FBI’s Deep Web Child Porn Ring Questions Role of Gov’t in Society
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This is why law enforcement shouldn't be allowed to set their own priorities. The institutional goals and the goals of the taxpayers who pay them don't match.
It's not entirely the FBI's fault. They're under heavy political pressure to stop every terrorist plot. Every time some nut actually does something, they get criticized for missing them.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/fbi-terrorism-sting...
Forgive me for being pedantic, but it's "trawling." Trolling is another thing entirely.
Although given the breadth of their fishing, I guess trawling (using a net) is more accurate than trolling (using a line).
I believe the polari version is more appropriate
This reminds somewhat of the "gun walker" case where the ATF let illegal guns flood the market in order to track the buyers, which resulted in the death of a border patrol agent and countless others along the border.
Now as far as entrapment goes there are legal definitions for it under most cases law enforcement isn't allowed to change the outcome of an event.
For example it is ok for an undercover officer to sell you drugs in a sting operation but it is not ok to come to you and convince you to do drugs and then sell them to you.
For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography.
If the fbi did not operate the server they would still have acquired it just from a different source.
The ATF sting was a pretty shitty operation with dubious legal backing but it's not an case for not running intelligence gathering or sting operation, it's just evidence that they should be planned and executed better and that certain restrictions should apply especially in cases where public safety might be put at risk.
I'm a little dubious of this brand of logic. The one that goes if X was not supplied they would just get it from the <potentially slightly harder to find &/or riskier> place.
Perhaps, but surely the point is to reduce the incentive by making it harder/riskier - as making it impossible is generally not a viable option?
FBI routinely creates, plots, then recruits people for made up terrorism plots, then arrests them
The DEA, in partnership with the ATF, recently ran a operation where they recruited people to rob fake stash houses, then arrested the people that were coerced into the plot
Entrapment is often used in prostitution stings as well.
None of these instances are tossed by the courts, entrapment is very much alive and well in the legal system
>>>>For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography.
While true, there are some very significant problems with this. For decades now the basis of the law against viewing child pornography is that each time the image is viewed the child is victimized. Thus by running the server for even 1 second the FBI was, according to the law, victimizing children in order to catch criminals.
If you then claim is no children were actually harmed by the FBI's action then one has to start looking at the very foundation of the Child Porn laws.
Personally I think the ethical and moral position (and should be the obvious one) is that the FBI should not, under any circumstances, be distributing child porn. Period.
Edit:
Sources for above can be found in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432737
Don't get me wrong going after the producers of new material is very important just as it is important to go after the human traffickers that facilitate the production.
I know it's all maybe's and could-be's, but they're maybe's and could-be's that ruin children's lives.
As such it's the net effect that's important.
http://m.phys.org/news/2010-11-legalizing-child-pornography-...
https://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+selec...
I recently saw an interview with a conservative Indian figure about porn where one man said "I'm not harming anyone by watching porn in my room" and the conservative man responded with "You might become corrupted and turn into a sex maniac". It sounded like hilariously backward thinking, but that's still how many people think of child porn.
Not to speak of black people being allowed to vote. To marry without consent of their owners.
Sorry - but do you really need more examples, that arguing with an universal morale is just one big smelly pile of bullshit?
Morale and societal norms change and shift over time. We develop and there is no basic morality, just societal contracts. And that is good. We do not need an entity enforcing or dictating our morals. We need rationality to identify the right rules to live as a society and then a system to enforce these rules in the best possible way (not that we do have that in place anywhere in the world). But given your comment/idea and our current systems I rather live in our current systems. I just do not want to be ruled by some morality dictators.
When government attempt to legislate morality is when atrocities and abuse occur.
To millions of people in various religions, being gay is immoral, a woman showing her face or hair, is immoral
Adult pornography is considered immoral by a large part of the population.
Instead of making a case for morality, one should use science and logic to make the case for victimization.
Each person has the self evident right to their own body, aka self ownership. We accept this has as the fundamental foundation of Human Rights.
Society through science has shown that children are mentally not equipped to make a choice to have sex as such society has prohibited adults from manipulating children into having sex. We also recognize that any time one person forces another with violence to engage in sex is a violation of their person hood. We have grouped these 2 crimes into the category of rape and created punishments for these crimes
No morality involved.
Using science should also come into play when evaluating the punishment and criminality of viewing or possessing child pornography.
Morality and Emotion have no place in the law
This is just where society originates from, instincts allowing for the forming of social contracts. For example if you exchanged resources with another party (your wife) for drugs and hugs, both sides would want for this contract to last. So you need a third party, which can be forced by both sides to enforce the contract.
