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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.
FBI SMASH TOR!
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.
Maybe it's a two-sentence headline...
"FBI Hunt for Child Porn. FBI Thwarted by TOR"
Because innocence kids were raped to make it you sick fuck. You've got to be fucking trolling.
Now the great old U.S. Government is going to use this as fuel to show that privacy and anonymity needs to go away on the internet, instead of continuing to work to find these people and prosecute them.
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.
This is why we can't have nice things. I would LOVE to support democracy locally and internationally by running a Tor node, but I would never run one as long as the risk existed that I'd be questioned about kiddie porn. I know I'm innocent, I could be PROVEN innocent, but anyone who ever heard would always think I was guilty. It's just not worth it to me. It's Kryptonite to free speech.
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
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.
innocence kids were raped to make it
Not under some countries' definitions of child pornography, which include drawings produced entirely without the involvement of children.
Criminals are going to use it. No matter what. Even no matter what it is, really.
If you want to decrease the proportion of illegal to legal users of Tor, there's two ways. One, reduce the number of illegal users. This is impossible. Second, you could increase the number of legal users. If half the country is using Tor for everyday browsing, the Feds literally will not be able to keep up - they can't interrogate everyone.
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!
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
We need to get the child rape off the internet and back in the church where it belongs.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
completely defeating the purpose of the entire system, as no one will use tor again.... who are you going to trust with the keys to that backdoor?
my sig pwns your sig
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.
It's just bit. There is no difference to the network between an image of child porn and a manifesto to free Tibet.
If you can find the source of one you can find the source of the other.
So the "problem" is actually a case of "working as designed".
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.)
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.
While the are both horrible, would you rather find out that your child was molested, or find their dead body on your front yard? No, murder is worse.
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.
And calling "manga" illegal is about as misleadingly stupid as calling "books" or "movies" illegal just because it's possible to create child pornography in the medium. These aren't subtle distinctions, if you can't tell the difference between a comic book and child porn you are a pretty twisted person.
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.
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.
If it is a supply and demand issue, then maybe we should let the free market sort it out.
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
The vast majority of CP is free. This isn't an economic problem.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
The hard part is figuring out a way to generate a public-private key pair without any single computer or individual ever having the entire private key during the keygen process. I will leave that as an exercise for the crypto researchers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7_zMdNRAmo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8APlx9btTn8
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Is absolute tyrannical control over communications really the only alternative to pure unstoppable anonymity?
Maybe I'll take C), where the government obtains valid, reasonable, limited, warrants for the monitoring of communications, carries out those warrants, and finds the bad guys.
I can't believe this got modded "insightful"... methinks the mods (and the parent) need to read up on the logical fallacy called the False Dilemma.
Child abuse is special because it occurs when a child's personality and identity is developing. Severe mental disorders often occur due to child abuse, especially repeated child abuse. One example is borderline personality disorder which occurs more often among children who are repeatedly raped.
Severe mental disorders don't always occur, but the fact the the worst types of mental disorders occur to child abuse victims makes it a special type of crime. It elevates it above crimes like assault and rape (which also has severe mental health impacts). The psychological trauma involved in child abuse will often make a normal life and even transient moments of happiness impossible for the survivor. Some people consider this a fate worse than death (especially for the major disorders like BPD, CPTSD, and dissociative identity disorder). The suicide rates of child abuse survivors are astronomical--molestation will often lead to the death of the abused child, but only after years and years of a tortured existence and then by their own hands.
I agree with you completely
But why do you think your observations have any relevancy to the production and consumption of CHILD pornography?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Having known more than one abuse survivor that tried to kill themself as a result of the PTSD, and one that did succeed...
Yeah -- there are worse crimes. There's crimes that destroy the very fucking mind and sanity of the person leaving only the barest shell of a human being in their body.
There's things that happened to them that left at least two women lying awake at night, shrieking in raw terror for hours. That had them burst into panicked tears if they saw a man with his fly unzipped.
I know they /wanted/ death.
