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Anonymous Hackers Take Down Child Porn Websites
chrb writes "According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin #OpDarknet, including personal details of some users of a site named 'Lolita City,' and DDoS tools that target Hidden Wiki and Freedom Hosting — alleged to be two of the biggest darknet sites hosting child porn."
I mean, who wouldn't use false credentials if they were into that sorta thing? Someone is gonna get wrapped up in a lynching who doesn't have the foggiest idea as to why, watch. It's a PR stunt to try to make Anon look like more than a group of petty thugs, as if their ideals deserved attention or merit. Frankly, they can all DIAF.
I believe the word you were trying to use was Vigilante. As far as I am concerned, this is the first and only thing they have done that actually makes any sense or has any redeeming value.
when the cops abuse their authority with impunity in front of everyone and there's no repercusions
when the rich and powerful get more rich and more powerful by trampling on others in complicity with self serving politicians
when the judges consider smoking pot and stealing food way worse than ruining the economy of a nation in the name of profits
yes, vigilance must come
Laws don't apply to the powerful, so why respect them at all?
Obey or disobey as expedient.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
So if they were bringing down pirates or The Pirate Bay, would you support them as well? They're against the law too.
So vigilance actions are ok now?
I don't support them, but I sure as well don't support people who take it to their own hands to commit crimes like viruses and DDOS just because other people did wrong. They all should be taken to jail.
Whenever children, especially child pornography are involved, the spoken opinion of most of society is "yes."
The quality of the journalists for Tabloids will be tested with this one, how will they manage to spin this into saying it was an awful tragedy and no one thinks of the children? Assuming they don't just say hacking causes cancer, or something.
It's easier to think about them as an unguided mass that will attack targets at random. Sometimes the targets are assholes and people will cheer for them, but that doesn't make them freedom fighters. They reverted back to trolls some time ago.
Well, so they took down those "porn" websites, but one has to ask, why the authorities have done nothing, preferring to sit on their backsides? Politicians or police using such sites and they want to cover it up?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
How are we even going to know whether or not this is true? Nobody in their right mind would try to verify whether those sites were taken down or not, and even if they did, they sure wouldn't talk about it publicly, what with the risk of the cops showing up just for visiting those sites. Anonymous can pretty much say whatever they want about this with impunity.
>I mean isn't anonymous pretty widely recognized as being associated with the child porn website 4chan?
Yes, in the same way that Princeton University is widely recognized as being associated with The Jersey Shore.
Get off my lawn.
Oh no. They hate the bastards. CP'ers DO use 4chan, but only to be met with a hailstorm of shit. They even got a guy a while ago, got his details and put the cops on his arse. So this I guess is a continuation on that theme of internet vigilante-ism. Hell, Pedo bear was created to MOCK CP'ers. 4chan and anon is responsible for a lot of things, good and bad, but CP is not one of them. I am not a channer by the way; I'm just sayin'.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
So they're tackling the only issue about which there is absolutely no debate, just like cable news anchors. Does Anonymous have a PR department now, improving their image?
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
It's fine until a pediatrician has her home attacked, like what happened in the UK. We may well complain about injustice at the hands of the authorities, but vigilantes are far more likely to target the innocent.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
http://www.vatican.va/
still up
This tactic could work if it they relentlessly keep doing it and gets it publicized. Fighting pedophiles is tried and true way to win support for almost anything.
Next time some politician attack Anonymous:
- Oh you are attacking Anonymous?
- How come you, they are protecting our CHILDREN!
Wah! The child-raper is a victim.
Fuck that. Child-rapers, while *perhaps* having been victimized as children, still had a choice as adults. They chose wrong.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Right. Until they release someone's personal info who made the mistake of not securing his wifi.
I'm not sure why people are surprised. The general collective has always seemed to have a conscience. Their tactics may be illegal but they generally push forward a righteous agenda. Protesting rigged Iranian elections, exposing BofA corruption, defending WikiLeaks and in general defending free speech. I'm not saying they are saints or that they are justified in their actions, just that this fits their m.o.
I'm not sure how you justify the Sony attacks but I'm sure it had something to do with corporate greed and perceived threats to free speech.
4chan is hardly a child-porn website. Just that if you allow anonymous image postings, the child porn trolls soon follow. You might as well call Slashdot the GNAA hideout. Or a libertarian website.
Anontalk is a "splinter" group that does heavily favor free speech, totally unrestricted free speech... trouble is that there really isn't that much to speak about in the west except endless silly conspiracies. The only really censored type of speech is related to child porn. So... what do you? Either you have free speech and child porn is part of it, or you don't. Yahoo by the way hosts far more child porn, depending on what you call child porn? Does the art of David Hamilton qualify? It does for some.
