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I appreciate that they included real examples of conversations they captured in the article, as disturbing as that may be. A lot of the conversation around sex

I appreciate that they included real examples of conversations they captured in the article, as disturbing as that may be. A lot of the conversation around sexual predation, especially around child porn, is problematic from a democracy point of view: You get authorities asking for more power (usually, more draconian surveillance laws), without showing evidence of what it is that they are supposedly fighting -- and of course, nobody wants to ask too strongly for such evidence being shown, lest they be accused of being a potential predator as well. But we can't just give authorities more power just based on their say-so. Hence, my appreciation for the choice to release some of that material in the article. I'm against more draconian laws, but I do think people should be able to make up their own minds, and the discussions we have about those issues should be more open.

api 7y ago
This nicely shows that they don't need more surveillance. A simple honey trap appears to fill up like a bug zapper tray in Mississippi in July. No dark web, no Hollywood hacker shit. Just go on social media and pretend to be a pretty underage girl and fish meet barrel. These days you could automate this with a good adversarial neural net (including image generation!) that would engage predators and let them incriminate themselves. The authorities don't do this because they don't really care. Child abuse is a political dog whistle but it's not a real priority. As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false).
- mc32 7y ago
  Well since we’re guessing it’s also possible this is the tip of the iceberg and that it’s also possible only amateurs do it in plain sight. I’d imagine agencies who tackle this issue have more insight into that realm than an amateur sleuth of online commenters.
  - zbentley 7y ago
    Absolutely. I assume that (as horrible as what the people quoted are doing) someone who doesn't predate in the open commits even more disgusting and damaging acts. Given the number of creeps that show up for "level 1" abuse, it seems likely that there are also huge numbers of people doing even worse things.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Maybe. Or maybe child molesters, like most criminals, are criminals because they have a pattern of making poor life decisions and hence it’s perfectly normal for them to make “amateur” mistakes.
    - pdkl95 7y ago
      Or, as Zoz explained in his DEFCON 22 talk "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1], OPSEC is really REALLY hard. Even people that have the necessary technical background are human and make mistakes. To stay secure in the "dark web" you need to never make a mistake and e.g. forget to turn on your VPN/Tor before logging in somewhere important. I doubt anybody - even people that made the "best" life decisions - could do this successfully without a LOT of very specific, very technical training. >> "OPSEC is a 24/7 job." >> "... a lot of OPSEC fails ... [from] the folly of only using privacy tools when you’re up to no good." >> "For example, investigators could look at who went and downloaded the Tor Browser Bundle right before the bomb threat got called in; or look at everyone who connected to a known Tor entry node at that time, or who accessed the Tor directory servers. [...] no compromise of Tor necessary." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        (Just wanted to say thanks for linking in the video, it was really good.)
      - philwelch 7y ago
        This is true and this is ultimately how the small minority of genuinely smart criminals get foiled. The vast majority can be pretty dumb though.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false) This was one of the hard problems about the Rotherham abuse scandal. Many of the victims had been in "care" (ie taken away from abusive parents), and their reports weren't believed. Therefore a substantial grooming ring could be built up. This is why people keep saying "believe victims".
  - philwelch 7y ago
    The problem is that with children especially, it’s also not that hard to implant false memories and coach them to not only make false accusations but to actually believe them. This is part of what happened with the whole “Satanic ritual abuse” panic with “repressed memories”. This is part of why people keep saying, “wait for all the evidence” and “presumed innocent until proved guilty”.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Yes. But in a lot of cases of sexual assault there is only testimony, and the dispute is over whether the activity was consensual or not. You'd expect this wouldn't apply to child sexual abuse, but you'd be amazed at the number of people who claim the child seduced them and they weren't aware of their age. The best approach against the "repressed memories" or "why are you reporting this now" is to make it as straightforward and encouraged as possible to report incidents as and when they happen, and collect and process any evidence at the time.
      - philwelch 7y ago
        This is also why age of consent laws exist.
        tialaramex 7y ago
        In English law consent still matters unless the child is very young indeed. The imaginary 11 year old in this story would be young enough that it's always rape and if the defence (or more likely the accused personally) tries to bring up consent they'll get shut down by the judge because it's irrelevant. But for a teenager consent matters and a defence barrister would be doing their client a disservice if they didn't seize any opportunity to suggest their client believed there was consent. It's illegal for an adult to have sex with a 15 year old, but there's considerable gap between the likely tariff for "Had sex with a 15 year old" versus "Rape". The maximum tariff for having sex with a 15 year old is not inconsiderable (14 years) but it's far short of the tariff for rape (life imprisonment). In the case of a 15 year old either might be plausible for prosecutors depending on what evidence they have. If it's clear there was no consent, it'd always make sense to charge rape regardless of whether they're sure they can persuade a jury the defendant knew the victim was under age - but if consent is tricky, or especially if the victim is prepared to testify for the defence that they consented, then you need solid proof the defendant knew they were under age or it won't go anywhere.