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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.
Whilst I am of course against child pornography, I get the feeling this isn't the real reason. Instead child-porn is now the catch-all excuse the FBI/NSA/CIA/whoever will use every time to try and legislate against any and all kinds of encryption, sharing or anonymising system that they can't get into.
No politician will stand up to defend our rights if it means they also risk being perceived as possibly defending child abuse.
I'm far more inclined to believe the real interest behind this is the RIAA/MPAA who want to make it impossible to anonymously share files at all and/or the gov itself who want to monitor every email, IM and keystroke we make online.
Reading the comments on this thread, I'm realizing that likely within our lifetimes, we'll be having the same debate about strong cryptography that we're now having about guns, likely spurred on by stories like this about pedophiles, terrorists, "hackers" and all those other scary people on the internets.
Some of the same talking points are already in use ("We'll need them when the government comes for us", "Only criminals need them", "If they're banned, only criminals will have them and we'll be defenseless", etc), and strong cryptography, much like guns, are something that the governments and law enforcement fear as they can make it possible for people to break the law (just or otherwise) without the government being able to stop them.
I hope I'm wrong, and of course, you can't quite ban code so easily, but still, a scary future and an unpleasant debate may well be ahead.
It's just pictures. Better the creeps inside jacking off than outside doing it personally. Isn't it time to get the government out of the bedroom?
If you've ever stumbled onto CP through any of the random image polling scripts from the image sites, what you see can be soul crushing. The looks on the children's faces are that of absolute depression and mental anguish. These children never had the option to say 'no' or reject what was happening to them... they were forced into their situation and what is happening to them will destroy their entire futures. They didn't start doing drugs and have to resort to porn to pay for their addictions, they were kidnapped and didn't know what was happening until their childhoods were irrevocably destroyed.
I support tracking down anyone who is sharing these images, since it leads to either one single person not sharing them with others, or (hopefully) maybe to the source. Yes, some people who are deprived of images will proceed to attempting abductions in real life; BUT these same people have a fairly high chance of doing the same thing with or without pictures. The larger idea of stopping these pictures from going out is to stop the BUSINESSES of child porn. There are people that kidnap and rape children just because they get paid for it. That is one of the things the government is trying to stop. Take away the subscribers and even if you can never find the source, at least the businesses stop getting paid and hopefully do less abuse to children.
TOR is awesome... it allows people in countries that are locked down to communicate freely and see beyond the propaganda that their governments are forcing on them; unfortunately though, in a system with absolute anonymity there will be those sick individuals that post and share images that society as a whole knows are horrible. Some of those will never be traceable, and that is sad but also the entire point of the TOR project. I would like to be able to trace them and shut them down, but that same ability would allow oppressive governments to shut down whatever they didn't like when they see dissenting opinions.
One other point: I have read the thread so far and it seems that a large portion of the people are complaining that Japanese hentai are what people get busted for. While that may be true in rare occurrences like someone sharing gigabytes of CP manga... I've worked with law enforcement on CP cases, and they really don't care that much about comics. Yes it's part of the law, but at least in the US, the FBI normally goes after the people with REAL CP and not cartoons. And even then, they go after the people with true collections and not 1-2 images in their cache that they stumbled into while searching random sites. Please link me to a news article that proves me wrong if people are getting busted for single images, since I am only an individual person and could have missed something. And before someone says "they don't report on small time CP busts," yes they do. Every time I've been involved with a CP case, the media is all over it as soon as they find out. They love to put the 'bad guy gets busted' stories in the news.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson