For six months, the police provided strong incentive to actively commit new child abuse, because they were running a site that required active uploading.<p>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 <i>acts</i> in them should be completely illegal. With the current system, pedophiles hoard images, and on sites like this, they'll want <i>new</i> material.<p>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.
The 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.
Great 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.
Is it just me finding it very strange how such child predators have "diligently kept a ledger" of their acts, with names?<p>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"...
I 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.
This 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.
> 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.<p>You can help law enforcement identify locations by using an app to take photographs of hotel rooms.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058357" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058357</a>
When 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?