If you think that's a problem, combine it with this: while ignorance of the law is no excuse for a citizen, it absolutely *is* thanks to our courts an excuse for the police. They can detain and search you even if what you're doing is legal but they believe otherwise. There's no consequences for the cop; just an innocent mistake, and you're entitled to no compensation, and anything they find as a consequence of their search is fair game. All thanks to our wonderful enlightened SCOTUS in Heien v. North Carolina where both sides once again joined together to piss on the 4th amendment.
That's funny, I already download Netflix original shows at full 1080p, 4-7GB for an hour episode, as DRM free mkvs. Since they're not stopping piracy, that leaves screwing the customer.
Is this what you want? Yet another site posting Democrat propaganda 24/7 with a sprinkling of technology news on slow politics-news days?
Judging by the numbers of comments on the articles like this versus the number of comments on articles actually about software and hardware topics, yes, that's precisely what the vast majority of/. wants.
And yes that sucks... join me in the puppy and coloring book filled safe space?
You expect wrong. You're forgetting that it's New York City. It's not even the looking that's the problem, mentally ill homeless openly masturbating while watching porn on these kiosks is happening all the time, usually (but not always) at night, and the police keep getting calls... that's why it's being shut down, not because someone loaded a nudie pic and ran. Heck, men obviously masturbating doesn't even require porn here, not a week goes by where the police don't put out a flyer asking for help locating the latest guy to masturbate in front of a bunch of people on the subway while staring at some poor woman.
NYC: "Ok, we agree then, you'll pass every house."
Verizon: "Yup, we'll 'pass' every house. Every address shall be 'passed', you got it."::snickers in background:: ...contract term elapses
NYC: "What's the deal Verizon, not every address can get service!"
Verizon: "Yeah and? That's not what pass means. We passed everywhere, that doesn't actually mean we have to offer service where we passed."
NYC: "But that *is* what pass means, that they can get service."
Verizon: "That's not our definition, and your definition wasn't in the contract, so we met our contract."
NYC: "Hey, nobody screws our citizens over that bad at the level of bribes you offered, cya in court whenever you stop bribing for more time!"
That only protects the teller. Most banks are (rightfully) unwilling to put their customers and floor employees lives at risk over the $1-2k or less in a tellers drawer. A lot of robbers don't even display weapons.
I don't know who you asked, but it sure couldn't have been an actual postal inspector. It's mainly a question of resources; they absolutely do use drug dogs, and x-rays look for signs of drugs too. But it's mainly focused on packages arriving from overseas. That level of inspection of domestic mail is well beyond current funding because of the volume. According to, um, people, maybe 5% of packages from overseas get intercepted in the US? Vacuum sealed or not. Postal inspectors on occasion will intercept domestic drug shipments too. There's a long list of techniques they use, which you'd have found if instead of asking someone with no particular knowledge of this topic, you actually researched it. If they don't find anything, they typically re-seal so well you don't even know it was opened. If they do find something, you get a funny letter basically saying "uh, we've got your drugs, come down here and claim them if you're somehow not breaking a law, otherwise we're keeping them".
Shutting down even top level targets has little to no impact?? Surely if we spend twice as much and sentence the next site runner to DOUBLE life, the online war on drugs will end in victory. -Typical drug warrior.
Chris Christie will be just fine, he gets to go back to governing New Jersey....oh shit yeah let's get this poor guy a padded room and 15-minute life checks.
To which President are you referring? More federal raids of state-legal marijuana businesses were carried out under Obama than were under Bush. If anything, the fault with Obama is not doing anything about the DEA and friends ignoring guidelines about it.
Do you mean the sacrifices and many deaths involved in choosing to build nuclear weapons while millions starve; or the sacrifices and many deaths when their shiny new nuke blows up on the launch pad and irradiates a good chunk of their own country?
That alone isn't enough. They needed to be fined enough that they get the message. There's no way their legal department didn't inform the higher ups that this kind of abuse would leave them open to liability, but the past has proved to them any resulting fines are a minor fraction of the money they made doing it. The only way to actually discourage this kind of behavior is to make the fine so severe that their shareholders take notice. I'm thinking a whole quarters profit should get that message across, which Google tells me was $5bn in Q1 2015.
