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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
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.
...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.
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
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!”
Don't forget that there are many young, underage kids that are now sex offenders in the glorious United States.
"Throughout the United States, children as young as nine years old who are adjudicated delinquent may be subject to sex offender registration laws"
http://bostonreview.net/blog/y...
http://www.sacurrent.com/sanan...
http://www.justicepolicy.org/n...
I can recall several years ago a story about two young girls, not even in middle school becoming registered sex offenders for sending pictures of themselves to each other. Under current laws, they were "producing child pornography".
Sure, there are a lot of sick fucks out there, but the current method is completely broken.
Hey, we're only doing the media keeps telling us, to think of the children.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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." ---
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.
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!
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."