Enter the pedophiles and gays. Your wife is going to make certain you hate them and she can switch of that hate, via sanctioning there existence (e.g. church/political inclination). That instinct-switch is as important to her, as beauty is to you.
Now, ten years into a cellphone society, where even thought offenders soon will be blatant obvious by constant NN observation all that remains are the instincts. The function is gone, but the gears of this bio-machinery still churn on.
I miss those days, where i still felt burning hatred for some Gears and was involved in affairs of the species in general. Life was so much easier if one just glued arguments to what one feels.
I looked into this whole messy affair, because one of those bastards tried to get on my younger brother when i was young. And for such there should be punishment, even a lifetime in prison. But though crimes, like a deprecated bio-machine, masturbating to a Victorian child-labour-sweatshop , to prosecute those is foolish.
It bewilders me that this comment makes perfect sense in someone's mind.
In a way it's similar to prostitution, where there might be nothing morally wrong with selling or buying sex, but it (potentially?) promotes human trafficking. I doubt that'd the only reason it's illegal though, at least in the US.
Why aren't they doing a divide and conquer type approach that would kill these underground communities? Advertise big bounties for snitches and undermine whatever holds them together.
Cue DEA adding Kratom to Schedule I list so they can pad numbers.
For starters, to even use the entrapment defense in most jurisdictions requires the judge's permission, which is rarely granted. Second, the burden is on the defendant to show that they would never have engaged in the illegal behavior at all without the police.
E.g., if the police physically threaten or blackmail you into selling drugs, you might have a case. If they simply pester you on the phone a bunch, probably not.
In this case, the FBI didn't force anyone to visit the child porn site, so it's not entrapment. What's up for debate is whether the harm of disseminating the material outweighs the benefits of catching more users.
But I would be interested to hear a knowledgeable opinion on whether the "viewing is new harm to the victim" argument is often employed against producers and distributors, rather than consumers. The argument that distribution makes a market for producers to satisfy would seem much stronger here.
>>>The court quoted academic research, which concluded that “Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place.”
---
United States v. Blinkensop, 606 F.3d 1110, 1117 (9th Cir. 2010) (affirming the sentencing judge, who stated)
>>> “it is a clear reality . . . that every time one of these web sites is opened and every time one of these images is viewed, additional harm is visited upon the victim.
-----
FBI and DOJ routinely state the same in Sentencing, victim impact, and other official court and prosecution documents and activities
The idea that simply viewing child porn victimizes the child, is infact the legal foundation for its prohibition
It is clear and well established fact
DEA/ATF Fake Stash houses?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160809/14081135202/judge...
FBI creating their own Terror plots
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/21/us-terrorism-prosecution...
Or do you disagree that the legal foundation for making the act of viewing/possession (not making or distributing) Child Porn is based in the idea that simply having the child porn is re-victimizing the child depicted
Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 111 "the sentencing judge, who stated “it is a clear reality . . . that every time one of these web sites is opened and every time one of these images is viewed, additional harm is visited upon the victim. "
This is horrific abuse towards the victims, and gross waste of policing resources that could be used to solve real crimes instead.
That was one of the core questions here - why logins went up 350% under the control of the FBI. Was there any advertising, inducements?
And "part of the role of of maintaining a non-suspicious facade was uploading new material for members".
I do not believe the FBI continued to operate it as is on the criminals hardware, I believe they took possession of the "server" then likely imaged it and spun up a new instance of the site on the FBI own servers, these servers likely had much better specs, and a much better connection to the internet.
Too bad. Police work isn't supposed to be easy. If it is, that means you're living in a police state.
They're certainly beyond the reach of the law, at least by the standards the rest of us are held to.
A good start on repairing relations with the police would involve holding them to higher standards of behavior than the rest of us are expected to exhibit, instead of lower ones. I think most good cops would agree with that basic sentiment, since they're the ones who behave as if it were already the case.
Ultimately, though, when the government decides to launch an impossible war on drugs, terror, pornography, or some other abstract noun, the police will have to do the inevitable dirty work, and they will have to take much of the blame for the consequences. The real problem here isn't the FBI agents running the servers, but the administrative and legislative bosses they answer to.
There is little practical difference between the Black Marias described by Solzhenitsyn and what happened to Freddie Gray in the back of a van in Baltimore. But how can we fix that sort of thing at an institutional level, when supervisors, prosecutors, judges, and juries insist on going easy on the actual perpetrators? That's the sort of question I'm compelled to ask when the FBI comes around, hat in hand, to ask for even more surveillance and enforcement powers.
You horrify me, sir. You truly do.