So fuck your analysis about grandstanding and irrational. For ten to fifteen years of their lives they would happily have chosen death. It might not always be worse -- but even if you asked them today, I'm pretty sure the wish they'd succeeded in ending their own lives just to escape the memories and issues they caused.
"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."
Wow! I'm going to call the FBI right away and suggest they try and find out who and where those kids are so they can be rescued! I'm sure they haven't already thought of that one!
Yeah, I'm sure it's a piece of cake tracking down the precise identity of some random abused youth locked in a completely generic concrete basement. There are only millions upon millions of generic concrete basements out there in the world.
Do you still wish to die? If so, do you think everyone else feels that way? I think the problem with murder is that the person is simply gone, and there is absolutely no way they can recover from that (as in, live anything like a normal life in any way).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
Surveillance thwarted? Sounds like TOR is functioning exactly as it should.
If there's any actual "problem" here, that problem is the FBI.
Liberty in your lifetime
There was child porn and sexual exploitation of children way before the Internet came around. I'll be happy to see it removed from the Internet, just so my kids don't run into it, but not for a second do I believe that it does anything significant to reduce demand or actual harm to children. Unfortunately people with these needs will simply turn elsewhere. Directly to children if they must.
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?
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.
Cartoon depictions of child sexual activity (commonly found in manga)
Bullshit. Your local Barnes & Noble is filled with manga volumes completely bereft of child porn.
It'd be just as (in)accurate to say, "Graphic depictions of sexual abuse (commonly found in Spanish literature)" or "Vivid roleplaying of homosexual violence (commonly found in sports)."
DATABASE WOW WOW
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.
http://www.japanator.com/post.phtml?pk=8753
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/06/27/u-s-citizen-arrested-in-canada-for-manga-on-laptop-faces-minim/
And this was a few seconds on Google. It happens.
...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.
Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
Yes, they're guilty by association! They must be part of that group!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
but it does help discourage it.
I don't believe the fact that it might help discourage it warrants prosecuting the people who didn't even rape anyone over maybes (maybe they encouraged more child porn to be made). I think it's just a waste of time.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
For example, maybe if people watch cp enough they will want to try it out with their own kids or other children.
I think that's about as valid as saying that someone who watches pornography will go off and rape someone simply because they don't have anyone to have sex with. I haven't seen any evidence (which I believe is incredibly important) to support such a thing.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I was sexually abused as a child. I wish I had been killed instead.
If you *ACTUALLY* wished for this then you would have offed yourself shortly after. The fact is that people throw the words "I wish I'd been killed instead" around so much that it actually has no meaning anymore. The only people who really wish this cease to live.
So why are you still alive?
I'm making some assumptions here. For one you're on the internet browsing slashdot, your spelling and grammar are good so it looks like you've gotten to be a functioning member of society. Why do that if you would rather have been killed?
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.
Of course, I was 28 at the time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You're posting links to videos (without including any description of what's in the video) in the comments to a child porn story???
As has been pointed out above, if one of them happens to be kiddie porn, everyone who clicks on it suddenly become a sex offender (at least in the US) through no fault of their own. Maybe that was your point, i don't know.
"Vivid roleplaying of homosexual violence (commonly found in sports)."
Don't complain.
At least playing rugby keeps them off our streets and out of our zoos.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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?
You're posting links to videos (without including any description of what's in the video) in the comments to a child porn story???
As has been pointed out above, if one of them happens to be kiddie porn, everyone who clicks on it suddenly become a sex offender (at least in the US) through no fault of their own. Maybe that was your point, i don't know.
A healthy dose of paranoia is good and all, but you're far more likely to run into risque material on Channel 4 than youtube.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
I guess since the thinkofthechildren crowd became worse.
Simple egoism. NAMBLA won't affect me, the thinkofthechildren crowd might. We're at the point where you could go to jail if some pervert judge gets a boner over your kid's pics that you thought were innocent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
A good friend of mine is serving 180 months for child pornography. Did he produce it? Sell it? Rape children? No. He ran an IRC fileserver and it was uploaded by a user. His upload directory was accessible, which is admittedly an idiotic thing to do. Some FBI agent across the country found it on his server and started the ball rolling. Eventually his house was stormed by agents and all computer equipment seized. He had deleted the files long before this point, but of course they were easily recovered.
