Slashdot Mirror
FBI "Took Over World's Biggest Child Porn Website" (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Telegraph: The FBI took over the world biggest child pornography website in a sting operation intended to catch viewers of sexual images of children sometimes 'barely old enough for kindergarten', it has been revealed. The controversial operation ran for nearly two weeks last year, when the bureau took control of the Playpen website in an effort to weed out users who would normally be hidden because they accessed such sites through encrypted addresses. Agents have defended the dubious of ethics of a government agency running a child porn site by insisting there was no other way to catch offenders.
Do they mean Tor and such? Because if so, then how did they get addresses even when they were running it?
Also, why not just remove all the images so that the links show errors. You'd achieve the same end results but you wouldn't be hosting or DISTRIBUTING kiddie porn. Claim it was a drive failure or whatever.
Not to mention possibly being able to track the people who complained about the images being broken. Get them to use another, non-Tor, way to check when the images would be fixed.
It starts to go downhill when it is a crime to download or just view (which is pretty much the same thing) an underage pic on your computer (and let's not go into ludicrous things like underage cartoon characters who are also considered verbotten!).
The problem here is... just viewing the picture is creating a 'demand' for such material, and therefore a supply must be created, which exploits minors. I'm not really on board with the drawings of such things being forbidden as well, that seems like overkill to me, and drawings may supply the consumers of such materials that aren't exploitative of minors. It's an ugly nasty situation for sure.
Then they tell you the same thing is not a crime if you do it in order to catch other people doing it. So, is it a crime or isn't it? I don't know of another crime that it is OK to "perform" if you're "the good guy"...
I definitely have a problem with a honeypot situation involving child porn. I've already said in other posts, committing a crime to catch criminals is really in my opinion 'bad policing', and promoting 'do as I say, not as I do.' I also doubt the ability of such a honeypot (assuming it was TOR network site) being capable of revealing anyone's true identity. Though I think the other article said they were infecting the users of the site with some kind of malware/virus to help reveal their identities, which by the way, is also against the law. So double whammie here, hosting child porn and distributing malware.
Nasty can of worms. I definitely think kiddie porn is disgusting (though as I said, drawings of it are ok by me. Not interested, but at least there's no victims) but so is Law Enforcement breaking laws to catch criminals. Not sure which is worse, they're both pretty low in my view.
yeah the worst part is how they conduct the negotiations. I've seen plenty of cop shows where they officer is almost forceful in trying to talk people into buying drugs. I recall one where the guy changed his mind and he was hassled by the cop for 5 minutes as he tried to talk him back into buying it. There should be some sort of limit to what they can do such as if they say no they stop pushing the person into the crime. But instead that instance the man caved to the cop so he would stop hassling him and was arrested where had the cop just said "fine get the fuck out of here then" the guy wouldn't of committed a crime. Its all about the arrests not about actually upholding the laws
How many producers of child porn were caught in this "sting"?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The officers that distributed child pornography committed felonies. The government is not allowed to commit felonies in the pursuit of criminals. In fact with this knowledge in hand any attempt to prosecute anyone involved is under threat of having the evidence suppressed because of the felony.
This would be akin to officers selling drugs on the street and allowing everyone to drive off after purchasing in the hope that maybe they could catch a couple of them several weeks later. This would not be legal and the officers would be prosecuted for distribution of a controlled substance and sent to prison. All the FBI agents involved should be prosecuted for distribution of child pornography.
That is why entrapment is forbidden in a lot of countries in the world. It is tempting people who might otherwise never commit such a crime into commiting a crime. It is inventing/creating criminals and that is not a thing we as citizens should condone of our respective law enforcement agencies.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
It is not about pedophiles in slashdot, bloody idiot. It is about the erosions of our liberties. It is about CSI and TV series brainwashing us the police can do whatever it wants without respecting the constitution and upholding the law. It is about cunts like you not caring a single iota about the rights we gained in the last couple of centuries. It is about unlawful entrapment. It is about doing something morally wrong. It is about a morbid culture and society.
Cops are not allowed to rape people under any circumstances and with good reason. The whole argument against CP is that it victimizes those displayed again. Hence the FBI committed mass child-abuse in a very real sense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which ones? The ones who actually do the molesting or the ones who casually view it? Both need Mental Counseling but only one needs to be in Prison. Regardless of how awful it is, it is a Mental Disorder.
What's even more disturbing is Men and Women who Wax and Shave their parts to mimic prepubescent children. You are not kids anymore, grow up.
The problem, however, is deciding when it's actual abuse or not. If courts decided that on case by case instances, *without* automatic statutory rape principles which currently do not take a nuanced approach, I have no issue with it. However, many laws are currently written that *automatically* makes it an offence, the moment "minor" and "sex" comes together. This becomes very problematic, since minors are not sexual inactive until, at the very moment they turn 18, they suddenly and magically become sexually active. That's silly. That's not reality you're describing.
