Canada police arrest ‘pedophile hunting’ group over child abuse images | Hacker News Reader

Canada police arrest ‘pedophile hunting’ group over child abuse images

theguardian.com

10 pointsmatbilodeau12 comments

I ran across some groups on Reddit who seemed to portray themselves as vigilantes in search of pedophiles.

They had all sorts of conspiracy theories and ideas intertwined with their “research”.

But at some point it seemed that’s all it was. Conspiracy theories, and their activities that honestly seemed indistinguishable from just describing trading child porn…

Always hard to know if it was real but it was a weird crowd. They seemed to be very personally invested in their role, and very confident in their ability to find various crimes wherever they looked.

Are you talking about the FBI?

How the FBI became the world’s largest distributor of child sex abuse imagery https://thenextweb.com/news/how-the-fbi-became-the-worlds-la...

No I’m talking about a group on Reddit.

oops...

“There were exchanges of photos during conversations [online] and what the law says, when you share a photo, that it is explicit pornographic material and that you claim that it represents a person of age minor, even if it really isn’t, it becomes child pornography,” constable Andrée East told the Canadian Press. “It’s considered as such, even if in truth it doesn’t really represent the body of a minor person.”

Yes there is an exception in Canadian legislation when such investigation techniques are used by law enforcement.

> that it is explicit pornographic material and that you claim that it represents a person of age minor, even if it really isn’t, it becomes child pornography

This is idiotic

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Ron_Jere...

This photo of a 55-year old ron jeremy is actually of a 15 year old, as per my claim right here. Come and get me, RCMP!

Wow. They sent legal porn but claimed it was an underage persona, which made it legally the same as real child abuse and molestation. That's a very strange law.

It's to tackle potential defense strategies. - No harm done, just drawings... - No harm done, the person actually waiting in the motel room was of legal age. etc.

The drawings one is weird. In the case of the "decoy" being of age, it doesn't matter because the person intended to abuse a child. But a drawing? It's disgusting but I don't see why it should be a crime.

Here are excerpts from a Canadian Supreme Court decision explaining the reasoning in a much better way than my previous summary. Reasoning is the same.

P38 The first issue is important because it governs whether the prohibition on possession is confined to representations of actual persons, or whether it extends to drawings from the imagination, cartoons, or computer generated composites. The available evidence suggests that explicit sexual materials can be harmful whether or not they depict actual children (...)

P43 (...)The question is this: would a reasonable observer perceive the person in the representation as being under 18 and engaged in explicit sexual activity?

P51 Family photos of naked children, viewed objectively, generally do not have as their “dominant characteristic” the depiction of a sexual organ or anal region “for a sexual purpose”. Placing a photo in an album of sexual photos and adding a sexual caption could change its meaning such that its dominant characteristic or purpose becomes unmistakably sexual in the view of a reasonable objective observer(...)

https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2001/2001scc2/2001scc2....

This is interesting. You can exchange or even purchase stolen or breached data to confirm its authenticity or access your own data (see haveibeenpwned). You can also leverage the data to find its origins, leaker, etc.

You cant handle other materials to find the perpetrators?

Interesting how people who put elites at risk of being caught for child sexual abuse get arrested, but no elites ever get arrested…

What “elites” was this group catching?

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