We agree, I think - I hope - that our current system of rule staggers under an enormous burden of corruption, which if not addressed will continue to expand until it bears us all under. And we agree, I think - I hope - that this is something which would better be prevented than otherwise.
But to equate what happened to one man, himself and his fate far from usual in myriad ways, with what happened as a matter of official policy under a regime that murdered thirty millions of its subjects simply because they were inconvenient? Where is the sense, or the value, in this? You have succeeded in horrifying someone who has otherwise considerable sympathy for the point you sought to make, although not so much the lack of nuance with which you did so. What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
Good. That's a start; it's a horrible business.
What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
I can only recount the emergence of my own point of view. It's 1990-something, and I'm killing a Saturday afternoon in a used-book store in Austin, somewhere near the UT campus. Wow, lots of dust on this one. I'll bet nobody's touched it for 20 years. I've heard of this Solzhenitsyn guy, wonder what it's about? Didn't he win a Nobel? I guess for $1 it's worth a shot.
And then, a few months later when I got around to reading it: Wow, I used to think that the Russians were like the Nazis or something, a bunch of inhuman demons, maybe a barbarian race that evolved from a worse sort of ape than the rest of us. But they aren't. They really aren't. They're just like us. They are us. And the stuff in this book didn't really happen because of differences in politics or religion or economics or communism versus capitalism or whatever. It happened because the Russian people allowed their political system to dominate their judicial system. The courts were their last line of defense, and when they fell, the rest was inevitable.
The best time to stop the Black Marias would have been before the first one rolled out. The next best time was just after the first one rolled out. Either way, it didn't happen, and now I see the same thing happening here in the US that led to the events described in the Gulag Archipelago: the political subversion of justice.
It seems to start with the elevation of the cult of law enforcement as a privileged class, or at least that's something that tends to happen in the early stages of metastasis (to use Solzhenitsyn's metaphor.) In Russia, the rationale was the struggle against counterrevolutionary forces and the bourgeoisie. In the US, it's the War on Terror, Drugs, and Kiddie Porn. I don't see much difference.
So, yeah, horror is an appropriate expression when you think you can see a map like this starting to unfold.
I will say this: perhaps the most striking feature I observe in your analysis is that everything in it is very simple. I wish I had more often observed reality to be so.
That aside, how surreal is it to argue in favor of the application of equal justice for all under the rule of law, only to have "herp, derp, why don't you move to Somalia?" thrown in your face as a counterargument?
I agree. Do you think perhaps it might be of some value to argue this point in a way that's not trivial to dismiss for valid reasons? I think perhaps it might be of some value. Feel free to continue to caricature yourself for the benefit of unsympathetic interlocutors if it pleases you to do so, but please also consider the possibility that you might argue more effectively by doing otherwise.
Entrapment, at least in my mind, just doesn't enter the equation when you're operating in an environment which is difficult to access, siloed from the public, and known to be populated exclusively by dangerous criminals.
If you understand human psychology, I hope you understand how there is an excellent chance at least one person would push the button. Possibly 5 would. Possibly more. Simply because the opportunity is presented to them on a silver platter.
Does that mean those people are actively seeking out how to detonate a nuclear weapon? No, of course not. Should we actively seek out people with such "inclinations" and deal with them preemptively?
If you say we should, what happens when your particular mental tic is deemed a danger to society? Who deems what is a danger? Are you so sure you are entirely safe? So were many people in societies of ages past, under Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc.
An ex-collegue said he attended a talk where they explained that images are often hidden under layers in a word document. You may be unaware that you have illegal on your machine.
I don't think so. They should be held to a higher standard than everyone else, or at least an equal one, but not a lesser one.
I'm not particularly concerned that doing so would make it more difficult for them to catch criminals - people who are otherwise innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. It should be difficult (but not impossible) for law enforcement to do its job. That's the sign of a society in which civil liberties still have some meaning.
In this particular case, we have the FBI running a child pornography ring to catch child pornographers. Arrest every member of the FBI who was involved, send them to prison and put them on the sex-offenders' list for the rest of their lives. Treat them the way they would treat everyone else.
Maybe then they'll learn to actually respect the laws they enforce, and the judicial process would wind up being more fair out of the need for self-preservation.
But if they did have to, then the police should be charged for speeding as well, since a speeding police car presents the same potential danger as a civilian one.
This is a pretty odd defense. How would you answer OP's question when worded this way - "So how exactly would they catch speeders then if they absolutely must not break the speed limit in 1955?"
I'm not arguing that they absolutely can't break the speed limit - only that when they do, they should pay for it. The police should have no greater privilege to break the law than anyone else.
