FBI Operated 23 Tor-Hidden Child Porn Sites, Deployed Malware From Them (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal investigators temporarily seized a Tor-hidden site known as Playpen in 2015 and operated it for 13 days before shutting it down. The agency then used a "network investigative technique" (NIT) as a way to ensnare site users. However, according to newly unsealed documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI not only temporarily took over one Tor-hidden child pornography website in order to investigate it, the organization was in fact authorized to run a total of 23 other such websites. According to an FBI affidavit among the unsealed documents: "In the normal course of the operation of a web site, a user sends "request data" to the web site in order to access that site. While Websites 1-23 operate at a government facility, such request data associated with a user's actions on Websites 1-23 will be collected. That data collection is not a function of the NIT. Such request data can be paired with data collected by the NIT, however, in order to attempt to identify a particular user and to determine that particular user's actions on Websites 1-23." Security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told Ars that "it's a pretty reasonable assumption" that at one point the FBI was running roughly half of the known child porn sites hosted on Tor-hidden servers. Lewis runs OnionScan, an ongoing bot-driven analysis of the Tor-hidden darknet. Her research began in April 2016, and it shows that as of August 2016, there were 29 unique child porn related sites on Tor-hidden servers. That NIT, which many security experts have dubbed as malware, used a Tor exploit of some kind to force the browser to return the user's actual IP address, operating system, MAC address, and other data. As part of the operation that took down Playpen, the FBI was then able to identify and arrest the nearly 200 child porn suspects. (However, nearly 1,000 IP addresses were revealed as a result of the NIT's deployment, which could suggest that even more charges may be filed.)

Comments

I'm afraid to click on any of this article's links

[JoeyRox]

For fear that I'll unwittingly be taken to a child porn site and then have my IP address logged for immediate arrest.

eh

[Anonymous Coward]

i think most can argue even in true free markets that who cares what happens to people that like that.

Re:eh

[The Rizz]

i think most can argue even in true free markets that who cares what happens to people that like that.

The question is whether that data collection was legal, and fell with a scope that didn't amount to a fishing expedition. There are two main reasons everyone should care about this:

1) If it's not legal, then it risks these suspects going free on a technicality.
2) If it's not legal, but people decide to just let it slip by because "those people are horrible", then it sets a precedent that said methods are OK, and it gets harder for it later to be declared illegal when the government starts using it for less clear-cut or outright nefarious purposes.

Re:eh

[Qzukk]

There's a third option:

3) It didn't happen, but people think the FBI can make it happen.

After rounding up these 1000 undesirables, next month word will get out that the FBI actually ran 300 child porn sites, and "I have here in my hand a list of two thousand and fifty commun... sorry, pedophiles."

Re: eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute, you think being a pedophile who drives a market for child pornograph is just like having a difference of opinion on politics?

Re: eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute, you think cows banana blink ding?

McCarthy never produced his famed list of Communists, and whatever lists he did produce were significantly smaller than the one he claimed to have in his hand. But you better believe that if he had read out a single name in that environment, whatever name he picked would probably have been lynched on the spot.

Of course, you'd know that personally, Mr. "Anonymous Coward", seeing as your name is #1283 on my list of pedophiles.

Re: eh

[Qzukk]

You think being a Communist during the Red Scare is just like "having a difference of opinion on politics?"

The point was that someone who overstated his ability to gather information about evildoers apparently padded out his numbers a little bit with a few extra names here and there. Of course, nobody would question whether he ACTUALLY had 205 names of card-carrying Communists in his hand, they trusted him because they believed he had the ability to identify these Communists.

Re: eh

[dbIII]

You think being a Communist during the Red Scare is just like "having a difference of opinion on politics?"

In those cases back then - yes - frequently that's all it was and today we'd even call some of those people libertarians and a wide range of other labels depending on who they were. Even the Hollywood millionaire Charlie Chaplin was called a communist while he and a pile of others called communists by McCarthy etc were nothing but anti-fascists. Where the scare fell apart was when General Marshall of the Marshall Plan (and a lot of other things) was called a communist.

whether he ACTUALLY had 205 names of card-carrying Communists in his hand

If he really did, considering he did not reveal them to the authorities what does it make him? That is of course a moot point since he was just a liar stirring up a fuss to have a chance at the Presidency in a field of war heroes and others that had done something of note with their lives.

Yes there were real communists out there in a pile of different factions, even some sad cases who were as deluded about Stalin as FDR was at Yalta (Good old Uncle Joe? WTF?), but why would a handful of them in 1950 be a threat when masses of them in 1930 were not? McCarthy despite all his fuss didn't even find one!

Re:eh

[SuricouRaven]

I think 2) may be the intention.

Re: eh

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument is illogical. It's like saying those who play violent video games create a market for murdering people. There is no commercial market for child porn. That's a myth spread by the FBI and others with ulterior motives. Whatever markets existed died sometime between 1970 and 1990. There is a market for sex with children in Thailand and similar though. There is a crime committed if a child is forced to have sex and that is what should be prosecuted. Everything else is just FUD spread by bigoted people who can't attack gays as easily any more because it's socially unacceptable.

Re: eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Paedophiles are just like the rest of us. There isn't a risk of them molesting children any more than there is a risk of your heterosexual non-pedo neighbour raping your wife. They couldn't find enough child molesters so they fabricated it. The stories about cults of paedophiles were shown to be fabricated and false. They were created by terrible police tactics which got kids to say things that were false. What is a risk is reducing the supply of pornography of any type. The studies that have been done where pornography was legalized showed rapes fall and when outlawed again rapes go up. One study in one country where it was legalized, criminalized, and legalized against showed clear evidence of this. Some small percentage of paedophiles are going to rape children just like some small percentage of children population is going to go out and rape women/men.

Re:eh

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see at least two more problems.
1) The malware might not work, meaning that the state is effectively providing child porn for free.
2) People might accidentally click a link, not knowing where it leads, and get infected and/or arrested.

Is Tor still vulnerable?

[BitterOak]

That NIT, which many security experts have dubbed as malware, used a Tor exploit of some kind to force the browser to return the user's actual IP address,

Does anyone know if that exploit has been fixed or is it still unpatched? If the FBI can use this exploit to catch child pornographers then other, possibly malicious, people can use the same exploit.

Re:Is Tor still vulnerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considered how deepiy involved the US government is with Tor only a retard would be trusting it as your layer of anonymity.

Re:Is Tor still vulnerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

The EFF is trying to force the FBI to disclose the exploit they used. To date, the FBI has not publicly revealed it.

In addition to difficult questions concerning the Fourth Amendment, Rule 41, and the limits of government hacking, the Playpen cases raise an important question about the future of digital rights: whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances the government must disclose to criminal defendants how the government carried out its hacking.

In the Playpen cases, the government has provided some information to the accused about how the “network investigative technique,” or “NIT,” operated. But, critically, the government refuses to produce the exploit it used to allegedly take control of suspects' computers.

That refusal—in addition to all the other problems with the Playpen cases—violates the rights of the accused. And, as at least one court has correctly found, the refusal to disclose the exploit to the defense requires suppression of evidence obtained as a result.

At its core, the government's argument is: “You don’t need to know how we got into your computer (the exploit) because it does not change the information that we took from your computer (the private information copied and transmitted by the payload). Just trust us on this.”

Re:Is Tor still vulnerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about disclosing the exploit and methods used so we have some idea if the IPs collected are actually legitimate?

Re: Is Tor still vulnerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering most hosts don't know their own IP, my guess is embedding a link to something that isn't a TOR site and saying "exploit" to cover pure social trick.

Re: Is Tor still vulnerable?

[WarJolt]

Only a moron would actually turn on flash in a browser.

