6 ms·

Look at the affidavit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3216737-Freedom-Hosting-NIT-Affidavit.html#document/p91/a327945 https://www.documentcloud.org/doc

Look at the affidavit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3216737-Freedom-Hosting-NIT-Affidavit.html#document/p91/a327945 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3216737-Freedom-Host... I only skimmed, but at least 1 of the Websites required users to upload their own CP, to be approved by the admins, before they could download any.

arthulia 10y ago
You don't think they just found it elsewhere on the internet?
- mikey_p 10y ago
  Regardless, this is generating demand for child porn.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  I have no special insight but admins of a CP server are likely to have access to considerable collections. They surely would have all the easiest CP to find already.
Cyph0n 10y ago
Uploading != producing
- dogma1138 10y ago
  But if the upload requires it to be new or at least unique to the site it usually does means production either directly or a contracted one. If not everyone would upload the same content pretty much.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    My assumption is that production is concentrated to a small inner "scene", just like the warez scene. If you have enough connections and perhaps money, you could get the material from the source, and then use that to gain access to other sites that require contributions, which is analogous to how elite private torrent trackers work. So again, uploading does not imply production capability, at least the way I see it.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      The scene is already fairly small, production is more or less adhoc these days, underaged prostitution is still very much alive these days even in western countries, not to mention places like Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. The difference is that with the warez scene there is no production effectively, since they just copy things which are constantly produced by industry, here there isn't an industry to back it up other than the one within the community. Additionally with how laws are structured in many places selling CP is a worse offense than possession, hence the trading scene is an easy way to legally cover your ass to get a reduced sentence or no sentence at all. But this also means that there is either direct production or contracting for this material from developing nations since otherwise everyone would be trading the same thing, about 9-10 years ago I've volunteered with the police and we were tracking sharing and downloading back then over P2P. Once there was sufficient evidence they would flag the person and check their travel history, quite a few of them had traveled back then often (2-3 times a year or more) to either the Balkans/Central Europe and Asia and they were going there to effectively purchase or produce it for self consumption and trade. Sadly there are way to many places where you can have sex with a child for money, and not for a lot of it, child prostitution in Mexico even in border towns it cheaper than normal street prostitution in the US not to mention higher end call girls. Get a laptop or a camera and for a few 100$ you can produce quite a bit of content.
      - Cyph0n 10y ago
        Thanks for the insight. I'm absolutely disgusted about the fact that child prostitution is easily accessible. Are you aware of ways a software developer could help in the war against CP, especially if indirectly? (I don't have the heart for the "real" stuff)
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Other than developing exploits for the FBI not really, there is a reason why this is centralized now P2P (Kazaa, eDonkey etc.) was hard enough to track especially once cheap VPN's became popular (since even a non no-log VPN would usually prevent the police from doing anything as it would be detected as a foreign IP which is out of their jurisdiction, at best they could forward that to interpol which usually didn't do anything). Financially you can always donate to international NGOs and local organizations that battle and assist the victims of CP but overall I don't think they have much actual impact other than the feel good factor, I doubt they have the reach for it, maybe Mexico, but Thailand et. al highly unlikely. These days it seems that anti-CP operations are pretty much centralized on TOR and a few other networks, P2P and Usenet used to be the spot for that but over the past 10 years everything moved to either private internet sites that domain hop frequently or TOR and similar networks. Encryption, VPN's and other privacy tools make the job of tracking people down en mass without any exploits nearly impossible, even 10 years ago besides the usual rehashed crap that one could find with a few search terms on P2P file sharing apps everything was already encrypted. CP users were pretty much encrypting everything way before anyone else, on P2P/Usenet they were running PGP rings and they would exchange keys via side channels and share their content encrypted so only people that were in the ring could decrypt it (this was in effect running your own private site over P2P or a specific newsgroup). Back then the best LEOs could do is try to get into the PGP rings and lure some of their members to meet in person or reveal their identity (no one even thought of using malware to track them down, that tradecraft wasn't there, nor would it have been admissible most likely) via other means. Today this type of well effectively state level intelligence agency operations is pretty much the only way of combating CP at any reasonable scale, and even this scale is likely quite underwhelming when compared to the amount of content produced and traded each year. But AFIAK probably the only LEO worldwide that does this is the FBI, local police departments don't have the resources, Interpol and Europol are mostly a joke, and most countries have considerable constraints on active network exploitation by law enforcement.
- sosborn 10y ago
  They aren't mutually exclusive though.

arthulia 10y ago

You don't think they just found it elsewhere on the internet?

mikey_p 10y ago
Regardless, this is generating demand for child porn.
SixSigma 10y ago
I have no special insight but admins of a CP server are likely to have access to considerable collections. They surely would have all the easiest CP to find already.