And yes, sometimes that might mean letting speeders off the hook. I don't have a problem with that. It's better to have the police be hamstrung by the law than to allow them to exercise arbitrary power, as long as they're hamstrung in the same way as every other citizen.
Which, by the way, is the way it already works.
"Police have to break the law to do their jobs" is not a defense, because the law can be changed.
If the police want to run a child porn ring to catch pedophiles, let them try to get the law changed to allow that. Having the police decide which laws they are and aren't allowed to break is not a recipe for a free and just society.
The police should have no more power than a normal person, they are simply hired and trained to do what normal people do not have the desire to do.
This goes back to the foundation of American style governance, For the people by the people. The police are people, as such they are not the masters of anyone, nor are the people subordinate to them.
For example, ambulances and firefighters are certainly also allowed to speed, when they're carrying out their duties - we've added exceptions to our laws for those circumstances, and done so as part of the normal democratic process. More mundanely, a park ranger is going to be allowed to do things like not pay the same parking fees that everyone else is allowed to, or cull animals out of season when the general population isn't allowed to hunt.
This is fine! In a democratic society, we make the laws, and within certain bounds we can make whatever we want legal or illegal. We can also debate about whether or not certain groups that represent us should have certain powers, and it's also perfectly fine to have different points of view about what exact powers they should have. But fundamentally, all that's really going on here is we're deciding to delegate certain powers and responsibilities to a particular branch of government, which of course works on our behalf.
The problem here isn't that the police have these exceptions carved out for them, the problem is that - at least arguably, there's room for debate here - the democratic process and rule of law has broken down in this instance, and the police aren't following the law at all.
Now there's always considerable shades of gray in situations like this - arguably more so in common law countries, where there's layers and layers of interpretation on top of everything, and a good deal of vagueness in quite a lot of the law. It's been generally accepted for a long time that the police have a certain amount of latitude to break various laws in ways that are not remotely spelled out in the course of investigating crimes; many would argue (with some justification) that this covers what the FBI is doing here. There's nothing inherently wrong with this argument, as long as there really are checks and balances - that is, if the interpretation of what laws police are allowed to break isn't arbitrary, but is the result of some kind of consensus where the judicial system and the legislative system (the democratic process) has set bounds as it sees fit. I personally would be in favor of generally stricter limits, less vagueness and greater scrutiny of precisely what laws the police are allowed to break and when - but still, there's nothing _inherently_ wrong with the situation we're in now, at least to the degree that police conduct does follow the rule of law and it isn't "police getting away with things just because they're police".
And on the more general subject of police and the rule of law - I don't find this particular instance with the FBI particularly problematic; I would prefer stricter limits here but I don't think this is an instance where the rule of law has broken down. I do think that the situation with entrapment in general _is_ a genuine problem - for example, the FBI has been manufacturing terrorist plots and cajoling/bribing people to help out in some small way that never would have if they didn't need the money, just because they're Muslim (which the FBI has been doing repeatedly). That, I think, is a clear example of an instance where the judicial system has clearly failed. Or even worse, the many police departments that routinely murder black people with hardly ever any real repercussions.
But again - the problem isn't with the police having exceptions to the law, the problem is with a breakdown of the rule of law.
and see I do not agree with these exemptions, or rather I believe it should be acceptable for a normal person to also speed when there is an emergency that would require it. So the Police and Fire are not exempted from the law, it is simply acceptable for all persons to speed when X is happening, and in most instances X would only apply to police and fire.
The same is true for park rangers, If there is need to cull animals is should be open to all persons to cull them when the need arises. This is generally true today, as most places will hold a lottery or some other activity to give the public limited access to an area to cull the needed number of animals.
>>This is fine! In a democratic society,
It is not fine. I will set aside the fact that I am not a strong supporter of democracy, democracy is mob rule, and simply end with a Quote from an essay that I feel should be the Basis for law.
-----
The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
"What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."
----
If you believe in individual freedom at all, then it should be held that the collective force (government) can have no more power than that of an individual, and the government does not have the legitimate authority to grant powers and privileges to one individual (police, fire etc) that are not granted to all individuals.
That does not follow.
What you're basically saying is that you're an anarchist. That's a perfectly legitimate position to take - hell, I'm all in favor of anarchism as a personal philosophy - but it's not a terribly practical method of organizing and running a large society, and if you don't believe in the social contract you're not going to have much common ground with most people.
I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road."
Apparently it is ALREADY legal for the police to run the pornography ring, in order to catch people.
