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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."
"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."
So they are guilty for providing secure online storage. Apparently you aren't allowed to supply secure storage, you have to snoop through your users content to make sure its not illegal... Also land lords much search all apartments, banks must search safety deposit boxes, storage rental owners must search their units.
Something isnt adding up. That's the kind of volume I would expect for an aspiring XHampster and a much wider legit audience, petabytes of child porn just doesn't seem possible. That's what, a couple of hundred gigabytes for each of the accused? Potentially hundreds of thousands of hours of video? Who the hell could have produced that much????
This sounds like BS to force datacentres to give backdoors to the feds.
Yes - and THAT is what is wrong with the cloud. Unless you are encrypting it independently before uploading, your stuff is going to be scanned for various purposes. All of those purposes are detrimental to your privacy. It's great that they took down a pedo ring - IF they really took down a pedo ring. But, they are going to use this as an excuse or reason to continue spying on all honest citizens.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I hate articles like this.
They say "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."
Uh... I'll translate this to, the files are all protected with easy to remember, dictionary based passwords and they wrote a script which uses a rainbow list to try each one which is why it's so damn slow.
When you read shit statements made by whoever provided the interview to whoever actually performed it and realize they're both clueless, it becomes really hard to take the rest of the article seriously. It's like when you read a CV from a fry boy at McDonalds who writes "Food preparation technician", you just can't expect everything else to be embellished in order to sound more important.
Another example of "STUPID!!!" is :
"The volume of information is so expansive that in order to store and analyze the data safely and securely, police had to purchase storage hardware similar to what was used by Canadian military forces in Afghanistan."
Computer crimes forensics has to be handled very carefully. If you alter the data, it's inadmissible in most courts as it's tampering with evidence. The FBI paid millions to write data handling procedures following the public beating they took on the gloves in the OJ case. So, it's important to have a backup and some way to read the data without altering it... or they need to keep a copy.
A 1.2 petabyte SAN can be done in 16U for analysis using 6TB drives and Cisco 3160 servers. For unaltered storage, there are tape drives. They're slow and they're inefficient, but they're an accepted medium for evidence.
So, making dumb ass statements like "we needed 1.2TB of hard drives and a workstation" as making some idiotic remark like how they've gone war zone grade was just LAME!
Nailing the data center is a great idea EXCEPT!!! they probably run almost all that crap through Tor and use BitCoin now. So, if there is actually any real traceable information to be had, they just passed up their best opportunity to planting a proper honeypot and actually busting the people using the site. They could have put "dating sites" like "find an anonymous live show in your area" and the pervs who are using telephones can provide their locations via GPS. Then they can track and bust them.
Instead, they've just done what the police have found so successful with the Pirate Bay and the site will be moved somewhere else next week or month and they won't have a clue what to do about it.
Let's be honest, these fool cops probably just secured the safety of the pedophiles for a while longer.