to cater for paedophiles.
then there'll be some real witch hunts and crusades.

Re:Child porn laws

[RulerOf]

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 ;)

Need a lawyer for the terminology

[BenEnglishAtHome]

The 94-page report (Yes, I read it; feel free to hound me off slashdot.) repeatedly refers to alleged subscriptions (via PayPal!) to "predicated child pornography websites".

What does "predicated" mean in this use? Does it mean that the question of whether the Home Collection sites were child porn or not had not yet been settled by a court?

Or is there some more obscure meaning?

Re:Need a lawyer for the terminology

[hitmark]

dictionary seems to indicate that the pages stated in some way that they shoused child porn.

agreed - wrong people for security work

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

I am not opposed to child pornography. It is ludicrous to believe that possession of a photo inherently causes harm. We used to laugh at people who objected to being photographed because it stole their soul - now we jail not only the photographer but anyone who can be proven to have seen the image.

That said, I wonder how these guys got work in Security. I mean, everyone knows that the paysites are mostly FBI honeypots, and - incidentally - the FBI has even put new child porn into general distribution via these sites, so I wonder about the intelligence and judgement of those who paid for cp. Likewise, why on earth were they using government computers for this? They must be reckless idiots.

Anyone with even a modest understanding of security would at least be using TOR or a proxy, and only accessing this material from a non-monitored computer, preferably one with no personally identifiable information on it. The lack of even these simple steps suggests that these people are unsuited to their profession.

Of course, these are only the ones that got caught. Other evidence from a decade ago suggests that ten years ago perhaps 10 million Americans were accessing child pornography, and the true number is probably much higher - especially if one includes pictures of 16 and 17 year olds. At some point we will have to come to realize that we can't put everyone in jail for violating someone else's sensibilities.

Re:honest coward

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

You're not sick. Little girls are HOT! Women are . . . not.

Studies show that 90+% of men are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls, 20-30% find girls at least as attractive as women (or moreso), and a guesstimate for exclusive attraction to girls is maybe 3 to 10%.

Let's turn those into numbers, using a figure of 300 million Americans, half of whom are male:

That would be at least 120 million who sometimes like little girls, at least 30 million who find girls at least as sexy as women, and at least 9 million (more than the population of New York City) who are exclusively attracted to little girls.

Plus there are the boy lovers and female peds. We are not a small community, despite what our enemies would have you believe.

And looking around, I believe I see some signs of change. We will not be silent much longer.

Fire them

[gmuslera]

That way won't be a problem if they get blackmailed. In fact, after firing them, explain why you did that, so they can't be blackmailed for something that is already public domain. And put them in jail, probably in the same place where some convicts had childs that were.. let say molested.

If they think that normal citizens that could had watched some of that material, even if was just following the wrong links, or collects anime and related artwork deserve punishment, they must give the example in a big way with their own rotten apples. If not, then they are admitting that is not a big offense, so must stop screwing people privacy.

Will somone please...

[VortexCortex]

...think of the children!

Wait, not like that you sick bastards!

Re:Child porn laws

[dgatwood]

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.

Thanks. I couldn't think of the term for that and couldn't be bothered to look it up. My point was that society has a tendency to lump those two together, for better or worse.

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 ;)

And the lower end rises more slowly; the distance always seems greater when looking up. It would be quite fascinating to analyze the percentage of people who find women of different ages sexually attractive, assuming you could get people past the fear of stigmatization and actually get a random sampling of the population to answer honestly in some way. But, as they say, good luck with that....

actually it's both

[Anonymous Coward]

the "think of the children" types are useful idiots for the Prison State.

it's common, and it's a sexual orientation

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

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.

Re:it's common, and it's a sexual orientation

[the_one(2)]

90% are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls.

[Citation Needed].
Not saying you are wrong but it's a bit higher than I would expect and I would really be interested in reading the source.

Definition of child porn ?

[aepervius]

What MIGHT beb the problerm is the definition of child porn. You might think of 5 year old getting abused, while the FBI or whomever also count 17 years old having sex together. I am not saying this is the case, but IIRC seventeen.com is for example childporn in the USA.

thanx for the comments everyone!!

[finalcutmonstar]

i was pretty disgusted when i found this out, thank you to the slashdot community, and the editors for posting this. Much Love -finalcutmonstar

Now it all makes sense

[Hognoxious]

Finally, the real explanation of why they're so antsy about getting hacked by Gary McKinnon.

Re:Surveillance

[V!NCENT]

ROFL xD Mod parent funny!

Re:Just wow.

[stonewallred]

Are they going to name their movement Islam?

Re:Take care of this problem quickly

[GameboyRMH]

50ish years ago? I remember seeing similar Coppertone ads when I was a kid.

I mean, uh, I've never seen it before in my life, whatever we're talking about!

*Uses wipe to clear browser image cache*

*Clears browser history*

What often really happens...

[ZOP]

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.