Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot
geekslop.com
geekslop.com
> The exit node IP address of the user was easily obtained using the two different methods discussed briefly above.
This is really not a vulnerability but simply how tor, and the internet at large, works - hidden services by design protect the service not the user (the user is protected by tor by default) - what the author actually did here was "leak" their non-hidden services IP.
> and true external IP address (see partial data example to the above). And to answer the second question, “no”, this did not involve the placement of malicious malware. Read on…
The author then goes on to state that they gave the users malicious malware to run which revealed their ip address. They justify that this was not malware by stating:
> It should be noted that this was not malware per se. It did not replicate and was run voluntarily by the user. The user was notified that a “security scan” was going to be run on their machine and they freely chose to run the scan.
The author then goes on to publish a list of tor exit nodes with tor user agents...which they could have gotten directly from the tor directory services...
And, as pointed out by others, the author never really goes on to state why they think Tor is the devil - they built a honeypot and were disgusted by the flies it attracted....I'm not really sure what they were expecting...
(I don't really care about the argument/premise itself, I just find your sloppy attempt at a counter-argument to be weak)
That said, I've always been very fond of the passages in the OT where individuals managed to 'change' God's mind, as well as the general human emotions he appeared to have.
The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
-- Homer, The Odyssey[1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/368547-the-blade-itself-inci...
The author states he started from 1 (one) seed URL, and then crawled the sites, visiting links. But that's not valid, as you'd only ever come across a possible fraction of what exists.
To be able to make any authoritative claim, he would need to scan the entire IP-space, like an actual search engine would.
I'm not condoning pedophelia or anything like it, but I think it's naive to take a simple approach and then make authoritative claims about the entirety of the TOR network.
But I also think that there were flagrant abuses that could be pursued under the CFAA. Just because something isn't "per se" malware doesn't mean it wouldn't fit the legal definition.
Which search engines do that? I was under the impression crawling was the way "actual" search engines worked.
Giving the Finger to Vasha: Child Pornography on the Internet
http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...
A straightford way to find many of those who profit from its distribution would be to use a bot to locate forum threads that go on for hundreds of pages.
geekslop says: July 7, 2015 at 9:59 pm
Appreciate the comment RedditorThrowaway. My parenthetical headline that “tor is the devil” was facetious and apparently a failed attempt at dry humor.
For example right now I'm reading a sci-fi book that remains unpublished in Russia, but it's available in the west. Or the other day had a browse of "steal this book".
Genuinely curious.
According to the comments section, the author says "My parenthetical headline that “tor is the devil” was facetious and apparently a failed attempt at dry humor."
Let there be no doubt. I have two kids and there is probably no limit to what I would do to someone who did anything to my kids. But it's not as simply as just condemning pedophiles for being that and I ultimately think there is something morally or ethically questionable about this approach.
It's fairly well established that many pedophiles where in fact victims of pedophilia in their childhood themselves and so I would like to see a less hysteric and more balanced response to the issue.
Just because he is helping catching the bad guys does not give him the moral upper hand as he seem to think he has. Too bad such a complex issue gets treated with such brushing generalizations.
Maybe I am reading too much into what he writes, but these honeypots to hit random people just feels wrong to me. Like snooping on someone else life.
Wouldn't that mean, that he is not only trying to catch pedophiles but actively curing pedophilia?
I think what is going on in the US with the public shaming of offenders in databases is wrong, but I am fine with honeypots to catch them. Legally he is in no position to do so, of course.
I find it all disgusting but these people need help not traps. They are humans not animals despite what we think of some of their actions.
Of course they need help, too. We need both prosecution and prevention.
Source? The handful of cases I've heard of don't seem to match that claim.
The justice system weights the crime of consuming child pornography by the number of images the defendent is in "possession" of. I guess laws vary, but at least in my jurisdiciton, you can be sentenced to years in prison per image. It would be easy for a single wank session to result in -- potentially -- life in prison.