Re: Is Tor still vulnerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

That scenario would still be routed through TOR and the FBI would get a hit from an exit node.

Re:Is Tor still vulnerable?

[AmiMoJo]

It's not a vulnerability in TOR, it's a vulnerability in the Firefox browser that shipped with the TOR Browser bundle. It's been patched.

Also, it looks like it only affected people with JavaScript enabled. Beware hidden sites that require JavaScript, they are almost certainly traps trying to unmask you.

Re:Is Tor still vulnerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Does anyone know if that exploit has been fixed or is it still unpatched?"
At the time, the Tor Browser Bundle didn't disable javascript by default.

entrapment

[lpq]

Why is this not entrapment?

If they offer 23 out of 29 sites, that would seem to be increasing enticement...

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they didn't make them do anything they wouldn't have otherwise done and they didn't force them to do it.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they didn't make them do anything they wouldn't have otherwise done and they didn't force them to do it.

I look forward to the day when pimps and pushers can use that argument too!
I didn't make little Joe take drugs... he could have gotten them anyways and Suzy would still be selling herself on the street corner.

 

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

why do you think that is even remotely related? the actions or intentions of the buyer have never been an excuse for the seller. The only area this argument is relavent is in intrapment rules where the police can't be seen as enticing them to commit the crime.

Re:entrapment

[smooth wombat]

Why is this not entrapment?

Because, as said above, the FBI didn't entice these people do anything they wouldn't have already done.

This comic wonderfully illustrates why things such as this are not entrapment.

But I'm sure you'll continue to argue despite the facts.

Re:entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

This approach is shady business. And it is hard to discuss it openly and rationally, because of the intense emotions surrounding the issue.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they didn't make them do anything they wouldn't have otherwise done and they didn't force them to do it.

perhaps they wouldn't have been tempted by the pornography if the FBI hadn't been running so many porn sites, making it easier to find.

Re: entrapment

[Calydor]

Never an excuse for the seller?

Alrighty, let's haul the entire FBI department responsible for this off the federal prison for peddling child porn. Or are they just above the law because reasons?

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they arrest them for visiting the sites or did they use the visitation of there sites as reason to investigate them further to find a history of child pornograph on there computer

Re:entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly they simply took over existing sites, and deferred shutting them down until they had collected data on the users.

Re:entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

If the only way to get links to the additional child porn sites is on original child porn site the feds seized, it's pretty hard to claim that it's entrapment because they were already violating the law when they got the links. If they had innocently and unintentionally arrived at the original child porn site, and not gone to the others, they might have been able to claim that they got there accidentally, but if they went to the other child porn sites, assuming the feds' malware doesn't force them to go to the porn sites, they don't have any defense. Only if the fed's malware redirects them to the child porn sites could they argue entrapment.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

if they were actually selling it then sure, however they had setup the site purely as a trap, Law enforcement is actually allowed to do things individuals would be arrested for.

Re: entrapment

[cold fjord]

Reason does seem to be your weak spot in evaluating the legality of properly authorized sting operations.

Re:entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it shady? They didn't hack these peoples computer to reroute their loads of CNN.com to go to these sites. These people were already going there.

Re:entrapment

[aaarrrgggh]

Because it was a limited time, and presumably they were not promoting the site, just getting residual traffic.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

At the very least they were violating copyright and using the victims' likeness without consent. At worst they're disseminating child pornography to anyone in the world and endangering and causing irreparable harm to the victims. This thing stinks of illegal.

Re:entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the Law says it is not.
The same is a cop buys stolen items.
He does not have to arrest you immediately.
The same for child porn.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing shady at all about disseminating child pornography.

Re: entrapment

[lpq]

That's what I was thinking -- if the FBI was supplying a significant amount of porn sites compared to what is normally there, it is likely to have an effect.

Compare this to the argument that that intra-state sales of something affects inter-state pricing because intra-state sales affects availability. If the FBI is increasing availability, doesn't that mean it's lowering the difficulty in randomly coming across such a site and being tempted by it?

If the FBI increases supply by 383% (23 more sites compared to original 6), then it seems it would be considerably easier to find such a site by whatever method the news of such sites existing is spread. That HAS to bring in more people than the original 6 sites.

Note -- if the FBI offered only 1-2 sites added to original 6, the increased availability would be noticeable, but, *arguably* *necessary* to carry out the operation. But providing a 383% increase in the availability of such sites -- 80% of all such sites, they have to realize they are likely to advertise it to people who never would have known about such. The FBI is increasing the number of offenders by reaching a larger audience. That seems unethical, at least, and should, IMWO (in my worthless opinion, :-)), not be legal.

Re: entrapment

[penix1]

...properly authorized sting operations.

"properly authorized" still means they have to be clean themselves. For example, they can't have sex with you then arrest you for solicitations based on that sex. If the servers had child pron on them and the FBI was running them, then they broke the law themselves since simply possessing said porn is a crime. It surprises me that nobody brought up this little twist yet.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they didn't make them do anything they wouldn't have otherwise done and they didn't force them to do it.

I look forward to the day when pimps and pushers can use that argument too!
I didn't make little Joe take drugs... he could have gotten them anyways and Suzy would still be selling herself on the street corner.

Poor analogy. There's a difference between answering the "pusher's/pimp's" phone and pretending to be them, and pretending the be a pusher or a pimp. It's the difference between putting a policewoman in a short skirt and getting her the ask people if they "want a good time" (which is entrapment) and filming people visiting illegal brothels or monitoring the illegal brothel's credit card transaction records.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay your still here, had not seen your posts as much lately.

I am AC that has loved to argue with you before but am glad to see you are not gone. We need opposing views, be it from true believers or government agents

Re:entrapment

[dbIII]

Facts? Cases get thrown out due to obvious entrapment every now and again. It's not always like your cartoons.
It's off the top of my head so don't use the excuse that it is an old case, but one of the most utterly ridiculous ones was from the Clinton era that ended up being described in a book as "Saddams Nuclear Triggers". It took months for FBI agents to convince a British industrial parts supplier to buy an item from one FBI agent and sell the same thing to another and claim that the supplier was supporting a nuclear bomb program that didn't exist in Iraq. The amoral pricks who set it up just wanted a high profile case so they could get promoted so they manufactured a fake crime and spent about a year going shopping for a patsy to frame for it, then months "grooming" their patsy before he agreed. It took years but in the end all charges were thrown out. It is well established as a FACT that real entrapment, unlike your comic, was the situation there and that there would have been no crime or attempt at one without the involvement of the agents.
More recently a mentally ill person with no strong political or religious views was encouraged to get a bomb by FBI agents, once again with a very long "grooming" process, then provided with a bomb by FBI agents. That one is still going through the legal process so there may be more to it.
It does happen and merely manufactures convictions instead of stopping crime.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's not illegality. It's hypocrisy. They smell really similar so I understand the confusion. You cannot possibly tell me the nerds running these traps weren't cranking em out to little babies and do you really think these people don't have a personal copy of it all?

Re: entrapment

[Gavagai80]

The FBI did not increase supply at all. They simply delayed the decreasing of supply after seizing sites that already existed.

Re:entrapment

[Type44Q]

I'm just wondering if you have to fail a psych exam to be allowed to do this sort of work (kind of like you need to to serve on a sub)...

Re: entrapment

[lpq]

Article said they took down 1 but operated it for 13 days to entice more. Fine. But then it said they got permission to operate 23 such sites. To me that sounded like they used the 1 site and made 22 copies of it. There was nothing to indicate they got the 22 copies by busting 22 different servers -- at least not from what the article said.

