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FBI Hunt For Child Porn Thwarted By Tor
v3rgEz writes "Documents released by the FBI provide an unusual inside look at how the agency is struggling to penetrate 'darknet' Onion sites routed through Tor, the online privacy tool funded in part by government grants to help global activists. In this case, agents were unable to pursue specific leads about an easily available child pornography site, while files withheld indicate that the FBI has ongoing investigations tied to the Silk Road marketplace, a popular, anonymous Tor site for buying and selling drugs and other illegal materials."
Sounds similar to the problems that plagued freenet.
Nothing is important enough that it takes priority over liberty and freedom of speech. Nothing.
Freedom of speech, or government monitoring of all communications.
Decide which one you want and accept the consequences of your decision.
Because innocence kids were raped to make it you sick fuck. You've got to be fucking trolling.
Isn't it kind of the POINT of a darknet that nobody can trace who's who? Sounds to me like the system is working as designed.
Yes, it will be used to break laws. But that's when you break out the actual investigative skills instead of relying on tech work and unrestricted wiretaps.
Seed "dark sites" with child porn.
Then, stop it "for the children".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
FBI: "There are secret anonymous corners of the internet, where people are trading illegally downloaded movies!"
Public: "So what?"
FBI: "That isn't all. They're ALSO buying and selling.... MARIJUANA!"
Public: "We don't care."
FBI: ".....AND CHILD PORNOGRAPHY"
Public: "Nooooooooooooo! Here's $50 million in extra funding and new broad new powers for your agency."
FBI: "We promise only to use them for your own good."
the same argument could have been made about many other services, including the internet itself.... some people still believe the web is just a porn service, and refuse to use it, well... their problem. everything can be used for good and bad, but i get your point, tor DOES seem to be attracting more illicit usage than what it was initially intended for, what it actually needs, is more legal users to out-shadow the bad ones, most people don't even bother with tor, leaving mostly the criminals to use it.
my sig pwns your sig
If they believe that they need to crack the encryption, that just means they're going after the wrong people. Instead of wasting time going after the darknet sites and/or their customers, they should be focusing 100% of their efforts on trying to identify A. the kids and/or B. the locations where the videos were shot. This approach has several advantages:
In contrast, by going after other people in the chain, you *might* occasionally get an actual child abuser, but usually you just ruin the lives of people who did something stupid and probably would not have actually harmed anyone's child. It's a bit like the difference between jailing people who are using guns to kill people and jailing everyone who carries a gun in the wrong part of town because a few of them might kill people....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Because it's Pure Evil, and I don't like it. Not to mention that it might encourage the creation of more (and we need to arrest people based on maybes and blame them for the actions of others even if they didn't pay them a single cent). Oh, and it's far easier to catch people who look at pictures than it is to stop those who are doing the molesting.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Also because, when you look at porn, don't you like to always find new stuff? There will always be new kids being exploited.
Both of these goals make it impossible for Tor as a system to prevent people from sharing child sex abuse images. Anything that could be done to prevent such sharing could just as easily be used by the Chinese to prevent dissidents from disseminating their information. Anything that could be done to track down people who share child sex abuse images could be used by China to track down dissidents and persecute them.
That is the trade-off: protecting free speech and dissidents who live under repressive governments necessarily thwarts the FBI's attempt to track down people who share child sex abuse imagery. This is a matter of priorities -- do we want to protect dissidents, or do we want to prevent child abuse images from being shared?
Palm trees and 8
I agree with OP. Assuming you didn't compensate the producer of the images, you in no way contributed to the market of child pornography. In saying this, I in no way condone the production of this material or in any way suggest that I like the stuff (I do not).
The problem I have is that mere possession of images should never be illegal in my opinion. The reason I say this is because it is extremely easy to accidentally download this material. I don't think people's lives should be ruined because they clicked on a bad link accidentally. The mere accusation can pretty much ruin your life, and there certainly have been cases where this has happened.
This guy has a point.
