Police Could Charge Data Center Operators In the Largest Child Porn Bust Ever

sarahnaomi sends this report from Motherboard: Canadian police say they've uncovered a massive online file sharing network for exploitative material that could involve up to 7,500 users in nearly 100 countries worldwide. But unlike past investigations into the distribution of child porn, which typically involve targeting suspects individually, police have instead seized over 1.2 petabytes of data ... from a data center responsible for storing the material, and may even attempt to lay criminal charges against its operators, too.

"What we are alleging is occurring is that there are individuals and organizations that are profiting from the storage and the exchange of child sexual exploitation material," Scott Tod, Deputy Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), told Motherboard at a conference late last month, after speaking to a crowd of defense specialists. "They store it and they provide a secure website that you can log into, much like people do with illegal online gaming sites."

Comments

Re:1.2 PETABYTES???

[gweihir]

Same here. If we assume 1GB/h, that would be 1.2 million hours of film, i.e. 140 years. That is a bit much to be credible. Seems to me some people are trying to abuse the victims even more in order to get more funding and more surveillance laws.

Just because they call it pedo doesn't mean it is

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a file sharing site, it almost certainly is 1.2 petabytes of regular porn, movies and music. But its encrypted so they don't know.

How do you force decryption? You play the "think of the children" card.

So they threaten the file host to get them to install some sort of webbugs and remove the decryption. Presumably they're threatening lots of the file hosts in a similar fashion.. "remove the encryption or well find one pedo file on there and claim its all pedo and bust you with screams of 'military grade hardware' and 1.2 TB drives.. blah blah blah.

What this means is that a file host refused to comply with their mass surveillance demands and so they're playing their pedo panic card. Perhaps the terrorist card will be played after that.

And people like you will do your marketing (and it is clearly marketing) for this. You even talk like one " If they were providing secure online storage to people whom they knew or should have known". Right.

Re:So what, the DC are gonna be gatekeepers now ?

[BitterOak]

"Ignorance is no excuse." ...ahem...even if there's no possible, reasonable, or legal way of ever knowing.

I believe the phrase is "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." It means that if you willfully commit an act, and that act happens to be illegal, then you are criminally liable even if you didn't know the act in question is illegal. That is to say, you don't have to have to form an intent to break the law, you merely have to form an intent (and act on that intent) to commit some action, and that action has to be illegal.

What's at issue here isn't ignorance of the law, but ignorance of the facts, and that, oftentimes, is an excuse. Although possession of child pornography is illegal in most jurisdictions, almost all the statues generally say something along the lines of "it is unlawful to knowingly possess...". There is a very practical reason for this: absent the word "knowingly", anyone could simply e-mail anyone else some images that are illegal, and the recipient could be criminally liable for possession even if they hit the delete key immediately upon seeing it. Defendants could e-mail such images to prosecutors and judges and said prosecutors and judges would be guilty of the same crime the defendant is accused of.

So it is very relevant here whether or not the owners, administrators, or employees of the data storage service knew that they were storing child pornography.

Re:Great cause, dumb ass cops

[complete loony]

To access the files, many of which are password protected, the cops developed password-cracking software in-house that is slowly sifting through the mountain of information.

So the real take away is that they have no idea how much of this 1.2 PB is actually child porn. What they have is a file sharing / web hosting service with 1.2 PB of data, provided by users, some of which they know is child porn.

Re:1.2 what?

[Shoten]

1.2 pedobytes.

According to the article, they seized more than 4 times more child porn than the Library of Congress has.

But unlike past investigations into the distribution of child porn, which typically involve targeting suspects individually, police have instead seized over 1.2 petabytes of data—more than four times the amount of data in the US Library of Congress

I'm kind of surprised that all congress could only manage to accumulate 300TB of child porn.

Actually, they seized 1.2 petabytes of data, not child porn.

The situation is that this is a data center. So that means SANs and virtual hosts. SANs mean that you don't just have a 1-to-1 relationship between a hard drive (or even a hard drive array) and a computer. And virtual hosting means you don't have a 1-to-1 relationship between a server and a website. So I'd bet my paycheck that they went in with a broad net, grabbing every SAN that they thought contained child porn. In essence, they grabbed the whole data center so that they can figure out just how much of it...and which of it...is actual evidence.