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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."
1.2 pedobytes.
Not stupid. Just clickbait.
If you actually read the article, it says "charges will likely hinge on the degree to which employees knew such activity was taking place." Nobody is going to get charged unless there's evidence that they knew they were hosting child porn and did nothing about it.
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.
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.