This isn't logically possible, if they had to obey the same rules, they wouldn't have any police powers:
- use of force to subdue someone (would otherwise be assault) - handling of evidence that is otherwise prohibited (drugs, munitions, etc.) - physically detaining people, which would be considered kidnapping by anyone else
The police have an elevated authority by definition. Certainly there should be (and are) constraints on this authority, it isn't unlimited, but it is too simplistic to simply say they have to obey the same rules as everyone else.
Now if you do this and the person is not in fact violating the law it will be you being arrested however if I catch someone breaking into my home at 3am I most certainly can use physical force to detain him/her.
At least in New Zealand, which is constitutionally similar to the UK, police are governed by specific laws that allow what would be otherwise considered illegal behavior (e.g. carrying firearms, use of physical force, speeding). If a police officer was to, say, rape someone, it would still be completely illegal.
N.B. "An Act does not bind the Crown unless it does so expressly or by necessary implication."
and
They [the Crown] are: the Sovereign personally; her servants or agents; and persons who are not Crown servants or agents but who, for certain limited purposes, are considered to be “in consimili casu”.
Are the police considered the Crown though? I'm struggling to find any real information on that point.
Crown servant is defined in the Official Secrets Act for the purposes of that act, but nonetheless useful for our edification, N.B. section (e):
In this Act "Crown servant" means -
(a) a Minister of the Crown;
[(aa) a member of the Scottish Executive or a junior Scottish Minister;]
[(ab) the First Minister for Wales, a Welsh Minister appointed under section 48 of the Government of Wales Act 2006, the Counsel General to the Welsh Assembly Government or a Deputy Welsh Minister;]
(b) . . .
(c) any person employed in the civil service of the Crown, including Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service, Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service, the civil service of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Court Service;
(d) any member of the naval, military or air forces of the Crown, including any person employed by an association established for the purposes of [Part XI of the Reserve Forces Act 1996];
(e) any constable and any other person employed or appointed in or for the purposes of any police force [(including the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Police Service of Northern Ireland Reserve)][or of the Serious Organised Crime Agency];
(f) any person who is a member or employee of a prescribed body or a body of a prescribed class and either is prescribed for the purposes of this paragraph or belongs to a prescribed class of members or employees of any such body;
(g) any person who is the holder of a prescribed office or who is an employee of such a holder and either is prescribed for the purposes of this paragraph or belongs to a prescribed class of such employees.
edit: you may also be interested in knowing where police get the legal right to break the speed limit, which is also obviously not from their non-existent immunity to the law:
> The Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 and The Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016 exempt emergency vehicles from:
- observing speed limits
- observing keep left/right signs
- complying with traffic lights (including pedestrian controlled crossings).
http://www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/road-policing-2...
Simply because someone wears the costume of the state does not mean they should be above the law that governs everyone else. The monopoly on force granted to law enforcement has created a toxic set of incentives. We are seeing ramifications of those incentives in the news every week.
Can they break down a door on reasonable suspicion when they arrive? Can they enter the contained private property without permission? Can they shoot one person to save the others life?
The other issue is I'm not sure if FBI did the right thing here. For whatever brief period this was state sponsored and sanctioned pedophile ring.
For the most part the consumers are being left out of major prosecutions, one can also make an argument that blocking all sources of CP might increase sexual assault cases involving children if the users cannot get their relief that way.
But this overall isn't a clear cut case.
mmm... I don't see how one could argue that without actual data.
Here's one article[1] claiming a possible link between availability of porn and abuse. But I'm sure there must be at least one other study arguing the opposite.
You do understand that child pornography is created by the rape of children?
You're saying, "Well, it could be argued that if we stop letting these guys rape them, possibly more children might get raped. We should let it go."
No.
In our current environment, this is mostly a pedantic distinction because almost all child porn is produced in an otherwise abusive environment.
Also, the definition of child porn is far broader than what would be required to meet the definition of rape, which requires penetration. [0]
The definition of child porn is also sufficiently broad to include any pornographic image that depicts an identifiable minor in a sexual act, whether or not said minor was actually ingaged in said act, or involved in the production in any way.
The FBI also has a stash of already created child porn. Any harm resulting from the creation of said porn has already been done, and is therefore not a reason to not use it in order to reduce future harm.
[0] Technically, many jurisdictions do not have any form of "statatury rape", but instead use other crimes like sexual abuse.
We're not talking about a 25 year old filming his 17 year old girlfriend giving him head here. This is the kind of stuff where the people involved cannot consent. Your spellchecker is broken.
Yes we are. What you describe is child pornography. Depending on jurisdiction, the girlfriend cannot consent. Even in jurisdictions where she can consent, it is still child porn. Even in situations where the 17 year old is acting alone, it is child porn. Even in situations where the 17 year old draws a picture of herself masturbating, it is child porn.