The issue is confounded by widespread lack of techical acumen among judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and even the forensic "experts" who investigate and testify (on both sides). For example, would you consider it reasonable to charge someone with a separate crime for every copy of the exact same digial file present on a hard disk? For both an image file and an automatically-generated thumbnail image of that same file? Do you meaningfully posess a file in your browsers temporary cache? How about a file deleted from the filesystem, but still present in residual form on the disk? Some of the issues are nuanced, and it's difficult to even have an intelligent conversation about the evidence.
[source: computer nerd supporting attorneys]
I do think their ought to be laws against the distribution of this kind of material (there probably are?), and there is no question that producing it is a criminal offence, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
On a different note: There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders. I know this argument is hard to make on HN, because free speech, but I think privacy is an important right, too.
Right! That's how it starts. In the end we have "there's nothing wrong with censoring 28 pages of a 9/11 report to protect the security of all Americans because it doesn't really matter who funded it, the government told us who the bad people are so we don't really need to keep the government on check on this".
That sort of thinking ends really well. /s
Remember, the citizens hire the government. They work for us. Would you allow your employees to censor some parts of your financial reports?
Grow some principles. If people are sick that they need to look at sick images then offer to help them. Enabling tyrants does not help keep children safe. Incidentally, not spanking them does. If you really care about protecting children, get off your bureaucrat high horse and start helping educate people on the impact of spanking.
If there were photos of me being raped as a kid I would want to see the rapist get punished and like-minded people forbidden to watch them. I do not think that it is moral to hurt people in concrete cases because of an abstract (debatable) threat to the values of a society. What do these values even mean if you do not have the mercy to grant victims this right?
You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
Let's say society makes a fund for people that were abused as kids (horribile dictu). Those funds are there only to benefit those people so we'd better be able to prove they were really victims of what they say there were, otherwise people can just say "yeah that happened to me" and collect the money without ever proving they were victims.
You may want to forbid people from seeing the evidence for your abuse but then you can't expect people to believe you. When we believe in tales of rape without proof we smear the name of the accused.
See how that's silly?
There are people who watch animated child porn and they are ruled as criminals even though no actual child was directly harmed.
There are people who watch snuff films, where people actually are killed, and the viewers are not breaking the law in most states.
Perhaps you would argue that snuff film viewing should be illegal, or that watching Game of Thrones should be illegal because it portrays rape, violence, murder, etc.
To me, it's clear that there is a distinct difference between watching that content and in producing it. Sure, if you actively encourage it to be produced you're breaking the law (same as if you try to convince someone to make a snuff film, you're breaking the law).
It's really not that simple and the laws are not consistent here.
I don't equate animated child porn with actual child porn, much in the same way I don't equate the beheadings in GoT with the beheadings of IS. But to insinuate that the poster above would extend their 'committing a crime,' in the case of actual child rape, to something that is acted out for TV is an injustice to what they actually said. In essence, you just threw up a strawman and attacked it as a way of validating your final point (which, by most accounts, I agree with).
No, you're watching fictional people pretend to kill each other.
You would have an argument if you used snuff films as an example. And yes, if watching a child being raped is illegal, than watching a real murder should be.
If the argument is that seeing murders causes someone to become a murderer, I'm not certain you can exempt fiction. If you outlaw depictions of murder on the presumption that it would lower the actual murder rate, you have to go whole hog.
_O \O/ ...meaning this ASCII art of
' |\+-@- one guy stabbing another guy
/ \ /| with a sword would be illegal.
So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen? At least a violent video game provides some virtual reward for virtual murders, such as glowing green stacks of cash, or mission advancement, or some stupid little thing that produces a squirt of dopamine.
That part of our brains does not know the difference between reality, dreams, and Hollywood trickery. Certain mirror neurons in the brain will fire whether you are actually doing yoga, thinking about doing yoga, or watching a yoga instructor do yoga. Your reward center doesn't really care if the image is a product of good photography or good GPU rendering. It doesn't even care that it is a 2D image rather than 3D reality.
Fortunately, there appears to be no causal link provable flowing from watching something done to doing the depicted act yourself. Instead, it appears that those who are predisposed to do something, or have already decided to do it, will very often model, simulate, and practice that action--using whatever means they have at their disposal--before going on to do it. If any one tool or strategy becomes unavailable, another would be substituted.
