Comment by briansmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briansmith | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Let me try to keep this "Hacker News":

It seems that the only way to even put a dent into child pornography is to basically outlaw any kind of network privacy hardware and software. As long as you have privacy you will have this kind of thing. If somebody starts a popular service with (close to) 100% anonymity and 100% data privacy (e.g. server provider doesn't hold encryption keys), they are virtually guaranteed that it will be used for this kind of content. In other words, any truly private service is almost certainly an unwilling accessory to this kind of abuse. Further, users of such services are going to be stigmatized for sharing a service with kiddie porn consumers/producers. That is very unfortunate.

Also, since apparently this kind of content is easily available, we are all one click away from becoming criminals. Imagine somebody posted a link to some kiddie porn on news.yc with a title like "Apple Announces iPhone 4G" on some non-alarming domain. Anybody that clicks the link to get their daily Apple rumor will instantly become a criminal.

Eventually, nearly all of us will probably have some kind of incident like this. And, as companies and governments start recording and analyzing everything we do online, this means that we will all eventually get caught. At any time, any of us could be instantly arrested and (nearly) instantly convicted. This is just like how cops claim that if they follow somebody long enough, eventually they will break a traffic law because it is nearly impossible to follow the laws.

Somebody that can solve these problems would be doing society a lot of good. I wonder if they could make any money in the process.

I recall a story about a case where a US government agency put a video file up on a server, linked to it in CP forum(s), and then traced the IPs of and got warrants for whomever downloaded the file.

The catch? The file was nothing but static. Their argument was anyone downloading the file was obviously thinking they were downloading CP, so the actual content of the file was irrelevant.

Can you imagine getting linked to that file, without context/with false context?

I think this is the perfect example of a comment that needs a citation to be taken at all seriously. I'm not saying you're lying, I'm just saying it's a pretty sensational and inflaming anecdote, and it would be nice if you could offer some proof.

Find it yourself if you care. I don't, especially. It was on Reddit within the past 6 months, but it's impossible to find things on Reddit. I'm not about to go googling about for it, personally.

Edit: Ok, ok, "fake" found it: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.l...

Thanks, and yes, that's a really disturbing tactic, and pretty unbelievable that it's actually court-approved.

To start: This whole topic really irks me.

To your comment: Wouldn't entrapment laws cover this?

I would have no problem with a site (run by the police) offers recycled CP/allows others to upload (ala youtube) then tracks really active users (say, 10+ hard core downloads or 1 verifiable homemade upload) for a long time while rounding up the ones that are abusing their own children.

In court the police would have to prove motive, etc.. But a good event log table should do the trick.

If I happen to get emailed CP spam, that is one thing, but when you can prove that a person clicked on button A then button B then button C and searched for "...", that is pretty good evidence in my eyes.

Egh. I really wish there was an easy way to shut this shit down without massive internet privacy invasion.

> To your comment: Wouldn't entrapment laws cover this?

In USA? Ask the To Catch a Predator crew and law enforcement (sic/sigh) agencies doing the on-camera drama.

> Anybody that clicks the link to get their daily Apple rumor will instantly become a criminal.

No this is not the case at all. It is my job to seperate out things like that - and show use. So a few images in your browser cache would be flagged as a negative. Or perhaps a (non apparent) zip file that was dl'd then deleted a few minutes later (with the images). Traces are left of the PC but you wqouldnt get in any trouble for isolated incidents like that.

On the other hand if the zip got downloaded and unzipped to "mucky pics/blah blah" and then there was evidence of it being viewed.. well....

Intent is the important thing

Two things worry me about the whole 'data as evidence' thing. The first is, the easiest way for a criminal to distance themself it must surely be to snoop some collegues password and log in on their computer after hours.

Secondly, in the old days, the KGB was the master of the 'honey trap': get some clerical worker in a compromising position and then blackmail them into spying. Given that there are many more ordinary people than pedophiles, I would have thought that installing illegal data by virus and then blackmailing would be a lucrative sideline for these Russian 'businessmen' who originate it. I'm a little surprised that you don't get many such viruses. The question is, have they not thought of it yet, does it not work for some reason, or are the viruses too clever at concealing themselves?

One of my favourite "teachers" in this industry that I learned a lot from had a great email I will give you in full.

"""A lot of them will use the defence it was a Virus. Which is the default "you got me but I want to squirm" defence of last resort. It does have merit and you should ALWAYS check for it. But at the end of the day it's a pretty amazing virus if it can search the internet, download 100 images, burn them to CD, write "mucky pics" on it and hide the thing behind the radiator"""

His point is simple: there is always a piece of evidence that will prove or disprove intent. SOmething that requires active, knowing, user input. We look at everything we possibly can do and build the picture as a whole.

In your specific example we carefully check the times stuff occurs. If, for example, there was one download incident at an odd time (compared to normal PC usage) it would trigger alarm bells in our heads. Im not saying it is impossible to frame people in these ways - but I would be

I've yet to see a virus that downloads CP in a form that can be viewed by the normal user. I have found a couple of isolated virus' that were part of a botnet used to distribute material. But the images were carefully hidden and it was obvious where they originated.

Certainly I dont know anyu virii that open IE and google for CP :D

I think the law states that you have to have stuff downloaded to your own computer for it to be incriminating evidence. So if you happen across some child pornography site and click away without downloading anything you haven't committed a crime.

Not sure, I just seem to remember reading it somewhere.

Makes no sense, you download every web page and every resource it links to (images, css, javascript) every single time you clink any link. All those files are saved on your hard drive, it's been downloaded automatically for you. If you don't download it, the browser can't display it.

I would imagine the distinction lies in where it is stored, and whether there has been an intention to save it.

If you can get prosecuted just by having the material on your harddisk then it would be a problem for a lot of people - the article talks about sending out lots of spam with this stuff, which will be saved to our harddisk. Even if it goes in the spam folder and you never see it, it will still be on your harddrive.

It would be reasonable that there's a difference, otherwise more or less anyone could be indicted for child pornography.

But you can't just depend on where it's downloaded, you'd simply manually download everything to your cache folder just to be technically not breaking the law.

Obviously, I think people who like child porn are bad; however, I can't help but think all these attempts to prevent it is just pissing in the wind. You simply cannot filter information that people, however misguided, want to trade with each other. They will find a way around any system you attempt to put in place.

Haven't everyone figured this out yet by watching all the failed attempts at killing mp3 sharing? Information wants to be free. You just can't stop people from communicating.

Computers store huge amounts of information if you know just how to extract it :) doing the above suggestion would leave traces for us to find (this is not a 10 minuts job; your looking at days of work per HDD).

Although that sounds correct, I suspect it's difficult to argue the distinction between an image download and an image cached by the browser to people who are extremely untechnical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com