Why would they need to get permission to operate 23 such sites when it sounds like they needed no permission at all to bust 1 site and operate it for 2 weeks after the bust. No -- they needed permission because they wanted to setup 22 more copies of the site. But taking down a site and not turning it off to uncover any related activity for 2 weeks is well within the scope of an investigation not needing pre-approval. The fact that they did need pre-approval indicated advance planning and wanting to setup 22 copies to go after unrelated traffic by setting out more sites to create a wider, more enticing net.

Doesn't sound ethical to me.

Re: entrapment

[oobayly]

My understanding of US law is that "putting a female police officer in a skirt and asking if you want a good time" *isn't* entrapment. The punter can simply say "no thanks" and walk on. It's entrapment if the punter is coerced into doing something illegal because you are given no choice but to break the law.

Re:entrapment

[thegarbz]

Cases get thrown out due to obvious entrapment every now and again

And a drug cultivator's case got thrown out a few weeks ago in Amsterdam too, that doesn't make it okay for everyone to grow drugs and that doesn't mean the technicality his got thrown out for suddenly applies to everyone.

Entrapment has a very clear legal definition. Come back when people directly prosecuted in this case have their cases thrown out due to "obvious" entrapment. After all it was a child porn site. Unless the FBI took out newspaper ads or started an advertising campaign all they did was catch existing people actively searching for illegal content and accessing it. That's not entrapment just because the guy on the other end is a cop.

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

It becomes entrapment if the officer suggests that having a good time will cost money.

Re:entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

I read through the comic. Nowhere in it do I see any example that I feel would apply to this case.
Remember the reason given to why both distribution of child pornography and possession is illegal?

Re: entrapment

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem with undisclosed malware is... we don't know what it does. Govt could operate from suspect-victim IP address and download more images over time to build up a case.

Re: entrapment

[penix1]

But taking down a site and not turning it off to uncover any related activity for 2 weeks is well within the scope of an investigation not needing pre-approval.

Except we are talking about child pornography here which is illegal to possess even for the FBI.

Re: entrapment

[lpq]

Um, isn't that the norm? They are doing it for the children!

Re:entrapment

[Megol]

No that is _not_ how it works, unless FBI made people download child pornography that they wouldn't otherwise have downloaded then it isn't entrapment. Police dressing up as hookers isn't entrapment if they don't try to convince people to have sex with them for money. Police acting as drug dealers isn't entrapment unless they try to convince people to buy drugs from them.

Re: entrapment

[Altrag]

I would assume that they use a similar argument to what bittorrent sites use -- they host a service, but they don't explicitly provide the content. Though the FBI probably has less work to defend that argument since nobody's going to be too hard on them for trying to stop CP (unlike the *AAs trying to stop bittorrent sites.) Just hard enough to ensure they're following the rules and not risk having their eventual cases tossed on a technicality.

Of course at some point they're going to have to review more than logs to ensure that the content they're prosecuting someone for is actually CP otherwise the defendant could just claim they were only there for the articles or some such nonsense.

So yes at some level, they will have to have special license granted to do this since in general anything even vaguely related to CP is automatically at least suspect if not outright illegal. And seeing some of the suggested related stories on TFA's site, it sounds like the FBI is having a bit of a time defending their practices (though it seems more to do with the IP-collecting malware than the hosting itself.)

Re:entrapment

[Megol]

Here's a hint: police have more rights than ordinary people in order to enforce laws. While it is commonly avoided police have been distributing weapons and illegal drugs (with the receiver under careful watch) in order to catch criminals. Why is this different? The intent is to catch criminals, that is people that download and/or distribute child pornography, so they set up a way to identify the persons accessing the illegal goods and continue to make it available a while. Analogous operations have been done forever and is in no way entrapment.

Also how do you think anyone can be prosecuted if the police isn't allowed to handle the illegal goods?

Re: entrapment

[Altrag]

I'm reasonably sure that the officer can't specifically ask a potential john -- the john would have to ask them. Otherwise the john could claim that they wouldn't have considered the thought of the officer hadn't suggested it.

Not sure if that's technically entrapment or not (because only words were exchanged not money) but its still a pretty shaky case to bring in front of a judge whereas if the john made the approach, the case is fairly solid that he was specifically searching for a prostitute.

Re:entrapment

[Megol]

While generally a good comic for the topic I don't like the example of a protest march. It isn't illegal to walk, there isn't an indication that the people in the march had conspired to block anything etc. Unless doing something that is legal at the same time as others that do the same legal thing is illegal that makes no sense.

(I understand that the scenario was chosen to illustrate what isn't entrapment but it still pisses me off)

Re:entrapment

[lpq]

And that's why we have a court system. ;^)

@ http://legal-dictionary.thefre..., they say this (among many other things):

"The [entrapment] defense is not available if the officer merely created an opportunity for the commission of the crime by a person already planning or willing to commit it."

If someone has never seen a child porn site, but stumbles upon one, and is curious about why someone would find such things sexual, and stumbles upon such a site due to their being over 300% more sites (due to police running them), they might satisfy their curiosity, whereas if they had to search for such a site, they wouldn't have ever visited -- as that would be too much work.

It really depends on how such sites are found and how much a 300% increase in site availability would affect those who only have idle curiosity about such matters.

I can't help but think about how the feds, at one point, told the states that they couldn't allow legal, intrastate cannabis, as it would affect prices outside of the state and would thus be affecting interstate commerce. It was seen as a simple matter of supply & demand, with higher supply resulting in lower prices.

That was considered to be a "given". Here, if the cop-operated sites were a significant percentage of all such sites, I can't help but feel they would attract people that would otherwise have not been planning or willing to put in the work to find such a site and would have not, otherwise, visited such a site.

But I can see you firmly disagree and like I said -- that's why we have
judges (and juries).

Re:entrapment

[dbIII]

Entrapment has a very clear legal definition

Yes. I gave an example of something fitting that. So did the cartoon linked by the other guy above.
This time looks a lot like it at first glance and looks like lazy policing to hit performance targets instead of catching actual criminals but the details are what matters. If the suspected perpetrator gets onto the site without actively trying to find anything illegal then it is a fuckup and a waste of taxpayers money equivalent to planting drugs on people then arresting them. As an analogy, there's a big difference between posing as a drug dealer to catch potential buyers and planting drugs on people, just as there is a big difference between advertising porn in general and specifically directing people to child porn. How the "sting" is implemented will matter and since it's already lazy policing it just takes a bit more laziness to have a fucked up "sting" operations that is entrapment.

Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

Let people see naked, prepubescent 18+ year olds and maybe the child porn problem wouldn't be so bad.

Re:Just sayin'

[MightyMartian]

The problem with your notion is that somewhere someone has to get people under the age of majority to take their clothes off. This means in most jurisdictions the photos themselves were produced unlawfully.

And, of course a great deal of child porn is far more than simply naked under age people posing.

So do you still think people should be able to look at pictures, even the most benign of which are in most, if not all cases, produced criminally involving at least one party who cannot lawfully grant consent?

Re: Just sayin'

[MightyMartian]

You've described the Libertarian alt-right future, where not only will you have the freedom to starve or die from treatable injuries and diseases, but where you'll have the added liberty of selling your children into sexual slavery.

Re:Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

I said 18 or over. It's been decided universally that they can consent. Who are we to say that they can't profit from selling pictures of their (underdeveloped) bodies? Hell, why can't people see nude women with totally flat chests? Surely they can consent as well.

Re: Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

Conflating libertarians with the alt-right... you must be one of those "everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler" liberals.

This sort of willful ignorance is exactly why your neoliberal globalist sjw Presidential candidate went down in flames.

The alt-right is actually closer to ISIS than libertarians on the subject of women's place in society.

Re:Just sayin'

[SuricouRaven]

Don't be so sure about that: Many countries have laws that define child pornography to explicitly include artistic depictions or photoshopped fake images (known legally as 'pseudophotgraphs' in the UK).