Rather than direct chemical triggers that stimulate the brains reward system ("tiny darts of cocaine"), they typically use other triggers to the reward system, like music. Same effect, less additional machinery.
What you must understand is that it normalises the behaviour in that persons mind and then we're onto other barriers to be eroded - i.e. the person moves onto physical acts.
The blasé attitude on this thread is beyond belief.
I could easily see it being the opposite: relieving sexual pressure could make people less likely to actually harm a child.
~Watching Game of Thrones leads to playing Grand Theft Auto, and doing that will make you a murderer. When you're sliding down the slippery slope, you have to hit every rock on the way down.~
The theory reverses the arrow of causality.
If the Army uses simulation and gaming as part of its psychological conditioning program to not only get its soldiers to fire their weapons, but also aim at and kill the enemy, that does not imply that those games or simulations, used in isolation, will necessarily result in desensitization to violence.
I seriously want to design a contagion that imparts to individuals an intuitive understanding of conditional probabilities, and how to reverse one.
If you know that 99% of child abusers viewed images of child abuse prior to engaging in that activity themselves, you only know P(A|B), where A is viewing photos, and B is taking action. You do not know P(B|A), which is the likelihood that someone that someone who has viewed photos has done abuse, unless you also know the unconditional probabilities for P(A) and P(B). You can probably infer those two from crime statistics and investigative activities like those described in the article. But given the existing legal prohibitions and resultant secretive behaviors, I doubt you could determine either with a great deal of precision.
If (hypothetically) P(A|B)=1.0, P(A)=0.001 and P(B)=0.0001, then P(B|A)=0.1 . That means that even if you know that everyone who did A also did B, you can't assume that everyone who has done B has necessarily done A.
We could more easily calculate for the Game of Thrones and murder hypothesis.
Let's say A is "committed murder in 2014" and B is "watched GoT in 2014". From crime statistics, I estimate that P(A)=0.000045 . From ratings estimates, P(B)=0.063 . Now, I'm not entirely certain how many new murderers in 2014 had watched GoT, but I'll guess that P(B|A) = 0.063 . That makes P(A|B)=0.000045 . Huh. It looks like I assumed they were independent events....
If you went and did an actual survey of 2014's murderers, and discovered that P(B|A) was actually 0.12, that's a great find, but it still only means that P(A|B)=0.000086 . That's not a convincing argument that watching GoT causes actual murder. It just means that 0.0086% of GoT watchers committed murder. That might be explained by GoT inducing violent behavior in its viewers, but from the numbers, it's not bloody likely.
The fact is that anyone who simply goes around arguing that something is morally good or bad better have solid reasons for doing so.
Sophie Turner is actually 19.
This point is oftentimes overlooked. Also, the word "pedophile" is oftentimes conflated with "child molester", which makes it impossible to distinguish the individuals who are pedophiles but have not (and have no intentions to) act on those desires.
I found this article to be a worthwhile read on the latter situation: https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-don...
Except of course for teenage sexting. Where the legal system has ruined lives for no reason. Or the weird edge cases it introduces. Such as a theoretical case where someone wearing Go Pro comes across a pedophile actively abusing a child out in the wild. The good samaritan Go Pro wearer is now guilty of both production and possession of child pornography. The laws do not leave any room.
Oh well!
We don't have a war on pedophilia. We have a war on "child pornography". I put "child pornography" in scare quotes because it's abundantly clear that many of the laws that aim to target child pornography really only use it as a bogeyman to obscure some other agenda.
Also, as for "safer", whatever we're doing now is clearly putting children at risk. In many countries (including the US), pedophilia is exempt from typical confidentiality laws regarding mental illnesses[0]. This makes pedophiles less likely to seek professional help, and I can only imagine that this means that they are more likely to harm or abuse a child.
[0] https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-don...
They found a young man who selfidenties as a pedophile, who was actually willing to go on camera and talk about his desires and urges. It was quite fascinating, and I do see many parellels not just to the war on drugs but to homosexuality as well.
