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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.

12 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Charged /= Guilty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    He pled guilty a couple of weeks ago.

  2. Re:Think of the children! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except their plan is basically grab everyones private information and make it public and hope that they only find the pedos.

  3. Re:Errors by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...but what will happen if Anonymous post something wrong about someone?

    If? No...when.

  4. Re:Think of the children! by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Conflicted : all for it yet scares the crop out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Who are you? I'm bat- er, ANON! by TiggertheMad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --

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    1. Re:Who are you? I'm bat- er, ANON! by sharknado · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Pedophiles are like Nazis

      You have that backwards. Pedophiles are the group that society wants to watch burn. The group that nobody will cry for as they are marched to the stake, or the concentration camp, or the guillotine. The group that politicians use as moral grounds for passing laws based on hate and vigilantism instead of justice. It's a slippery slope my friends.

    2. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Re:I Don't Buy It by davidwr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  9. Re:Think of the children! by nbauman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  10. Re:Think of the children! by rogoshen1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.