These days, most of those folks have moved on to Python.
And the flip side of that is many of the people still coding in VB6 write excellent code. Most samples being posted today have full sanity checks and error handling, are very easy to follow, support Unicode, have documentation and commenting... just what do you think makes 'good code' that VB6 programmers aren't generally doing these days? Sure there's still lots of people very new to it and writing terrible code (lots of new users coming from non-english speaking countries actually)... but I have a hard time believing good code is as rare as you're making it out to be these days.
I'm a "people". I'm very passionate about VB6. And I only work with it as a hobby, it's unrelated to my job. Here the thing: For standard Windows GUI-focused apps, there's nothing better. VB.NET might as well be something entirely different and basic tasks are far more complex. VB is still relevant not only because of the business case, but because there's all the benefits it originally had and it's still capably of making modern apps.
The power of VB6 is always understated. People think of ugly, old GUIs but it also lets you make GUIs with the latest Common Controls version and also lets you access all the modern shell features. There's plenty of room to be passionate about a language where all basic functionality is fast and easy, yet it provides virtually no upper limit to how complex you can get if you need to: I don't use the Win3.1-ish drive list and dropdown, I use the introduced-in-Vista IFileDialog. Why heck, VB6 will even allow you to use in-line assembly if you need to. Multi-threading? An actively developing frontier, just in the past year making true multithreaded apps has been made much easier.
Modernizing VB6 is in fact my biggest programming passion. There's a special joy that certainly inspires passion in bringing all the shell goodies that have been introduced in XP, Vista, 7, etc into a language from the 90s. My latest project was making the full suite of Core Audio (introduced in Vista) interfaces usable in VB6. Other people have brought in long-missing support for modern alpha-blended graphics/icons.
Have a look see on a site like vbforums.com, there's huge amounts of passion from real people, and huge amounts of quality code. The applications being made today can't even be visually distinguished from VB.NET.
So my daughter might be taking nude selfies of herself on her phone, which Google flags as child porn. But its not a pedo, its a selfie. So the engineers should carefully review those selfies, decide the phone belongs to a child, and the pictures are likely her own.
Except it is pedo, she's guilty of manufacturing CP, distributing CP if it's been sent to her BF, and exploitation of a minor (herself).. and the authorities should handle it since criminal charges will teach her not to ruin her life, by ruining her life. At least that's what some police officers and prosecutors think, and judges don't seem to mind either. It's not theoretical either, kids have actually been hit with those charges, most commonly for sharing, but for possessing too-- that's right, a prosecutor in NC actually had the gall to charge a 17 year old and his gf with exploitation of a minor for possessing naked pictures of themselves (distinct from the various other charges for sending and having their partners pics), in just one example of this obscene abuse of the law. If you think that's crazy, the insanity didn't even stop there: the boy was charged as an adult!
This country has completely lost its shit over teenage sexuality since it's been combined with technology. Probably because childhood has been extended so far that people don't recognize the difference between 17 and 7, so are equally freaked out by sex with the two ages.
Of course by "proves" you mean "claims with no evidence and simply has to say 'yes we own that' again with no evidence if you appeal, even if you prove they don't even own the copyright to what they're saying they do" right? Then if you attract enough attention through the media to get their PR department to notice, or hire a lawyer and start fighting just on principle, they might finally relent, but the false claimant gets to keep the revenue they've made in the first few weeks/months, which accounts for most of what will be made.
And they're still not doing enough to stop infringement according to "rightsholders", who have access to the system to monetize/takedown videos under their control with no oversight or repercussions for false and even outright fraudulent claims.
Actually, they DO know that people are fapping to their abuse pics some of the time, because the FBI helpfully informs known victims when their pics are found on a suspects computer.
Um, that sounded like sarcasm to me. Apart from those on suicide watch/psychiatric lockdown (and possibly supermax type facilities for the very violent, but I'm not familiar with them), prisoners do get bleach when they're on cleaning details, and do get razors to shave with*. Healthy balanced diet not so much, which is why those other two seemed like sarcasm. Inmates on work details sometimes even have access to [gasp] box cutters and knives.. it's almost like they're people instead of animals!