Cyph0n 10y ago

Uploading != producing

dogma1138 10y ago
But if the upload requires it to be new or at least unique to the site it usually does means production either directly or a contracted one. If not everyone would upload the same content pretty much.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  My assumption is that production is concentrated to a small inner "scene", just like the warez scene. If you have enough connections and perhaps money, you could get the material from the source, and then use that to gain access to other sites that require contributions, which is analogous to how elite private torrent trackers work. So again, uploading does not imply production capability, at least the way I see it.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    The scene is already fairly small, production is more or less adhoc these days, underaged prostitution is still very much alive these days even in western countries, not to mention places like Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. The difference is that with the warez scene there is no production effectively, since they just copy things which are constantly produced by industry, here there isn't an industry to back it up other than the one within the community. Additionally with how laws are structured in many places selling CP is a worse offense than possession, hence the trading scene is an easy way to legally cover your ass to get a reduced sentence or no sentence at all. But this also means that there is either direct production or contracting for this material from developing nations since otherwise everyone would be trading the same thing, about 9-10 years ago I've volunteered with the police and we were tracking sharing and downloading back then over P2P. Once there was sufficient evidence they would flag the person and check their travel history, quite a few of them had traveled back then often (2-3 times a year or more) to either the Balkans/Central Europe and Asia and they were going there to effectively purchase or produce it for self consumption and trade. Sadly there are way to many places where you can have sex with a child for money, and not for a lot of it, child prostitution in Mexico even in border towns it cheaper than normal street prostitution in the US not to mention higher end call girls. Get a laptop or a camera and for a few 100$ you can produce quite a bit of content.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      Thanks for the insight. I'm absolutely disgusted about the fact that child prostitution is easily accessible. Are you aware of ways a software developer could help in the war against CP, especially if indirectly? (I don't have the heart for the "real" stuff)
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        Other than developing exploits for the FBI not really, there is a reason why this is centralized now P2P (Kazaa, eDonkey etc.) was hard enough to track especially once cheap VPN's became popular (since even a non no-log VPN would usually prevent the police from doing anything as it would be detected as a foreign IP which is out of their jurisdiction, at best they could forward that to interpol which usually didn't do anything). Financially you can always donate to international NGOs and local organizations that battle and assist the victims of CP but overall I don't think they have much actual impact other than the feel good factor, I doubt they have the reach for it, maybe Mexico, but Thailand et. al highly unlikely. These days it seems that anti-CP operations are pretty much centralized on TOR and a few other networks, P2P and Usenet used to be the spot for that but over the past 10 years everything moved to either private internet sites that domain hop frequently or TOR and similar networks. Encryption, VPN's and other privacy tools make the job of tracking people down en mass without any exploits nearly impossible, even 10 years ago besides the usual rehashed crap that one could find with a few search terms on P2P file sharing apps everything was already encrypted. CP users were pretty much encrypting everything way before anyone else, on P2P/Usenet they were running PGP rings and they would exchange keys via side channels and share their content encrypted so only people that were in the ring could decrypt it (this was in effect running your own private site over P2P or a specific newsgroup). Back then the best LEOs could do is try to get into the PGP rings and lure some of their members to meet in person or reveal their identity (no one even thought of using malware to track them down, that tradecraft wasn't there, nor would it have been admissible most likely) via other means. Today this type of well effectively state level intelligence agency operations is pretty much the only way of combating CP at any reasonable scale, and even this scale is likely quite underwhelming when compared to the amount of content produced and traded each year. But AFIAK probably the only LEO worldwide that does this is the FBI, local police departments don't have the resources, Interpol and Europol are mostly a joke, and most countries have considerable constraints on active network exploitation by law enforcement.
sosborn 10y ago
They aren't mutually exclusive though.