Shouldn't the agents running this site be charged with child pornography distribution? Or are they above the law?
This would be a full blown investigation against the police in this country (Norway), but here entrapment is illegal too.
So taking over a pre-existing site centered around illegal activity and simply seeing who uses it is about as far away from entrapment as you can get.
"As a result, the number of visitors to Playpen while it was under Government control [increased] from an average of 11,000 weekly visitors to approximately 50,000 per week. During those two weeks, the website’s membership grew by over 30%, the number of unique weekly visitors to the site more than quadrupled, and approximately 200 videos, 9,000 images, and 13,000 links to child pornography were posted on the site,”
The defense lawyer says otherwise, but he's the defense lawyer.
Always good to have the source of info so that context can be applied correctly.
Surely though if the site was shut down then the likelihood of the crimes being committed, that were recorded in those 13 days of operation, approaches zero? Would be interesting to see how many of these criminals when caught belong to more than one group.
A cop being undercover inside a criminal operation seems to me like a different category to a whole criminal operation being run by a department of police.
It seems close to entrapment; perhaps like going to an alcoholic rehab centre and offering alcohol around. Sure they could get it somewhere else but cutting off their supply should have been helping them reform already.
Surely that's the rationale behind targeting suppliers of illicit goods. If the argument is "the users will just get it elsewhere" then you should target the users and remove the demand.
Then they can commit their favorite crime with impunity, at the expense of those too dumb to become cops first.
No one can be above the law. No one. If an undercover officer commits crimes to avoid breaking cover, the police department is culpable, and must pay some penalty. Since a corporate entity can't be jailed, I'm not certain what form of punishment would encourage it to minimize those lesser crimes committed in pursuit of the "big fish", but it is very clear that impunity is dangerous, destructive, and corrupting.
On a related note, why doesn't the mafia just require any suspected cop to commit rape of some target. Or are cops allowed to go that far?
Personally, I don't believe it's moral or ethical for law enforcement to commit crimes in order to catch criminals. After all, how can we defend our own morals and ethics if we're willing to ignore them for "reasons"?
I think you want to look at systemic effects and the potential for bulger-style corruption. Distribution of child porn does not do direct harm. It does harm by being a system that supports child abuse and we have collectively decided that child abuse is harmful enough to the fabric of our society that it is worth dismantling the systems that support it.
So here, the ends justify a certain scoped set of means, but also impose a duty of competence in deploying those means and a duty to stay within their scope.
Note that We don't currently have any penalties for crossing the bounds of that scope.
IMO it does, both to the user and the subjects of the pornography.
It's most likely the lesser harm compared to the original creation; though I'm not sure you could certainly say that in absolutely all situations.
Here [1] is a case from April where the police imported 12 kg of cocaine as part of a deal with a man trying to smuggle the cocaine. The result was that they got the whole cell of Albanian smugglers and not just their german scapegoat.
[1] http://www.dagbladet.no/2016/04/28/nyheter/innenriks/kokain/...
Is this too weird idea for HN?
For example always throw a server error AFTER a user entered its credentials. This way you can still track users.
They could have tried a con like "we lost the site, gaussed it to avoid detection, please re-upload" and collared people for distributing. Not sure how well that would go though.