* - and the one suicide attempt I saw, the dude didn't even use the razor, he took apart a handheld radio from the commissary and sharpened some of the electronics on the inside. It would have worked too if the CO didn't notice so quick, dude lost A LOT of blood (which, by the way, inmates then cleaned up with bleach and one of those deadly soap balls).
The consequences was the arrest of over 100 pedophiles.
And according to the official rationale, the re-victimization of thousands of abused children.
They did not run the website.
They absolutely did. They seized control and moved the site to their own servers, where they continued full operation. Their servers managed by their IT staff served abuse pics, accepted new members, accepted and distributed new pictures... everything.
They basically created a honey pot to collect information on any visitors.
They had to serve existing content and allow new content to do this? Never been an issue before with just not serving the real deal.
Law enforcement agencies engage in undercover actions all the time. One example is when undercover agents buy a few kilos of cocaine to go after the dealer. Purchasing the drugs does not mean they are dealing drugs. Buys of this nature go right into the evidence lockers and are eventually destroyed when no longer needed. anymore
But that's not what happened here. Imagine the officers bought those few kilos and sold it to thousands of men, women, and children, then just turned around and arrested 1% of them, long after they had consumed the content and in all likelihood sold it along to more people.
I imagine in this case that the entire website will be saved as evidence. Depending on where the site was hosted they will go after any server logs related to this site.
Which is what they should have done exclusively instead of becoming the administrators of a large scale child exploitation site.
Every thing they did in this investigation so far was perfectly legal.
According to a single low level judge. It's far from clear and far from resolved. There's material omissions in the warrant application alone that could invalidate the whole thing, like not mentioning they planned to take up serving images for 2 weeks (and it's pretty damn close to one of those 'general warrants' our founders hated so much; broad discretion to hack into and search an unspecified number of unknown people many of which were even outside US jurisdiction). *If* this practice stands, it's only because the clearly illegal nature was ignored for the benefit of catching pedophiles.
And you do realize you are actually support the suspected pedophiles? You are going after the FBI instead of the pedophiles. You are awarding the pedophiles the benefit of a doubt while giving none what so ever to the law enforcement agencies in this case.
And you're saying it's perfectly legal and ok for the FBI to victimize children in pursuit of people who viewed images. You've misstated their actions in clear bias towards being an authoritarian assclown who thinks any means are justified if the government says so, damn the implications, damn the victims, damn the victims families, damn due process, damn the law, damn the constitution, damn the doctrine of 'innocent until proven guilty', and damn the children whose records of horrific abuse were distributed to even more people by their very own government. Piss off. And nice job hiding behind AC.
The exploit almost certainly required Javascript to be enabled like the last time they did this.. This effected people stupid enough to turn it on, and those stupid enough to not turn it off for the versions where it was enabled by default (and not update). Which makes what the FBI did even worse, because they had no realistic chance of even catching a large percent of US-based users. 1,300 should actually be appreciated as a huge number considering the small percentage of people smart enough to get on tor and locate such a site, but not smart enough to realize that visiting the most evil, illegal place on the whole of the internet with js enabled was just not a terribly good idea.
If you think that's bad, just look at his rulings in criminal justice. You have to be absolutely delusional to claim that the constitution text and founders intent allows the federal government to criminalize (i.e. enforced at gunpoint by a federal police force) a plant grown in your own home and used only by you done legally under state law (Gonzales v. Raich, decided 5-4 with Scalia concurring), an interpretation of the commerce clause that contradicted his previous opinions- when it involved guns he found the commerce clause meant something entirely different. He started with a partisan conclusion, then worked backwards to find support, frequently twisting logic beyond its breaking point.
The problem here is... just viewing the picture is creating a 'demand' for such material, and therefore a supply must be created, which exploits minors. I'm not really on board with the drawings of such things being forbidden as well, that seems like overkill to me, and drawings may supply the consumers of such materials that aren't exploitative of minors. It's an ugly nasty situation for sure.