Re:Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no problem, most of the online material is according to FBI stuff from webcam sites and so on. This means, the videos are from little girls, which like to strip for attention. No abuse required for production of naked videos.
(parent post didn't speak about rape or similiar)

Re: Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats extremely funny you think you would be the only people doing it and making all that money.
Are you sure you're not still young?
Maybe just extremely naive then.

The FBI -

[Anonymous Coward]

- Can break the law concerning child porn distribution in order to catch kiddie porn collectors...
Makes me wonder about the legality of such actions...
"half the sites" - that is a bit much....
The method stinks. So does the topic.
I do approve catching child molesters, predators and such.
I do like the laws to protect children.
I just do not think that operating a kiddie porn site is the right way to do ths...

Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

When, may I ask, will the FBI go after the creators of child porn, and not just the consumers? The peopel who actually and directly abuse children for money? Or is it a lot simpler easier to entrap the customers, since you can wave the contraband in their faces? It's rather like penalizing people who drink poisoned water rather than finding the poisoners.

Re:Question for the FBI

[fustakrakich]

The creators are motivated by and profit from consumer demand

Re: Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

im not fbi but

they probably take over sites and stop them also look at supliers and consumers the consumers can be preditors too as well but also even if not persay promots the providers.

of course this could be used in other areas and is in many instances.

Re:Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

That's highly doubtful.

Re:Question for the FBI

[Boronx]

Fool! Don't question libertarian orthodoxy on Slashdot.

Re:Question for the FBI

[h33t l4x0r]

I imagine it's because they're outside the US while the consumers are within the US. FBI only operates within the US.

Re:Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you explain, then, why people selling it aren't doing it for money?

Re:Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

And there I thought America has learned it's lesson after decades of the "War on Drugs". Arresting junkies does not prevent drug crime. The demand is already there (people are predisposed to take drugs), outlawing people's urges does not magically make urges go away. I would argue that the relationship is inverse, it is child pornographers who prey on the weaknesses of people who have the natural inclination to desire such things.

But on a more pragmatic note, criminalizing possession has negative effects as well. It artificially restricts supply much like DRM and copyright law, thus inflating the value of the data and the profitability of the business model. Furthermore, it restricts the access to a harmless outlet, thus increasing sexual frustration and making those who have such urges more likely to seek out the real thing.

Now, I'm not sure whether criminalizing possession yields a net benefit, but I'm inclined to be skeptical, given the total absence of any evidence to support it's effectiveness.

Re:Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the libertarian free speech absolutists are one of the few groups who are against it, at least in my personal experience.

Re:Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

When, may I ask, will the FBI go after the creators of child porn, and not just the consumers? The peopel who actually and directly abuse children for money? Or is it a lot simpler easier to entrap the customers, since you can wave the contraband in their faces?

Um, let's see...This video is on their site.

So, unless you consider the video a lie, they are, in fact, doing it, it just doesn't make the headlines here, at Slashdot.

It's rather like penalizing people who drink poisoned water rather than finding the poisoners.

No, drinking poisoned water most likely makes you a victim, the consumers of child porn, are not, however, such, except maybe insofar as they may suffer from some mental illness.

Re:Question for the FBI

[LWATCDR]

1. They do.
2. Many of these sites are for sharing kiddie porn. You know like Reddit, YouTube, and Blogs are for sharing things. The consumers are often the creators.
3. " It's rather like penalizing people who drink poisoned water rather than finding the poisoners." Really? These people are going to a tor dark web site called the playpen and you are trying to paint them as victims? How about this instead, "it is like penalizing people that pay people to sexually abuse children for there entertainment".... Yea I got no problem with this.

Re:Question for the FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was put best by dr. horrible, you're treating a symptom, the disease rages on.

https://youtu.be/Of9kHpCv1ts?t...

Sure glad I only use Tor for Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing I ever use Tor for is to fuck the MPAA, RIAA, and television networks in the ass, and pirate their content, because I'm CHEAP and IDGAF about who owns what, I just want to watch shit -- for FREE, of course. So I have nothing to worry about, LOL xDDDDDD

reminiscent of the Reverse Sting drug deal

[rmdingler]

Akin to the drug deals that go down at an interstate truck stop when the _name your initials_ sells a kilo for under market value,

only to ensnare a rube who'd never be able to purchase at that level from legitimate drug dealers.

We can debate justifying the ethics of creating an environment that may have never existed for a drug arrest, but operating a pedobear porn site for a second crosses a line you cannot return from.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late, you came to this article. We have your IP and are coming to your home to arrest you.

Entrapment would be

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting up a Google ad for free ice cream that leads to a child porn site, and then arresting the people to which they traced the IP addresses for having child porn in their browser cache.

Incidentally, it's now illegal to delete your browser history it you're under federal investigation, so if they did that, put every everyone who clicked on the ad under investigation, and you deleted your history because you had unwittingly gone to a child porn site, they could convict you of that without even raising the issue of entrapment.

Re:Entrapment would be

[Anonymous Coward]

They could also use parallel construction to come up with a reason for why they knew your IP address other than that you clicked on the ad they put up, and simply deny they every put up the ad. It's just the desperate excuse of a pervert caught in the act, after all.

Re:Entrapment would be

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that would not be entrapment. Entrapment would be them contacting a person, offering them child pornography, and doing so in such a way and to such a degree that would lead the person to act out of character and agree to receive it. Falsely advertising would not even make it past the initial hearing, as it would be clear that there was no intent (mens rea), which is required for most crimes.

Re:Entrapment would be

[Anonymous Coward]

it's now illegal to delete your browser history it you're under federal investigation,

what happens to those people using VMs where their browser settings and cache are automatically destroyed during PC shutdown?

FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

Are pervs.

Sad to see Obama distribute child porn...

[Anonymous Coward]

An earlier story claimed he was the person that told them to do that. A story I read earlier today said it was a Penn State professor that helped them. There's a reason they're know an Pedo State. They protected a child rapist for decades.

Re: Sad to see Obama distribute child porn...

[Anonymous Coward]

At Penn State, they love their child rapists.

Re: Sad to see Obama distribute child porn...

[Anonymous Coward]

We are!

Ped State!

Re: Sad to see Obama distribute child porn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering proof came out that they knew about the child rapes over forty years ago, yes they do.

Except

[s.petry]

1. They had 2 warrants and judges approve the tactic. If you want to complain about the judges that is fair game, but the FBI did follow the rules. 2. The FBI did not setup these sites, they seized them through legal process.

I am extremely pro US Constitution and don't see what they did as wrong. They followed the legal process as they should. What I wish we could see is how many arrests they made from the tactic.

Re:Except

[rmdingler]

Constitutional? yes

Legal? plausibly

Defensible behavior? No. "Honey, what did you do at work today?"

"Ran a kiddie porn site for the greater good!"

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. They didn't "run" the kiddie porn sites, they delayed taking them down until they had collected user data. "Indefensible" would apply if they were creating child porn to be used to attract new users.

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. They didn't "run" the kiddie porn sites, they delayed taking them down until they had collected user data.

A distinction without a difference.

Re:Except

[MightyMartian]

It seems little different from any other kind of sting. Whether you have cops posing as drug dealers, prostitutes, or posing as public officials taking a bribe, so long as the perp is not enticed by the undercover officer or his associates into committing the crime, honey traps are permissible.

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. But there's a big difference between posing as a drug dealer and actually dealing drugs.

An undercover cop posing as a drug dealer will bust the perp the moment he tries to commit the crime. Running a kiddie porn site is akin to selling drugs, letting the a few thousands users get high for a few months, and then start making a couple of arrests.

I mean, they mentioned they got about a thousand IPs... how many did they NOT catch?

End does not justify means, yadda, yadda, yadda...