It's legal to share videos of someone torturing, killing, raping the corpse of someone else and feeding it to vultures.
As long as no one in there is a minor.
It is the only situation where possession of evidence is criminal in itself. You will not be prosecuted for having a movie of a robbery. Nor of an assassination. And both required people to be harmed. Yet a manga cartoon somehow harms society more than a video of an assassination? According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a manga cartoon is worse than several violent crimes.
So if you look at crime scene photos, are you going to become an axe murderer? And since possession of crime scene photos is legal, is murder less bad than child abuse? (Last question is rhetorical. Because to me, yes, murder is less bad than child abuse.)
So the "problem" is actually a case of "working as designed".
Exactly. The "news" here is that the FBI can't penetrate an anonymous network.
Am I the only one that finds this reassuring?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
As horrible as child abuse is, it is utterly irrational grandstanding to say that child abuse is worse than murder. If I asked you if you would rather be raped or killed, do you really mean to tell me that you would answer "killed"? If not, then murder is worse than any form of abuse. The heinousness of a crime is directly proportional to its effect on the victim. There can be no crime more heinous, therefore, than any crime that deprives the victim of his or her existence unwillingly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Stop being pedantic. That's very likely what he was referring to. Prosecuting people over pictures of imaginary children is just ridiculous.
It is the only situation where possession of evidence is criminal in itself. You will not be prosecuted for having a movie of a robbery. Nor of an assassination. And both required people to be harmed. Yet a manga cartoon somehow harms society more than a video of an assassination? According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a manga cartoon is worse than several violent crimes.
What's worse is that most of those poor schmucks who go to prison because they have video and photos of CP aren't ones abusing children. We could use these people to help find and arrest the slime who create this stuff.
The only reason why this was released to the public, was to drum up support to make programs like TOR illegal in the US.
You have been warned. Once the government uses the "For the children" excuse... or "Child pornography" excuse... it should immediately make you take notice that the government is trying to outlaw something.
In this case, its dark nets, because as we all know that is where piracy is heading, and they want to stop it.
The demand for pictures is not the same as the desire to rape. Consider that the availability of adult porn has exploded in the past ten years, but the occurrence of adult rape has not grown in the same way.
Are you really going to try to tell me that if nobody wanted to see CP, those that produce CP would stop making it?
CP is a behavioral issue. People would continue to make CP because _they_ enjoyed it, not because they thought someone else might enjoy it.
Anyone in the CP market to make a _profit_ would certainly suffer, but really I bet the number of CP producers turning a profit is quite small...
The only reason why this was released to the public, was to drum up support to make programs like TOR illegal in the US.
You have been warned. Once the government uses the "For the children" excuse... or "Child pornography" excuse... it should immediately make you take notice that the government is trying to outlaw something.
In this case, its dark nets, because as we all know that is where privacy is heading, and they want to stop it.
Fixed that for you.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I was sexually abused as a child. I wish I had been killed instead. You don't know the hell abuse at that age can do to someone.
Because people in general, and the US in particular cling to this whole "law and order" fantasy that states the stricter the punishment(and more people you arrest for it), the less the problem occurs. And have we seen with drugs, that simply doesn't work. And the paranoia and bloodlust surrounding child abuse/porn in the US probably results in MORE child rape, not less. In most places in the US psychiatrists are REQUIRED by law to report any people that come to them for help with pedophilia, regardless of whether they actually pose a real threat to anyone(and in fact may be going to the dr to help them avoid doing so, therapy has been shown effective for past offenders). So they have to essentially "go it alone" or else risk ruining their entire lives by being outed. And what often happens is that they cannot cope and end up hurting a child. And this is pretty much the only disorder that they are required to report, someone comes to them to try to avoid going on drugs or to help them with their violent tendencies nothing has to be reported unless there is a high probability the person is going to hurt themselves or others, but pedophiles are different, we somehow feel that they should be locked up for seeking help....