You're saying people have sex with children just to get some high fives online? It's illogical on its face. They might be more likely to record it if they're already doing it, but that's about it. Commercial transactions are an entirely different issue. Also, some people enjoy watching children beaten and brutally murdered. But that's legal (as long as the child isn't naked) to possess pictures/videos of. People get off on adults being raped too, but videos of that are legal. If viewing encourages the act, why aren't things like that illegal? Or maybe we should arrest anyone who has adult porn they can't find signed affidavits of affirmative consent for? The laws banning CP were created when most of it was purchased. When that was no longer the case they made up other rationales with little evidence and zero discussion of whether such a thin link was worth a massive infringement on freedom (destroying someones life because of data they possess) because why on earth would LE ever want to give up the massive power and carte blanche to ignore half the constitution that came with it. If it was really about protecting victims of crimes or that viewing encouraged crimes, a whole host of other things would be illegal.
You mentioned cartoons filling demand, but that doesn't go far enough: some studies have even indicated legal possession of already-created freely acquired CP (i.e. no realistic contribution to market) can actually satisfy a pedo so they don't go out and actually molest a kid, at a better success rate than completely abstaining from viewing such images. However disgusting CP is, if it prevents pedos from becoming child molesters at a higher rate than it encourages them to, the net result is less children hurt-- and that should be the goal, and right now it's not: we're far more interested in the low-hanging fruit of viewers.
Umm what about the undercover cop that sells drugs to victim drug users?? They don't just take their money and cuff them they usually make a true deal and the user is grabbed once the drugs are in their possession.
When an operation like that is conducted it's typically fake drugs. Pharma companies like Purdue and Actavis sell identical copies of their oxycodone pills without the oxycodone to law enforcement for example. Powders are obviously easy to fake. But in any case, they sure as hell don't sell to tens of thousands of buyers, let the buyers go home, enjoy the drugs, and pass some along to others, then sell some more to them a few days later, maybe bust them or not some months later, or if they're not US citizens just tell some other cops, for the tiny minority that they could follow to begin with (remember, this exploit only caught those people using older versions *with javascript enabled*.. who in their right mind does ANYTHING on the dark web with scripting enabled?).
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that's a problem, combine it with this: while ignorance of the law is no excuse for a citizen, it absolutely *is* thanks to our courts an excuse for the police. They can detain and search you even if what you're doing is legal but they believe otherwise. There's no consequences for the cop; just an innocent mistake, and you're entitled to no compensation, and anything they find as a consequence of their search is fair game. All thanks to our wonderful enlightened SCOTUS in Heien v. North Carolina where both sides once again joined together to piss on the 4th amendment.
That's funny, I already download Netflix original shows at full 1080p, 4-7GB for an hour episode, as DRM free mkvs. Since they're not stopping piracy, that leaves screwing the customer.
Is this what you want? Yet another site posting Democrat propaganda 24/7 with a sprinkling of technology news on slow politics-news days?
Judging by the numbers of comments on the articles like this versus the number of comments on articles actually about software and hardware topics, yes, that's precisely what the vast majority of /. wants.
And yes that sucks... join me in the puppy and coloring book filled safe space?
You expect wrong. You're forgetting that it's New York City. It's not even the looking that's the problem, mentally ill homeless openly masturbating while watching porn on these kiosks is happening all the time, usually (but not always) at night, and the police keep getting calls... that's why it's being shut down, not because someone loaded a nudie pic and ran. Heck, men obviously masturbating doesn't even require porn here, not a week goes by where the police don't put out a flyer asking for help locating the latest guy to masturbate in front of a bunch of people on the subway while staring at some poor woman.
Summary of the problem:
::snickers in background::
...contract term elapses
NYC: "Ok, we agree then, you'll pass every house."
Verizon: "Yup, we'll 'pass' every house. Every address shall be 'passed', you got it."
NYC: "What's the deal Verizon, not every address can get service!"
Verizon: "Yeah and? That's not what pass means. We passed everywhere, that doesn't actually mean we have to offer service where we passed."
NYC: "But that *is* what pass means, that they can get service."
Verizon: "That's not our definition, and your definition wasn't in the contract, so we met our contract."
NYC: "Hey, nobody screws our citizens over that bad at the level of bribes you offered, cya in court whenever you stop bribing for more time!"
Dude quiet about the layout. The last thing this site needs is "modern web design" shitting all over it.
