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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.
That the pedophiles on /. will tell us all how this is wrong while they fantasize about diddling toddlers.
ew ew ew that is so freaking wrong. send them all to jail! bernie sanders will clean house.
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
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.
"1000 pains = 1 Megahertz"
I have seen this one before. Pretty sure 1000 pains would be 1 kilohertz, not Megahertz." This is supposed to be a technically minded site.
I saw this story on motherboard earlier today. I say kudos to the FBI for catching these pricks, but if a judge throws it all out because the FBI ran the sites then was it really worth it?
From what I read, it sounds like the same type of exploit that hit TorMail a few years back. Maleware injected through javascript on computers using Windows. I could be wrong, but from the numbers given. It sounds like that's the NIT tactic.
Speaking of the numbers the site had 20,000 unique visitors per week? But they only caught 1300 IPs (which leads me to believe the above tactic was used.) Of those 1300IPs there are only 100 cases after a year!? Does that strike anyone else as odd? With all this press, (2nd story on /. this week) I imagine the other 1200 sickos are destroying evidence, dumping machines. etc. Which will make it more difficult to nab them with possession if they ever get raided.
I digress. Running the site is fine with me, I don't think it's entrapment. However if the judge throws out the cases then the FBI will legally lose this approach in the future. Wouldn't it of been more wise of them to wait until they had some sort of exploit in TBB that did not require javascript or worked on all machines? They must believe that it'll hold water in the courts otherwise I don't think they'd risk the ability to use this approach over 3-6% identification rate and 0.25%-0.5% case rate (Assuming there are no more cases.) Otherwise it would of probably been better just to run the exploit on the login system but leave the rest of the site not working or just make sure all the links on the site were broken.
It's a well known philosophical position called "the end justifies the means".
I'm Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC. Why don't you have a seat over there?
Look, child molesters are not people. They're monsters wearing people skin.
I approve.
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.
Yeah well i know that FBI was first known to have operated a child porn site in 2012. Badra Malik | http://www.t20worldcup-2016.co...
I think the only real issue people have with this is that if the FBI can justify such tactics then whats to stop them from doing the same to WikiLeaks
This comment section is full of bots pretending to be commenters. I hope they realize that manipulation of the public is a crime.
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"?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Believe it.
But isn't this fruit of the poisonous tree?
Cops violate civilian law all the time for the sake of enforcing the law. The main thing that comes to mind is speeding, running red lights, and blocking traffic.
Aren't those specific exceptions to the law granted to police officers? i.e. the law specifically allows emergency vehicles to go through red lights and for them to speed when responding to an emergency. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty certain there will not be an exemption to the laws about distribution of child pornography to let the police do it.
In similar types of cases involving lures to catch criminals in the act the police stop short of actually committing the crime themselves: if posing as a hitman they don't actually kill people to see if they can get more criminal clients. What I don't understand is why this strategy would not have worked here. If you blurred out the pictures and videos or arrange for the links to just timeout then you would still get the IP addresses without actually distributing the material. You might catch fewer of the criminals before they knew something was wrong but, like the hitman example, surely that's better than actually committing the crime?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
Yeah, right....what could possibly go wrong?
... justifies the means.
there is nothing to which this does not apply.
and all ends are justified, because we’ re the good guys.
if you want a text-book example of begging the question, this is it.
This is just fine, as long as all of the people involved in the FBI operation to run the site (including all the people who made the high-level decision to execute the operation) are now being prosecuted for distribution of child pornography. You know, on account of the fact that they willingly and intentionally distributed all of that child pornography.
Seems to me like an odd length to go to, but hey, if they're comfortable sacrificing themselves upon the altar of justice then I guess they've earned it.
FBI Took Over World's Biggest Child Porn Website
So they have them all indexed and ranked, but they just decided to go after the biggest one ?
Seems like they are more interested in going after the viewers than the producers.
I mean, I could commit bank robbery with that excuse: the state of my bank account is such that there is no other way the teller is going to hand me that much on a silver platter.
"Because there was no other way" is the classic "the end justifies the means, any means". When will the three-letter agencies formally drop the pretense that they are something other than an organized crime syndicate? Well ok, it might interfere with their funding. But they could just dial up robbery at gun point ("civil forfeiture") and their blackmailing business a bit.
