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Anonymous Asks Activists To Fight Pedophiles In 'Operation Deatheaters'

HughPickens.com writes The Independent reports that hacktivist group Anonymous, in a project named Operation DeathEaters, is calling for help in its fight against international pedophile networks, or what it calls the "paedosadist industry" and has issued a video instructing activists on how they can aid in the operation. The Anonymous project is intended to break what it says is a conspiracy of silence among sympathetic politicians, police and mainstream media to downplay the full extent of the online child sex industry. "The premise behind OpDeathEaters is to expose high level complicity, obstruction of justice and cover-up in the paedo-sadist industry in order to show the need for independent inquiries," says Heather Marsh, an online activist who is helping to co-ordinate the operation and describes herself as an "old friend" of Anonymous. The Anonymous database, which will be hosted on the GitHub online repository, promises to collate cases from all around the world, cross-referencing connections within sub-groups including the police, armed forces, schoolteachers, politicians, media, academics and religious organisations. The database's ultimate purpose has yet to be fully determined, but in the first instance the group says it wants to shut down the child-sex industry by "dismantling the power structure which held it there" and by "educating to create a cultural change".

The group is calling on volunteers to help with the ongoing work, which has been divided into three steps. The first is about collecting "all the factual information," second is to "share that information as widely as possible," and the third step is "to set up an independent, internationally linked, inquiry into all the areas which do not appear to have been investigated properly." Activists point to the muted media coverage given to a recent case in Washington DC in which Michael Centanni, a senior Republican fundraiser, was charged with child sex offences after investigators traced transmissions of child pornography to his computers in his basement. The case was not covered by The Washington Post or the New York Times, and was only picked up by a local NBC affiliate state and The Washington Examiner, a small conservative paper in the city. According to the court filings, Centanni was found in possession of 3,000 images, many apparently filmed in his own bedroom, including one showing a man raping a five-year-old girl who cries "no" and "mommy" while the man says "good baby" and "stop crying," according to one filing.

8 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. Think of the children! by Slick_W1lly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are many things Anonymous does which are morally dubious. But, I have to say, I can't really take issue with this vigilantism.

    After all "think of the children!". But uh.. actually, don't. It's kinda disturbing. Or do.. since, it's disturbing, and one shouldn't bury one's head in the sand because.. it's hard to think about.

    1. Re:Think of the children! by MikeBabcock · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Except that you've given every one of these people a free pass if you hack their computers because the court can no longer prove the data was there to begin with and not just planted.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    2. Re:Think of the children! by ultranova · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The problem is with the underlying assumption that there is some kind of conspiracy.

      There probably is. Not the purposefully coordinated kind where everyone meets in a dark room somewhere to plot their actions, but the kind where everyone sharing fundamentally rotten values leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour. For examples of this, look at Catholic Church's recent scandals; but it's hardly the only organization that sets the mask of respectability above the wellbeing of mere children.

      People are trained to pretend they are helpless against systemic injustices from the day they're born. It's what allows those injustices to continue existing. If a child molester takes advantage of this trained response to look the other way, for example if the local cops ignore what "respected" members of their community do with their children, it's a matter of semantics whether that should be counted as a conspiracy or not.

      In any case, there's going to be a lot of pain to go around as this culture of silence runs headfirst into the Information Age, becomes effectively defunct, and forces people to see what's been all around them all this time, whether they want to or not. The world will be better for it, though.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    3. Re:Think of the children! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The problem is with the underlying assumption that there is some kind of conspiracy.

      There probably is. Not the purposefully coordinated kind where everyone meets in a dark room...

      Indifference versus conspiracy.

      Depending how you count, something like 20,000 children (under 5) die of poverty every day. And there are far more people trained up to do science (science PhDs) than available jobs. They could be finding cures for cancer but instead their talent and education are wasted.

      ...forces people to see what's been all around them all this time, whether they want to or not.

      The people who control the world's economy are certainly aware of poverty and disease. But they would prefer to have the world's economy produce frivolous luxury items.

    4. Re: Think of the children! by DasDad · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You seem to forget, that your self-righteousness collides with logic at one crucial point: Abuse in the Catholic church DID come out, and police have arrested plenty of "respected" pedophiles, like the Republican operative mentioned in this very thread.

  2. Anonymous is asking to breach National Security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    There were multiple scandals in which government officials from various countries and organizations have been found to be using and abusing their power and abusing children. Here are the few pedophilia scandals:

    United Nations - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1538476/UN-staff-accused-of-raping-children-in-Sudan.html
    Vatican http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/vatican-sex-abuse-scandal/
    Prince Andrews - recent event
    UK politicians https://www.intellihub.com/10-uk-politicians-investigated-massive-pedophilia-ring/
    Latvia - http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2000/2/article/top-latvian-officials-linked-to-pedophile-scandal/266539.html
    German Green party

    The problem is that if someone will make a serious progress... is it likely that he/she will be called pedophile himself/herself? Will it require for the activists to keep samples of the problematic photos?

  3. Re:idiotic by gophther · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It speaks volumes that you are lumping organized pedophile rings that very much exist and destroy the lives of thousands of children, with "think of the children" idiots who don't want sex scenes in PG films.

  4. Re:Who are you? I'm bat- er, ANON! by cheetah_spottycat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, it's not. The slippery slope is where the legal definition got extended so much beyond the clinical definition that it no longer makes any sense by any rational criteria in an alarming number of cases it is applied to. Before we go out on the street and call for a witch hunt, the common definition of "pedophilia" needs to be reformed, so that it again means actual child abuse, and neither "12 year old boys discover their sexuality like everyone else did during puperty" nor "17 year old girlfriend sends naughty pictures to 18 year old boyfriend" or any completely normal, consensual and non-threatening behaviour in between. Free those resources to fight actual child abuse, and we don't need self-appointed trigger happy internet superheroes with torches and pitchforks who think who need to take the law into their own hands.