I guest you are correct, my comment should read:
s/rape/depiction in a sexual manner/g
Either way, my point is that we should be careful of the language we use, and recognize that child pornography is far broader than circumstances that would generally be considered "rape" are. My phrasing was sub-optimal due to my other problem with the conflation of statutory rape and normal rape.
I'd like to play the Devil's Advocate here.
Isn't that application of intent and affect the same as a convicted viewer could use to explain why they didn't hurt anyone? They weren't the person behind the camera, nor the person who had sexual relations with the child, so what harm is their consumption of the content?
The government also has a substantial quantity of already produced narcaotics, opiates, psychadellics, and other Schedule 1 drugs that they've confiscated from suppliers and users. Are they free to sell a portion of those drugs in order to find people they can target for future prosecution? I'm not talking about stings where no actual product is exchanged, but months of supplying communities with illegal drugs.
Easy to say if it isn't you or your kids getting raped on video.
The kids grow up and suffer tremendously. They are tortured every day for the rest of their lives.
Many, if not majority wish they were dead.
You must lack any empathy to make a comparison like that.
Its really only sexual crimes that get monsters to rage at monsters. It must be some primal instinct, that is completely detached from the crime and the victim itself. Its really all about the pure existence of the criminal.
A child pornography ring. I have yet to hear any evidence of FBI participation in physical abuse, new physical abuse. They seem to have allowed preexisting material to be re-shared. If anything new was uploaded during this time we would have heard about child abuse arrests. A "pedophile ring" has a very different connotation. Both are bad, but one is a very different type of evil.
But that brings up the entire question of how much anyone truly has a conscious choice in any of their actions. A lot of evidence is pointing to 'free will' being an illusion our conscious minds uphold to make us feel like we are in control.[0]
In the end I doubt very much there is a specific set of genes that causes one to be a pedophile, just as there isn't a set of genes that makes someone a murderer or thief. There's perhaps at best some genes that may pre-dispose a person towards pedophilia (though I doubt it), but clearly a persons environment is going to be the biggest determiner. It's well known that most child abusers were abused themselves.
So until we start looking on all criminals as people that need to be treated and cured of their condition, it doesn't make sense to treat pedophiles that way.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-n...
If you google relevant keywords I'm sure it will turn up.
Yea there's tons of studies talking about bonobos sexuality. I did a google search and nothing about a specific set of genes causing a certain sexual behavior in a segment of the bonobo population.
What you are talking about sounds like general behavior in an entire population. And if that's the case then why aren't all humans pedophiles?
Edit: As a counterpoint this is the first thing I found when searching for 'bonobo' 'gene' 'sexuality'
I wonder how well the distinction is applied, or far this can be pushed by the FBI to take down a someone.
On the other hand, needless to say that actual child porn is disgusting.
The law [0] seems to provided an affirmative defense if "the alleged child pornography was not produced using any actual minor or minors."
This defense does not apply if (emphasis added) "such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct."
My reading of this is that it is legal to have a pornagraphic drawing of a child character . It only become illegal when the drawing is of an actual minor.
Edit: We hear about this because defendants in criminal cases are questioning FBI practices. And because criminal cases in the US are public, unless there are national security issues. But we probably don't hear about similar efforts elsewhere against political dissidents etc.
Every state action prompts people to implement the security they already knew they should have been using
All shutting it down immediately would have done is prevented them from sharing the photos with each other, which seems like an extraordinarily small price to pay to catch even a single additional child molester, let alone a whole community of them.
Was that what happened, though? We saw that there were more logins, but were those unique logins? Did those additional 39,000 logins result in a significantly higher number of arrestees? Or were all 186 people who were prosecuted part of the initial 11,000?
Do we, as people not involved in the investigation, even get to find this out?
Of course the likelihood of effectiveness matters. As does the potential harm you're risking. What the article is arguing is that keeping the site up allowed for a much greater distribution of the photos -- to potentially many, many more individuals who continue to elude prosecution, and may continue to spread those photos themselves.
At the time the FBI took over the site, there were 11,000 weekly user logins. During the additional time they ran it, it grew to 50,000 weekly user logins. Out of a potential 50,000 individuals, the FBI is able to prosecute only 186. pavel_lishin is asking a fair question when he wonders if allowing a potential 39,000 additional individuals to download those photos and potentially distribute them elsewhere actually resulted in any additional prosecutions, and if so, is that number worth it compared to the (potentially massive) amount of additional distribution the FBI enabled?
Now, you could criticize their operational use of this power, but that is entirely distinct from criticizing, in general, the use of this sort of tactic. Which, I think, on its face, is clear can be an effective one.
