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Pentagon Workers Tied To Child Porn
finalcutmonstar tips a Boston Globe report on details released today of Operation Flicker (PDF), an investigation of subscribers to child porn websites, which seems to have implicated a number of government employees in sensitive positions. Quoting:
"Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports. The investigations have included employees of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which deal with some of the most sensitive work in intelligence and defense — among other organizations within the Defense Department. The number of offenders is a small percentage of the thousands of people working for sensitive Pentagon-related agencies. But the fact that offenders include people with access to government secrets puts national security agencies 'at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military installations,' according to one report by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service from late 2009."
Wait, you mean people with high security clearances that work for the government can also be disgusting perverts??
They try and avoid this. A friend-of-a-friend recently applied for full UK security clearance (or whatever it's called). A man in a smart suit visited my friend for a "background check". Every other question was about the guy's sex life -- number of girlfriends, whether he ever cheated, if he looked at porn, what kind, and so on. The defence guy said he didn't care what the answers were, but they needed to know whether someone might try and blackmail the friend into revealing secret details. A person with many partners but who's open about it is fine, someone with a very secret hidden relationship isn't.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Did you rtfa? The government loves child porn!