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Stings like this are the bread and butter of effective law enforcement. The fact is that the vast majority of criminals are not that hard to outsmart. It turns out that if you’re a master criminal pedophile, even then you don’t waste time with darkweb shit, you just con your way into the inner circles of the powerful and blackmail them into covering for you.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    There is an old saying, you can’t con an honest man.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Not true. Though possibly harder in cases.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      You can't con them with offerings to their greed. You can con them with your fake piety and lots of other ways... What's more true is that you can't easily con a con-artist. They know the signs/tricks.
      - goatinaboat 7y ago
        You can defraud an honest man yes, but that’s not the same as a classic con.
      - bsder 7y ago
        See: "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" ...
    - a1369209993 7y ago
      The full quote is: > There is an old saying 'You can't fool an honest man' which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Edit: Also, who exactly do you think is honest in this mess?
- Causality1 7y ago
  The constitutionality of such a honeytrap is not exactly clear though since the person isn't trying to molest an actual child. It's a bit like leaving a fake gun on the street and then prosecuting a person who picks it up and tries to shoot somebody for attempted murder. Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder? If you download a song that you weren't aware is in the public domain, is that attempted copyright infringement?
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Attempting to murder someone is still attempted murder, even if it was impossible for the attempt to succeed. Let’s say you and I both want to kill Bob. I sneak into his bedroom at night and smother him to death with a pillow. Bob is now dead and I sneak away—I have committed murder. Shortly afterwards, you sneak into his bedroom and shoot him multiple times with a gun. In this scenario, you are guilty of attempted murder even though the intended victim was already dead, unbeknownst to you. Many stings rely on similar principles. People who steal bait cars don’t actually succeed in stealing the car, nor do johns who solicit streetwalking undercover cops succeed in buying sexual favors from them.
    - megous 7y ago
      That's something different. Here you'd be charging someone based on what they thought during the act, and not on what they did or attempted to do.
      - RHSeeger 7y ago
        Not really. The murderer thought they were firing bullets into a live person. The sexual predator thought they were abusing a child. Both were incorrect about their target (dead body, grown adult). It seems to me to be a direct parallel.
        philwelch 7y ago
- paggle 7y ago
  Another reason that the authorities don’t care is that their bosses, the politicians, often partake in child sex abuse as a hobby (cf. Jeffrey Epstein and his very close links to Prince Andrew, his links to Donald Trump, and his acquaintance with Bill Clinton... that’s not all coincidence there).
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    Popular news stories aren't representative of the real world. There's no sense trying to imagine some cohesive picture of the world from them. It's like somebody discovering a mutant shark with two heads and saying there's less fish in the ocean because sharks have too many heads and are eating more than their fair share!
- mythrwy 7y ago
  What do authorities do for international cases? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pursuing any person who behaves as in the article to the greatest extent possible, but you they have to get IP, dig up the person, contact authorities in that country and hope they do something? That's a lot of paperwork for maybe something _might_ be done and no one died and no large amount of money went missing (so to speak). Maybe it's not so much they don't care (most people would care about this no?) and more they are limited in resources (and perhaps motivation) and it is difficult to get results.
  - sjy 7y ago
    If the authorities have cooperation agreements with the other country then often they’ll work together. In Australia the police catch a lot of paedophiles using information supplied by the FBI.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    How would more surveillance help you find and apprehend people internationally?
DanBC 7y ago
> without showing evidence of what it is that they are supposedly fighting - I don't understand what you're asking them to do. We know what the images contain, because the images are described in evidence put before the courts. We know what the images contain, because survivors of abuse tell us what their photographs are like. Start with things like the UK's Sentencing Council's definitive guidance page 76: https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Sexual-offences-definitive-guideline-Web.pdf https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Sexu... They've handily split the crimes into a matrix: possession, distribution, and production; and category A, B, and C. Or you can have a look at the "Copine Scale", which has 5 levels and is more descriptive: https://consult.justice.gov.uk/sentencing-council/indecent-images-children/supporting_documents/sexual%20offences_Indecent%20images%20of%20children.pdf https://consult.justice.gov.uk/sentencing-council/indecent-i... The image levels used are: level one – images depicting erotic posing with no sexual activity; level two – non-penetrative sexual activity between children, or solo masturbation by a child; level three – non-penetrative sexual activity between adults and children; level four – penetrative sexual activity involving a child or children or both children and adults; and level five – sadism or penetration of, or by, an animal More information on the Copine Scale is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPINE_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPINE_scale

