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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

The one thing I will throw out here that I can add to this conversation is that I think the government simply does not care, either. It's mainly only in regard to mass public outrage, or when someone is a political target that it gets dealt with from a law enforcement level.

Anecdotally, when I was a young adult I was a volunteer moderator for a large forum. We got reports of CSAM several times a month and had a process for escalating and reporting it to the FBI IC3 - we retained a lot of information about the users that posted it.

One of the administrators of the website mentioned to me that over the years since the inception of the forum, they'd reported almost a thousand incidents of CSAM distribution - and the FBI followed up with them to get information less than 10 times in total.

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That seems reasonable though. The FBI isn’t interested in busting one perv in a closet, they want the ones making the stuff.

The FBI is interested in busting perverts in closets. That's often how they work their way up the "supply chain" when it comes to CSAM. Consumers lead them to distributors, who lead them to producers.

A fair point. But it still seems reasonable that only about 1% of suspect posts lead to a formal inquiry. Doesn’t mean they aren’t taking the report into account. You have to figure that they already have leads on most of them.

Do we have to figure that?

Do we really have to give the benefit of the doubt to the agency that was literally running one of the largest CSAM distribution outlets in the world for years as a honeypot?

If you want ro argue that the FBI is a fundamentally flawed agency that on balance is a net negative, I won’t fight you that hard. But during the civil rights struggle, they were the only force that could be trusted at all.

Of course, that was 60 years ago.

Wasn't the FBI doing some pretty questionable stuff with regards to MLK during said civil rights movement?

Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

I guess "other forces were worse" can certainly be true, but then how low are we holding the bar?

As I said just above, I am not a fan. They are nor completely evil, though.

Yes, that was 60 years ago. No one involved at that time is still there - and in fact, most of them have passed. I don't know why you think there's a shred of relevance there.

If I didn’t mention it, someone would complain that I was ignoring the one time they were on the side of the angels.

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