We aren't treating these people in a humane way, and IMO we are making the problem worse by perpetuating a Wich Hunt.
[0] http://www.channel4.com/info/press/programme-information/the...
[1] Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO4yfvc9THs
A friend of mine, her boyfriend is a trucker. He had pulled over to urinate along the side of the highway late at night, in the shadow cover of his truck. A state trooper had pulled over a speeding vehicle, a distance behind him along the road. The trooper proceeded to then pull in behind the trucker, and threatened to put him on the sex offender's registry for public urination; the trooper spent 10 minutes reaming him out for it before letting him go.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/us/teenagers-jailing-bring...
No, what they do is threaten you with some hypothetical 30 year term if they were to charge you will all the broad interpretations of the law. This fear of hard time is then used as a carrot to get you to plead guilty to lesser charges that you may not have even done.
They get around the "judges" by the minimum sentencing laws: "sorry, my hands are tied, I have to lock you up for ____ years because I have to follow federal sentencing guidelines."
Furthermore, there is a huge incentive to prosecute "sex crimes" because that's a gold star for the prosecutor/judge. At the end of the year, or at election time they can say "We locked up N sex offenders this year for a combined total of X years".
This meme is repeated a lot about posession of child pornography, and is absoluely incorrect. Perhaps this is because in the UK the law had to be amended to include an exception, so that deliberately 'making' otherwise illegal images solely for the purpose of law enforcement was allowed as a defence. But (again, in the UK, but true for most other common law jurisdictions) there is still a 'mens rea' (that is, guilty mind, or intent) requirement, as with any crime.
EDIT: Also, there are no 'edge cases' in regard to sexting, at least in the UK at present, as the law allows the obvious defence that the images are of ones partner.
I do dislike the OP's guilt by association and vigilantism though. There's a reason we have a proper justice system. Imagine if someone like this was mistaken about one of those email addresses. You could sue him to hell but the damage might be done.
We might find the people watching child porn disgusting but they are after all only watching and not necessarily doing anything resembling rape porn.
They both fall under the same category but they are two very different things.
Also don't forget that a big part of the issue with pedophilia is actually society which because of the tabu and inability to distinguish between the different types of them ends up making the experience even worse and further adding to the problem.
And again I am not in any way defending this behavior, I have kids myself. I just believe that the very thorny subject requires more careful thinking than just calling evil.
The last time this came up on HN that I remember, someone linked to these posts by Rick Falkvinge:
https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-mu...
https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/11/child-porn-laws-arent-as-ba...
That doesn't seem like a strong argument, because it applies to a lot of other things as well, like illegal drugs. (And if the court relies on witnesses to establish that drugs were possessed, they could technically do the same by cp.)
Evil is the opposite of good, so if we agree that actions to promote life, liberty and happiness are good, then actions that promote death, slavery and misery are evil. Simple as that.
So there's plenty of evil in nature.
Saying that, I have definitely met people with malicious intentions, who are definitely 'evil' (or lacking a severe amount of empathy for their fellow beings). I am not sure people with challenged sexual instincts are these people, however I am sure there are people with a combination of both behavioural traits.
Not a complete or concise definition but the general theme I notice when I think about what I personally consider "evil" is the elevation of your own desires over the safety or well-being of others. In a way, evil (for me) is based on what helps humanity/society or hurts it. It's based in our natural instincts for empathy and the ignoring of those "higher" motives in favor of more primitive drives to take, hurt, kill, rape, or enslave.
For me, good versus evil is not so much about religious or Hollywood ideas of light vs. dark or god vs. devil but the more familiar battle between our "animal" side and our "human" side.
All that matters in nature is whether something works or does not work, not whether it's good or evil.
If viewing an image of child abuse is wrong. Isn't viewing an image of ISIS beheading someone also wrong? In both cases the crimes were committed and the images produced to satisfy an audience. But one is illegal because it's perverted while the other is legal because presumably far more people have blood-lust than a minority sexuality.