He was charged with four (or five? Been a few years) offenses, all of which carried a sentencing recommendation of five years. All but one that is -- advertising. This charge was included as the behavior of an IRC file server (i.e. "Type !hotxxxpics to access my server") is considered by the law as advertising. The majority of the charges violate 18 USC 2252A which deals with possession. The advertisement charge violates 18 USC 2251 which deals mostly with creating and selling. Everything would've been covered with a five year sentence, but the advertisement pushed it to fifteen. The feds have been tossing this advertisement charge in wherever they can get away with it to raise the mandatory sentence. Google it. Or don't, as you'll likely be red flagged by some FBI drone.
All court proceedings occurred in the state where the FBI office is located despite the fact that there is a federal courthouse in a town less than an hour from here. A request for change of venue was denied. Your tax dollars paid to buy him bus tickets across the country, food and lodging while he was there, and bus tickets back. Upon the urging of his federal public defender, he eventually plead guilty. As noted by his PD, the 180 month sentence is higher than the sentence recommendation for voluntary manslaughter or conspiracy to commit murder.
This friend is a decent person, father of three, whose life has been functionally ruined. He left his children in elementary school, and will be released as they finish college. He did something ridiculously stupid and will pay for it for the rest of his life as he is subject to "lifetime supervised release." He's met murderers and rapists who are serving shorter sentences. My suggestion was to plead to possession, as, well, he was possessing it, but to fight this advertisement shit tooth and nail. His PD made it clear that he was absolutely not interested in doing so as it was not likely to work and he'd end up with a longer sentence than he would by pleading guilty to all of it. Your tax dollars will be paying for his incarceration for fifteen years because some jackass uploaded CP to his file server and some FBI agent noticed it. Apparently others have already tried (and failed) claiming an eighth amendment violation. This is widespread and completely out of control.
Veered somewhat off topic ... sorry ... someone mentions how CP is prosecuted and I get a little pissed. Thanks for letting me vent.
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
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
Drugs are also illegal. And unlike CP, the demand for which is (at least to my knowledge) driven by the sex drive, the most powerful drive in humans aside of survival (and maybe even surpassing that), the demand for drugs is artificially created, by druggies craving it due to trying it and later getting hooked on it. I kinda doubt that pedos grow up as completely "normal" people, then decide to take a look at CP and suddenly turn into pedos. Knowing my own sex life I can say that I knew pretty early in my development where I'm heading. It's nothing I found out over night when looking at porn for the first time and going "hey, I should try that, it looks cool".
So we have a "war on drugs", substances that people have to choose to want, and we fail miserably at winning on that front. Drugs are everywhere. Even in the most tightly regulated and surveyed of places, namely prisons, drugs are easy to get.
Now, if we even fail at that where people have to willfully go out and start with the crap, how does anyone think we're going to be able to control stuff that is probably innate in the people who want it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The first thing they would do is leak it sixteen different ways due to somebody using it in a high profile situation to leverage a promotion.
You are talking about a group that still uses "lie detectors" FFS because they still don't want to admit they were scammed by the writer of a comic book and Hoover taking kickbacks. They are all about appearance and politics with law enforcement as a very distant second.
In short, he would have probably served a shorter time if he actually was a pedo who raped and killed his own kids without taking pictures of it.
This would be ridiculous if it wasn't so sick.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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).
Then why not ban all violent art? Why not ban the Bible while we're at it. It describes a guy being nailed to a cross after all. Let's not give people ideas.
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.
Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
I'm a big fan of Marlon Brando
So, just for argument's sake... when I was 14 I video-taped myself masturbating on camera. 12 years later, tools came out that let me convert the video to an MPG. 12 years after THAT, is today. I'm an adult, who may or may not possess images of a sexual nature involving a minor (me). Tell me who is harmed if I decide to share them.