That only protects the teller. Most banks are (rightfully) unwilling to put their customers and floor employees lives at risk over the $1-2k or less in a tellers drawer. A lot of robbers don't even display weapons.
I don't know who you asked, but it sure couldn't have been an actual postal inspector. It's mainly a question of resources; they absolutely do use drug dogs, and x-rays look for signs of drugs too. But it's mainly focused on packages arriving from overseas. That level of inspection of domestic mail is well beyond current funding because of the volume. According to, um, people, maybe 5% of packages from overseas get intercepted in the US? Vacuum sealed or not. Postal inspectors on occasion will intercept domestic drug shipments too. There's a long list of techniques they use, which you'd have found if instead of asking someone with no particular knowledge of this topic, you actually researched it. If they don't find anything, they typically re-seal so well you don't even know it was opened. If they do find something, you get a funny letter basically saying "uh, we've got your drugs, come down here and claim them if you're somehow not breaking a law, otherwise we're keeping them".
Shutting down even top level targets has little to no impact?? Surely if we spend twice as much and sentence the next site runner to DOUBLE life, the online war on drugs will end in victory. -Typical drug warrior.
Did he really think responding to DMCA takedown notices and removing the content was going to keep this from happening?
Chris Christie will be just fine, he gets to go back to governing New Jersey. ...oh shit yeah let's get this poor guy a padded room and 15-minute life checks.
To which President are you referring? More federal raids of state-legal marijuana businesses were carried out under Obama than were under Bush. If anything, the fault with Obama is not doing anything about the DEA and friends ignoring guidelines about it.
Do you mean the sacrifices and many deaths involved in choosing to build nuclear weapons while millions starve; or the sacrifices and many deaths when their shiny new nuke blows up on the launch pad and irradiates a good chunk of their own country?
That alone isn't enough. They needed to be fined enough that they get the message. There's no way their legal department didn't inform the higher ups that this kind of abuse would leave them open to liability, but the past has proved to them any resulting fines are a minor fraction of the money they made doing it. The only way to actually discourage this kind of behavior is to make the fine so severe that their shareholders take notice. I'm thinking a whole quarters profit should get that message across, which Google tells me was $5bn in Q1 2015.
These days, most of those folks have moved on to Python.
And the flip side of that is many of the people still coding in VB6 write excellent code. Most samples being posted today have full sanity checks and error handling, are very easy to follow, support Unicode, have documentation and commenting... just what do you think makes 'good code' that VB6 programmers aren't generally doing these days? Sure there's still lots of people very new to it and writing terrible code (lots of new users coming from non-english speaking countries actually)... but I have a hard time believing good code is as rare as you're making it out to be these days.
I'm a "people". I'm very passionate about VB6. And I only work with it as a hobby, it's unrelated to my job. Here the thing: For standard Windows GUI-focused apps, there's nothing better. VB.NET might as well be something entirely different and basic tasks are far more complex. VB is still relevant not only because of the business case, but because there's all the benefits it originally had and it's still capably of making modern apps.
The power of VB6 is always understated. People think of ugly, old GUIs but it also lets you make GUIs with the latest Common Controls version and also lets you access all the modern shell features. There's plenty of room to be passionate about a language where all basic functionality is fast and easy, yet it provides virtually no upper limit to how complex you can get if you need to: I don't use the Win3.1-ish drive list and dropdown, I use the introduced-in-Vista IFileDialog. Why heck, VB6 will even allow you to use in-line assembly if you need to. Multi-threading? An actively developing frontier, just in the past year making true multithreaded apps has been made much easier.
Modernizing VB6 is in fact my biggest programming passion. There's a special joy that certainly inspires passion in bringing all the shell goodies that have been introduced in XP, Vista, 7, etc into a language from the 90s. My latest project was making the full suite of Core Audio (introduced in Vista) interfaces usable in VB6. Other people have brought in long-missing support for modern alpha-blended graphics/icons.
Have a look see on a site like vbforums.com, there's huge amounts of passion from real people, and huge amounts of quality code. The applications being made today can't even be visually distinguished from VB.NET.