In Australia it's especially bad, with somebody being convicted for possessing hand-drawn Simpsons porn. There might be a copyright case there, but it's hard to make the connection between that activity and actual harm to any children. The defense argued that they weren't humans because they had 4 fingers and misshapen faces. This kind of case is what happens when the "evil pedophile" mindset overwhelms people.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/simpsons-cartoon-ripoff-is-ch...
You could go a step further and ask what's the difference between a parent taking photos of their naked child playing in the bath, and somebody doing the same thing but then having a wank with the photo later? I think the difference is that one is "normal" and the other is "perverted", so we make one legal and the other illegal. I probably appear in some baby bath photos and I certainly wasn't scarred by it. If they got onto the internet and people got some pleasure from them, is that really going to scar me for life, assuming I even know about it?
However I have never been able to avoid the counter argument that by allowing (implied consent) a market for cp imagery you may increase demand which will increase the incidence of child abuse in order to satisfy. The bath photo is simply one end of a spectrum.
This is one justification used to stop a paedophile from working with all children even if their particular interest is strictly not all children. If the paedophile is only interested in boys under 11 you still need to be careful when he's working with girls over 13 because he can use his access to those girls to get photographs which he then uses to get access to photographs of his target group.
Even discussing pedophilia calmly and reasonably opens one to the charge of being a pedophile or a "pedophile apologist." Taboos can reveal a lot about a society but I'll leave that discussion for another time.
I don't completely trust the motives of guys like the author of the linked article. Others have already pointed out technical errors in the article and questioned the soundness of his methodology. His irrationally labeling Tor as "the devil" is a bit odd too (and highly illogical), to say the least. He even admits he has an irrational hate-on for pedophiles.
What is this guy actually achieving with his "honeypot" other than wrestling with his own demons (more on this later)? He set out to entrap ostensible pedophiles and gather their IP addresses etc. Not child abusers or child pornographers but people that clicked on his link offering a "community of like minded individuals." He explains in detail the technical aspects of his operation and what he learned about the people he interacted with and draws some very dubious conclusions. (Such as "Many visitors to the site were active pedophile predators." Maybe this is the case, but he offers no compelling evidence other than a few lines of a chat room transcript. Not once does he mention even contemplating contacting the FBI or his local PD or any other LEA. Rather, this seems to be mostly about him.
There have been a few high-profile cases over the years where crusaders dedicated to fighting things they found morally reprehensible (e.g. prostitution, narcotics, pornography, homosexuality, child pornography) were outed as being voracious consumers and/or practitioners of that which they vehemently opposed in public at every opportunity. One of them was a DA who made a name for himself with his aggressive prosecution of alleged prostitutes and child pornographers. There is a term for this in psychology which I can't recall at the moment. Basically, there are some people who deal with the cognitive dissonance and the associated shame and guilt of being attracted to something society or their religion condemns morally by venting against it publicly while indulging in it privately. A guy who has an anti-porn website, say, and publishes anti-porn literature for distribution in schools who travels the country speaking out against porn and attending and organizing anti-porn conferences while fapping himself raw to internet porn every night after work.
I am *not saying I think the guy in the article is a pedophile or harms children. I am saying that I don't think his prime motive for doing this project is empathy or compassion for victims of child abusers and predators. He sets up a "honeypot" that serves no practical purpose. No suspected child abusers were investigated, no children saved from harm, police and LE don't even get a mention. Nothing new and useful was brought the table.
Yet based on his two-week escapade "Tor is the devil." That seems like a very odd statement, especially coming from an engineer. Is his computer the devil's sidekick? He does admit that he is motivated by personal reasons and it very much shows. After reading his piece I don't know what the take away is supposed to be. Pedophiles use the internet? Tor is used for illegal activities? Anyway, it's late and this is going in circles. I mean no disrespect to the author but I am left feeling very puzzled.
The up/down voting system on here is toxic as it disappears posts for no good reason whatsoever.
As for LE, I mentioned in the article that I contacted them, as a courtesy, twice during the project. The last time was a few days before the hidden services were shut down. I let them know that I had a pedo honeypot running and was about to take it offline, giving them the opportunity to take over the VM or scrape the data gathered.
