Hacker News Reader

Comment by atq2119 | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate that they included real examples of conversations they captured in the article, as disturbing as that may be.

A lot of the conversation around sexual predation, especially around child porn, is problematic from a democracy point of view: You get authorities asking for more power (usually, more draconian surveillance laws), without showing evidence of what it is that they are supposedly fighting -- and of course, nobody wants to ask too strongly for such evidence being shown, lest they be accused of being a potential predator as well. But we can't just give authorities more power just based on their say-so. Hence, my appreciation for the choice to release some of that material in the article. I'm against more draconian laws, but I do think people should be able to make up their own minds, and the discussions we have about those issues should be more open.

View on HN

This nicely shows that they don't need more surveillance. A simple honey trap appears to fill up like a bug zapper tray in Mississippi in July.

No dark web, no Hollywood hacker shit. Just go on social media and pretend to be a pretty underage girl and fish meet barrel. These days you could automate this with a good adversarial neural net (including image generation!) that would engage predators and let them incriminate themselves.

The authorities don't do this because they don't really care. Child abuse is a political dog whistle but it's not a real priority. As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false).

Well since we’re guessing it’s also possible this is the tip of the iceberg and that it’s also possible only amateurs do it in plain sight. I’d imagine agencies who tackle this issue have more insight into that realm than an amateur sleuth of online commenters.

Absolutely. I assume that (as horrible as what the people quoted are doing) someone who doesn't predate in the open commits even more disgusting and damaging acts. Given the number of creeps that show up for "level 1" abuse, it seems likely that there are also huge numbers of people doing even worse things.

Maybe. Or maybe child molesters, like most criminals, are criminals because they have a pattern of making poor life decisions and hence it’s perfectly normal for them to make “amateur” mistakes.

Or, as Zoz explained in his DEFCON 22 talk "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1], OPSEC is really REALLY hard. Even people that have the necessary technical background are human and make mistakes. To stay secure in the "dark web" you need to never make a mistake and e.g. forget to turn on your VPN/Tor before logging in somewhere important. I doubt anybody - even people that made the "best" life decisions - could do this successfully without a LOT of very specific, very technical training.

>> "OPSEC is a 24/7 job."

>> "... a lot of OPSEC fails ... [from] the folly of only using privacy tools when you’re up to no good."

>> "For example, investigators could look at who went and downloaded the Tor Browser Bundle right before the bomb threat got called in; or look at everyone who connected to a known Tor entry node at that time, or who accessed the Tor directory servers. [...] no compromise of Tor necessary."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8

(Just wanted to say thanks for linking in the video, it was really good.)

This is true and this is ultimately how the small minority of genuinely smart criminals get foiled. The vast majority can be pretty dumb though.

> As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false)

This was one of the hard problems about the Rotherham abuse scandal. Many of the victims had been in "care" (ie taken away from abusive parents), and their reports weren't believed. Therefore a substantial grooming ring could be built up. This is why people keep saying "believe victims".

The problem is that with children especially, it’s also not that hard to implant false memories and coach them to not only make false accusations but to actually believe them. This is part of what happened with the whole “Satanic ritual abuse” panic with “repressed memories”.

This is part of why people keep saying, “wait for all the evidence” and “presumed innocent until proved guilty”.

Yes. But in a lot of cases of sexual assault there is only testimony, and the dispute is over whether the activity was consensual or not.

You'd expect this wouldn't apply to child sexual abuse, but you'd be amazed at the number of people who claim the child seduced them and they weren't aware of their age.

The best approach against the "repressed memories" or "why are you reporting this now" is to make it as straightforward and encouraged as possible to report incidents as and when they happen, and collect and process any evidence at the time.

This is also why age of consent laws exist.

In English law consent still matters unless the child is very young indeed. The imaginary 11 year old in this story would be young enough that it's always rape and if the defence (or more likely the accused personally) tries to bring up consent they'll get shut down by the judge because it's irrelevant. But for a teenager consent matters and a defence barrister would be doing their client a disservice if they didn't seize any opportunity to suggest their client believed there was consent.

It's illegal for an adult to have sex with a 15 year old, but there's considerable gap between the likely tariff for "Had sex with a 15 year old" versus "Rape". The maximum tariff for having sex with a 15 year old is not inconsiderable (14 years) but it's far short of the tariff for rape (life imprisonment).

In the case of a 15 year old either might be plausible for prosecutors depending on what evidence they have. If it's clear there was no consent, it'd always make sense to charge rape regardless of whether they're sure they can persuade a jury the defendant knew the victim was under age - but if consent is tricky, or especially if the victim is prepared to testify for the defence that they consented, then you need solid proof the defendant knew they were under age or it won't go anywhere.