Monstar L
In the case of child abuse images, it is not necessarily true that anyone who possesses such images actually did pay for them. Like anything else that can be downloaded, child abuse imagery can be downloaded at no cost online, and people so exactly that. Arresting someone who was never willing to pay for child abuse images does absolutely nothing to the demand for those images.
If you want to combat the economics of child abuse imagery, you need to reserve prosecution for people who actually paid for the images in their possession. Otherwise, you are just going after the low-hanging fruit, while leaving the truly dangerous people -- the people who are abusing children -- untouched.
Palm trees and 8
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. Eventually these pedo's will screw up and get caught. Time to go do some real police work.
Cartoon depictions of child sexual activity (commonly found in manga) is against the child porn statutes in many countries. So, yes, I can tell the difference, but the law can not.
Of course it can. "The law" is not a computer program, it's interpreted by people. And the law and those people can't somehow infer that an entire medium is now illegal because someone used it to do something illegal. Movies, photos, and comics (Japanese or not) are entirely the same in this regard.
People want to pretend this is some slippery slope, but you know, it really isn't. Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a manga cartoon is worse than several violent crimes.
which is equivalent to saying:
According to a strict interpretation of the law, in the US, possession of a Japanese comic books is worse than several violent crimes.
which is completely false. Only the possession of manga that explicitly depict sexual activity involving children could be considered illegal. Just like how movies aren't illegal, only movies that explicitly depict sexual activity involving children are illegal.
This is the exact same point Dahamma tried to bring up. His post was pretty clear, at least to me. Maybe you should read it again.
Assuming you didn't compensate the producer of the images, you in no way contributed to the market of child pornography.
I don't disagree with most of your points except your first. The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers which probably is worth far more than money, and it also contributes to a sense of normalization of their behavior for all participants. Taking away money won't stop CP any more than taking away all CP will stop child sexual abuse but it does help discourage it.
...guess I thought Tor probably already had an FBI/CIA back door.
... and this article disproves that how? If the FBI had a back door to Tor, the first thing they'd be doing is running articles like this one. That way everybody who wants to do something outside of FBI purview starts logging in, and Tor becomes one big honeypot for them to skim.
I want Tor to exist and succeed for privacy and free speech, especially for people in less free countries than the US. I also know victims of childhood sexual abuse and the lasting effects it has. The FBI breaking or backdooring Tor means that kiddie porn producers get rounded up, but it also means that free speech loses one more haven. I have no idea who I'm cheering for here.
Two things:
First, although this isn't an extremely rare reaction to abuse, it is by no means the norm. The sex abuse victims I've known (admittedly a small sample size) have not wished that they were dead. Such a reaction is not healthy, and can get worse with time. If you truly feel that way, please seek proper counseling from a trained medical professional. Help brings hope. You can recover from this.
Second, not to diminish your experience in any way, but what you're describing is a fairly well-understood psychological phenomenon. The problem with your argument is that the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even actual abuse). A certain subset of the population reacts in this way because of bullying, physical abuse, serious financial losses, relationship breakups, and any number of other crises in their lives.
Clearly a guy dumping his girlfriend isn't guilty of something as heinous as murder, or else we're all in trouble. Yet for some people, it is just as bad. For this reason, you cannot judge a crime's heinousness based on how a particular individual is affected by the crime, but rather based on the typical effect. Most people would rather live than die, including most victims, and calling abuse a worse crime than murder is essentially claiming that even the abuse victims who do not feel that they would rather have died would still have been better off dead.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You're completely missing the point. Law enforcement, like anything else that involves time and effort, is a zero sum game. Every minute they spend wasting their time chasing distributors and downloaders and other penny-ante criminals (who have almost zero chance of being actual producers) is a minute that they did not spend doing something else that might have actually resulted in an arrest of a real child molester or other abuser.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
My parents had a scrap book that had pictures of me butt naked in a kiddie pool in the back yard. By today's standards, they would be considered the most dangerous criminals in the world.