If the original owners sold to new owners, and the FBI observed the new owners serving the same N specific images for two weeks, would they be committing a crime? Causing harm. Yes?
If the FBI muscled in and took over the site, serving those exact same N images for two weeks, would they be committing a crime? Causing harm? Yes?
The tradeoff ought to be evaluated on a case by case basis, of course. Because you are trading some small harm for the theoretical reduction in some greater harm. However, I think it's pretty clear that stopping actual child abuse is much more important than preventing the dissemination of child pornography.
2. Who were these mythical "kingpins" you believe the FBI was seeking, in every case publicly known about prosecution resulting from this operation is about simple possession of child pornography, Not production. From my understanding of the cases not a single child porn producer has been prosecuted, and I believe the FBI has stated most of the images are very old and previously known to the FBI or other agencies. That made that statement to attempt to curb some of the outrage. Given that however it contradics your reasoning for them to continue operating the server as they had already caught the largest "kingpin" the server owner. It would seem they worked backwards in this operations, they caught the top guy first then used the server to sweep up the "street level" or bottom level persons.
By that logic the people who were using the site to view child porn should not be arrested. Only those that produce it should.
That being said, I suppose it's irrelevant what we think the law ought to be, the law does define the consumption of child pornography and therefore the facilitation of that consumption to be a crime, and by extension to be causing some kind of harm. However, all investigative agencies via undercover and covert informant based work engage in this sort of behavior, that either supports indirectly or prolongs unnecessarily some level of criminal behavior in order to infiltrate and stop a greater criminal syndicate from operating. This is not even remotely unprecedented, and, in my view is a fundamentally sound principle to follow. If you can prevent substantially greater harm (actual child abuse) by temporarily facilitating a very small harm (consumption of images of child abuse), you should do so.
What doesn't sit well with me is the government directly running or supporting illegal behavior. If they had infiltrated the server and backdoored it(say by offering tech support) while the owner ran it I would not have any problem. When they took over the server by not shutting it down they became the top of the criminal syndicate not just someone providing support.
I have similar problems with when they arrest a group of 'terrorists' by actively recruiting people, putting together a plot, providing the (fake) explosives and finally using tactics akin to brainwashing and abuse the get the 'terrorists' to carry out the plot so they can be arrested.
The entire reason they have leeway is so they can get the head of the organization, not so they can be the head.
Addendum: I want to thank you for being able to discuss this without being emotional and resorting to personal attacks. It is rare to get this nice of a discourse on such a subject.
In place of continuing to host the content to catch predators, could the government covertly transition sites they run from hosting to linking to other sites? Making their site "more robust to takedown"?
Encouraging users to instead link to other sites? The resulting contributions can then be used to go after and prosecute, and even shut down (some of) the submitted sites?
I don't know if it's possible to do that transition well, at some point the site is just a host of links (like HN or Reddit). At some point they'd become the largest aggregator of child porn, at which point they can go after the most popular or prolific producers.
This of course is also along the lines of locate and punish, and doesn't explore helping the people who make, distribute, or consume. Addressing the demand for the content I don't like the idea of a strike system however catching and treating people and moving to prosecuting the people who reoffend after treatment is harder to do, I don't even know how monitoring to detect offenders after catching them once.
When the FBI prosecutes the consumers of their honeypot, it has the added benefit of shrinking the total market (both directly, and by spreading the perception that consuming child porn is not safe because of the chance that it is a honeypot).
I'm not advocating no punishment for consumers, however only focusing police/FBI resources on producers (as that doesn't appear to be the approach today) and pushing the expenses of care/treatment for consumers elsewhere (the healthcare system?) Could lead to a more significant reduction in both consumption and production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...
Or even FBI's own terrorist factory. It's all "for a good cause," I'm sure.
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-te...
And now they want us to let them backdoor encryption, because they've clearly proven themselves such upstanding and trustworthy "good guys" so far.
Lets further deduce that s/he implemented on his own time the following filter in Pseudo-Code:
From Conversations => Select(p1.age < 18 | p2.age < 18 ) => Select(p1.age > 16 & p2.age > 16 ) => Filter(FamilyGraph.Related(p1, 1, p2) => NNFilter(Contains(conversation.content,sexual)) => CreateReport(vicitim= NNFilter(p1.conversation.history, traumatized) | NNFilter(p2.conversation.history, traumatized), suspects = SUB(conversation.person, victim))
Now lets assume this sort of technology is already in place, but you just will never know, the sort of quantum observation, that just leads to remarkable good police work - because lucky guesses..