That’s true, laws differ on this, and in some cases there is a legal distinction not because statutory rape is OK but because forcible rape is so much worse. In the US, the scenario might be very similar to what you describe except with explicit plea bargaining between the prosecution and defense. In fact the prosecution would probably try to charge forcible rape anyway just so they can negotiate down to statutory rape.

> but if consent is tricky, or especially if the victim is prepared to testify for the defence that they consented, then you need solid proof the defendant knew they were under age or it won't go anywhere.

This last sentence is a bit wrong.

Where the child is under 16 and has not consented the CPS recommend prosecuting for rape because that's a more serious offence. Where the child is under 16 but is "consenting" the offence of rape cannot be proved (because rape requires lack of consent), so the CPS recommend charging for section 9 sexual activity with a child.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offenc...

> Conversely, when reviewing cases involving children under 16 and 18 prosecutors should select more serious charges involving proof of absence of consent over those contained in sections 9 to 12, where all the elements can be proved. So, for example, section 1 rape should be preferred to section 9 sexual activity with a child under 16 where the elements of rape are satisfied.

> The best approach against the "repressed memories" or "why are you reporting this now" is to make it as straightforward and encouraged as possible to report incidents as and when they happen, and collect and process any evidence at the time.

After the Cleveland "satanic abuse" scandal (where many children were wrongly removed from their kind and loving parents) the UK implemented wide ranging changes.

These include ABE (achieving best evidence) interview techniques that are designed to get accurate information from witnesses without creating false memories; getting social workers to say "allegation of abuse" and not "disclosure of abuse". http://www.transparencyproject.org.uk/things-children-say-di... and a culture of supporting the victim while providing a robust investigation which holds open the possibility that it's a malicious allegation. I'm not sure they're getting the balance right at the moment, and I think too many victims are not seeing justice.

Police and social workers are in a tricky situation here. Clearly Cleveland was awful and something needed to be done to protect innocent parents and children from the harm of false allegations. But the current rate of conviction for sexual offences is far too low (over 100,000 rapes each year, fewer than 3,000 convictions), and the Rotherham scandal was terrible -- vulnerable children being raped by criminal gangs were assumed to have "chosen" that lifestyle and abandoned by their social workers.

Stings like this are the bread and butter of effective law enforcement. The fact is that the vast majority of criminals are not that hard to outsmart. It turns out that if you’re a master criminal pedophile, even then you don’t waste time with darkweb shit, you just con your way into the inner circles of the powerful and blackmail them into covering for you.

There is an old saying, you can’t con an honest man.

Not true.

Though possibly harder in cases.

You can't con them with offerings to their greed.

You can con them with your fake piety and lots of other ways...

What's more true is that you can't easily con a con-artist. They know the signs/tricks.

You can defraud an honest man yes, but that’s not the same as a classic con.

See: "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" ...

The full quote is:

> There is an old saying 'You can't fool an honest man' which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men.

Edit: Also, who exactly do you think is honest in this mess?

The constitutionality of such a honeytrap is not exactly clear though since the person isn't trying to molest an actual child. It's a bit like leaving a fake gun on the street and then prosecuting a person who picks it up and tries to shoot somebody for attempted murder. Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder? If you download a song that you weren't aware is in the public domain, is that attempted copyright infringement?

Attempting to murder someone is still attempted murder, even if it was impossible for the attempt to succeed.

Let’s say you and I both want to kill Bob. I sneak into his bedroom at night and smother him to death with a pillow. Bob is now dead and I sneak away—I have committed murder. Shortly afterwards, you sneak into his bedroom and shoot him multiple times with a gun. In this scenario, you are guilty of attempted murder even though the intended victim was already dead, unbeknownst to you.

Many stings rely on similar principles. People who steal bait cars don’t actually succeed in stealing the car, nor do johns who solicit streetwalking undercover cops succeed in buying sexual favors from them.

That's something different. Here you'd be charging someone based on what they thought during the act, and not on what they did or attempted to do.

Not really. The murderer thought they were firing bullets into a live person. The sexual predator thought they were abusing a child. Both were incorrect about their target (dead body, grown adult). It seems to me to be a direct parallel.

Though the better analogy might be: Bob knows that somebody is out to kill him and so he hides at the police station while a cop places a mannequin in his bed and waits in Bob’s closet for the murderer to show up. Or, more commonly, the cop goes undercover and poses as a hit man and gets the murderer on tape contracting the hit. That’s a pretty common sting and people get first degree murder convictions out of it.

That’s true for most crimes. If you sneak into Bob’s bedroom and notice that he is already dead, but shoot his dead body anyway, you’ve technically only committed corpse desecration. (Setting aside the question of why you were sneaking into his bedroom with a loaded gun in the first place.) Intentionality is a central aspect of most crimes—that’s what distinguishes premeditated murder from manslaughter or felony murder.