Any posted child porn is quickly removed of 4chan but the nature of a public board is that the users really create the content. 4chan has a board for beautifull women. It USED to be mostly asian models because 4chan is a copy of the japanese 2chan board. But over time more and more people used it who had an almost insane hatred of anything non-white. Now the board is filled with "amateur" (read to ugly to be paid) western women. Users deciding content.
So is 4chan about porn then?
If you consider lolcats porn, then yes. 4chan is better known for endless lolcats then child porn which frankly in quite a few years of occasional use I have only seen in the form of deleted posts. Then again, I never ventured into /b/
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A witch hunt... for the children!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This is a DDoS. It's not a lynching. Comparing a DDoS to a lynching devalues and denigrates the memories of those who were actually lynched.
I'm sorry if I can't find some sympathy, but I can't. Nope, not even a smidge. And coming from a background on the internet where we used to take care of our own problems, I don't even see this as abnormal or even slightly unethical. There are those who should suffer the Internet Death Penalty, and child pornographers and their deliberate have always been on that list.
--
BMO
We should use the same approach for terrorists/terrorism then. Oh wait...
If the only reason you don't kill people is because you respect "law" but don't respect "people", please explain that logic.
If someone is deserving of death in your eyes, why does "law" restrain you and to what purpose?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I believe the word you were trying to use was Vigilante.
Damn the AutoCorrect!
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
If his hammer breaks when trying to hammer in a normal nail, he most certainly will.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
perverted-justice.com has been taking down pedophiles online for years, and doing it legally.
Advice: on VPS providers
At a sit-in one occupies a space owned by a for-profit company without spending a significant amount of money. This space could be used to generate a normal stream of revenue if customers were able to purchase goods or services and move along. By preventing the proprietor from bringing in a normal amount of customers' money, sit-ins definitely result in a loss of revenue and likely tack on an added cost; it takes a few bucks more to ventilate and condition a building full of people than to hold an empty building at a steady state.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Nope. The carpenter will blame the carpenter's helper, who actually cracked the handle of the hammer two days earlier.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A DDoS attack is also a cowards protest because it removes accountability. Whereas people partaking in a sit-in are accountable for their actions, they can't hide.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
It already happened. Remember all those people in the 80s and early 90s who were arrested because of fears that they were child molesters? Remember the satanic ritual abuse panic? People were being arrested on accusations of being witches and engaging in ritualistic abuse of children, and there was practically no evidence for any of it. We are seeing the tail end of that witch hunt with the modern fears of child pornography and pedophiles hiding around every corner.
Palm trees and 8
Personal info of some of the users was posted. Simple enough to insert the contact info of some innocent.
I approve of taking down all websites because everything is disgusting and wrong.
If his hammer breaks when trying to hammer in a normal nail, he most certainly will.
Spoken like someone who's never actually used a hammer. Hammers don't break during normal use unless you've damaged them by doing something they weren't intended to do.
I'm pretty sure you can make a hammer which breaks easily. The reason why you don't see such hammers is that you wouldn't be able to sell many of them before everyone knew they are shit and avoided them like the plague.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Since Anonymous was thought to have split some time ago, I wouldn't be surprise if this is maybe "the better half," if you will.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
For fucks sake.
Anon didn't just take down CP sites. They are attacking Freedom Hosting, which hosts many other sites, because they refuse to comply with Anon's orders.
And this is why vigilantism is dangerous - because it's riddled with collateral damage since the attackers answer to nobody.
Dilbert RSS feed
I approve of taking down your moms pants because they are disgusting and wrong
Dude -- climb down out of the ivory tower for a moment. You are over-analyzing a very simple, straight forward situation. If it is not morally allowable for one person -- a single, solitary hacker let's say -- to take down a website (deface a system, in your terminology) why would it be morally allowable if a bunch of people conspired to do the same thing? Your attempt to mitigate the immorality of the act by diluting it over the number of conspirators, or diluting the harm done by spreading the damage out over society at large is interesting, but de Tocqueville and Mill, the architects of modern political philosophy and Utilitarians to the core (especially Mill,) rightly rejected that approach to the formulation of legislation and (in the case of de Tocqueville) the administration of justice. Indeed, in every jurisdiction that I am aware of, conspirators are all equally guilty; it follows that there is no safety in numbers if one is committing an immoral act.
To be fair, FTP is most decidedly designed around the sharing of files, and it (like The Pirate Bay) is completely agnostic as to whether they're 'illegal' or not.
They don't go against child porn sites because they are illegal. They couldn't care less about that. They go against child porn sites because they are immoral (at least from the perspective of the vast majority).
The vast majority also acknowledges that sites like The Pirate Bay are illegal, but the morality of these sites and their users is rather neutral, if not positively.
Astroturfers and shills are liars of the worst kind. They deserve to be tarred and feathered at every occasion.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Yes, bring down the just because I dont accept people taking law to their own hands. Note that they didn't. Police does, and the ask court.
