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The takeover: how police ended up running a paedophile site
- DanBC 10y ago> Paul Griffiths, a police officer from England with a cropped haircut and a hard stare, worked on Argos in Queensland as a victim identification specialist, scanning gigabytes of images and videos each week looking for clues – a brand of food, a grain of wood – that might give away a child’s location. Above his desk was a whiteboard scrawled with two dozen usernames: the forum’s most wanted. You can help law enforcement identify locations by using an app to take photographs of hotel rooms. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058357
- 05 10y agoWhy bother, NSA has all the private data it needs to do this on a scale that could actually work, like hotel room pictures geotagged by your smartphone, as well as your indoor pictures from your house.. Of course, you're really naive thinking this will only (or even predominantly) be used against child molesters..
- halomru 10y agoWell, NSA's mission is foreign intelligence and counter intelligence. Fighting crime isn't related to their tasks at all. And I would really prefer if it stayed that way.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- HappyTypist 10y agoEpic sleuthing.
- ludamad 10y agoI wonder how many of their tactics they withheld from the story, given that child abusers will be taking notes. At least there's not much that can be done about location recognition.
- DanBC 10y agoThere were some hints in the article. Forensic teams look at brands. Coca Cola labeling isn't identical across the world, and is very common, so leaving a bottle of coca cola in the room can provide a hint to location. (There was a programme on BBC Radio 4 that mentioned programmers getting together with police to develop machine-recognition of coca cola bottles. Sadly, the BBC search is hopelessly poor, so I'm unable to find the programme.) There's other stuff, like wallpaper patterns and fabric patterns in windows. There's a bunch of image processing, the most obvious example being swirly-face man, but there are plenty of others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil
- ikeboy 10y agoApparently it is possible to investigate such sites without hacking, just regular investigative work. Who'd have thought?
- toxik 10y agoGreat job all around, but I think the elephant in the room here is that the police was effectively enabling pedophiles to exchange videos of the sexual abuse of small children. I'm not convinced this feels 100% kosher to me.
- grpdn 10y agoIf police had not used the opportunity to collect evidence on many others before closing the site then the paedophiles would have just dispersed before reorganising somewhere else. In the long run I suspect that the total amount of child abuse material exchanged has been reduced.
- Bromskloss 10y agoWhich brings us to the question of what harm is acceptable to inflict upon one person against his or her will, for the benefit of someone else, or perhaps for many other people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments I'm not proposing an answer; I just want to see you all fight about it. :-)
- ikeboy 10y agoThe people using the site would most likely be abusing kids anyway.
- J_Darnley 10y agoOkay, you want to see a fight? Sharing an image of abuse does not inflict more violence against the victim. What's the old line? "What they don't know can't hurt them."
- ikeboy 10y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/04/23/the-supreme-court-promises-child-pornography-victims-full-restitution-someday-how-long-is-that/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... > Briefly, in around 1999, the victim, Amy, was raped as an eight-year-old girl by her uncle. The uncle was caught and convicted. Amy received psychological counseling and the uncle was ordered to pay the cost for her treatment up to that time, a few thousand dollars. By the end of her treatment in 1999, Amy was (as reflected in her therapist’s notes) “back to normal” and engaged in age-appropriate activities such as dance. Sadly, eight years later, Amy’s condition drastically deteriorated when she learned that her child sex abuse images were widely traded on the Internet. The “Misty” series depicting Amy is one of the most widely-circulated sets of sexual abuse images (i.e., child pornography) trafficked in the world. According to her psychologist, the global trafficking of Amy’s child sex abuse images has caused “long lasting and life changing impact[s] on her.” As Amy explained in her own, personal victim impact statement, “Every day of my life I live in constant fear that someone will see my pictures and recognize me and that I will be humiliated all over again.”
- rdl 10y agoThis is the "The Love Zone" (TLZ) case, I believe (which was a Tor HS). Not sure what country the gag order applies in, but I suspect not the United States.
- Fede_V 10y agoThe cops who have to look at these awful images to track down those monsters are heroes. I cannot imagine having to do that every day without ending up completely broken up inside.
- Chilinot 10y agoJust the thought of having to dig through all that crap gives me shivers.
- Ensorceled 10y agoMy brother says the key for him is to stay focused on the victim and what he's trying to accomplish: stop the abuse or find them and stop the abuse, find their abuser, convict their abuser so it doesn't happen again. If you constantly get angry or upset, you'll have a very hard time doing it for long.
- busterarm 10y agoSemi-related, worth viewing: http://www.callmeluckymovie.com/ http://www.callmeluckymovie.com/
- samskeller 10y agoI used to work for a company that partnered with some of these law enforcement personnel and can confirm that they are amazing people doing a mostly thankless job. Absolute heroes
- willvarfar 10y agoWhen they first took over the first user account, did they post any new images? Or were they able to move quickly enough to take out the webmaster before they got kicked?
- theonemind 10y agoFor six months, the police provided strong incentive to actively commit new child abuse, because they were running a site that required active uploading. Really, possession and distribution of these images should be legal. Then pedophiles wouldn't feel the need to hoard it. They could easily get it online. However, obviously, the acts in them should be completely illegal. With the current system, pedophiles hoard images, and on sites like this, they'll want new material. Much like the war on drugs, I don't think second-order effects have been considered in policy. Sure, law makers and most sexually normal people are going to have a gut reaction of disgust to child pornography. This leads to a knee-jerk "ban it" reaction. I think the "reasoning" stops right there. For every additional concept it takes to solve a test problem, you lose 75-80% of students. Likewise, I feel like lawmakers and the public have at least a 75-80% loss rate considering the second and third order effects of their policies.
- rmc 10y ago> Really, possession and distribution of these images should be legal. Strongly disagree.
- gambiting 10y agoMy opinion is that it should not be illegal to posses any information. It should not be illegal to have a book, drawing or an image of anything. In some countries it's illegal to have drawings of such pornography - and while I agree that individuals who enjoy it should probably seek treatment, I find the fact that you can go to prison for possession of a drawing to be absolutely insane.
- jsmeaton 10y agoPossession promotes exploitation of children. It's very different to possessing content of dubious (to some) but consensual participants. Relevant case law is linked elsewhere in this thread which discusses why child pornography (and possession and transfer) is outside protection of free speech.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pdimitar 10y agoIs it just me finding it very strange how such child predators have "diligently kept a ledger" of their acts, with names? I am obviously not a criminal psychiatrist but this seems all too convenient and the paranoia in me screams that such evidence might be planted. Then again, maybe these monsters need to periodically validate themselves by looking through that "ledger"...
- smoyer 10y agoYou could make the same argument for why serial killers shouldn't keep trophies ... but they do. The trophies are said to allow the killer to relive their crime - perhaps the ledger is an effort to validate the paedophile's acumen as a business person? Or maybe he was making enough cash that he needed to accurately launder it through his other businesses?
- blowski 10y agoAlso similar to how the Nazis kept extremely detailed records in concentration camps.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Fjolsvith 10y agoIt's a psychological error in their thinking processes. They have a personal pride in their accomplishments and would brag about them to the world if they could do so with impunity.
- adsteel_ 10y ago"The disarray was typical of a predator’s home." Is this true? Do sexual predators tend to live in wildly unkempt and unwashed homes?