api 7y ago

This nicely shows that they don't need more surveillance. A simple honey trap appears to fill up like a bug zapper tray in Mississippi in July. No dark web, no Hollywood hacker shit. Just go on social media and pretend to be a pretty underage girl and fish meet barrel. These days you could automate this with a good adversarial neural net (including image generation!) that would engage predators and let them incriminate themselves. The authorities don't do this because they don't really care. Child abuse is a political dog whistle but it's not a real priority. As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false).

mc32 7y ago
Well since we’re guessing it’s also possible this is the tip of the iceberg and that it’s also possible only amateurs do it in plain sight. I’d imagine agencies who tackle this issue have more insight into that realm than an amateur sleuth of online commenters.
- zbentley 7y ago
  Absolutely. I assume that (as horrible as what the people quoted are doing) someone who doesn't predate in the open commits even more disgusting and damaging acts. Given the number of creeps that show up for "level 1" abuse, it seems likely that there are also huge numbers of people doing even worse things.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Maybe. Or maybe child molesters, like most criminals, are criminals because they have a pattern of making poor life decisions and hence it’s perfectly normal for them to make “amateur” mistakes.
  - pdkl95 7y ago
    Or, as Zoz explained in his DEFCON 22 talk "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1], OPSEC is really REALLY hard. Even people that have the necessary technical background are human and make mistakes. To stay secure in the "dark web" you need to never make a mistake and e.g. forget to turn on your VPN/Tor before logging in somewhere important. I doubt anybody - even people that made the "best" life decisions - could do this successfully without a LOT of very specific, very technical training. >> "OPSEC is a 24/7 job." >> "... a lot of OPSEC fails ... [from] the folly of only using privacy tools when you’re up to no good." >> "For example, investigators could look at who went and downloaded the Tor Browser Bundle right before the bomb threat got called in; or look at everyone who connected to a known Tor entry node at that time, or who accessed the Tor directory servers. [...] no compromise of Tor necessary." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      (Just wanted to say thanks for linking in the video, it was really good.)
    - philwelch 7y ago
      This is true and this is ultimately how the small minority of genuinely smart criminals get foiled. The vast majority can be pretty dumb though.
pjc50 7y ago
> As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false) This was one of the hard problems about the Rotherham abuse scandal. Many of the victims had been in "care" (ie taken away from abusive parents), and their reports weren't believed. Therefore a substantial grooming ring could be built up. This is why people keep saying "believe victims".
- philwelch 7y ago
  The problem is that with children especially, it’s also not that hard to implant false memories and coach them to not only make false accusations but to actually believe them. This is part of what happened with the whole “Satanic ritual abuse” panic with “repressed memories”. This is part of why people keep saying, “wait for all the evidence” and “presumed innocent until proved guilty”.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Yes. But in a lot of cases of sexual assault there is only testimony, and the dispute is over whether the activity was consensual or not. You'd expect this wouldn't apply to child sexual abuse, but you'd be amazed at the number of people who claim the child seduced them and they weren't aware of their age. The best approach against the "repressed memories" or "why are you reporting this now" is to make it as straightforward and encouraged as possible to report incidents as and when they happen, and collect and process any evidence at the time.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      This is also why age of consent laws exist.
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        In English law consent still matters unless the child is very young indeed. The imaginary 11 year old in this story would be young enough that it's always rape and if the defence (or more likely the accused personally) tries to bring up consent they'll get shut down by the judge because it's irrelevant. But for a teenager consent matters and a defence barrister would be doing their client a disservice if they didn't seize any opportunity to suggest their client believed there was consent. It's illegal for an adult to have sex with a 15 year old, but there's considerable gap between the likely tariff for "Had sex with a 15 year old" versus "Rape". The maximum tariff for having sex with a 15 year old is not inconsiderable (14 years) but it's far short of the tariff for rape (life imprisonment). In the case of a 15 year old either might be plausible for prosecutors depending on what evidence they have. If it's clear there was no consent, it'd always make sense to charge rape regardless of whether they're sure they can persuade a jury the defendant knew the victim was under age - but if consent is tricky, or especially if the victim is prepared to testify for the defence that they consented, then you need solid proof the defendant knew they were under age or it won't go anywhere.
philwelch 7y ago