But since we went this route, what about if I said " SmallFurryCreature is interested in childporn", as you take part in this discussion. IN FACT your username suggests something similar too. There are no need for courts. You are a child molester. Kill him.
See what I did there?
I took down your mom's pants and what I saw was disgusting and wrong, so I quickly pulled them back up.
I don't think most people have an issue with taking down child porn sites. It's the way that the issue is pursued, or the definitions of child porn that tend to cross the lines of all rationality. Putting someone on a list meant to shame pedophiles because he urinated in public, or forwarded a picture of his 15 yo girlfriend when he himself was a teenager is not rational. It's just fucking stupid and people can't seem to understand this.
It's not about safety in numbers, it's about standing up. There is a kids book you should read, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes.
It's about bravery in the face of great might and terrible consequence. It's about (and this is the important one) defining morality and justice through the eyes of history.
People make right, and numbers bring change.
At least de Tocqueville understood that he must speak out in the face of great resistance to his beliefs. In fact from your own knowledge of de Tocqueville you should know that he would have been involved in both the civil rights movement and other non-violent acts of civil disobedience.
Do you tout this 'no safety in numbers' line because you fear the discomfort involved in standing up for what's right? Or do you repeat it so that you will feel justified at some future juncture when you do nothing and morally should have broke the law and protested?
On the other hand, to play devil's advocate here, the primary purpose of a representative democracy—the government style that most of us in the western world hold dear—as opposed to a direct democracy is to prevent tyranny of the majority. The fact that something is seen as wrong by the majority does not inherently mean that something should be prevented, much less that it must be.
You're going to need a stronger argument than "the majority consider it immoral". The majority considered homosexuality immoral just a couple of decades ago. The majority considered having whites and blacks eat at the same table to be immoral not long before that. So to argue that attacking someone for immorality is okay in general requires arguing for segregation and gay bashing. Your criteria are way, way too loose here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that child porn is a good thing. I'm just saying that if you're going to argue that vigilanteism is acceptable, you need to come up with a much better argument than the presumption of harm to children. You need to prove that the people attacked by the vigilantes (including the users whose names were revealed) caused or planned to cause harm to children, at an absolute minimum, and that they were beyond the reach of legitimate law enforcement, and that not acting would have caused or greatly increased the risk of immediate harm.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Protocols in general are content-agnostic. Unless you want to argue that sharing any kind of content (even by content producers/owners) is illegal, no protocol is inherently illegal.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P protocols, the most widely-used probably being WoW's patch system.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
How do we know that the FBI didn't intend to? How do we know they hadn't seeded the ranks with people investigating their actions.
Anonymous did a disservice to everyone.
First, they've drawn attention to that particular site. They've provided names, where people could, for example, use Google to see what other sites they frequent. So they have just opened up this underworld to more people who may be casually interested. And I suggest that it's not in your best interest to even put those names into Google to see what may come back.
Second, they have tainted absolutely everything on that site. It is no longer viable evidence. The logs, the membership roster, the uploaders. Not a single piece of information there can be considered valid, and would be thrown out of court.
Third, any investigation that was already ongoing will have suffered a significant setback. Any investigation can no longer gather evidence from it.
Consider this. If there is a drug dealer in your town, the police could go arrest him, and put him out of business. Great, that's one drug dealer off the streets. Instead, they can watch him. They can see who he interacts with, where his money goes, and follow those lines of evidence up to bigger busts. Are they interested in the guy selling crack on the corner, or the guy responsible for importing it into the country? Busting the importer means that hundreds or thousands of dealers will be unable to sell. Investigating him carefully, they can follow the distribution chains back down to every dealer.
So Anonymous cut off one site, and cut a bunch of people off from *one* outlet. That means all those people are going to go elsewhere, and any means to build a case on them is gone.
If it wasn't an anonymous group, they could have volunteered the evidence to the authorities. They could have testified about what was done in acquiring that information. That could have been useful to the authorities. Now that they published it all, anyone can say they did it. You or I could go to the FBI right now and say "I broke into that site, here's the list". It's worthless though, as any number of other people could claim exactly the same thing.
Should it shame the FBI? Not really. It's more encouragement for the FBI to stop them. That takes resources away from other investigations, which could be stopping pedophiles, murderers, etc, off the streets.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
That's right. He blames his apprentice instead.
Couldn't you say the same thing about homosexuality?
And wouldn't possession of eg. movies containing violence also count as a declaration of war on society, and social laws?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Your "understanding" of Libertarianism is truly warped. What you describe is anarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy , not Libertarianism.