As for personal demons - we all have them and I won't argue that I may have more than most - it's all a part of life experiences. I've dealt with LE and CPS on child abuse issues for years and it has certainly tainted my view. Then again, I have a vantage point that most do not have - a much closer, clear view of the problem.
People don't know what the prevalence of paedophilia is, or the ratios of paedophiles that never act on that vs paedophiles who do act on it.
If someone commits multiple offences it's easier to catch them, so the statistics of convicted offenders are probably skewed towards frequent offenders. That may make paedophile offenders appear to be riskier.
It's important to remember that child abuse does cause very real, often severe life-limiting, harm. We've come a long way from the 1970s thinking of "making a fuss is what causes the harm" to recognising that it's the abuse that causes most of the harm.
Who wants dirty water? Who wants to create second-class citizens? Who likes pedophilia?
As humans we love these issues where you'd be either an idiot or extremely asocial to oppose. We like slogans. We like to feel superior. We do not like nuance, or having to think a lot about things.
However, if they prove to be a danger to the kids, they have to be locked away or something. It's just because we don't know a better way to treat the issue.
Even if there is no crime involved, and there won't ever be. I blame the media for misusing the word "pedophile" to mean child molester.
That reminds me, Freenet has an interesting stance on this:
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/david-cameron-encryption-back...
Also not clear whether the Dark Web spider project was just to later seed the honeypot sites to appear legit, or was it a project on its own? The quote "The reports are published nightly on a hacker-related Dark Web site that I am involved with" hints at the latter, and then I'd double don't understand why Tor would be the devil, if for other uses (hackers) the author is happy to take advantage of it?
I'm a bit confused about what good does it do to reveal the exit node addresses? It has nothing to do with the actual Tor user, and could be even considered "public info" the way Tor is used, doesn't it?
I think the "why I now think Tor is the devil" question is answered in the opening—because it has illegal/immoral stuff on it. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised about this though...
EDIT: In fact, I don't think that the security scanner was even that effective: "around 5-10% of the registered users chose to run the scanner" (later, he changes this to 4-7%) and that "some of the users who opted to run the software appeared to be government or private researchers". I don't know what percentage of people using Tor for illegal activity would be incautious enough to run some random program on their computer, but I would be surprised if it was very high.
The exit node IP is not totally useless. It's enough to prompt a knock on your door by the authorities. Granted, once they recognize you're running an exit node there's nothing they can do (otherwise Charter could also be held liable) but still, it can prompt an action by the authorities.
My guess that they some were researchers: at least one came from a university IP address while others were very bare-bone machines with minimal running services, possibly virtual machines or test boxes.
The Tor project does a lot of work to make operating an exit node safer and less likely to prompt the authorities to intervene. This is good, because even if the authorities did want to talk to exit node providers, those people _couldn't_ provide any useful logs.
I think it would certainly depend on the type of "illegal activity"; it's quite plausible that those looking for drugs or counterfeiting are going to have much higher suspicion and opsec than porn-driven pedophiles, leading to the difference in number of registrations at each honeypot.
might be a typo, but just in case - a 'tenet' is a rule or principle, a 'tenant' is an occupier.
> First, the pedo site saw magnitudes more traffic than the counterfeiting or drugs websites – in the order of 100 times more traffic than the other two combined.
When someone wants to use the DNMs, they start at http://deepdotweb.com/ , http://thehub7gqe43miyc.onion/ , http://darknetmarkets.reddit.com/ or http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival ; these are curated community lists, which people use to avoid falling for phishing links and scams.
Just look at the traffic stats for the one subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/about/traffic/ !
DNM users do not start at a random .onion because that is a recipe for being the latest victim of 'Drug Market' and other longstanding onion scams.
OP appears to have made no effort to get his honeypot into any of the standard sources of DNM info, and accordingly, he got no traffic. This is exactly as one would hope, and says more about how badly he bungled the drugs honeypot (and conversely, how pathetic the security of the pedo community is) than about any ratio of pedos to drug buyers.