Pictures of kids used as sexual imagery is icky as hell, but let's not bullshit here: it's all an excuse to stop people from downloading movies. The entire child porn hysteria is ridiculous. And if a "child was raped" to make the porn, then the rapist needs to be arrested, for rape.
Pictures is pictures. Rape is rape. And until the FBI starts treating the ongoing sexual abuse by clergy and football coaches as seriously as child porn, it's pretty clear that the whole child porn mania is just a cover to control the Internet. There's a worldwide criminal enterprise that enables child rape and they are hiding behind "religious freedom". There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there are dozens if not hundreds of cardinals and one pope that should have done perp walks long ago. Child porn my ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So once a person rapes the child, there is no reason to even consider letting the child go. After all, the punishment for murder is the same, so why increase the risk of getting caught by letting the kid go?
What's worst is that we reach the point where raping a child and killing the child comes up with almost the same jail time. So what's the logical thing to do if you're a rapist?
Hint: A dead witness cannot testify.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Only low-budget movies, of course. If it comes from hollywood, it's exempt somehow. For example, Britain has a law against 'extreme pornography' which prohibits depictions of genital torture. Yet when genital torture was used to interrogate James Bond in Casino Royale, no police agency seemed particually concerned. I suspect that if exactly the same scene had been shot, word-for-word and action-for-action by a minimal-budget independant studio they'd have at least been forced to cut it to avoid a risk of prosecution.
That's not even remotely a valid interpretation of what I said. What I said was that the fundamental problem with the argument that death is preferable to child molestation is that in the vast majority of cases it isn't. When it is, it is caused by either the circumstances being particularly heinous or the victim being particularly susceptible.
The heinousness of a crime in the general sense should not be gauged based upon unusually extreme examples of that crime. It is a crime to rob a bank. It is a crime to rob a bank by dropping an atomic bomb on it and sucking up the molten gold using a giant vacuum cleaner. Robbing a bank is not (typically) tantamount in heinousness to nuking a city.
The victim being particularly susceptible/vulnerable, as a rule, means that the victim needs more/better counseling, not that the crime was more heinous (unless the reason for choosing that victim was because the victim was particularly susceptible/vulnerable).
At no point did I suggest that anyone "suck it up". Quite the opposite. The only acceptable response to a post like that is to recommend professional counseling. Suicidal thoughts are nothing to screw around with.
You parsed that sentence wrong, though I'll admit that my elision of two implied words could cause someone to read it that way. Reinsert the implied words "limited to" and you'll understand the intended meaning:
...the reaction you describe isn't limited to sexual abuse (or even limited to actual abuse).
In other words, not only is it not limited to the sexual abuse (a narrow category), but it is further not even limited to actual abuse (a broader category that includes the former). Many people experience those symptoms even in some situations where they merely perceive abuse, but no actual abuse has taken place. The key point was that until the person (whether an actual victim or not) chooses to stop acting like a victim, no healing can take place, and the fact that some people react in this way to any one particular crime is irrelevant in determining its heinousness because some people react that way to every crime to some extent (and to many, many things that are not crimes).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Because the demand is a mental condition that is not caused by CP.
If you're not a pedo, you don't want to look at pictures of children being raped. If you are, you do.
The pictures don't cause the condition, so reducing the availability of the pictures is not going to reduce the demand for them.
However, reducing availability of the pictures could cause people with the condition to go and rape children because they can't get their jollies from the pictures.
So clamping down on CP will have no impact on the numbers of pedos, and could conceivably increase the occurrence of child rape. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
What is this "letting the kid go" thing you are talking about? The vast majority of child abuse happens in the home, by the parents.. Kids getting abducted and raped is pretty much the exception as far as I know. People don't abuse kids because they want to hurt them, they do it because they [think they] love them.. and killing is rarely going to be a part of that
Not to mention, that letting the kid live has other advantages.. firstly, you told them not to tell and you might get away with it (vs a dead kid is pretty obvious) and secondly, you might get to do them again (you can do that with dead kids but not for long I guess).
He's making a point. Child rape will happen regardless of what we do on the internet.