Or did they donate the profit plus extra to a charity for abused children?
And how many actual children were saved by this? Because to save them, you can't stop the kiddie porn being watched to do that, you have to stop the kiddie porn BEING MADE.
Much like violent games or even violent fantasies, an outlet for some problem you have means you don't have to find other ways to vent. And if one way is only virtual harm, the others actual harm, less harm is done by letting porn go and finding out where the porn came from. Eventually you'll find the source.
However, that is hard work, harder than just catching someone fapping to a teenager, calling it paedophilia (which it isn't), then chalking the ruination of this person's life (it will usually be male, despite being nearly equally represented in either sex, because we can't understand "nurturing women" being bad, whereas we know men can be) to "the good guys". And as long as the source remains, this remains a perpetual motion machine that looks good, gets jobs secure, confirms biases and prejudices, and has no downside for anyone that you are socially allowed to feel sorry for.
As long as you forget the child hasn't been protected, and never will, since you need a perpetual source of KP to find on people or you're out of a job.
They play on our fears, and want back doors into our house. We must end encryption to.. protect our children. We have to give the government keys to the back door of our banking, bills paid, any and all purchases made, because it protects us. From terrorists and child molesters. Brothers and sisters this is not how we were meant to live. This is george orwellian. If a stranger came up to my door needing food or a place to crash, I would more then likely say yeah bail out to the shed. These guys, all they want is access to my shed at anytime. In the name of my families security.
Because first of all, paedophilia doesn't cover just 2-4 year old children. Indeed, even pro-rata on age, it's far far less common, though more common for women to kidnap them (this is a misfiring of the maternal instinct caused by a mental problem and is purely female) and then abandon them when they're too old to be mothered (which is what the maternal instinct is driving them to do). Secondly, as with the so-called "paedophile hunter", who has NEVER CAUGHT A PAEDOPHILE (that's right, check it out, all of them were soliciting post pubescent adults under the age of consent), this site probably had no or very little paedophilia informatoin on it and most of the people caught weren't paedophiles.
However, your post indicates precisely what is wrong with the law.
The laws are made to assuage the "outrage" of idiots like you, who hear "sexual assault of a minor" and think "Fucked a toddler in the mouth" even if it was "grabbed the ass of a 17 year old". And you demand laws to punish people doing the former, but under conditions that include the latter.
You are as sick as the paedo. Just in a different manner. You, like them, don't bother to think and merely insist on what you want to be true (toddler fucking/kid wants sex) rather than what IS true (late teen fondling/kid doesn't want sex). You, like they, want power over others.
So the government works as low as the worse criminals= our government is the worse criminals
Now her paints are dry and I looked outside at the corner. Where there was once life growth and prosperity, now lies brown grass. I traded blindness for sublime heavan without ever acting.. I watched my kids being imprisoned slowly, and did nothing. I helped imprison my kid by no reaction.
One of the big issues is if the FBI hurt the children or not. If distributing child pornography does hurt the children, then the FBI did it, and there is no point in keeping law enforcement that hurts the most vulnerable. OTOH, if they argue that distributing child pornography doesn't actually hurt the children (after all, they didn't produce the pornography), then there is even less of a case against those who download it.
Back in the day of the first Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the largest producer of child porn was... The United States government.
Turns out all the images they used for sting operations (the results of which you can read about in Project Looking Glass and Jacobson v. United States) had become the stock and trade for child porn. I'd be willing to wager several of those government produced pictures are floating through the internet today.
Adding to that is Masha’s law, which allows for civil damages for the distribution of child porn.
Well now, that's a sticky wicket.
This is the problem with most sting operations (see Operation Fast and Furious) where that fine line between catching criminals and becoming criminals is rather dubious for government to navigate.
But hey, it certainly is easier and any collateral damage is certainly worth it *snark*.
It seems an awfully small number of arrests compared to the 100,000 accounts. Even assuming that most accounts are probably dead we're talking about roughly 0.1% efficiency.
Was it the usual? You only catch the dumb ones?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> It starts to go downhill when it is a crime to download or just view
You misunderstand the law. If you simply run across it and you either dispose of it or show it to the police (but NOT other random people), you're okay according to federal law. So the police are actually under the same law as the rest of us here, it's just that the average person has never bothered to look up the statutes.