Which is one of the reasons why abuse cases happen in third world countrys nowadays. This is something that should be deployed worldwide. Oh, compiler is done building - better worlds, all of them.
How to be taken seriously, step zero: proofread
If this were even slightly true, there would be reputable news sites all over this story by now.
Edit: http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/294341-fbi-denies-s...
> In February 2015, the FBI seized control of the site and operated it for two weeks so that the agency could distribute malware to users with the intention of identifying suspects.
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) denies that charge, writing in case documents, “The Government Played No Role in Creating the Crime for Which Chase is Being Prosecuted or Otherwise Encouraged His Criminal Conduct. Chase created the Playpen website, not the government.”
> The FBI has also denied claims that during their operation of Playpen, agents improved the site’s performance, helping it run faster.
> “Chase claims absent actual factual support that the government enhanced or improved the website’s functionality,” the DOJ said.
> Even if the FBI did upgrade Playpen’s performance, criminal defense attorney Norman Pattis says, it would have little impact on the case.
> “I don’t think there would be much implication at all,” Pattis said. “I think the defense is misapplying entrapment.”
> “Speeding up access doesn’t create the desire to do it,” he added. “The fact that people come to the market looking for it already doesn’t make it entrapment.”
> The DOJ justified the FBI’s actions in continuing to operate Playpen after arresting Chase. They wrote that shutting down Playpen immediately “might have answered the immediate issue of child pornography trafficking on Playpen, it would have done nothing to address the larger problem.”
The FBI has openly admitted to running the server http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websit...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websit...
https://www.rt.com/usa/356896-fbi-kiddie-porn-playpen/
https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/23/fbi-improved-dark-web-ch...
http://gizmodo.com/traffic-surged-to-a-child-porn-ring-after...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160614/19243034713/judge...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbis-unprecedented-hack...
That's a massively different picture than what you get by reading the article, and the headline 'FBI's deep web child porn ring'. It wasn't FBI's child porn ring, it was this guy's child porn ring.
there are law against entrapment. but when fbi agents get on a chat room anonymously and send someone a link "want to see this illegal content?" now the person who could have zero interest in the matter will just want to check it out to see if it's true, for whatever reason, which could very well be to report to the authorities if it is true. but now, since the person was entrapped, the fbi can just deny the anonymous entrapment and prosecute the person for arriving on the site by their own means and drive.
Yeah, sure. I see a link saying 'child porn click here' and I click that link just out of curiosity. Sure.
> which could very well be to report to the authorities if it is true
You can report it to the authorities without needing to click the link (as any sensible person would do).
remember that there was a famous uk singer that was entrapped just like that since 4 years or so ago. can't remember the name though... he had a foundation to fight child abuse. he spent years reporting links he found to no effect, so he started to collect hard evidence and was busted for possession of that material. he had a hard time fighting the charges, and he might very well be really guilty after all, what I'm telling if just the news as I've read at the time.
Entrapment only comes into play if you convince someone to commit a crime they weren't already predisposed to commit. So if you give them a link that says "here's CP" and they download half the site and add it to their collection, it's hard to argue that the cops made you collect CP. In general, if all the police did is provide you a chance to commit a crime and you did so, you were busted, not entrapped.
I suggest this as an entertaining introduction to the law on the concept: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=633
Please do not assume you'll be fine if you self-report to the police.
> That's a massively different picture...
No, it isn't. The USG treats every instance of child pornography as a separate occurrence of a crime against the child. That is the way they've structured it so that they can convict as many people as possible, not just the individuals responsible for production. In this case the USG, by their own standard, committed an untold number of crimes against these children by keeping the site up and acting as a distributor. There is no difference between this and them setting up a honey pot full of CP.
They kept the site online so they could distribute malware to people who viewed it. What's the actual evidence that they distributed CP?
"...including more than 9,000 files that users could download directly from the FBI. Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten."
In the court filings described by the previously linked stories, one of which I quoted in the comment you just responded to. What do you think they were charging people with, intent to download cp.jpg? Are you having such a hard time believing that the USG would distribute CP that you are mentally blocking all the evidence available to you? Because I have bad news for you, they've done much worse than that.
> Given the nature of the site, this included uploading large volumes of new child pornography.
or
> During the investigation, logins increased by more than 350 percent to 50,000 per week. The defense attorneys’ motion seeks to discover exactly how the FBI boosted its traffic so much.
This is a pretty interesting argument for the government to make, given its existing legal theory that the children depicted in child pornography suffer redressible harm whenever such an image is viewed. By that theory, improving the site, resulting in many additional views, means the government is actively causing harm to the viewed children, which it shouldn't be doing.