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

[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

[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

[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]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

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.

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: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.
 

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?

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

[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

[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

[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

[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?

Wrong

[riker1384]

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

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: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.

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: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: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!).

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 ;)

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.

Will somone please...

[VortexCortex]

...think of the children!

Wait, not like that you sick bastards!

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.

Now it all makes sense

[Hognoxious]

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

Re:Just wow.

[stonewallred]

Are they going to name their movement Islam?

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.