Re:Except

[MightyMartian]

I'm sure when the FBI is going after drug gangs and cartels, they will go a lot deeper than just busting the street dealer. And as others have pointed out, these are seized sites being used as honey pots.

I'm not clear why, providing it has been approved by a judge, anyone would have a problem with this. Undercover cops will embed themselves a helluva lot more than just keeping a server up and running and logging user details.

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

... except,the government claims the viewing and distribution of the images causes harm to the victim. Therefore the viewing and distributing of the images is a criminal offense. The FBI is distributing the images, hence causing additional harm. Which according to them, is a crime. A drug sting is a different situation with a different claim to harm.

Re:Except

[ArtemaOne]

That's a lie. They ran them, and even made them faster so people could get more off them faster.

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not clear why, providing it has been approved by a judge, anyone would have a problem with this.

Suppose instead of a CP site it was a murder-for-hire site. You enter a person's name and address, pay some bitcoin, and the site ops arrange for a hit-man to kill the person you specified. This is bad, ok. Those people should be busted.

But now the FBI seizes the site and instead of shutting it down immediately, it continues operating it and performs 100s of actual murders for months while collecting IP addresses. Is that somehow less insane because a judge has approved it? To me it says the judge should go to jail too, along with the FBI agents.

Same thing here: the FBI committed crimes, the judge who signed off is an accessory to the crimes, they should all be locked up.

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

I have often wondered how you have managed to become a "Senior System Engineer/Architect" with your less-than-analytical way of thinking.

Given your apparent need to flaunt your title in every single post you make, I think you are well aware that you are probably not worthy of it.

That said, this little gem of yours

I am extremely pro US Constitution and don't see what they did as wrong.

more or less proves that you are not worthy of it.

What they did wrong here is that they perpetuated what is according to law considered to be harm to minors.

The availability and distribution of CP over time, indeed even just possession, is in itself considered active harm and is criminal according to law.

They actively and knowingly contributed to this crime continuing over time, thus actively and knowingly causing ongoing harm to those already exposed and more than likely caused new harm to those appearing in new material being made available on the involved sites during the time which they kept them running.

That is criminal and they should be ashamed and preferably punished for it.

For some reason, I get the feeling that you might be a Trump supporter...

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

And what makes the US exempt from other countries laws regarding distribution of child porn?

The FBI could easily be dragged into court in my country for what they did!

Re:Except

[thegarbz]

Defensible behavior? No. "Honey, what did you do at work today?"

"Ran a kiddie porn site for the greater good!"

Yes because catching sick fucks through legal means is not "defensible"

"Honey, what did you do at work today?"
"I just shutdown a website paedophiles were using. We could have used that website to catch many of them and place them all behind bars but we just decided to close it and let them all go instead."

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

"sick fucks"
That's the spirit. Kill all abnormal beings! Purge! Purify! Cleanse! Let your anger flow through you!

Re:Except

[Anonymous Coward]

Defensible behavior? No. "Honey, what did you do at work today?"

"Ran a kiddie porn site for the greater good!"

Yes because catching sick fucks through legal means is not "defensible"

"Honey, what did you do at work today?"
"I just shutdown a website paedophiles were using. We could have used that website to catch many of them and place them all behind bars but we just decided to close it and let them all go instead."

"We could have let the owners keep running it and hung packet sniffers and malware injectors at the ISP level. I mean, we identified where the hidden server was operating on the darknet, which means we had the ISP where that box was connected. Packet sniffers probably wouldn't have done much over TOR. But that would have been morally defensible, unlike our current 'Fast & Furious' tactics which allow us to do totally illegal things in the name of PEACE and NATIONAL SECURITY and LAW ENFORCEMENT.
We could have paid the money to experts to help us learn how to compromise TOR users without being directly responsible ourselves for furthering the spread of child porn. But who cares about protecting all users of teh internets when there are teh criminalz to catch!!!"
Or, ethically akin to letting a thousand murderers go free rather than convicting an innocent, better to let a thousand child pornster users go free rather than allow our law enforcement services to break the law while trying to enforce it.

Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

The hosting site in question was known as "Freedom Hosting", it was the host of many sites including OPVA (main CP video site), Lolita City (main CP pic site), TorMail (used by everyone and their dog) and many others. The cops took over *all* of them when they took the host, what they're talking about here is the server request logs. The NIT was supposedly only deployed on CP sites, but that's a lie it was deployed on all sites hosted by FH. I'm not about to testify on that though.

The exploit was based on a Javascript exploit in Firefox, in the CP community it was well known that you should disable any form of scripting that TorBrowser insist on shipping enabled because otherwise it'd break too many regular sites. So in the end they caught a few nobodies that didn't follow best practices, shafted someone who only did the hosting and punch water knocking out the main sites. It's like bittorrent, we tend to crowd but the crowd could always meet somewhere else.

For what it's worth, they also took over TLZ (The Love Zone) and ran it for half a year. Playpen they took over and ran for two weeks. They catch the people who do stupid things like pay for hosting with non-anonymous methods, say compromising things in private messages and so on. They pick of the stupid, the smart stay on... 20+ years and counting, the cops are n00bs. They think the scene is TPB, it's just barely scratching the surface.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked with people who did this sort of work (though for a different country). They are not the geniuses you're making them out to be, though they're not particularly bad at their job, they're particularly good at it, either.

I have no interest in the GP's interests, but I will say, the police usually catch people who aren't good at what they do (or people that are good but get sloppy/desperate), and I doubt CP is a particular exception to that rule.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

And how many kids to the government kill in Iraq and elsewhere fighting their "war on terror"? thousands? tens of thousands? They should stop wasting time tracking down people who jerk off to kids, there are much larger problems in this world that cause much greater harm to many more people. In fact the notion that a mere image or video of a crime is itself criminal is insidious and damaging to a free society. In no other instance, except for pornography involving minors, is possession of an image or video of a crime itself a crime. Do the families of murder victims suffer less when the footage of their loved one's murder is posted online? If your answer to that is no, then why are videos of murders and other horrific crimes freely shared online without themselves being criminal? Frankly, there ought not to be any crime for mere possession of child pornography, but like the bogey man nobody wants to talk about it publicly. We call ourselves an enlightened nation of laws, but in reality we're all a bunch of hypocrites and those in the law enforcement business are the biggest hypocrites of all.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story grandpa, could have used a vampire

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

You talk like you have some exciting insight to offer in a cat and mouse game, but in reality your a just a generic dirtbag lowlife that gets off jerking off to kids. This weekend i worked with some newer grad FBI agents and their capabilities are fucking amazing, they get it. Ive been doing UNIX and dev for 20+ years and was impressed. Make no mistake you are only free because of budgets and priorities (which change), not because they are "noobs". Your days are numbered.

You're only hearing the news from the Iraqi information minister on the crushing defeats and trembling of the enemy as they flee from the mighty police.

1. Society is getting hyper-sexual and it is less and less related to love and reproduction. People have sex because it feels good, younger and younger adolescents are picking up on that and experiment with their sexuality and have earlier and more advanced sex.
2. Camera phones and webcams means young ones record more, share more in constantly improving quality and flirting has become much more graphic than before, hence "sexting".
3. The attention frenzy of social media drives kids to seek attention and acting out online is one way of doing that, if you think it's all leaks from boyfriends I can tell you many are showing off for entire channels and they know it.

Those three alone pretty much overwhelm the system and you can't very well put these kids in jail and throw away the key. It's only the fringes that could be classified as CP but there's enough 10yos spreading and rubbing one out on cam that it's hard to keep up.

On top of that you have the enthusiastic amateurs, say what you will but the cops don't have any chance to stop anything spread to the general community it's many thousands of copies spreading like wildfire. Sometimes the supply is cut short, but you can't empty a dam where things flow in and nothing flows out.