The justice system in the US is a total mess. There can be no denial that cops are doing awful things all too frequently. Local lawmakers also do some of the most ignorant things one can imagine. And when one gets into the courts, there is a tendency to investigate nothing and get decisions that are based upon the convenience of the judge rather than any hint of justice. And it is not just sex crimes that are twisted either. We need to dump our laws and reform the entire justice system from the fender bender in traffic all the way up through murder and sex crimes. As far as sex crimes go we have a segment of our population that see themselves as some sort of morality wizards. They tend to see the world as a pathway of moral choices and they have decided that they will be the ones who decide exactly where on that path one may step. In my area, we end up with sex offenders living in our hedges. They can live nowhere in town at all. They tend to live under our bridges as the bridges are distant from school yards and play- grounds. So if a cop stops them and asks where they live they say under the bridge. But in reality, they tend to stop when they feel tired and try to sleep out of sight. It is very similar to what they did with prostitutes. The hookers had their phoney massage parlors and dating parlors shut down by the cops. That caused them to ply their wares on the streets, exposing more people to prostitutes and offering less control over diseases and endangering the Johns as well as without a fixed address the Johns were frequently beaten or robbed.
Why does it seem like the system spends all of the effort going after the small problem. I would argue that people viewing the pictures are causing less harm than the people making the pictures in the first place. Yes they should have shut down the site but found out where the pictures were uploaded from and gone after the content creators. And not the people who write fictional stories and the cartoons. Those aren't the high priority. While disgusting children weren't harmed in it's creation. Go after the sick f*cks that are hurting kids to create pictures to distribute. They should be the top priority. Stop them and you stop more kids from being hurt by them in the future.
It's the same thing with drugs. Law enforcement seems to be targeting users and the lowest level dealers. But they rarely cause trouble for the higher levels. You may never stop the flow of drugs but you can make it a lot more difficult for them. Start taking out their middle-men and a few higher-ups along with the distribution system and while not eliminating the problem you make drugs more expensive on the street.
Committing crimes to catch criminals is not a sting or entrapment. It is criminality. They should be prosecuted and those hapless should caught up in the program should be exonerated on the basis that criminals (liars) cannot bring witness or charges against anyone. Further any case any of the individuals or the department itself worked on should reviewed for expungement on the basis of unclean hands and untruthful prosecution. Bad witnesses and prosecutors are bad witnesses and prosecutors period in our system of justice.
Remember, justice is blind. This is a test case for that claim.
so under presisent BayRack's fbi logic the fbi can run a human trafficking sex slave brothel for two weeks just to catch the scum that rape women. the brave new world of marxism.
People watching child porn are not a danger to my children.
They may not be a direct danger, but to the extent that their viewing the stuff makes your "friendly neighborhood wanna-be child porn producer" think there is a demand for it, he may decide to start producing.
There is also the issue of "porn isn't enough any more" - your local child-porn viewer may decide just watching kids on-screen isn't enough and he may start acting out what he sees.
While your children are probably safe just because of the extremely low percentage of kids who are victimized in this way, the odds are > zero.
On the flip side, your neighborhood would-be child molester may be one of those who, if child porn were legal outright or at least available in a rherapeutic setting, would satisfy himself with those images while he and his therapist work out his issues and/or work on teaching him that lusting after people (besides your spouse or someone you have a realistic chance of dating) is at a minimum just plain disrespectful.
Bottom line: On balance, the wide availablility of child porn raises the risk that your kids will be sexually abused, but the increase in risk is probably so close to zero that it's probably statistical noise to you. BUT, worldwide, the harm done to children through sexual abuse would go down significantly if child porn were extremely difficult to obtain and if those who wanted to make or view it were identified and force-marched into some kind of therapy and/or convinced that if they ever tried to abuse a child or seek or such images, they would almost certainly be caught and punished.
The tricky or impossible task is doing that without creating a police state. If I had to choose between the current state of the world and a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque world free of child sexual abuse, I would take the world as it is today.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The "age of consent" is different in various countries so some of you will not understand how absurd this is .. but here is the situation:
- You can legally have sex with anyone who is 15 years or older (this varies by country).
