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Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it

• mynameishere 14y ago
  freely allowed to say really anything Well, that's allowed on the normal internet for the most part.
  • nsmartt 14y ago
    That is utter nonsense. I don't even know where to begin. Technically, you can say whatever you want, but you cannot expect to avoid persecution (or prosecution) if you do.
    • falcolas 14y ago
      And in most forums, you can't even say whatever you want. You'll be censored by the site hosting the forum, by the hosting company (for web sites), or ISPs.
    • mynameishere 14y ago
      You can begin wherever you like, but you aren't going anywhere. If it was nonsense, it wouldn't be happening non-stop on 4chan and lots of other places. The only people iirc who've gotten in trouble there are those who've confessed to actual crimes. For instance, the kid who broke into Sarah Palin's yahoo account, or the guy who stood in a box of burger king lettuce. It's easy to track people down, but simply doesn't happen (yet) for speech "violations". Maybe you're in Canada or some more oppressive place though.
      • nsmartt 14y ago
        4chan has bans, and authorities are frequently called when illegal content is posted. Try again.
    • nacker 14y ago
      The saddest aspect of this kind of discussion to me is to see how people argue in favor of their own oppression. People seem to be increasingly conditioned by fear, and increasingly cowardly. What happened to sentiments like "Live free or die!" ?
      • zerostar07 14y ago
        Selected out
  • rorrr 14y ago
    Try openly writing about your plans of assassinating some high-level official. You won't last a day.
• noonespecial 14y ago
  That's the proof that its working. As you say, when the child molesters are really and truly safe to speak their minds, everyone is. These people would exist anyway. Sometimes humanity sucks. Interesting though, TOR allowed you to study them in a way you would never have been able to otherwise. It merely disgusted you, but it could be a valuable resource to someone who studies how people break and thinks about what might be possibly done to help or hinder them.
  • fatbird 14y ago
    Whether or not they exist anyway, it seems obvious to me that a supportive peer group is going to increase their effectiveness at predation. Perhaps they talk about it so much that they don't get around to doing it--studies on violent pornography and child pornography sometimes find that viewers use them as a safe outlet to actually doing it themselves. But that's a huge gamble. At present, TOR is simply enabling child predators to be better child predators.
    • nowarninglabel 14y ago
      Although, logically, it doesn't allow for infiltrators (e.g., police) to enter the forums and attempt to build enough cred to initiate convincing these predators into doing something stupid, for instance dangling financial rewards in front of them for real world meetup for exchange of goods, etc. This is how law enforcement has been working on carding forums. And while I don't think the enforcement is effective for that, since the financial incentive is always there, I do think there is a finite supply of people willing to prey on children for money and that there's a possibility of capturing the vast majority of them.
      • thinkingisfun 14y ago
        The problem aren't the people who do it for money :/ Why would they ever meet up? What goods are there to exchange, other than, uhh, tips and tricks? I wish I could share your optimism, but I decidedly don't.
• rodolphoarruda 14y ago
  Oh yeah. Ethics and moral values simply evaporate when we are unable to see/watch one another in society. We are suppressed animals. Go watch 'Blindness'[1]; it is the real life representation of the dark web. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
• anonymous 14y ago
  As wrong as it sounds, maybe it's for the better to have a forum where pedophiles can aggregate knowledge on how to safely (physically speaking) molest children. Also, I have to say that while I find the idea of sex with children repulsive, having a place where you can discuss the topic should be 100% ok. Child rape is awful, talking about child rape is unsettling, but having someone proactively monitor my communications is even more unsettling. It feels like a stranger offering me candy. Besides, for this particular problem, the best solution seems to be what we're already doing - tell as many children as possible that if someone tries to rape them, there are people who will listen and help.
  • fatbird 14y ago
    You don't think that enabling them to discuss it, enables them to carry it out? Who's the more effective child predator: the one who does it alone, with little guidance or feedback from others; or the guy who spends time discussing it with a supportive peer group and perhaps carrying out predation with their help? The only value to such a forum is for monitoring and catching them. If by definition the forum isn't useful for that because it's TOR, then that's a giant negative for me in the existence of TOR. If the cost of assisting dissidents is that children get raped... then I don't know that we should be assisting dissidents this way.
    • nowarninglabel 14y ago
      I'm not sure you have a basis to make the assumption that the forum leads to more predation. What if it works the opposite? We know that violent movies lead to lower violent crime rates, because the criminals who would be out committing violent crimes are instead enjoying going and seeing this movie. The same could be true of people who might otherwise act on their intentions for predation, but are instead satisfied by just living vicariously through others on the forums. I agree with you that I'd like nothing better than to round all these predators up, but it's only through rational thought and discussion that we can figure out the best way to do that.
      • ahelwer 14y ago
• jchrisa 14y ago
  I didn't click through the links described (or even have time to install Tor), but it occurs to me that one may be able to find these guys via statistical analysis of writing style. Spider the web and then correlate less-anonymous writings with the stuff the ringleaders are saying on the Darknet.