Stings like this are the bread and butter of effective law enforcement. The fact is that the vast majority of criminals are not that hard to outsmart. It turns out that if you’re a master criminal pedophile, even then you don’t waste time with darkweb shit, you just con your way into the inner circles of the powerful and blackmail them into covering for you.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  There is an old saying, you can’t con an honest man.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Not true. Though possibly harder in cases.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    You can't con them with offerings to their greed. You can con them with your fake piety and lots of other ways... What's more true is that you can't easily con a con-artist. They know the signs/tricks.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      You can defraud an honest man yes, but that’s not the same as a classic con.
    - bsder 7y ago
      See: "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" ...
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    The full quote is: > There is an old saying 'You can't fool an honest man' which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Edit: Also, who exactly do you think is honest in this mess?
Causality1 7y ago
The constitutionality of such a honeytrap is not exactly clear though since the person isn't trying to molest an actual child. It's a bit like leaving a fake gun on the street and then prosecuting a person who picks it up and tries to shoot somebody for attempted murder. Are you still guilty of a crime if you only think you were going to commit a crime? If someone lies to you that they are allergic to peanuts and you secretly give them peanuts is that attempted murder? If you download a song that you weren't aware is in the public domain, is that attempted copyright infringement?
- philwelch 7y ago
  Attempting to murder someone is still attempted murder, even if it was impossible for the attempt to succeed. Let’s say you and I both want to kill Bob. I sneak into his bedroom at night and smother him to death with a pillow. Bob is now dead and I sneak away—I have committed murder. Shortly afterwards, you sneak into his bedroom and shoot him multiple times with a gun. In this scenario, you are guilty of attempted murder even though the intended victim was already dead, unbeknownst to you. Many stings rely on similar principles. People who steal bait cars don’t actually succeed in stealing the car, nor do johns who solicit streetwalking undercover cops succeed in buying sexual favors from them.
  - megous 7y ago
    That's something different. Here you'd be charging someone based on what they thought during the act, and not on what they did or attempted to do.
    - RHSeeger 7y ago
      Not really. The murderer thought they were firing bullets into a live person. The sexual predator thought they were abusing a child. Both were incorrect about their target (dead body, grown adult). It seems to me to be a direct parallel.
      - philwelch 7y ago
paggle 7y ago
Another reason that the authorities don’t care is that their bosses, the politicians, often partake in child sex abuse as a hobby (cf. Jeffrey Epstein and his very close links to Prince Andrew, his links to Donald Trump, and his acquaintance with Bill Clinton... that’s not all coincidence there).
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Popular news stories aren't representative of the real world. There's no sense trying to imagine some cohesive picture of the world from them. It's like somebody discovering a mutant shark with two heads and saying there's less fish in the ocean because sharks have too many heads and are eating more than their fair share!
mythrwy 7y ago
What do authorities do for international cases? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for pursuing any person who behaves as in the article to the greatest extent possible, but you they have to get IP, dig up the person, contact authorities in that country and hope they do something? That's a lot of paperwork for maybe something _might_ be done and no one died and no large amount of money went missing (so to speak). Maybe it's not so much they don't care (most people would care about this no?) and more they are limited in resources (and perhaps motivation) and it is difficult to get results.
- sjy 7y ago
  If the authorities have cooperation agreements with the other country then often they’ll work together. In Australia the police catch a lot of paedophiles using information supplied by the FBI.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  How would more surveillance help you find and apprehend people internationally?

DanBC 7y ago

> without showing evidence of what it is that they are supposedly fighting - I don't understand what you're asking them to do. We know what the images contain, because the images are described in evidence put before the courts. We know what the images contain, because survivors of abuse tell us what their photographs are like. Start with things like the UK's Sentencing Council's definitive guidance page 76: https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Sexual-offences-definitive-guideline-Web.pdf https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Sexu... They've handily split the crimes into a matrix: possession, distribution, and production; and category A, B, and C. Or you can have a look at the "Copine Scale", which has 5 levels and is more descriptive: https://consult.justice.gov.uk/sentencing-council/indecent-images-children/supporting_documents/sexual%20offences_Indecent%20images%20of%20children.pdf https://consult.justice.gov.uk/sentencing-council/indecent-i... The image levels used are: level one – images depicting erotic posing with no sexual activity; level two – non-penetrative sexual activity between children, or solo masturbation by a child; level three – non-penetrative sexual activity between adults and children; level four – penetrative sexual activity involving a child or children or both children and adults; and level five – sadism or penetration of, or by, an animal More information on the Copine Scale is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPINE_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPINE_scale