Stop being pedantic. That's very likely what he was referring to. Prosecuting people over pictures of imaginary children is just ridiculous.
Yet many western countries do this. They also prosecute people over picutres of adults that the court decides might look like a child, and they can also prosecute a husband who has a picture of his wife's tits if his wife is, or looks, under 18.
I was sexually abused as a kid. It did fuck me up a bit, but not too badly, and I got over it. I'm now a relatively happy, well adjusted person - currently single, but have had numerous normal, healthy relationships.
If you're seriously suggesting that I'd be better off dead, you can go fuck yourself.
And that is indeed/ totally ridiculous.
Child abuse (sexual or violent or otherwise) is a crime, and rightfully so.
Possessing recordings of a crime (images, video, whatever), is usually not a crime (though I'm not so sure about those "snuff movies" or whatever they're called where people are actually killed in the process of making them).
Creating or owning drawings of a crime that never took place for real, should not be a crime. That'd fall under freedom of speech (with possible limits where specific individuals or groups are targeted).
What you see in movie theatres are often rather violent movies (especially coming out of Hollywood): people being murdered is something you very commonly see. Now I assume those people don't actually die, yet they do their best to make it look as if they really die. With lots of blood and so. A crime, but the recording of it is no problem at all.
Similar for erotic movies. A bit less accepted by many people, the porn industry is thriving. And that also includes movies depicting rape and possibly other crimes. This again is also considered totally legal. Now these people are not actually being raped as in they take part in the scene consensually (consent given in return for a big enough cheque), yet again the movie makers do their best to make it look like the actual crime is taking place.
In case of porn involving minors receiving consent is not possible, so the act is illegal, and the people involved should be tracked down and prosecuted. The evidence of the crime is there: the movie, presumably shot in high resolution, good quality; not grainy surveillance camera stuff.
It'd be rather more effective for police to try to track down where this move was shot, who was involved shooting it, and prosecute those people. This should be relatively easy with the top-notch video evidence that is available of the crime.
If there's no demand, there's no supply
therefore it is valid to go after demand
Worked great for pot. We started imprisoning potheads in Federal pens, and no one grew weed anymore! *dusts hands* Mission accomplished.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
I agree with you completely
But why do you think your observations have any relevancy to the production and consumption of CHILD pornography?
Increased availability of porn is positively correlated with a reduction in sexual violence. Why exactly would his observation NOT have relevance?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sunny-side-of-smut
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Enforcement doesn't seem appropriate, let along not being enough.
Let me try on a few hats, here (and make it clear that I am wearing a hat, that all that comes with that hat goes away once I remove it). Let's just suppose, for a moment, that I'm a drug addict.
Now, I recognize that using drugs is destroying my life, so I seek help. I go speak to a counselor and tell them I have these urges and I need help ot figure out why I have them and what I can do to essentially make them go away. They help me and I no longer feel that I need to use drugs.
Now, let me remove that hat and let's suppose, for a moment, that I'm a pedophile.
Now, I recognize that actually doing anything with or to a child would irreparably harm them, so I seek help. I go speak to a counselor and tell them I have these urges and I need help ot figure out why I have them and what I can do to essentially make them go away. Later that day, I am arrested, my home raided, all of my family photo albums and computer equipment confiscated to be searched for images of child porn. A thumbnail of a girl of unverifiable age is found in my browser cache, I'm tried and convicted on charges of posession of child pornography and face 5 years in prison.
Why? I never touched a child, the girl in the image (a thumbnail, with no accompanying full-size image found in my browser cache, indicating that I likely never even looked at it or knew it was there) may well have been over 18, and I was seeking help so that I would not harm anyone. I did nothing wrong. So, why?
Now, let me remove that hat. I rather enjoy my freedom and situations similar to the one I describe above have happened in my country.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Are you serious? I can see a financial fine, but prison time? For what? Keeping his computer unsecured?
Boy, if that gets punishable with time I'd guess it's time to invest in prison stock!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.