- You can legally take a picture or record a video of anyone who is nude/doing something even remotely sexual if they are 18 years or older. It is a serious crime to take such a picture of anyone who is not 18 years old.
So.. you can get a girlfriend when you're 15 and have sex with her for years and when she's a month from her 18th birthday she sends you a naughty picture and someone finds out and now you're in jail and a sexual offender.
Is this very logical?
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
The Pope must be really pissed off right now... LOL... BTW, I'm more concerned on freeing the slaves they trade in those websites rather than erasing pictures from a server. Like arrested drug smugglers, we have the idea there's substitutes that will replace them to unfortunately keep the wheel of their business rolling. I'm sure the real culprids are still there, running governments and sailing expensive boats paid with the blood of the children they sell for those canibalistic sadic rapists.
One day ladies and gentleman, we'll witness an altar boy going inside a church at Vatican with a machine gun and murder hundreds, hopefully thousands of child molesters, and we gonna be glad to know that's justify acts of terrorism for a good cause.
EVER. But especially here. Ew.
So if there's no other way for me to do something than to break federal laws, it's OK to break them?! Neat!
Twinstiq, game news
The argument against distributing, as opposed to producing, child porn is that people seeing the images harm the victims. That harm is believed to be very great, resulting in long jail sentences for people who distribute or view child porn.
If that is true, then the FBI did great harm to those innocent victims by distributing the pictures.
If that is not true, then we need to re-evaluate why viewing child porn is such a serious felony.
It is NOT OK for the the FBI to do a few contract murders to try to catch criminals in the mob. I don't see this as any different.
"Dubious ethics?" Let's be clear here: the FBI committed a crime, the same crime that the owners of the website committed.
It's time we started insisting that law enforcement obey the law.
Dateline NBC had no trouble catching offenders, without creating a child porn website.
From my understanding, online sex offenders are very easy to catch. Just use standard "honeypot" methods: pretend to be child online, place phony ads, etc.
You do not have to actually provide child porn, or subject children to prostitution, just make that promise, and the child molesters will jump all over it.
Most of it isn't posted by molesters, it's the girls doing it themselves
They took over their own shit.
Telegraph nonsense. "The FBI took over the world's biggest child pornographic website". So they know it is bigger than the second-biggest or the third biggest. So the FBI know all these websites and they give them a size as in this one is small this one is very small and this one is the second-biggest and this one is the biggest. Or one of the biggest! So the FBI is trying to outdo the British government in the size of child porn websites it runs.. Anglo-Saxon problem it's an Anglo-Saxon problem. Did you know in Japan, they prosecute the guardian because the guardian is legally responsible for defending and protecting the child. The Anglo-Saxons act hysterical like it is them personally who is guilty or who is under suspicion. Very unhealthy mentally very. https://youtu.be/zrzMhU_4m-g The law will do what the law does. It is just as sick as dropping napalm on women and children or atomic weapons. It is just as bad as killing little Arabic children. With the Anglo-Saxons they have lost the sense of what is and what isn't immoral the penis is the most immoral thing on earth it would seem for Anglo-Saxons. But they are all as equally immoral. 259 + 1
and when she's a month from her 18th birthday she sends you a naughty picture and someone finds out and now you're in jail and a sexual offender. Is this very logical?
No, which is why it doesn't happen outside your imagination..
Don't know of any case in the US where the only minor involved was 17 and 11 months, but in a broader sense it appears that it does happen.
@xiando's explanation of the laws is essentially correct; although age of consent varies by state (not nation) in the USA, sexual pictures of anybody under 18, even if voluntarily generated and only shared privately with other minors who are already in a (legal!) relationship with the minor pictured, are legally child porn and have led to child porn prosecutions and even convictions.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Is this a suggestion that the government is running all of these websites? How are they determining the size of these sites?
They aren't using it for 'research purposes'.
if you have to facilitate ANY part of a crime, then you suck at police work.
...
CP is the ultimate blackmail tool and far too many prominent people - politicians, law enforcement, judges, businessmen, clergymen, etc. -are involved. The world is going to hell in a handbasket because our so-called "leaders" have been compromised. The cops aren't as interested in catching pedos as they are protecting the establishment.