Looking at some of the comments, it seems that a few people don't seem to get Anonymous. Anonymous isn't a group, really - they don't have a common agenda, they don't have common opinions or necessarily common skills. Rather, Anonymous is a label people have claimed and since it seems to be a similar type of person each time (e.g. from a certain part of the Internet, hacks sites or brings them down, may be vigilantes or may well be trolling), people still hold the misconception that they are somehow a unified group. They're not. Anonymous are anonymous. That's the point. There is no link between anything they do except people copycatting each other, and using the label. Thus Anonymous is not a group - I would say it is more of a phenomenon that has arisen, with the help of the Internet.
Your post is philosophically incoherent.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
It remains virtually impossible for adult males to befriend children. (Friendships between adults and children used to be pretty common, even in the USA.)
As one example:
Neil Wilkes was a teacher in Manchester, England who had a close relationship with an eight year old girl he taught. He got on well with her and with her family.
But someone decided it was "inappropriate" for a man to befriend a girl, and launched a formal investigation into the relationship.
There was no evidence that Neil Wilkes had done anything wrong.
All the same, Neil lost his job and the girl's family was frightened into breaking off all contact.
On October 20th 2010, Neil Wilkes went to a quiet tourist spot, sent a text message to the girl telling her "I love you and I always will", doused himself with fuel, and set himself on fire.
http://www.thejournal.ie/teacher-sets-himself-alight-after-texting-i-love-you-to-girl-8-2011-03/
It is clear to me that the obsession with child pornography and child abuse is intended to break down the trust between generations, provide an excuse for controlling and monitoring all expression, and firmly cement the power of the ruling class. This panic also provides employment opportunities for a predatory class of therapists and an entire child abuse industry.
Thanks to the manipulation of the public consciousness and abusing the public's natural concern for the well-being of children, the prohibition of child pornography has provided a means for the ruling class to do whatever it wants. Want to eliminate a rival? Just claim they had child pornography on their computer. No one will investigate it, because investigating it would constitute a crime - so everyone must take their public servant overlords' word at face value - and the public accepts this without question.
We don't even have proof of what typical child pornography looks like. The claim is that it is all horrific images of rape and abuse, but ordinary citizens - even reporters - are not allowed to see for themselves. It seems more likely that it is mostly pictures of happy children wearing little or no clothing, because most guys don't get turned on by pictures of real abuse - but how could we find out? The public goes along with the farce, because they have been conditioned to hate pedophiles so much that they don't care whether their victims are even pedophiles, much less whether pedophiles or child pornographers are actually doing harm.
However, we do occasionally get a window into child pornography convictions. Here are a few young ladies speaking out against the conviction of the man who took their photographs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2xfzmcOPg0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ogJhlOw9U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqKEybfBPAs
This case is illustrative of two points: First, that many of the models do not feel harmed, and secondly that much "child pornography" consists of pictures of clothed children. It certainly gives the lie to the traditional narrative.
Protocols in general are content-agnostic.
So are torrent sites. If you post an Ubuntu torrent on The Pirate Bay, they don't take it down because it isn't infringing.
I always liked the way Gabe Newell put it, it was something along the lines of "piracy grows because they offer a better product than you do". And you know what? he's right. i know I've personally been bit in the ass by games i bought back in the day that if i try to run them the legit way they won't run, not because the code won't run on a 64 bit OS, nope its because their shitty DRM wants to jam 32 bit kernel hooks into my 64bit kernel. The pirate version? it don't do that. it don't phone home, it don't make me set up accounts with some service i don't want like GFWL, oh and some of the older versions of Starforce and SecuROM will happily jam 32bit code hooks into a 64bit OS and then just to make it fun their uninstaller can't remove it, not even the sanctioned tools they offer on their site. fun huh?
As for TFA, i have no problem getting rid of CP the problem I have is whose definition do we use. Remember so far we've seen kids busted for taking pics of their own genitals, we've seen a guy get prison time for comics, and at least two thrown in jail for words on a page. No pics, no actual kids involved, just words on a page. Now wasn't there someone who wrote about a day coming when one could be arrested for thoughts? i'd say getting busted for words on a page would fit that description, wouldn't you?
So while I'm sure the Anons took out some legit targets the libertarian in me worries about how the definition keeps growing and the words keep getting twisted. it is like old Carlin used to talk about how shell shock became PTSD, which sounds like PMS, in this case we've seen rapist turn into "sex offender' which has been stretched so far to mean anything you can do with your junk including taking a pee, and CP went from kids being raped to cartoons to words on a page. Scary stuff folks and if you use the "Simpsons standard" frankly there probably isn't two guys here that wouldn't go to PMITA prison. Got any vampire books, what are vampires? Undead teen hotties that use sexual attraction to prey upon the living...sounds Lolita to me! Book 'em! after all the Simpsons would be pushing late 30s for the youngest at least yet they threw a guy in jail for Simpsons porn, and they are about as "real" as vampires..
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.