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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

1) Law enforcement agents are allowed to participate in illegal activity in order to catch criminals. Otherwise it'd be pretty damn easy to root out undercover cops. 2) Honeypots are not entrapment, which has a very specific legal definition. The person needs to be "normally law-abiding" and can't be otherwise already disposed to commit the crime in question. Not only that, but in most states (not sure about Federal law which would be what applies here) the defendant needs to actually resist the illegal act and be further coerced by an agent of the government.

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.

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>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.//

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.

This leads to the failure mode wherein all those predisposed to commit crimes of a certain nature aim to become undercover police officers tasked with combating those crimes.

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.

Can a cop commit rape or murder? Normally a cop is only allowed to do minor illegal things that aren't on the level of directly harming a person. Since the government argues child porn directly harms the child (as otherwise it would be protected by the first amendment), a cop should not be allowed to engage in activities related to it.

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?

fwiw, nypd has a clothes on policy in stings involving sex work. Only on the books because you know why

They didn't just take it over though. They made major improvements which caused the traffic to increase 8x during the time they operated it.

Do you have a source on this? I haven't read this about the case previously.

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/lawyer-dark-web-child-porn...

"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,”

Thank you for the link, based on the original comment I thought they added new feature/wrote new code (which is not outside the realm of possibility) but this would point to just better hardware and a better internet connection.

Np.

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.

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