FBI’s Deep Web Child Porn Ring Questions Role of Gov’t in Society

The real problem with the FBI&#x27;s &quot;Innocent Images&quot; program is that too much of the FBI&#x27;s resources are devoted to it. As of about 5 years ago, the FBI&#x27;s &quot;cyber security&quot; operation was about 50% &quot;national security&quot; (much of which is trolling for wannabe terrorists), 40% child pornography (much of which is trolling for people who want child porn), and 10% online fraud. The first two are easy; FBI people can sit in their offices in Baltimore and do much of that. It brings up their numbers. Solving online crimes is really hard, involving tracking through multiple countries, and is likely to be unsuccessful.<p>This is why law enforcement shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to set their own priorities. The institutional goals and the goals of the taxpayers who pay them don&#x27;t match.

The rule should be that law enforcement cannot commit a crime in order to catch a criminal. For instance, they cannot be part of a bank robbery, or murder someone.<p>This reminds somewhat of the &quot;gun walker&quot; case where the ATF let illegal guns flood the market in order to track the buyers, which resulted in the death of a border patrol agent and countless others along the border.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ATF_gunwalking_scandal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ATF_gunwalking_scandal</a>

So pedophiles obviously don&#x27;t choose to be pedophiles. I&#x27;m certain it is a biological vagary. There should be a better way to treat people that are a certain way because of biology and not choice.<p>The other issue is I&#x27;m not sure if FBI did the right thing here. For whatever brief period this was state sponsored and sanctioned pedophile ring.

As opposed to the illustration of the article, one needs to note that <i>child</i> pornography includes a photo, a drawing or a 3D CGI representing anyone below 18 years old. Given the recipient rarely has the ID card on file, it&#x27;s hard to prove it to the judge, even if the porn model was 22. Not even talking about age fabrication, which turns unsuspecting viewers into felons.<p>I wonder how well the distinction is applied, or far this can be pushed by the FBI to take down a someone.<p>On the other hand, needless to say that actual child porn is disgusting.

It also questions Tor Project&#x27;s effectiveness at educating its users. Especially users engaged in high-risk activity. Once PlayPen had been compromised, this FBI operation relied entirely on exploiting a Firefox vulnerability to drop malware that phoned home, bypassing Tor. Putting tor daemon and userland in separate VMs would have prevented user compromise. Even firewall rules might have prevented it. Why doesn&#x27;t Tor Project focus more on user safety?<p>Edit: We hear about this because defendants in criminal cases are questioning FBI practices. And because criminal cases in the US are public, unless there are national security issues. But we probably don&#x27;t hear about similar efforts elsewhere against political dissidents etc.

I don&#x27;t really understand the objection to this. Continuing to operate the site for a short period in order to catch more pedophiles seems fine to me. They weren&#x27;t abusing children themselves, and shutting down the site wouldn&#x27;t have prevented the continuing abuse of children by its users.<p>All shutting it down immediately would have done is prevented them from sharing the photos with each other, which seems like an extraordinarily small price to pay to catch even a single additional child molester, let alone a whole community of them.

It introduces an interesting question on tactics. Stopping child porn is good, reducing gun trafficking is good. It&#x27;s not clear how that is done currently.<p>In place of continuing to host the content to catch predators, could the government covertly transition sites they run from hosting to linking to other sites? Making their site &quot;more robust to takedown&quot;?<p>Encouraging users to instead link to other sites? The resulting contributions can then be used to go after and prosecute, and even shut down (some of) the submitted sites?<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s possible to do that transition well, at some point the site is just a host of links (like HN or Reddit). At some point they&#x27;d become the largest aggregator of child porn, at which point they can go after the most popular or prolific producers.<p>This of course is also along the lines of locate and punish, and doesn&#x27;t explore helping the people who make, distribute, or consume. Addressing the demand for the content I don&#x27;t like the idea of a strike system however catching and treating people and moving to prosecuting the people who reoffend after treatment is harder to do, I don&#x27;t even know how monitoring to detect offenders after catching them once.

I mean, wasn&#x27;t the government supposed to learn you can&#x27;t do this sort of shit, I dunno, countless government scandals involving essentially the same thing? If your involvement in an illegal industry is such that the market is composed primarily of you, you&#x27;re probably doing something immoral. The ends do not justify the means, especially when you&#x27;re given a privileged position of power. In my opinion, those FBI agents involved in this operation should be tried on criminal charges. The fact that no one spoke up has very concerning implications about the ethical culture at the FBI.