So my daughter might be taking nude selfies of herself on her phone, which Google flags as child porn. But its not a pedo, its a selfie. So the engineers should carefully review those selfies, decide the phone belongs to a child, and the pictures are likely her own.
Except it is pedo, she's guilty of manufacturing CP, distributing CP if it's been sent to her BF, and exploitation of a minor (herself).. and the authorities should handle it since criminal charges will teach her not to ruin her life, by ruining her life. At least that's what some police officers and prosecutors think, and judges don't seem to mind either. It's not theoretical either, kids have actually been hit with those charges, most commonly for sharing, but for possessing too-- that's right, a prosecutor in NC actually had the gall to charge a 17 year old and his gf with exploitation of a minor for possessing naked pictures of themselves (distinct from the various other charges for sending and having their partners pics), in just one example of this obscene abuse of the law. If you think that's crazy, the insanity didn't even stop there: the boy was charged as an adult!
This country has completely lost its shit over teenage sexuality since it's been combined with technology. Probably because childhood has been extended so far that people don't recognize the difference between 17 and 7, so are equally freaked out by sex with the two ages.
Of course by "proves" you mean "claims with no evidence and simply has to say 'yes we own that' again with no evidence if you appeal, even if you prove they don't even own the copyright to what they're saying they do" right? Then if you attract enough attention through the media to get their PR department to notice, or hire a lawyer and start fighting just on principle, they might finally relent, but the false claimant gets to keep the revenue they've made in the first few weeks/months, which accounts for most of what will be made.
And they're still not doing enough to stop infringement according to "rightsholders", who have access to the system to monetize/takedown videos under their control with no oversight or repercussions for false and even outright fraudulent claims.
Actually, they DO know that people are fapping to their abuse pics some of the time, because the FBI helpfully informs known victims when their pics are found on a suspects computer.
Um, that sounded like sarcasm to me. Apart from those on suicide watch/psychiatric lockdown (and possibly supermax type facilities for the very violent, but I'm not familiar with them), prisoners do get bleach when they're on cleaning details, and do get razors to shave with*. Healthy balanced diet not so much, which is why those other two seemed like sarcasm. Inmates on work details sometimes even have access to [gasp] box cutters and knives.. it's almost like they're people instead of animals!
* - and the one suicide attempt I saw, the dude didn't even use the razor, he took apart a handheld radio from the commissary and sharpened some of the electronics on the inside. It would have worked too if the CO didn't notice so quick, dude lost A LOT of blood (which, by the way, inmates then cleaned up with bleach and one of those deadly soap balls).
The consequences was the arrest of over 100 pedophiles.
And according to the official rationale, the re-victimization of thousands of abused children.
They did not run the website.
They absolutely did. They seized control and moved the site to their own servers, where they continued full operation. Their servers managed by their IT staff served abuse pics, accepted new members, accepted and distributed new pictures... everything.
They basically created a honey pot to collect information on any visitors.
They had to serve existing content and allow new content to do this? Never been an issue before with just not serving the real deal.
Law enforcement agencies engage in undercover actions all the time. One example is when undercover agents buy a few kilos of cocaine to go after the dealer. Purchasing the drugs does not mean they are dealing drugs. Buys of this nature go right into the evidence lockers and are eventually destroyed when no longer needed. anymore
But that's not what happened here. Imagine the officers bought those few kilos and sold it to thousands of men, women, and children, then just turned around and arrested 1% of them, long after they had consumed the content and in all likelihood sold it along to more people.
I imagine in this case that the entire website will be saved as evidence. Depending on where the site was hosted they will go after any server logs related to this site.
Which is what they should have done exclusively instead of becoming the administrators of a large scale child exploitation site.
Every thing they did in this investigation so far was perfectly legal.
According to a single low level judge. It's far from clear and far from resolved. There's material omissions in the warrant application alone that could invalidate the whole thing, like not mentioning they planned to take up serving images for 2 weeks (and it's pretty damn close to one of those 'general warrants' our founders hated so much; broad discretion to hack into and search an unspecified number of unknown people many of which were even outside US jurisdiction). *If* this practice stands, it's only because the clearly illegal nature was ignored for the benefit of catching pedophiles.