In most places in the US psychiatrists are REQUIRED by law to report any people that come to them for help with pedophilia,
It is really sad to hear that.
In case of a psychiatrist, they should have a confidentiality requirement like e.g. medical staff and clergymen have too: whatever you say to those people (when in function at least) they must keep confidential, even a judge can not overrule that. For that is what allows them to fulfil their duties, the person seeking help must be sure that what he says in the psychiatrist's clinic stays in the clinic.
Of course there is always the ethical issue that when you learn about a crime someone committed, should you report it or not. And I'm glad that there is still the confidentiality, which tells these people that they can not, and are not expected to, reveal criminals.
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.
This is really a fill-in-the-blank story. You could easily drop in "malware" or "criminals" or the "evil" empire of your choice and that would easily reboot this conversation. Tor is going to protect whoever uses it.
Years ago a company I worked for ad a top site listing system that ended up being used by CP site owners to allow their customers to find their sites even as they changed hosting/domains and I got an eyeful that I'm never going to get out of my head.
The images weren't anywhere near puberty, in fact, they were 3,4 and 5 year old children being raped by adults. I was going to mod this whole thread down but then I realized that normally we only hear about the cases where the law does something questionable rather than what it is supposed to do. I know Canada has a CP task force and I know they spend most of their time investigating crimes against children under the age of 10 and the police use the images to find the children that are still being harmed.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
Most countries struggle very hard to get an 80% attendance rate in national elections, you think you can get that for any random piece of traffic? I'm guessing that system would either be stuffed with "can't be arsed" nodes that'll lead to an automatic rejection and if you could only actual votes then "information wants to be free" idealists that'll reject anything or "think of the children" moralists that'll approve anything. Besides in a P2P system who's going to guarantee the backdoor information has been properly added and could be decrypted? You obviously can't trust the peer itself, and you won't know until you actually try...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...everyone walk instead?
Attaching TOR to child porn or any other unethical or illegal activity is no different than doing the same with cars. So how come the FBI isn't claiming FORD is a vehicle of illegal drugs? Why don;t they attach the internet to lying politicians?
So we'll soon see a lot of dead and burned kids?
Being the statistician and cold hearted bastard that I am, I'd guess the logical thing to do when you rape a child is to kill and burn it if, and only if, the sentence is the same for rape and murder. The chance of the kid yelling "that's the guy" is still much higher than you finding anything useful in a heap of cremated bones.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
If they don't care about comics, why are the comics illegal. There is no harm in sharing even gigabytes of hentai images and the law that allows busting people for possesing/sharing virtual child porn is clearly bad. And yes, there are people who had problems just for small amount of hentai images, see here: http://www.animenation.net/blog/2010/08/02/sweden-fines-translator-for-having-hentai-images/ (arrested for one scanlation) or here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.175488-Hentai-Collector-Sentenced-to-Jail-Over-Obscene-Material?page=1 (arrested for six books)
It's history repeating itself again. We saw similar nonsense when Lolita from Nabokov or Howl from Gingsberg were initialy published. How many people will need to be busted for lawmakers to get the the idea that the illegality of something must be based on it's level of social dangerousness and not on some false and ever-changing morality? The proponents of those bans often say that hentai/Howl/Lolita/whatever has no artistic value and is obscene, so it should be illegal, but who are they to judge the artistic value of something? And even if something realy has no artistic value, is it enough to justify its ilegality if it is otherwise harmless? I don't think so.
I agree with the rest of your post (creation and sharing of child porn involving real children should be prosecuted, maybe with some exceptions to cover cases like 17 years old partners e-mailing nude images of themself to each other).
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/scjudgments/2008nswsc.nsf/6ccf7431c546464bca2570e6001a45d2/ef4625a9db3003f1ca25751500066d48?OpenDocument
TLDR-
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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."