It has long been established that minors, even young kids, engage in some sexual behaviour, and that is just part of a natural behaviour while growing up. Our society has demonised this, and made laws that are so draconian, one gets situations as described by other posters, where a 15 year old takes a nude picture of herself, and gets convicted as a sex-offender who has created child-porn, and has to be registered as such for the next 25 years. That is crazy, period. Idem with youths who voluntarily have sexual acts with eachother; when caught, they often get crushed by society - especially in prude USA - and got labelled sex-offenders for the rest of their life, with all the dire consequences for their future life. And for what? For engaging in behaviour which is NOT abnormal, but is just part of growing up. And which, btw, the vast majority is doing to some degree long before they turn 18. It's just antithetic to how people actually live and behave, thus. And in most of these cases, there is no victim, in the sense as we normally understand it (and not as statutory rape defines it).
Luckily, at least in Europe, people begin to realise this, and the prudish USA-type of hysteria gets some counter. In many countries in the EU now, one starts to make exemptions in the law for minors that voluntarily engage in sexual acts with other minors (from around the same age). That's because one finally has realised that going the USA way is ridiculous, since the main goal is to protect kids against things they do not want (aka, actual abuse), not 'protect' kids by putting them in jail themselves for things that shouldn't have been criminalised in the first place.
I'm all for a more nuanced approach to it, like in the EU, for the simple reason USA laws are getting to a point where they are defeating their own purpose, and create massive damage to children itself.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Indeed, but that contradiction is the consequence of laws going awry. In some states, sexual 'offences' - even between minors, and even when voluntary - are deemed so grave, one can convict them as adults.
Which, as other posters already pointed out, begs the question:
If they are legally deemed to be able to be sentenced as an adult, why can't they be legally deemed to be allowed having sex as an adult in the first place?
It makes no sense.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Yes, a high school couple (at least one of whom is 17) sexting each other is definitely causing harm to innocent victims! After all, they are manufacturing, possessing, and distributing sexually explicit images of minors. Won't somebody think of the children?!?
The child porn laws are broken, very badly. There's no room in them for taking the actual situation into consideration. That's what happens when you laws that are written in absolutes, when the world is more complex than righteously angry legislators (and the fools who vote for them) can bother to take into consideration.
People making claims like "always causes harm to an innocent victim" without actually paying any attention to what qualifies as "childporn" in this country are part of the problem. Yes, this means you.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
If I have to choose between siding with child molesters or siding with a police state, I'm on the side of child molesters. Simple self interest.
Child molesters have no interest to bother me. The same cannot be said about a police state.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They do not commit murder in the performance of their duties.
When they commit murder the public gets upset, the city that hires them loses millions, they lose their jobs and sometimes (not often enough) they go to jail.
The situation actually analogous to your situation is if the police murdered a person when told to while undercover. That would be murder.
Police in large scale undercover operations are allowed to consume drugs (they have to report it as soon as possible and get treatment after the undercover operation is over). Vice police are allowed to solicit prostitution. Normal police are not allowed to consume drugs or solicit prostitution. No police are allowed to murder people.
Police are allowed to shoot suspects if they fear for their safety or if the criminal poses a danger to the public.
That's why you see the police saying that the 16 year old kid with a 4" blade who was walking away from them that they shot a full clip into the kid's back made them fear for their safety. Or how the guy tasered and spasming face down on the ground who they shot in the back multiple times (after a traffic stop) made them feel in fear for their life.
Child porn is treated as very evil to ludicrous lengths (i.e. where a person is flagged as a sexual predator for life for having a picture of bart simpson with a fingerlike undetailed cartoon penis). I'm not sure if it is bad as murder.
I'm not sure if they should have been allowed to operate the site for two weeks. It seems dubious to me. It probably depends on if people who were actively hurting children (as opposed to trading old pictures of people who are probably of age now). It's a terrible crime tho so I guess I'd cut them some slack in this case. Sort of a slippery slope tho.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Don't be so sure about the child porn.
Firstly, in many countries even artwork, photoshop fake images, crude comics and fiction are classified as child pornography.
Secondly - if the images already exist, does distributing them hurt the 'victim' any more? Their part is done. They won't even know if another person looks, so how can it possibly harm them? You could argue that it creates demand for more images and so create a financial incentive to create more, but by that logic downloading music should increase demand and increase profits by the labels.
Now that the battle to normalize homosexuality is largely won there are a growing number of voices in society (including academicians) working to normalize pedophilia.
No there aren't.
There was a time (which had its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s) when there was a push to abolish ages of consent and recognize the possible validity of sexual relationships between all ages, and it had some significant academic support (particularly in Europe).
But that was 30-40 years ago. Support for that sort of thing has been declining ever since.
There is some growing interest (though only in a small minority of researchers) in trying to sort out more details concerning the behavior of pedophiles -- for example, how many viewers of child pornography actually also commit offenses with children? How often does the "escalation" you refer to actually occur? Are there differences in the recidivism rates and possibilities for rehabilitation in those who merely view child pornography vs. those who actually sexually assault children?
The research on a lot of these questions is in its infancy, partly because it's a very icky topic, and we all want to believe the worst about anyone who would ever view a naked picture of a child. But such research is trying to sort out whether our criminal penalties make sense, whether they are actually effective in reducing further abuse, etc.
That's not "normalizing pedophilia" -- it's trying to focus effort on places where it can prevent the most harm, and trying to help people who may actually be able to be helped vs. just demonizing everyone who we can corral into the category of "dangerous pedophile."