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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.
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.
I know nothing about the particular case that they are referring to. But the fact that it wasn't widely reported is actually a good thing. Being charged is not the same as being convicted. There are too many cases of people being tried in the media and having their lives destroyed when they actually haven't done anything wrong.
Given people are so fucking stupid they will attack paediatricians thinking they are paedophiles just sums up the wider mobs inability to effectively deal with the information.
Except their plan is basically grab everyones private information and make it public and hope that they only find the pedos.
...but what will happen if Anonymous post something wrong about someone?
If? No...when.
I'm sure that they have the best of intentions. The problem is with the underlying assumption that there is some kind of conspiracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenatchee_child_abuse_prosecutions
Once you accept that there is a conspiracy, there is no end to it.
If they were just interested in cataloguing the various cases then that could be done by scripts and Google news. If something is not getting media exposure then it is more likely to be because of lazy "journalists" than because someone is trying to bury the story.
Given that its most likely that "Anonymous" at this point is mostly government agents now, its going to be real intresting to see who they finger as pedophiles, and if any of these people are actually guilty.
Not all pedophiles act on their urges. The ones that realize their urges cannot be acted upon and thus live their lives suffering with such an affliction should be commended, not referred to as "scum" just because of an attraction they probably wish they didn't have.
This also looks a lot like a slightly unpopular kid going and beating up the most unpopular kid to make everyone else like them more.
Pedophiles are like Nazis: They are widely assumed to be completely and thoroughly evil and thus worthless human beings. If you are going to pick a group to engage in vigilante activity against this is just about the perfect one, because who is going to going to stand up and say 'that's not right'. Unlike other extremely unpopular groups like Human traffickers or actual no-Nazis, pedophiles are not generally gun toting violent lunatics, so the risk of being murdered in retaliation is pretty low.
If you want to break the law to try to uphold the law, this is a logical choice, I guess.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Suspected != guilty and if they go around publicizing suspects or even people who the police have named as suspects or "persons of interest" who turn out to be innocent, it will hurt Anonymous's own reputation big-time.
What they - and everyone else - can and should do is make sure that if you do run across child porn or links to what you think is child porn, you immediately report it to all relevant authorities and that if the authorities seem to be ignoring a case, that all relevant news outlets are notified. If the news outlets seem to be participating in a cover up, notify other news outlets, but be careful: What looks like a "news outlet conspiracy of silence" may be because the FBI is in the middle of a sting and the feds have asked the news outlets to keep quiet until the trap is sprung. If Anonymous's well-meaning attempts to bring things into the open result in the sting being aborted or going bust, well, that would be bad.
On a side-note:
* Do not go "looking for" child porn - you could wind up being charged and convicted yourself. If you are wondering what it's like, my best educated guess is it is like looking at images of concentration-camp children: 1) the underlying event that happened to land on camera haunts the person in the photograph for his or her life, 2) the image itself is likely to be so stomach-churning that it will haunt you for a long time, and even if it doesn't, 3) the knowledge of what happened to that child should haunt you for a long long time (if it doesn't, either you have grown jaded and I'm sad for you, or you need to talk to someone because your conscience may be less than that of the average adult's and this diminished conscience may lead you to hurt someone without realizing it and/or without caring)
* If you routinely do things in your fight against child-porn that put you at a higher risk of running across it, as some of these Anonymous guys likely are, take technical steps to reduce your risk (use a text-only browser, for instance), and have a lawyer on retainer. Ask your lawyer what steps you need to take so when the police do come knocking it's painfully obvious to the police, the jury, and to everyone else that you are not intending to actually download or possess the stuff but sometimes it gets through your technical barriers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Reddit was crowd sourcing surveillance and amateur photos taken from the bombing scene. They latched onto one person and started a witch hunt. Turns out the guy had nothing to do with it but now he had a million internet neckbeards and other crazies calling for his head.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Going to cause a lot of collateral damage to start doxxing people who may or may not be pedobears. It may also be used for vindictive purposes.
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.
No one is sympathetic to pedophiles.
I guess that depends on what you mean by sympathetic and what you mean by pedophile.
I assume you meant "child molester" not pedophile. Someone else has in another sub-thread already said that pedophiles who control their urges should be commended not called scum.
As for child molesters:
Anyone who due to biology or upbringing (e.g. being brainwashed to enjoy sex while a child themselves) that lets them enjoy having sex with kids or young teens and who due to biology or upbringing lacks the self control to keep away from the insides of kids' pants deserves prison (or a psych lockup if legally insane), in- and (if not a life sentence) post-prison mental-health care, and, yes, sympathy.
Why sympathy? You can't help your biology. You can't help your up-bringing. You CAN and MUST make your own choices as an adult, but if you are facing life with "two strikes against you," you do deserve and have my sympathy. But if I'm your juror that sympathy won't reduce your punishment.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There probably is.
The real conspiracy, if one exists at all, is when freedom-hating scumbags conspire together to rile up with public with claims that we need to stop the pedophiles ("child molester" is a better term) and get rid of all child porn, just so they can push through laws which violate our constitution, our freedoms, and our privacy.
How do you know their "evidence" isn't fabricated?
How do you know you aren't the target when your wife wants to divorce you, get all your stuff, and take revenge on you?
But it's not Innocent until Proven Guilty anymore. It's not even Guilty until Proven Innocent.
Current climate is: Guilty until we can no longer libel you as guilty, but 'it probably could have happened anyway'. Just check out the turn-around the media and people did after that fraternity thing.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/...
Self-styled vigilantes attacked the home of a hospital paediatrician after apparently confusing her professional title with the word "paedophile", it emerged yesterday.
Dr Yvette Cloete, a specialist registrar in paediatric medicine at the Royal Gwent hospital in Newport, was forced to flee her house after vandals daubed it with graffiti in the middle of the night.
The word "paedo" was written across the front porch and door of the house she shared with her brother in the village of St Brides, south Wales.
Gwent police confirmed that the attack last Friday night was prompted by a confusion over the words "paedophile" and "paediatrician".
Here's the problem though. While pedo's make for an abhorrent target, and due process just seems 'too good for them' -- where does the mob mentality end? We have a criminal justice system in civilized societies for a reason (inb4 anti-american snark).
If the angry mob decided tomorrow that some belief or group membership was wrong, should they be allowed to take matters into their own hands? Pretend for a moment that these were jaywalkers or people with overdue library books.
Lady Justice is not Heimdall or Janus, for a very good reason.
Is there any evidence for that? No. Is there any evidence that enforcement against viewers is effective? No.
Yes, indeed we are. You fabricate "facts" to support an encroachment of a surveillance state and totalitarian government. Typical for you.
RTFA, they are collecting official case information, not internet rumors. Don't worry about your nonexistent wife or girlfriend.
Oh, that's reassuring. They're collecting official unverified accusations, from reliable sources like anonymous reporting lines.
It happened once. 15 years ago. Stop recycling it.
True. But if you read the link, it also happened during public hysteria worked up over a campaign to "name and shame" sex offenders in the past. TFA here is proposing to do this on a much grander scale. Therefore it's a pretty relevant example of the kinds of things that public hysteria over this issue can do if it's not handled well.
Going to cause a lot of collateral damage to start doxxing people who may or may not be pedobears
Call me when anonymous starts busting down doors without warning at 3 AM and kills occupants. Call me when they snag people rolling through town who just took out cash to buy a car, and confiscate the money. Call me when they drag people through the court for years, ruining their good name with no real conviction. Call me when they just shoot you on the street even though you're un-armed.
Those are all things the "real cops" have been doing. When the authorities aren't doing their job, alternatives start to look better.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?