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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

My example of an analogy would be like taking over a drug house and putting GPS in each shipment, but still allowing the drugs to get sold and consumed.

I'm not sure whether this is OK or not.

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Here's mine...

The FBI discovers a child prostitution ring and infiltrates it, but keeps running it and forces the children to have sex for a month to ensnare more customers.

If one accepts the idea of re-victimization, then I'm not sure how what the FBI did here can be considered acceptable, or any different than the analogy above.

I think the idea in this case is that there isn't re-victimization. The point of these sting operations is to lead to less victims overall.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. If you accept the idea that a child is re-victimized by the viewing of child pornography (which, as I understand it, is one of the justifications for the criminalization of viewing child pornography), then I don't see how what the FBI did can be considered acceptable.

I agree with your logic except the last clause. The FBI are presumably trying to minimise the overall perceived harm caused by the viewing of child pornography, and have judged that enabling some viewing initially will help prevent a greater amount of future viewing.

True, but 1) I question heavily whether this operation will actually prevent a greater amount of future viewing, and 2) would anybody accept that sort of means-justify-ends approach in the context of my initial analogy of continuing to operate a child prostitution ring?

1) Seems like a fair question, but 2) just seems like a completely unfair analogy. Perhaps it's own lack of imagination, but I can't see how someone viewing an image is equivalent to someone having sex with a child prostitute. Is this really the argument? To answer your question, no, I don't think anyone would accept that.

Re-victimization is the (IMO fairly reasonable) ideology that the government uses to criminalize CP. Therefore it's hypocritical for the FBI to operate by a different standard. If re-victimization is valid, the FBI is as bad as any CP distributor. If it's not valid, the FBI has no business serving up malware like this.

Makes sense. Somehow the FBI being philosophically inconsistent doesn't surprise me.

Does it lead to less victims?

From all I have heard and read on the subject of sex crimes, the research and the government policy has nothing to do with each other. Worse, some feminist movements have successfully lobbied to prevent research on criminal sexual behavior, on the principle that deeming such behavior as abnormal will result in lower jail sentence for criminals.

Instead we have this abnormal-but-not-abnormal behavior happening "randomly" by totally "healthy" individuals, and there is very little to explain why it happens or how we can reduce it.

I think there are some pretty strong signs that we don't understand deviant sexuality well, especially with regards to taboo attractions such as hebephilia and pedophilia.

More research I think would go a long way.

As noted elsewhere in the thread - FBI did not continue to serve child porn off of those sites, it swapped it to an error message that served malware targeting the TOR browser.

Source? This Reason article says differently:

"Operation Pacifier is reminiscent of reverse drug stings in which cops pose as dealers to catch retail buyers, except that in this case the FBI actually disseminated contraband. It did not merely pose as a distributor of child pornography; it was a distributor of child pornography. During the two weeks the FBI was running The Playpen, about 100,000 people visited the site, accessing at least 48,000 photos, 200 videos, and 13,000 links. In fact, the FBI seems to have made The Playpen a lot more popular by making it faster and more accessible."

http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/31/the-fbi-distributes-child-...

Operation Pacifier is a completely different case. The operation discussed in the article occurred two years earlier.

The Ars article discusses Playpen / Operation Pacifier in the first sentence. But you're saying that these 23 other sites only displayed an error message and distributed malware? Ok, but still, the FBI did in at least one instance distribute child porn, and that was mentioned in the article at hand, so I don't see why my analogy is out of place in this discussion.

> I don't see why my analogy is out of place in this discussion.

It's not out of place at all. I just wanted to add some context to make things clear, that your Reason link doesn't contradict the claim that in the Freedom Hosting case they only displayed an error message.

Thanks, clarification appreciated!

Then how could they press charges against the people visiting the site? I'm no lawyer. Is there a difference between trying to do something illegal and actually doing something illegal in the eyes of the law?

This runs afoul of drug legalization morality. Drug trade may be bad for society, but to lots of people it's not a unambiguous universal evil.

Here's a better one: Fighting sex trafficking by abducting and selling children, but training them to rat on their captors first. I think that better captures the disaster that this is.

Not that it matters at this point. The new administration is going to give these folks a medal.

I'm pro depending on the context, gravity and overall plan. If a gov operates a drug house for some time in order to shut down 50% of the market for 30x that time (one month of bad for 3 years of massive improvement) then I'd accept.

It feels like a pretty typical sting-style operation to me. Undercover ops usually require some degree of temporary cooperation with the illegal activity in order to shut it down permanently.

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