Talking to an adult is not a crime in the first place though.

Suppose corpse desecration isn’t either, that’s not the point.

Why would I suppose something that's not true in the US?

So if you paid someone to kill your coworker by casting a magic spell on them you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder? How about praying for someone to be killed? Quite a few people believe that has a non-zero chance of working.

On an unrelated note, I'm surprised internet pedophiles don't ever say something like "I know you're not really a child but I'm going to pretend you are because that's hot" to create plausible deniability in the event they're not actually talking to a child.

Plenty of people have been prosecuted for conspiracies that, unbeknown to the conspirators, could not possibly have succeeded. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2230....

> So if you paid someone to kill your coworker by casting a magic spell on them you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder?

By matter of pure legality, I suppose it would. In practicality, I doubt you could prove beyond reasonable doubt that such a person genuinely believed that witchcraft was an effective means of committing homicide.

This point is rather academic because any reasonable person believes that propositioning people on the internet who claim to be underage girls is, in fact, an effective method of propositioning underage girls.

> Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder?

... Yes? Intent matters; why let someone go just because they only tried to commit murder?

Pretty sure FBI provides fake bombs to would-be terrorists as part of sting operations, which is pretty much your example, so yes, you do charge someone with "attempted" murder.

Dependes on the country. In my country, it's not enough to charge someone even if they did think they were talking to a child. But the chance that they can be entrapped like this and get into real trouble as a result, can be enough to scare some people from attempting to do this out of boredom or frustration or whatever.

> Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime?

I'd argue that it's worth discussing whether it even matters. The goal of the legal system _should_ be to make society safer. Taking a sexual predator off the streets does make society safer, even if they didn't actually commit the crime. They did _try_ to commit the crime; they believed they were committing it.

Admittedly, this falls at least partially into the realm of pre-crime. Is it fair to lock someone up because they are _going_ to commit a crime? It's in the middle ground, because they did believe they were committing the crime. But it's still also very much in the gray area as far as morality is concerned too.

If the point is to protect society, why are they ever let out of jail?

Because criminals are part of society and also need protecting from the government. Without that concept, we'd just have the death penalty for every crime, no matter how minor.

But then the question becomes whether they would have crossed the legal line if it had been an actual child instead of a bot designed to entice them. Maybe a real child would've been more hesitant and made them reconsider their course of action. Maybe a real child would've been genuinely innocent in a way that would've triggered their conscience. I'm not saying that's likely, I'm just saying this is a program designed to turn pedophiles into intended child molesters.

For these reasons, for many crimes even the attempt at them is punishable.

If the articles claims are true, it would seem to me that even if the recorded conduct wasn't chargeable, it would be probable cause to see their other message history; there's most likely a pattern of behavior if you're surfing newest instagram posters and sending dickpics.

"It's a bit like leaving a fake gun on the street and then prosecuting a person who picks it up and tries to shoot somebody for attempted murder. Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder? If you download a song that you weren't aware is in the public domain, is that attempted copyright infringement?"

You bring up an interesting question, but your examples confuse the issue.

In your examples there are always real, intended victims: the person who was being shot at with the fake gun, the person who was being given peanuts, and the copyright holder are all the intended victim (despite the attempts failing due to misconceptions on the part of the perpetator).

In such cases, a better analogy might be to someone trying to rob a bank with a fake (or a broken) gun. It's pretty clear that in such a case they would go to jail for attempted robbery.

However, in the case where an adult pretends to be a child, there's no victim. There's real intent, but the victim is imaginary.

This is similar to laws making it a crime to possess cartoon child porn. Once again, there's no victim.

Another reason that the authorities don’t care is that their bosses, the politicians, often partake in child sex abuse as a hobby (cf. Jeffrey Epstein and his very close links to Prince Andrew, his links to Donald Trump, and his acquaintance with Bill Clinton... that’s not all coincidence there).

Popular news stories aren't representative of the real world. There's no sense trying to imagine some cohesive picture of the world from them. It's like somebody discovering a mutant shark with two heads and saying there's less fish in the ocean because sharks have too many heads and are eating more than their fair share!

What do authorities do for international cases?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pursuing any person who behaves as in the article to the greatest extent possible, but you they have to get IP, dig up the person, contact authorities in that country and hope they do something?

That's a lot of paperwork for maybe something _might_ be done and no one died and no large amount of money went missing (so to speak).

Maybe it's not so much they don't care (most people would care about this no?) and more they are limited in resources (and perhaps motivation) and it is difficult to get results.

If the authorities have cooperation agreements with the other country then often they’ll work together. In Australia the police catch a lot of paedophiles using information supplied by the FBI.

How would more surveillance help you find and apprehend people internationally?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com