  • S4M 14y ago
    Interesting idea. Do you have any link of methods to identify people by writing style? Google didn't give me anything. To be honest I am a bit skeptical that it's possible but I'd appreciate to be proven wrong.
    • DanBC 14y ago
      (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/identifying_peo_2.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/identifying_pe...) Criticism: (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3317 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3317) Tips to evade: (http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/IAAI/IAAI09/paper/view/257 http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/IAAI/IAAI09/paper/view/257)
  • pvarangot 14y ago
    A while ago Anonymous hacked one of those forums and published the usernames and hashes. Apparently a lot of them where using the same usernames and passwords in another porn-related forums in the "lit" web. Don't know if it resulted in someone being caught by the police or not, but definitely subtler methods such as statistical analysis of writing style are not the only way to get a lead from those forums.
    • DanBC 14y ago
      So, Tor is only as good as the person using it. I urge caution against amateur investigations, but it'd be interesting to see what software tools could be written to help law enforcement do a better job. Statistical analysis of text "social web" etc.
• patrickgzill 14y ago
  How many are Feds, on the site you mention? Something you did not take into consideration.
  • thinkingisfun 14y ago
    What can the feds do, other than take note of the information the predators exchange? How protective do you think pedophiles are of their real identity, or clues that might lead to it? Something you did not take into consideration. As if the most gut-wrenching bits were written by feds, which you surely did not mean to imply, how does it matter if even 80% were feds?
• naner 14y ago
  ...just shows that Tor is really anonymous and safe. It shows that the groups who go after and prosecute these people don't have the resources or motivation to get to all of them. When you have a very significant target of the US (near the wanted level of Bin Landen) or China talking freely on Tor without getting caught, then perhaps you can rule it as being seriously anonymous. I don't know about other countries, but in the US I generally only hear about people getting prosecuted for CP and similar crimes when they are caught in the act or when somehow the computer files get accidentally discovered or reported by some 3rd party.
  • doktrin 14y ago
    This is an important point. The anonymity of Tor relies on finding safety in numbers (or rather, among numbers). However, the bar doesn't have to be quite that high in order for Tor to be considered de-facto anonymous. There is an order of magnitude separating the resources available to a local police force and the entire DoD. Criminals guilty of capital offenses might only garner the attention of the former, whereas someone at a 'Bin Laden' level of notoriety would be chased with the near-limitless resources of a superpower's defense apparatus.
  • pdsull 14y ago
    The feds conduct ongoing child porn investigations, not just passive enforcement. Once someone with CP is found, the feds often try to seize the provider in order to collect information on other offenders, which in turn leads to further arrests/prosecutions. And the cycle continues. I used to think Child Porn was rare. I was wrong.
  • runn1ng 14y ago
    China is blocking Tor outright and pretty effectively. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/OONI/censorshipwiki/CensorshipByCountry/China https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/OONI/censo...
    • TWAndrews 14y ago
      So really, rather than providing useful anonymity to political dissidents, it's just providing anonymity to pedophiles?
• mike-cardwell 14y ago
  I hope you're not in the UK. Just looking at that stuff, whatever the reason, is enough to get you on the sex offender register here.
  • nacker 14y ago
    Good point. Especially in the UK, the so-called "good guys" are a hair's breadth away from a doctrine of thought-crime, and pre-crime.
• kika 14y ago
  I can add to disgust: 50% (unsubstantiated claim) of these people are active duty federal and state officers, sitting behind their boring desks in their boring offices across the country. Seriously, though, if you think about it from this perspective then you'll agree that Tor is a great thing. Instead of working knee deep in the dirt, risking their real lives finding highly suspective local small groups of child abusers and infiltrating them, officers can do their jobs sipping lattes under air conditioner and risking no more than their avatars.
• Cushman 14y ago
  > Drug markets, weapon markets, assasin markets (altough I don't know how sersiously to take those), terrorist websites, child porn websites. One of these things, is not like the others...
  • dhimes 14y ago
    I assume you are talking about "drug markets."
    • GFKjunior 14y ago
      Why would that be any different from a weapons market? If either existed (in brick and motor or amazon style stores) I would frequent both regularly.
      • Cushman 14y ago
        The difference, if I could put it in as mild a way as possible, is that it has yet to be conclusively demonstrated that safe, reliable access to weapons of known quality is a net positive to public health and safety.
      • lolcraft 14y ago
        Some of us see it as, drugs being something that one inflicts to oneself, while weaponry, assassination, terrorism and manufacture of pedophile pornography is, in contrast, inflicted to others by force.
        • GFKjunior 14y ago
          Well yes, the last three in your list are terrible exactly because they harm others. That is what I said. Weapons are like drugs, they don't necessarily hurt anyone unless you plan to invade my home or threaten me. Assassination implies that the sole goal is killing a target, buying a gun can be for protection, for a collection, for fun and hobby, for sustenance, ect.
