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Comment by whipoodle | Hacker News Reader

Sounds illegal.

Just to clarify - the police department didn't create the site from scratch. They busted the original owner of it, then took over the site 'as is' and ran it for a while longer to gather evidence of other users, then shut the whole thing down.

No different from cops everywhere knowing where a drug shipment is landing, then setting up a sting operation around that to see who comes along to collect, and then pouncing. (Rather than intercepting the drugs mid shipment or before it leaves).

That's not a fair comparison since in that scenario the police don't interact with any end user and are not distribution anything themselves.

This is more akin to a police going under cover and selling drugs on the street, hoping to get near the supplier.

...and in doing so, becoming the largest dealer... for a year.

In this case surely getting the producers is significantly outweighs being a dealer for a bit.

>The Argos commander, Insp Jon Rouse, said it had led to “significant rescues of children globally” and the arrest of “serious criminal child sex offenders”.

Yes, which is something a lot of advocates has been pushing for. Put the massive resource currently allocated at blocking and use it to go after the producers. The consumers, the technology, the platforms, all those are of limited interest when the real goal is to rescues of children and stopping sex offenders. With limited resources police should prioritize efforts where it has the biggest positive effect on people and not where it has the biggest political effect.

>In this case surely getting the producers is significantly outweighs being a dealer for a bit.

I agree. The producers were abusing children, lots of them. Running the site allowed the police to identify a lot of the producers, so they can be arrested and locked up.

For a year... the largest dealer. Imagine if the DEA secretly busted a whole cartel, and turned into the largest producer and exporter of cocaine for a year!!!

Completely different.

>Imagine if the DEA secretly busted a whole cartel, and turned into the largest producer

The police did not produce any material.

Trying to compare illegal drugs to child exploitation is absurd.

Unless you’re one of the kids in those pics I guess... then the harm is easier to see. Plus drugs almost only ever involve consenting adults!!!

If you read the article, you would know that it is in fact not illegal for police in Australia.

By the same token, other countries could try to extradite them under their laws, broken through the international, online distribution of CP.

They could, but the AFP is used by those other countries for exactly this reason. They have frighteningly broad latitude when it comes to breaking laws to achieve their goals. In this case, perhaps it was justified, but the VG article posted above raised some concerns with their methods that I agree with.

Should see what our intelligence agencies are allowed to do. Australia has rather weak protections for its populace, and rather strong laws allowing police and intelligence forces to do this. Despite some large controversies, the public doesn’t seem to really mind, which scares me. My state, QLD, literally became a police state in some ways, under Bjelke-Peterson. I don’t forget that, but often it feels like everyone around me does...

I think it's just apathy, politics is mostly a joke here in Australia.

We also don't have the same type of deep distrust of government that some other Western countries have - which is not to say that Australians love their governments, far from it, but we don't exactly have a strong anti-government streak. In many ways this is a good thing, but it does tend to mean we don't spend much time thinking about checks and balances.

No, I know it's not illegal when law enforcement does it. Very little is!

Actually were it to be done by police in the USA, Canada and many other countries it would be illegal even for law enforcement.

Yeah, it's illegal in the U.S. so they had AUS do it for 'em.

It's also illegal for them to murder people for no reason, but they get away with that pretty easily.

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