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.
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.
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.
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."