And you do realize you are actually support the suspected pedophiles? You are going after the FBI instead of the pedophiles. You are awarding the pedophiles the benefit of a doubt while giving none what so ever to the law enforcement agencies in this case.
And you're saying it's perfectly legal and ok for the FBI to victimize children in pursuit of people who viewed images. You've misstated their actions in clear bias towards being an authoritarian assclown who thinks any means are justified if the government says so, damn the implications, damn the victims, damn the victims families, damn due process, damn the law, damn the constitution, damn the doctrine of 'innocent until proven guilty', and damn the children whose records of horrific abuse were distributed to even more people by their very own government. Piss off. And nice job hiding behind AC.
The exploit almost certainly required Javascript to be enabled like the last time they did this.. This effected people stupid enough to turn it on, and those stupid enough to not turn it off for the versions where it was enabled by default (and not update). Which makes what the FBI did even worse, because they had no realistic chance of even catching a large percent of US-based users. 1,300 should actually be appreciated as a huge number considering the small percentage of people smart enough to get on tor and locate such a site, but not smart enough to realize that visiting the most evil, illegal place on the whole of the internet with js enabled was just not a terribly good idea.
If you think that's bad, just look at his rulings in criminal justice. You have to be absolutely delusional to claim that the constitution text and founders intent allows the federal government to criminalize (i.e. enforced at gunpoint by a federal police force) a plant grown in your own home and used only by you done legally under state law (Gonzales v. Raich, decided 5-4 with Scalia concurring), an interpretation of the commerce clause that contradicted his previous opinions- when it involved guns he found the commerce clause meant something entirely different. He started with a partisan conclusion, then worked backwards to find support, frequently twisting logic beyond its breaking point.
The problem here is... just viewing the picture is creating a 'demand' for such material, and therefore a supply must be created, which exploits minors. I'm not really on board with the drawings of such things being forbidden as well, that seems like overkill to me, and drawings may supply the consumers of such materials that aren't exploitative of minors. It's an ugly nasty situation for sure.
You're saying people have sex with children just to get some high fives online? It's illogical on its face. They might be more likely to record it if they're already doing it, but that's about it. Commercial transactions are an entirely different issue. Also, some people enjoy watching children beaten and brutally murdered. But that's legal (as long as the child isn't naked) to possess pictures/videos of. People get off on adults being raped too, but videos of that are legal. If viewing encourages the act, why aren't things like that illegal? Or maybe we should arrest anyone who has adult porn they can't find signed affidavits of affirmative consent for? The laws banning CP were created when most of it was purchased. When that was no longer the case they made up other rationales with little evidence and zero discussion of whether such a thin link was worth a massive infringement on freedom (destroying someones life because of data they possess) because why on earth would LE ever want to give up the massive power and carte blanche to ignore half the constitution that came with it. If it was really about protecting victims of crimes or that viewing encouraged crimes, a whole host of other things would be illegal.
You mentioned cartoons filling demand, but that doesn't go far enough: some studies have even indicated legal possession of already-created freely acquired CP (i.e. no realistic contribution to market) can actually satisfy a pedo so they don't go out and actually molest a kid, at a better success rate than completely abstaining from viewing such images. However disgusting CP is, if it prevents pedos from becoming child molesters at a higher rate than it encourages them to, the net result is less children hurt-- and that should be the goal, and right now it's not: we're far more interested in the low-hanging fruit of viewers.
Umm what about the undercover cop that sells drugs to victim drug users?? They don't just take their money and cuff them they usually make a true deal and the user is grabbed once the drugs are in their possession.
When an operation like that is conducted it's typically fake drugs. Pharma companies like Purdue and Actavis sell identical copies of their oxycodone pills without the oxycodone to law enforcement for example. Powders are obviously easy to fake. But in any case, they sure as hell don't sell to tens of thousands of buyers, let the buyers go home, enjoy the drugs, and pass some along to others, then sell some more to them a few days later, maybe bust them or not some months later, or if they're not US citizens just tell some other cops, for the tiny minority that they could follow to begin with (remember, this exploit only caught those people using older versions *with javascript enabled*.. who in their right mind does ANYTHING on the dark web with scripting enabled?).