Well yeah, because fuck zombies.
and we need to arrest people based on maybes
While I generally agree with your point I do think there are times when punishing people who have not actually harmed anyone else yet is right. The most obvious example is drink driving. Even if that person doesn't hit someone it is so irresponsible and dangerous we choose not to allow it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"I now firmly believe it should be a offence to knowingly posses what the GP described (images of pre-pubecent child rape, or for that matter any rape). Yes that opinion puts a limit on free speech but it does not have to limit the visual and theatrical arts. Yes it's debatable if jacking off to CP is harmful/helpful to society, but contrary to popular opinion around here we do in fact live in a democracy and the vast majority of the population (including me) think prosecuting these people who jack off to rape videos is The RightThingToDo(TM), like me they are not going to change their minds just because someone, somewhere, (allegedly) abuses the justice system once in a blue moon*."
A couple of things....
First, I feel bad for pedophiles. I didn't used to really, in fact I never really thought about it until I was hanging out with some friends and ended up watching that train wreck "to catch a predator". The biggest alcoholic in the group had one of those clarity moments and said "boy, for all my bad addictions, I am so glad I don't have that desire" (though, admittedly I have seen them claim people on that show were going to meet "kids" as old as 16, which, is getting into those fuzzy areas...shit 16 is legal here...)
You know...I am glad I don't either. Yes, as much as I want to be against law in all cases, its good to stop the rape of children, and dealing with the people who do that is a good thing, and justified. The ones who just jack off to kids... yah maybe they are a danger and need to be dealt with too but... there is a difference in action and, arn't these people sick? It seems like, prison isn't exactly the right answer, though, leaving them be is probably not a good idea either.
Now that said... "but contrary to popular opinion around here we do in fact live in a democracy and the vast majority of the population (including me) think prosecuting these people who jack off to rape videos is The RightThingToDo(TM)"
No, its a constitutional democracy, and actually a republic. The point of a constitution is that majority opinion is great for many things but, is not the right way to decide civil rights, because it really means not having them. It takes a lot more than majority opinion to take those away, or it was supposed to. Turns out the system can be pretty well gamed when few understand and less care.... and has been.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers which probably is worth far more than money
I think you are seriously overestimating how valuable it is for a child abuser to know that there are people who like watching what he is doing. Producing and distributing child sex abuse imagery is one of the riskiest things a person can do -- almost no countries would hesitate to imprison people for it, and the jail sentences are often long or indefinite. Emotional validation is nowhere near sufficient to justify taking such risks; money or some other form of trade (e.g. one abuser trading new pictures with another) is basically a necessity.
Sure, there is the occasional idiot who produces child abuse images for the reason you stated; such people are sometimes caught when the police are going after low-hanging fruit i.e. people whose only crime is possession of child abuse images. The really dangerous people are the ones who are not so stupid, the ones who take real precautions and who demand some form of payment for their images/videos. My understanding is that most of the child abuse imagery out there today was produced by that second category, by the people who are turning it into an enterprise of sorts. Those were the sort of people involved with Dreamboard (for those who do not remember, this was a truly depraved website for trading images of child abuse that was recently taken down), the sort involved with Yardbird (a group that used anonymous remailers and Usenet, which had escaped notice by the police until one of their members was inadvertently arrested), the sort who run "modeling" agencies in Eastern Europe, and so forth.
The problem, of course, is that the sort of people I described above are not doing the sort of stupid things that allows the police to catch "low hanging fruit." These are not people who share their images on Kazaa (the FBI has an ongoing program to catch people who do), they are the sort of people who know how to mitigate and manage risk and how to use opsec to protect themselves. Catching them is a challenge, which is why it only happens rarely and only after years of investigative work.
Of course, law enforcement agencies need to keep up their arrest numbers and need to remind people that they are catching "pedophiles." Thus you see efforts to catch low-hanging fruit, e.g. honeypot websites, efforts to catch people who download sex abuse images from peer-to-peer networks, arrests for possession of such images. These efforts do little to combat the production of child abuse imagery, and only catch idiots and people who were either curious or who just wanted to satisfy some bizarre urge. People who produce child abuse imagery have no way to count how many people are sharing those images on peer to peer networks, so even if your point were valid, such efforts are pointless.