(This is a similar problem as the paper which counts .onions and argues that pedophiles are 99% or whatever of hidden-service traffic; the differing communities using hidden-services simply don't work the way that OP or that paper assumed for ease of making wild claims. Counting onion addresses does not work because the pedo sites tend to change onions constantly while the huge blackmarkets like Agora stick at a single onion like agorahooawayyfoe.onion for months or years; counting visits to a lame honeypot like OP's does not work because with no advertising, vetting, or sellers, no one would bother with his honeypot when they could use Agora, Nucleus, Abraxas, or other established markets with broad offerings.)
The biggest thing he demonstrated is that a percentage of pedos would run an executable from some guy on Tor if he asks nicely. How can it be hard for the FBI to catch those guys?
> Given my circumstances, I have seen first-hand, the psychological damage a pedophile’s actions cause. The damage done to these children is permanent and no matter how much counseling and assistance they seek – the experience is forever embedded into their self, shaping (and sometimes limiting) what they become as adults.
I can't pretend like I really get this because I've never dealt with pedophiles or pedophilia first-hand but I can agree, however, that people that hurt children are doing something morally wrong. With that said, this kinds of vigilante-esque behavior can be (and often times is) the absolute antithesis of justice.
> On two different occasions I contacted the FBI about the project and offered to provide full sets of data that I had collected.
Since OP tried to approach the FBI on two different occasions, it doesn't really seem to me like this was merely an innocuous "security" experiment (like this one: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/spoiled-onions-tor-network,news-...). It seems like OP really feels a deep hatred towards pedophiles and was, in a sense, out to get them.
Thankfully, we have the justice system that handles this for us. These are people that try to be impartial, fair, and just. When accused, we have the court system -- a system that values innocence until proven guilt. I hope I won't be taken out of context here. I'm not defending pedophilia (or drug trafficking or murder -- a few other Tor commodities). Do you really feel compelled to "get the bad guys?" Great. Go to a police academy or go to law school. Real life isn't like a superhero graphic novel. The law, for the most part, works. More importantly, it provides some boundaries for those that enforce it.
I had to read Mill's On Liberty in a Philosophy of Law class I took a few years ago and Chapter IV, Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual, really stuck with me. I would strongly suggest OP give it a good read: http://www.bartleby.com/130/4.html.
It's amazing the damage people can do chasing justice.
But he should still chill the fuck out. Yes, bad things happen. But no, you're not permanently broken. You can grow up and have a normal life.
"However, I have adopted a beautiful daughter who was abused in the most unimaginable ways (physically and sexually beginning at age 5). Her abuse was doled out via multiple pedophiles while she shuffled in and out of the child protective services system (which repeatedly failed to protect her)."
Also this gave me a nasty flashback of looking at filenames (never content) of deleted files in the process of gathering evidence against a family member who now sits on the registered sex offender list...
Add to this the amount of bots out there, and "false" data generated by police, federal investigators and interest groups doing the very thing people pay them to do, and you would really have to design the data collecting system in such a way that it identified who is doing the searching and what their usage patterns are.
For example, If they return every hour on the hour, such result would likely be made by a bot, or if every search is extremely specific, it could very likely be an investigator doing work in a specific case. If I did this kind of research, I would contact professional investigators in order to work together and to collect search patterns so to exclude that kind of traffic.
The fact that tor is full of stuff like kidporn is actually a positive commentary on our society. It means that almost everyone, even people with wildly unpopular views, feel comfortable discussing them in the open. Tor isn't full of manifestos and political texts because people don't feel the need to hide that stuff.
I am sort of glad tor exists in spite of the nasty uses some put it to. It's like the modern equivalent of what having a well armed militia around was once supposed to achieve. It's like a backup system.
Considering that no actual files were made available for download, and many of the visitors were likely researchers, there wouldn't be enough to prosecute, but given the implied level of security the actual pedos were using, the FBI could just search their computers and would likely find enough evidence.
>For instance, pedophiles form their own communities and within those communities, a sense of trust is developed.