Finally you have shady businesses most non-western places, SE Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and so on. They're few and the customers few, it's not the billion dollar industry people think but they're there if you got lots of money and want custom make-to-order material. Not saying I agree with it, but not going to pretend it's not there.

Taking down all that would be a bundle. Or you could try to attack the places we swap, but they tried with P2P which is like shooting fish in a barrel and they never managed to empty it as new fools joined. And there will still have to all the fun with jurisdictions and passing the case around.

The police are winning every battle, but still losing the war. In the 90s it was shitty scans of a polaroid or digitized 8mm from the 70s over crappy dial-up or the very few who could digitize a VHS tape. Today it's a lot easier, the quality and selection is much better, the tools are safer... the trend is in our favor, not theirs.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet Podesta and his cabal are still free.

The world is changing for the worse, because the NWO wants it that way, its makes them lots of shekels. It also destroys the moral foundations your forefathers built the country on, which the NWO wants to enslave. And your sitting here telling us how its going more Sexual by accident.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi fellow AC, I'm your next door neighbor. As a pastime, I've put out a standing offer to everyone on our street to pay for photos and videos of them raping you. I'm sure you don't mind, because I'm not going to be harming you at all.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

To think that he's alone in being able to thwart NIT is naive. There are a lot of stupid people, but an NIT should be pretty simple to thwart amongst any Tor-using paedophile communities that exist. I know of dozens of methods other non-pedophile Tor users use to thwart these attacks.

Examples: Disabling javascript would have stopped this attack, click 'high security' option in the Tor Browser would have stopped the attack, running Tails would have stopped this attack. Running Tor Browser as a separate user without direct access to the internet and directing all traffic to 127.0.0.1 on a port that runs Tor as a separate user would have thwarted this attack (provided the user is behind a NAT). Running Tor Browser in a virtual machine where host-only networking is setup and only Tor running on the host machine has access to the internet would have thwarted this attack. Removing a wifi card and directing all traffic through a VPN router would have thwarted this attack.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Draeven]

The irony here is, the resulting videos and photos would not be illegal, so long as that AC wasn't a minor.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

They disclosed the JS exploits from the first FH busts and Playpen was much later. Given how hard they've dug in their heels on this one (letting evidence be suppressed, guaranteeing the person walks free), it's entirely likely this isn't the basic JS exploit from back in the LC days. There's good reason to believe it's file-based (see, 7-zip and JPEG2000 code execution flaws, others that cause certain media players to contact a server when opened) or some more serious bug not involving allowing scripts or flash in some versions of Tor browser or against the Tor network.

And while local cops might for example think TBP is piracy, this is the FBI and international agencies-- the people that actually do know about the scene and arrest group leaders. They actually do have some seriously competent people.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the stats show that people are having less sex, not more.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Megol]

No.

Re: Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

They are too busy looking at porn to have sex.

Re:Your resident pedo here

[Anonymous Coward]

... related to love and reproduction ...

Everyone wants sex == love but we spend much more time thinking about sex than love. The two are not automatically equal and now society is hyper-sexual we need to deal with our built-in disconnect towards love.

... have earlier and more advanced sex.

Adults like to think there's a magic age where growing schoolgirls never think about fucking but there have always been sexually-active 15 year-olds; there's less need to hide it in a hyper-sexual society. That is probably why earlier generations of school-girls had sex later: Fears of pregnancy and being called a slut, not a disinterest in fucking.

... attention frenzy of social media ...

The US-lead push to criminalize a nudie photo because because it contains a 15 year-old is wrong. That said, everyone is entitled to privacy and we need to punish distribution: Social network censorship and laws against revenge porn are great but until invading someone's cyber-privacy is vigorously prosecuted, the incentive to abuse others will remain. Of course, the biggest abuses of privacy are committed by governments and US corporations which is why there are more and more laws demanding ordinary people protect the vulnerable: So the worst behaved are not responsible for invading the cyber-privacy of vulnerable people.

justice

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're serving up deviant shit like kiddie porn I hope they all get the same sentence as anybody else would get.
 
Will the federal purveyors of child porn be prosecuted and imprisoned?

Re:justice

[Megol]

That is not how the world works. No, they will not be sentenced as it isn't illegal for them _with_permission_ to serve goods that would be illegal otherwise, this in order to catch actual criminals. While most of the time police try to use dummy goods (fake drugs that appear genuine unless tested chemically, weapons that seem to work 100% but can't actually be fired etc.) sometimes that isn't possible - and this is the case here. This isn't something novel and it isn't something illegal for the police.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[ShanghaiBill]

Pedophiles fear many things. If they seek psychiatric help, the doctor is required to report them. So they stay untreated in the shadows. Other countries are more enlightened. In Japan, pedophiles can buy child-sized sex dolls. Although data is scarce, the dolls appear to provide a release for their predilection and reduce offenses against actual children. This is unlikely to happen in America, but soon we will have a sexual predator as our president, so maybe he will be more empathetic.

Pizza Party?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the politically connected paedophiles will be arrested when? ...

Thought not.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[cold fjord]

More empathetic? Probably not. The sex predator couple that occupied the White House in the 90s, and was just defeated, didn't do anything like that. Of course maybe the Clintons were holding that for the 4th term lame duck surprise. That, and a pardon of Bills pedophile friend. Rumors .. rumors

I know those raided over this, info inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI needlessly raided, embarrassed, and stole a lot of property from people it disliked irregardless of the fact they didn't even know who they were targeting in most cases. The IP addresses don't equal persons or places to be searched despite what the courts have accepted. I know that because I can demonstrate it here with this very example. I do know that in this case the FBI did know who they were targeting because they were targeting an activist or two or group who stood up against the FBI for immoral and reprehensible behaviour (distributing child porn). Mark Edge and Ian Freeman stood up and called the FBI out just two weeks before they raided the studio of Free Talk Live and home of numerous liberty activists. The government has been targeting Ian Freeman's reputation for some time and slandering/libeling his name making claims he's a paedophile who advocates for the rape of children under six. Ian advocates against the use of violence including against children and doesn't think children under six should be having or are ready for sex.

Here is what I can tell you: The warrants didn't name a person, place, location, and specific things to be seized. In this case they've stolen a few dozen computers and devices from many innocent parties. The courts literally rubber stamp these types of warrants and higher courts have ensured this continues.

You can see exactly what happens in the videos below (thanks to other activists who recorded the raid). FTL is a libertarian talk show that has promoted the Free State Project which is a migration of liberty minded activists to New Hampshire for the purpose of pursuing liberty and freedom. Check out www.freekeene.com for Liberty news in New Hampshire. And don't worry- if you join us there are thousands of people here already. You won't be raided as long as you don't live near the home of the most active activists. They didn't succeed in undermining the movement (which actually consists of numerous groups throughout New Hampshire) and within a handful of hours they raised $5,000 and got Free Talk Live on air- before they even missed airing a single episode.

Check out:

http://www.copblock.org/156621/got-enemies-have-the-fbi/

Raid itself:

http://freekeene.com/2016/03/20/men-donning-badges-steal-property-from-free-talk-live-studios/

Re:I know those raided over this, info inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Ian advocates against the use of violence including against children and doesn't think children under six should be having or are ready for sex.

Ri-ght. And it's OK to have sex with children over the age of six? I can understand why you believe it's reasonable to associate that sort of mentality with the Free State Project instead of hiding under a rock with the rest of the rock spiders. You've pretty much cornered the market on scumbaggery.

You are seriously fucked up individual, and my immediate wish is for that to state to become a cricket bat actualised literal state.