Kind of reminds me of CIA&#x27;s drug trafficking:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...</a><p>Or even FBI&#x27;s own terrorist factory. It&#x27;s all &quot;for a good cause,&quot; I&#x27;m sure.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;fbi-manufacture-plots-terrorism-isis-grave-threats&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;fbi-manufacture-plots-te...</a><p>And now they want us to let them backdoor encryption, because they&#x27;ve clearly proven themselves such upstanding and trustworthy &quot;good guys&quot; so far.

Lets assume that on the WhatsApp-Team there is a least one father or mother.<p>Lets further deduce that s&#x2F;he implemented on his own time the following filter in Pseudo-Code:<p>From Conversations =&gt; Select(p1.age &lt; 18 | p2.age &lt; 18 ) =&gt; Select(p1.age &gt; 16 &amp; p2.age &gt; 16 ) =&gt; Filter(FamilyGraph.Related(p1, 1, p2) =&gt; NNFilter(Contains(conversation.content,sexual)) =&gt; CreateReport(vicitim= NNFilter(p1.conversation.history, traumatized) | NNFilter(p2.conversation.history, traumatized), suspects = SUB(conversation.person, victim))<p>Now lets assume this sort of technology is already in place, but you just will never know, the sort of quantum observation, that just leads to remarkable good police work - because lucky guesses..<p>Which is one of the reasons why abuse cases happen in third world countrys nowadays. This is something that should be deployed worldwide. Oh, compiler is done building - better worlds, all of them.

I&#x27;m guessing this wasn&#x27;t in the FBI&#x27;s Approach to Cyber Threats speech

As a meta-point, I wonder why people who (apparently) see themselves as bitcoin&#x2F;privacy advocates think it&#x27;s a good idea (from an efficiency-towards-that-goal perspective) to defend child molesters, or attack people trying to catch child molesters. Maybe they&#x27;re just not very capable of making the distinction between their personal convictions (about the boogey-man government) and how to realistically achieve certain goals on privacy advocacy, but talking about cutting off one&#x27;s nose to spite one&#x27;s face...

Response in this thread seems rather contrasting with response to the similar Australian operation (Argos). I may not be grasping the differences tho

It makes sense that a porn ring would question the role of government in society.<p>How to be taken seriously, step zero: proofread

Given that this comes from a highly questionable source (bitcoin.com, run by Roger Ver, a guy convicted for sending explosives in the mail, a bitcoin investor, and libertarian who revoked his U.S citizenship so he wouldn&#x27;t have to pay taxes, and is highly biased against the government), this should be taken with a massive grain of salt.<p>If this were even slightly true, there would be reputable news sites all over this story by now.<p>Edit: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;transportation&#x2F;294341-fbi-denies-speeding-up-child-porn-site-during-investigation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;transportation&#x2F;294341-fbi-denies-s...</a><p>&gt; In February 2015, the FBI seized control of the site and operated it for two weeks so that the agency could <i></i>distribute malware to users with the intention of identifying suspects.<i></i><p>&gt; The Department of Justice (DOJ) denies that charge, writing in case documents, “The Government Played No Role in Creating the Crime for Which Chase is Being Prosecuted or Otherwise Encouraged His Criminal Conduct. Chase created the Playpen website, not the government.”<p>&gt; The FBI has also denied claims that during their operation of Playpen, agents improved the site’s performance, helping it run faster.<p>&gt; “Chase claims absent actual factual support that the government enhanced or improved the website’s functionality,” the DOJ said.<p>&gt; Even if the FBI did upgrade Playpen’s performance, criminal defense attorney Norman Pattis says, it would have little impact on the case.<p>&gt; “I don’t think there would be much implication at all,” Pattis said. “I think the defense is misapplying entrapment.”<p>&gt; “Speeding up access doesn’t create the desire to do it,” he added. “The fact that people come to the market looking for it already doesn’t make it entrapment.”<p>&gt; The DOJ justified the FBI’s actions in continuing to operate Playpen after arresting Chase. They wrote that shutting down Playpen immediately “might have answered the immediate issue of child pornography trafficking on Playpen, it would have done nothing to address the larger problem.”