The original reason for making the possession of child abuse imagery illegal was the assumption (which at the time was valid) that anyone who possesses such imagery must have purchased it. That assumption is not valid in this century; I would be willing to be that the majority of people who possess child abuse imagery did not pay for it or in any way contribute to its production. We may find the images disturbing (and I would be suspicious of someone who does not), we may have difficulty understanding why anyone would want to masturbate to such imagery, we may not understand why people who collect and create detailed categories of such imagery, but we should not allow our disgust or our poor understanding of psychology lead us to assume that the low-hanging fruit represents a serious threat to children. There is a difference between someone with perverse fantasies and someone who is actually harming children.
Palm trees and 8
Naval Intelligence. But? Same smell, different orifice,
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I think where things go a bit astray is that authorities view child pornography almost exactly like they do the drug trade. You have producers, dealers, and users.
Producers of drugs and child pornography fill the same basic role: they create a product for which there is a demand.
Dealers are a little different. Drug dealers, of course, take money in exchange for the drugs. Child porn "dealers," on the other hand, would be those running websites, most of which are free. I think very few people are making any actual money from it.
Then you have the users/consumers. When it comes to drugs, users consume the drugs themselves (usually.) Since child porn has gone almost 100% digital, though, there is no "consumption" in the sense that a person uses up a finite product. People who view child porn can also share it (read: make copies) so they can also be "dealers."
Authorities try to go after all three tiers in the child porn market, just like they do with drugs, seemingly failing to realize that money is not a key factor in child porn the way it is with drugs. It makes the most sense to focus on the producers of child porn, and those who operate websites distributing it, rather than people who may have downloaded it. In other words: attack it the way copyright infringement is generally attacked, by going after those who make the infringement possible rather than trying to hunt down large numbers of individual infringers. (This is not meant to draw any kind of moral parallel between copyright infringement and child porn, nor between drug use and child porn, it's just about enforcement strategy.)
On the other hand, I can kind of see why they go after individual users: publicly embarrassing people either due to their drug use or taste for child porn could be seen as a significant deterrent. But then that's really nothing to do with any kind of justice, it's just a cynical use of the system to make people behave a certain way.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
The fucked up part is it's worse than you describe. If you're a pedophile, you can't even seek help; if you mention your desires to a counselor, it is immediately to be considered as though you have described a planned crime in detail and to be reported to police immediately following the session. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what happens after that.
So, if you have ever find yourself sexually attracted to a minor, you're kind of screwed. If you don't see anything wrong with it and you act on it, you're probably going away for that. If you do see something wrong with it and seek help, you're probably going away for that.
Prison is an eventuality for a pedophile. If you seek help, you will be reported and arrested; if you don't seek help, you will eventually act on it.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
A common tactic used by pedophiles is to trivialise the offense by broadening the definition until it becomes meaningless, for example the congressman who was caught sending sexually explicit texts to 14yo boys
That's not pedophilia. It's still wrong, but it's absolutely *not* pedophilia. Pedophilia is an attraction to pre-pubescent (or pre-pubescent-looking) children. If you're attracted to tits and shapely hips, you're not a pedophile. If you're attracted to fully functional penises, you're not a pedophile.
The reason I piss in the wind to point this out is that misusing the word 'pedophile' cheapens its meaning. Calling someone who has a relationship/flirts with teenagers a pedophile lumps them in with people who molest 4-year-olds, when reality is that the things are *completely different*.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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.
You said it yourself just now. The human survival trait is a strong one. People wish they were dead but don't actually take their life.
This further strengthens the GPs argument that murder is worse than rape.
a) You are fucking paranoid
b) You give your government too much credit. They can't get their act together on such simple issues, you think they are actually monitoring you specifically 24/7?
c) If you are convinced that you can get in troubles for clicking on a random link, move somewhere that doesn't suck.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?