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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.
The ones who actually abuse the children. Are they doing anything about catching them?
I could understand it when it was a crime to cause harm to underage kids, like assaulting them or taking pictures of them. I can also understand how it would be bad to sell pictures of kids even if you haven't produced them yourself, there should not be a market for that.
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!). 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"...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
...To the broken US justice system where they get labelled as sex offenders, are on a public registry and can never again get a decent job or live anywhere close to anyone.
Many of these people were abused themselves as children. I met an Australian who volunteered with troubled youth. He met kids who were angry at their abusers, their families .. the world. And they had a right to be. They were sexually abused in horrible horrible ways. ... any person would see that kid as a victim who has a right to be angry ...and at some point, there is a possibility that kid turns into an abuser -- manipulating children into relationships that those kids have no ability to understand. They are monsters; horrible people with no hope of redemption.
So when does the victim ... become the monster? At 15? 18?
I'm not saying I agree with what they do, but we can't just keep locking them up. I don't know what the solution is, but the current system is broken.
I've been abused in my youth. I don't think any photos were taken, but if they were, the idea that the government I elected is distributing them is far more abhorrent to me than the idea that a bunch of creeps is gawping at them. The latter are people who need serious therapy but who pose no threat sweating behind a monitor, while the former are the very model of power imbalance against a helpless child.
If I witness news footage showing someone dying (e.g. war, terrorist attack, police shoot-out, whatever) then I'm not re-murdering them. But there are ethical questions involved in distributing such videos: am I being respectful to the memory of the deceased or survivors? am I glorifying the murder? am I exploiting the murder? am I providing sufficient warning? and so on. Shitlords on the Internet will spam such videos insensitively as "gore", and they remain shitlords, but that's all. Governments, however, are acting on my behalf. They should not just do what is legal, but avoid doing what is not ethical.
In particular, a government's duty is to publicise third parties only when the public interest in the content of the publication outweighs the harm to the third parties. If there is no benefit in the public consuming the content, but instead the content is being used for some further aim, the publication is not occurring in the public interest. Rather, the subjects of the content are being exploited non-consensually.
So, the police might distribute CCTV of a hooligan attack which shows the parts of the victims (probably face blurred out), even if the victims cannot all be identified. This would help make the public aware of an attacker, and give them the opportunity to report sightings to the police: obvious public interest in the content of the publication. But to use the video not to find the perpetrator but, instead, to identify other people who want to watch it - telling the victims that they need to have their attack watched over and over to stop those who want to watch them being attacked - is patently absurd.
Once again, Nietzsche knew what he was talking about:
"Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...
for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you."
ew ew ew that is so freaking wrong. send them all to jail!
Who are we talking about here, the FBI or the pedophiles?
Isn't this just the Feds again telling us that the ends justifies the means? Apparently, it is ok to run a child pornography site, as long as it is being used to catch sex offenders.I have mixed feelings about this. It is clearly good that the FBI is working to put people who would hurt children in jail. It is less clear that people who might be consuming such illegal material are the people who produce it. It seems eerily similar to the failed drug wars where large numbers of people who consume drugs are the people that are being arrested, as opposed to the people who are making and distributing drugs.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
How many producers of child porn were caught in this "sting"?
Zero probably. Its so much easier to catch the users here instead and claim a nice PR victory than actually try and solve a problem.
It's exactly like the war on drugs, just with an even touchier subject. The problem is all imported. This shit is being made over seas, in places where the laws are different, people don't give a fuck, or are corrupt enough to be bought off, or all three. And as long as all we do is focus on the end user instead of the source, we will piss away lots and lots of money, and accomplish sweet fuck all.
Except these criminals don't have to smuggle 100 tons of coke across the border. Five minutes and a high speed internet connection and they are set. We can't hope to try and keep it "out" because it not a physical product to be intercepted anymore. We can't possibly get anywhere in terms of restricting access, we either get the source, or fail.
Looking at the news over recent years, it seems there is an explosion in the number of pedophiles - I'm not too sure about that, various historical traces show that it isn't anything new, but it has recently been fount as a very efficient tool to get quite unsavoury laws passed. However, if indeed there is a growth in those numbers, I can't help but think that your kind of attitude fuels it. After all, if you think that, whatever their age, children should be subject to criminal laws intended for adults, why couldn't they be perfectly valid sexual partners?
Name a place in the US where two 17 year olds have sex, and once one of them turns 18, it suddenly becomes illegal.
For one, the age of consent isn't uniformly 18, and most places have restrictions on the law that allow for close-age relationships.
The screwed up thing is that some of the places that don't have the exceptions for close ages can have consensual 14 year olds both raping each other at the same time. And places where the age of consent is 16, you can legally have sex at 16 with a 45 year old if you want, but if anyone takes a photo of it, that's child porn. Is there any other case where taking a photo of something is illegal? Defense installations? Oh my God, she's got a nuclear reactor between her thighs.
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You wont intimidate someone as an AC. If I was hiding something, or was interested in something as sick as pedophilia, I would hide my name. The creeps in this case were the FBI for not closing down, and upholding the law IMMEDIATELY. They did not do their job. I bet you are a teen by your line of thinking.
I like CSI:Cyber for something the writers didn't intend: It shows a realistic example of police abuse of power. The protagonists of the show are not out to be an oppressive, invasive government agency - but they are driven to catch the bad guys. Little things like warrants and due process just get in the way - from the perspective of law enforcement, they are just weasel tricks that the horrible people use to escape justice. The Cyber Squad are constantly intimidating and threatening suspects and routinely carry out acts that are blatantly illegal, or legal only on very NSAish grounds - they outright state at one point that they have a law that grants them the right to hack any computer anywhere so long as they have reasonable suspicion that it contains data important to an investigation, which they use to hack the database from a dating app because it's the quickest way to identify which user is their suspect. The one time a person denies their request for information without a warrant they pull political strings and threaten to have their organisation barred from government contracts if the information isn't handed over 'voluntarily' rather than go to the delay of getting a warrant. But despite this, they maintain the conviction that they are the 'good guys.' The end justifies the means - and when the end is catching murderers, rapists and child molesters*, that enough to justify any means. To themselves, at least.
It's an interesting approach to the program, but the problem is that is leads viewers to the same conclusion: Watch enough super-virtuous cops on TV who routinely break the law to catch a filthy perverted murderer, and the public's attitudes to such things relax in the real world. Where the police are not infallible, and it isn't always clear who the villain is, and sometimes innocent people are accused.
I've noticed Cyber Squad also like to brutalise suspects a bit on arrest, making sure to 'accidentally' slam someone's head against a concrete floor even when they aren't resisting.
*Cyber or not, it's still CSI: Practically every crime has a sex angle. Ratings!