Re:I know those raided over this, info inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't understand. The scum bags who paint Ian as a paedophile twisted a story about him being molested at the age of six into a story about him advocating for sex with children at six or under. All he ever said was that he didn't feel it was a traumatic experience and that automatically making it out to be this terrible thing was nothing more than FUD by conservatives and religious nut jobs. Ian doesn't think the government should be involved in deciding what age is appropriate for 'children' to have sex, but recognizes that puberty is the point in which someone is going to seek it out. At no point did he say it would be appropriate for an adult to have sex with a child. Most of the problems that stem from age of consent are not related to adults having sex with kids, but 'kids' having sex with 'kids'. So a 12 year old having sex with a 10 year old. Or a 15 year old having sex with a 17 year old or an 17 year old having sex with an 18 year old. The government is literally ruining peoples lives and putting kids on sex offender lists for no good reason. It's simply nobody's business but that of the individual with whom and when sex is an appropriate thing to undertake. Rape is rape. If a 25 year old has sex with a 13 year old and the 13 year old didn't consent that is rape and that 25 year old should be charged. The same is true in reverse. The age shouldn't matter. Even a 4 year old can identify an act as something they don't like. Every parent knows what there kid likes and doesn't like. Even babies! There is no good logical reason to put an age on which a person can or can't decide for themselves whether to have sex. You can prove rape without such laws. Age of consent is only useful to persecute people where both parties actually consented and that almost always happens with people of similar ages.

Re: I'm afraid to click on any of this article's l

[Anonymous Coward]

Doctors are only required to report them if they threaten to commit a future crime. Saying you have sexual fantasies involving children does not in itself require disclosure.

No clicking required

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid to click on any of this article's links
For fear that I'll unwittingly be taken to a child porn site and then have my IP address logged for immediate arrest.

Just hovering over the link in Firefox will make a "silent request" to the websites in those links. No clicking required.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[tsotha]

...but soon we will have a sexual predator as our president...

Yeah, except... no. Those allegations fell apart the day after the election.

Besides, we had a sexual predator in the White house starting in 1992, and it didn't seem to matter much.

Re:reminiscent of the Reverse Sting drug deal

[Anonymous Coward]

but operating a pedobear porn site for a second crosses a line you cannot return from

Indeed. I can understand child porn, but furry porn is a step too far!

You mean is Tor complicit?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not only vulnerable, it's complicit in the surveillance. In particular the "Tor Stinks" document stated they planned to run lots of their own nodes, and do attacks like downgrade attacks. Independent researchers discovered 100 such nodes simply by setting up dummy hidden services. Tor foundation *excused* this, instead of looking themselves.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/over-100-snooping-tor-nodes-have-been-spying-on-dark-web-sites

Tor exit nodes are mapped, Tor foundation have obfuscation nodes which are delivered by Gmail (i.e. NSA PRISM will be watching those emails, and a Gmail account gives them the Android device surveillance to connect it to for audio and video and phone and location and contacts and names and photographs, etc.). It's very odd to use a Gmail account.

Now that Putin friendly Trump has annexed America. What is the betting that Trump will share Tor surveillance data with Putin's FSA "to catch kiddie diddlers", when it really is just payback for his help in the election.

Dissidents cannot use Tor, its backdoored, soon the backdoor will open both west and east ways.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

When did they fall apart?

Rule 29 b.

[bmo]

Rule 29 is now amended thusly:

Rule 29 (a) In the Internet all the girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents.
        (b) All child porn servers are FBI servers

Which should have been obvious before this.

--
BMO

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Breitbart or someone said so? That's debunked if you're a trump supporter I suppose.

Re: I'm afraid to click on any of this article's l

[Anonymous Coward]

The law doesn't require proof, it only requires suspicion. The supreme court has also ruled that "civil commitment" of pedophiles is not a punishment, therefore does not require the presumption of innocence. Additionally, what might be acceptable to admit today could get them in trouble in a week. Then, supposing that they do go "get help", that help is putting them in "therapy" programs that views them as liars and tries to find reasons to hurt them, and prescribes them drugs to fuck up their health in the hopes they can no longer get an erection.

So basically, it's a horrible fucking decision to involve others for a pedophile.

one server, 23 sites

[Anonymous Coward]

23 cp sites were run on one server administered by the same people who provided TorMail, which was also hosted on the same one server. TFA makes it sound like the sites were on several servers which it wasn't. NIT ran off the same server.

I don't feel too sorry for the chesters......

[BlytheBowman]

...i am happy they are going to be locked away and abused by the guards and hopefuly other inmates in PC

Re:I don't feel too sorry for the chesters......

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off with your fucking facebook login.

Re:I don't feel too sorry for the chesters......

[Anonymous Coward]

They actually live pretty well, the only problems they face are the time away from their friends and families (5 year minimum) and the massive amount of money that they have to pay in fines and "entitlements" the lawyers who orchestrated this whole thing don't cum cheaply!

I wonder how much Project Safe Childhood has colluded with the FBI to prosecute 30-35 y/o white males. I figured it was an attempt to stifle votes, I suppose we'll see.

Don't feel bad for the chesters, feel bad for the people who aren't chesters getting caught up in the mix. Feel bad for the chesters who weren't chesters til their friends started leaving them cuz some guy on slashdot told him that chesters gon git ya. Feel bad for the lawyers and others who you'd be led to believe were white knights; are simply protected and immune offenders.

Feel sorry for the children who've got to grow up around this type of victimization. Someone with this kind record will certainly not be afforded the same rights or privileges as any other mostly-sane person.

IMO i think all chesters should be shipped across the country to a shed where they are starved, beaten, and gassed to death.

Disgusted but not surprised

[dbIII]

Disgusted but not surprised - how about they put in the hard work of solving crimes instead of the quick way to promotion of enabling crimes and catching the people they have tempted?
The primary target should be catching the people molesting the kids in the first place, but instead those get left alone as being too difficult.

Re:Disgusted but not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Disgusted but not surprised - how about they put in the hard work of solving crimes instead of the quick way to promotion of enabling crimes and catching the people they have tempted?
The primary target should be catching the people molesting the kids in the first place, but instead those get left alone as being too difficult.

Um. From what I read, to be a part of at least some of those sites you have to upload your own material, so probably a lot of the people who were signing up WERE actually doing some of the abuse.

Hey FBI,...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a .onion address for https://tips.fbi.gov/?

End of cartoon

[dbIII]

OK - so I didn't get to the end of the cartoon before replying and the two examples I gave fit the end of that.
My point is still that the very lazy policing of entrapment is still being practiced at times and that line between getting the attention of criminals and enticing people into performing criminal acts that they may not have otherwise done is crossed on occasion.
I'd prefer them to put some more effort into actually catching child rapists, which seems to be getting ignored to chase after those who look at porn instead.

Re:reminiscent of the Reverse Sting drug deal

[Sabriel]

What I'm wondering is how often such stings have ever collided. "You're-" "under-" arrest..." *stereo* "Wait, what?"

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

When the police investigated and concluded that the fantasy hopes of anti-Trump children don't constitute a spontaneous materialization of crimes that never happened.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

When she failed to get elected.

Half of the sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then surely they would have more than enough hard evidence to arrest many of the "ruling elite" who are involved in these sickening paedophile rings. And yet they don't....

One must wonder how many police officers have been compromised also.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Serge_Tomiko]

You've got to understand. This is Slashdot. Most readers here can't get laid, or if they have, their partner count is low. They don't understand what it is like to follow the baseball metaphor for sex. If they have sex at all, it is because the woman finally settles for them and initiates everything (after fucking a lot of alpha guys less worthy than Trump).

So, "grab them by the pussy" means nothing to a man who only can have sex when a woman grabs him by the balls.

Anyone who is remotely attractive and talented knows how it works. First base, you kiss the girl, second base, you feel her up, third base, you grab her pussy, and if she is still into it, then you can push for a home run - getting her back to your place to fucking her.