Or, pedos aren't drawn from the same population that knows how to do stuff securely, they just read a guide or two on how to use Tor. I'd assume you could get "4-7%" of many groups of people to download something and run it, that doesn't show that pedos necessarily are more trusting. (In fact, I'd expect higher numbers from random internet users, thus implying that pedos are less trusting, which I'd expect at a minimum given the fact that they can access Tor).
At any time, Tor is frequented by many like him. Some law enforcement, some working for child abuse organizations, some academia, and a lot of regular people with the same ambitions. Advertising a high child porn site is the best way to attract them. Most likely many of them have an unhealthy interest in this stuff, and line between "researcher" and paedophile is not always clear. The law does not make a distinction.
One could argue that this type of pornography would encourage pedophiles to seek out real girls, but then the same would apply for married men looking at porn. Do most of them seek out women in bars or escort services? I doubt that.
At what point do users give up since there is no content on the website?
so what the author of this article was actually doing was just leaking his own IP. lol
· You adopted a girl at some point.
· You are not law enforcement, and are not authorised by them in any way.
· You disclose, here in this webpage, that you ran a hidden service site, via Tor, explicitly for paedophiles.
· You have admitted the above, to the FBI.
· You haven't considered what child protective services' post-adoptive services might think of your doing this?
Um, I am a trifle concerned that you may have let your emotional investment get in the way of good research, or good sense, thinking this vigilantism through to its logical conclusion.
Secondly, I think I'm enough of an expert on the topic of malware to say that the software, designed to cause a privacy breach upon whomever runs it and to disguise that purpose so that they may be tricked into running it voluntarily, is definitely malware: what is technically known as a "Trojan Horse", essentially doing the same job as the FBI's "CIPAV", but worse.
Thirdly, I've spoken with law enforcement on this topic before, in the context of discussing anonymous networks like Tor. They are frequently displeased about vigilantes ruining their operations by doing shit like this - it makes the paedophiles more paranoid and careful, actively disrupting ongoing law enforcement investigations.
Fourthly, it's not valid research. geek_slop doesn't appear to be familiar with how Tor actually works, in fact, they actually list the wonderful exit nodes they got, apparently unaware that the list of exit nodes is public and by design doesn't tell you anything at all about the visitors to your site. Web crawlers (including "Dark Web" - a wording which is another sign that the author does not have a strong background in anonymous networks - it's correctly "onion site" now, formerly "hidden service") naturally find related sites that link to each other, if you're going by links, which they might have done. If they're neutrally HSdir crawling, most of them are dead (because they're ephemeral services created by a P2P chat app?). We know all that from previous research (Dr Gareth Owen, University of Portsmouth, Tor Hidden Services and Deanonymisation, 31C3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdeRmlj8Gw ).
Finally, this crawler might in fact be the exact same "dumb crawler" I previously identified as doing repeated HSdir directory service lookups (instead of caching) while refreshing paedophile sites, causing disproportionate load on the Tor network's HSdir services and strongly skewing Dr Owen's results on this topic (if it's not yours, it's probably IWF's). So, um, thanks for that.
Did the FBI corporate with you? You said, you contacted them twice
The FBI twice rejecting a set of information that could have reasonably led to the arrest of several pedophiles seems like a big mistake.
I'm not surprised the FBI turned him down.
Besides, taking down these pedophiles might be "fun" to some people, but if you really want to help children you need to go after the people producing/hosting child pornography.
> npt@hotmail.com: hi im a married dad of 3, i prefer girls from pt to jb. I’m looking forward to joining in and sharing in the community
A little later in the article there is an entire section devoted to his findings that many visitors of the site were predators seeking to do more than look at photographs. In addition,
> Many visitors offered photos from their “private collection” as a means to bribe me for entrance to the website. They took care to note that the material they were offering me was original.
Later on he explains,
> Scans on the server dropped and some of the users who opted to run the software appeared to be government or private researchers.
Who says the people viewing it aren't abusing children?
There is no world in which this content is acceptable. The presence of this on TOR is not "good for society" in any way shape or form, and reveals that society can't be trusted with anonymous speech...
Which is a really big problem, because there are a shit-ton of other problems that require anonymous speech.