      • rdl 14y ago
• TWAndrews 14y ago
  I hope that law enforcement agencies at least use this as a window into how these people operate.
• DanBC 14y ago
  > Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.) That was a ridiculously reckless thing for you to do. You've opened yourself up to a variety of legal sanctions. Knowingly, deliberately, breaking the law is a bafflingly dumb thing to do, especially when the consequences to your life would be so severe.
  • nacker 14y ago
    There are many bafflingly dumb laws. Hundreds of them. If I was smoking cannabis right now I might be thrown in jail for breaking the law. The problem is that there are so many stupid laws and so many state goons employed to enforce them.
    • Cushman 14y ago
      Lots of people smoking weed right now would not shed a tear for you if you were arrested because you went looking for child pornography.
      • nacker 14y ago
        So you missed my point exactly. Would you not shed a tear for the OP then?
        • Cushman 14y ago
          Yes, because I'm super baked. No, but seriously-- is it off that I can be made a felon because I clicked the wrong link? Yes. Does that make the laws forbidding the possession of child pornography dumb? No. If there were a reliable way to find out who they all were -- which is a fairy-tale scenario, so we're clear -- would I have a problem with anyone who looked for child pornography on the Internet being brought in for questioning? Nope. Because it is that bad.
          • nacker 14y ago
• konstruktor 14y ago
  Let me put on my tin foil hat for a moment: Tor being anonymous, there is no way to know whether what you saw was a.) authentic content created (mostly) by actual child molesters b.) excellent copy written to cause maximum outrage against tor by some entity that does not like tor c.) somewhere in between, e.g. making sure that you actually stumble upon CP every once in a while when using onion sites While b is not very probable, I can actually imagine that c is a pretty easy option to put many decent people off using tor.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• ArneBab 14y ago
  So now all this information about them is freely available. Why doesn’t the police do text and psychology analyses to find those people? Once you write, you give something of you away.
• yosho 14y ago
  Be careful about visiting those sites. If you have any of the images saved in any sort of browser cache you could have criminal charges brought against you for possession of child porn. This is doubly true if you work in tech or IT and know a lot about computers... which I'm assuming many people in HN are
• poft 14y ago
  I am a pedophile and I use Tor. I use it not to share pictures nor commit crimes but to do what you say is worse: talk to other pedophiles. Tor permits us a safe support forum. fatbird says: Whether or not they exist anyway, it seems obvious to me that a supportive peer group is going to increase their effectiveness at predation. Quite the opposite in fact. Dialogue among pedophiles facilitates two things that you might not have expected: 1. Greater awareness of the draconian consequences which generally result from breaking certain laws, and a corresponding discouragement of doing so in the first place. 2. Most importantly, it gives us role models beyond the ugly stereotypes society has created for us: each other. Since role models are by definition templates for action, this makes it far less likely that we'll act as badly as society would expect. I can't claim that all pedophile forums are like this. But the ones I frequent -- which are among the most popular -- are, and the less we're driven underground, the more our dialogue will resemble my description and the less it will resemble yours.
  • setheron 14y ago
    are you actually a pedophile? Just curious.
    • poft 14y ago
      Yes.
      • marvin 14y ago
        ...and this is a perfect example of why anonymity on the internet is a good thing which has inherent value. Now we've learned something we wouldn't have otherwise. It's not like people with these paraphelias show up for interviews with the newspaper.
        • throwaway_24680 14y ago
          That's dangerous reasoning. Your comment suggests there is greater value in learning from a pedophile while he is out there victimizing children than there is learning from him behind bars. There are plenty of interviews of convicted pedophiles that help the public understand their point of view (e.g. http://www.putlocker.com/file/19CQ36KXSUTC0408# http://www.putlocker.com/file/19CQ36KXSUTC0408# - many more in scientific journals, less sensationalized than TV)
• throw4397901 14y ago
  One thing that really bothers me about the whole war on child porn is that there seems to be no difference in gradation to people: people seem to think that a pedophile is the worst kind of human that can possibly exist no matter the circumstances. I think the following three scenarios are very different: A. An 18 year old falls in love with a 14 year old girl, they're completely comfortable with each other and have some sexual experimentation. B. A 35 year old captures and rapes a 14 year old girl. C. 35 year old is attracted to young and innocent, cute-looking girls, and sometimes feels attracted to 10 year old girls on the street in bikinis. He does, however, not deliberately go to swimming pools in order to spot them. He deals with his fetish by watching animated cartoons of young-looking people engaging in consensual sex and dating petite women that have cute manners, well above the age of consent. Our strategy for dealing with child porn should be aimed at reducing the number of actual children harmed, and turning as many pedophiles from group B into group C as possible. A support group where you can anonymously exchange stories could definitely help. So long as we, as a society, hold the position that pedophile C is no different from pedophile B, we may pressure people that really don't want to rape children into feeling a kinship with people who do think it is normal to rape children.