If you are the kind of man women want, this is easy to do. There are at least 2 dozen girls I've done this with in less than 2 hours. A woman who doesn't resist you grabbing her pussy will fuck you, guaranteed. And women know this game. I've probably experienced 3 dozens times where I made out with a girl, quickly accelerated to second base, but when I went for her pussy, she brushed my and away, or in a few cases, pushed me away. Such is life. They didn't think anything of it, and in most cases they asked to go on a second date or even stated they wanted to take it slow.

And that's where a lot of this comes from. Trump did well for women, because women know how the game works. I mean seriously, Chaucer writes about grabbing a woman's pussy to see if she is ready and interested in sex. Men have been writing shit similar to the baseball metaphor for sex since writing was invented. In a more civilized age before testosterone levels plummeted, fathers would patiently explain to their sons the proper, respectable order of events.

For the nerd however, autism is his flaw. Poetry is a foreign language. Social cues with women are not understood. BUT, they do understand that alphas like Trump can fuck any woman they want, and deep down they know almost every woman wants to fuck him.

So they manufacture bullshit like this.

I am not a Trump supporter. I think he is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I believe political correctness has been propagated to kill progressive economic policies and discredit the left. There are SO MANY REASONS to criticize Trump, but claiming he is a sexual predator? Bullshit. Total bullshit.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so painfully full of shit I don't know whether to laugh or cringe.

"There are at least 2 dozen girls I've done this with in less than 2 hours," really good sir? A tip of the fedora to you, that's an active fucking imagination you've got. A shame you can't tell the difference between what's real and what goes in in your cum-stained mind.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[AmiMoJo]

I browse with a VPN service all the time. I'm afraid to browse without it, for reasons like this.

Okay, maybe the VPN provider lied and does keep logs, but at least it's another layer of (likely international) process they need to through.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this comment listed as "troll"?

Be definition, Former President and Governor Bill Clinton used his position of power to have sexual relations with two women which is what a sexual predator does. Yet we have little proof so far that President elect Donald Trump is a predator. And please don't claim the supposed the 13-year old girl rape case as proof because that case hasn't seen a court room. Nor is there proof to all the claims that suddenly appeared right before the election. None of those have seen a court room either just as with the some of encounters of Bill Clinton's. There is thing called innocent until proven guilty.

Good thing

[Cley Faye]

That's a good move. Instead of fighting windmills trying to shut down the network, use it. No idea how it will fare, but that's the way to go.

Good thing you're not a lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

The AC would need to consent to activity for the perpetrators to not be convicted of rape, and that wouldn't matter for jurisdictions that define staged rape videos as illegal forms of pornography.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you going to tell us how underrated glory hole etiquette is next, or what positions really work best for threesomes, you know, stuff I want to learn from our next president, but he's going to be too busy now.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If they seek psychiatric help, the doctor is required to report them. So they stay untreated in the shadows.

This is a good point. They've made it dangerous for these people to seek treatment (not that many of them do, but still...).

In a way I almost feel sorry for them. We don't pick what we like or what we're attracted to, and it seems clear that most pedophiles are driven by urges far beyond conscious choice. (I mean, who would consciously choose to be attracted to children? No one, that's who.)

So obviously we can't let them do what they want to do (molest children), but at the same time we should recognize that they're not in control of what they want. That appears to be something that's baked into their personality from the start.

Just look at these guys on "To Catch A Predator"- many of them have seen the shows and are even worried that the "girl" they're going to meet is in fact a setup, and they still go. What does that tell you? It tells you that they'll ignore their own reasoning for a chance to fulfill their desires. That's an obvious sign of a mental disorder.

So you're right- pedophiles shouldn't be made to be afraid to seek treatment, or as you point out, they'll stay untreated in the shadows. And that benefits no one, especially the children they'll eventually victimize.

Good Grief!

[Torodung]

Oh my God. YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. You are committing crimes in the course of your undercover investigation and abrogating 4th amendment rights.

No, "kiddie porn" and "think of the children" doesn't justify it. NOTHING does.

Signed,

A concerned citizen

Re: I'm afraid to click on any of this article's l

[Anonymous Coward]

He is an admitted predator and brags about it.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[war4peace]

There's been some sort of growth change as of late (I blame the hormones-infested meat the industry pushes into supermarkets). During the last two decades, I'll be darned if I can reliably tell whether that hot chick I see on the street is 24 or 14. Could be anything in between.
If you don't ask for an ID, you could spend long years in jail.

Back in 2002 I almost fell for it. Luckily I asked her which University she went to and she serenely said "I'm 8th grade". Mind you, that was in a bar.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I'll be darned if I can reliably tell whether that hot chick I see on the street is 24 or 14.

It's not just you. They sure don't look like they did when I was younger.

I see young women in stores and yeah, they could be 15 or they could be in their 20s. And they're a lot more curvy or buxom or whatever than I remember them being when I was in high school or junior high. Some scientific studies are claiming that the age of puberty is dropping, so maybe that's it.

https://www.theguardian.com/so...
http://sph.unc.edu/age-of-pube...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/0...

"At the turn of the 20th century, the average age for an American girl to get her period was 16 to 17. Today, that number has plummeted to less than 13, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey."

So yeah, there's something going on.

The US government is the worlds largest provider??

[Anonymous Coward]

So my tax dollars went to guys looking at and making webpages with child porn?

Whats nest a serial killer to catch serial killers? A cop killer to catch cop killers?

How bout they dont violate laws to catch someone violating laws. People are only going to act similar to government attitude, if they can break laws so can we

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[x_t0ken_407]

Why is this comment listed as "troll"?

Be definition, Former President and Governor Bill Clinton used his position of power to have sexual relations with two women which is what a sexual predator does. Yet we have little proof so far that President elect Donald Trump is a predator. And please don't claim the supposed the 13-year old girl rape case as proof because that case hasn't seen a court room. Nor is there proof to all the claims that suddenly appeared right before the election. None of those have seen a court room either just as with the some of encounters of Bill Clinton's. There is thing called innocent until proven guilty.

Ain't partisanship grand?

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[syntotic]

These people are doing several things WRONG. The case is real, kidnappers are not after the money but have much shadier agendas, so where do you think you have to go to see if you can find any clue as to what happened to missing people? All women have a responsibility to tell you if they got pregnant and they will always be in condition to reach you and make you pay for it, eh?

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so painfully full of shit I don't know whether to laugh or cringe.

"There are at least 2 dozen girls I've done this with in less than 2 hours," really good sir? A tip of the fedora to you, that's an active fucking imagination you've got.

Say he's been active in clubs/bars for 20 years, single for 50% of that time, and goes out once per week while single. If he brings someone home 10% of the time, that's 52 partners. This sort of number is only far-fetched if you're a teenager or a shut-in.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[piojo]

There's been some sort of growth change as of late (I blame the hormones-infested meat the industry pushes into supermarkets). During the last two decades, I'll be darned if I can reliably tell whether that hot chick I see on the street is 24 or 14.

That's true, but it's not the same thing as pedophilia. Our society has the bad habit of treating someone exactly the same whether they sleep with a kid or a 17 year-old. Media is partly to blame, because "child" is a highly inflammatory term in the context of sexuality, so they overuse that term. The result now is that someone with a healthy brain who is attracted to young adults can end up being treated the same as someone with an abnormal brain (who is attracted to children). Our collective enjoyment of outrage is removing the nuance and shades of gray from life.

Re:I'm afraid to click on any of this article's li

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you've had to work your whole life of unrequited love in order to get one girl to touch your genitals doesn't mean it's even a challenge for someone who knows how to play the game.

People like you are pathetic, go get some juice for your wife's son, then head back to the cuckshed. Chad is on his way over.