The word "pedophile" should be defined as someone with a sexual attraction towards children. It doesn't describe behavior: people can choose to not act on the attraction, and many, invisible as they are, in fact do not. Also, the people operating and visiting that hidden service could have had other reasons for visiting. They are not necessarily all pedophiles.
Such as?
The Dutch rapporteur for sexual abuse summarized that it is estimated that about 20% of the people caught for possessing child pornography are actual pedophiles, meaning people with a persistent sexual attraction towards children: http://www.nationaalrapporteur.nl/Images/nationaal-rapporteu...
For all we know, the "operator" was just showing a dump of things he found on an abandoned site five years ago, and was not involved at all in the production, and had no intention to be. Or perhaps he applied the principles of the MPAA and pirated for free as much material as he could, and put it on his website for free so as to try to get viewers to stop paying the producers and supporting their crimes.
(Which, by the way, is a strategy I would recommend law-enforcement pursue if they take their own arguments seriously. Spend federal money on servers hosting free, searchable torrents and direct downloads of CP; perhaps restrict it to material produced at least 20 years ago, and strip out or change any identifying metadata, so as to avoid any semblance of supporting or encouraging the producers of the materials.)
If you want to make the case that the viewers are liable for supporting the production of child abuse materials, that's a specific claim that you would have to prove in any individual case. By no means is it to be assumed.
What you mentioned was "encouraging its distribution", not "its production". Still, I can't imagine why the former would be rationally considered criminal except insofar as it contributes to the latter (notwithstanding rhetoric about "re-victimizing our children every time it is passed from one person to another"--which is completely absurd unless the viewers encounter the victims in real life and mistreat them in a way they wouldn't have if they didn't see the video, which seems outlandish--I doubt if it's even possible to track down the real-life identities of the victims most of the time).
A few years ago we had a shitsplosion involving the BATF running illegal guns in order to "catch criminals", with the result that few if any criminals were caught and Mexican drug lords found themselves in possession of nifty new guns. AFAIR none of the major decision makers lost their jobs, let alone were prosecuted.
I wonder how much actual law enforcement purpose is behind these ops and how much of it is just a game of "let's see what we can get away with".
Philosophical purity is very appealing, but ultimately the justifications we use for why the law is the way it is only have to stand up long enough to convince most interested parties that we're doing the right thing.
When the law is influenced by societal consensus the legal system becomes a farce.
To criminalize it in all of its forms, is the same thing as criminalizing any sexuality. Perhaps one day we'll create an algorithm that can generate these images without anyone being involved -- does that sound distasteful as well.
At this point even artful depictions of a sexual nature are illegal, criminal offense.
The law is not a programming language.
I think that, while people do care for the victims, their main driving force behind their interactions is hatred of the entire group (both those who commit crimes and those who don't). Hatred they justify by the damage some do, but hatred that does not originate there. It is almost like there is some need to have a group painted as evil beyond any consideration, some group you can openly hate regardless of anything else which fuels it. This is one reason why I think support for treatment of non-offenders is so lacking (other than 'lock them up and throw away the key') and why people tolerate the police engaging in abuse of the very same kind to catch them.
And then, the small piece of my mind which loves a good conspiracy begins to wonder if this wasn't engineered as an constant backdoor into digital rights/freedoms. One only needs to look at laws greater than 60 to 100 years ago to see how vastly different society reacted (often there wasn't much care even when a victim was being directly victimized, especially if they weren't the child of someone white and well off).
The same way downloading pirated material creates a market for it, even if you download it for free and the providers don't get money from it (but are rewarded with scene creds)
Regardless, I think someone with expertise should be allowed to review any code developed by the government in such operations only to ensure it does not somehow violate the rights of innocents
It's really not that much of an issue. It makes things more fun.
I am curious about whether they developed the malware in-house or if they hired a contractor. Is there any information out there on this? I wouldn't be surprised if they cut out parts, which may hint at a particular contractor having developed the malware.
Also, I still do not understand why TOR Browser Bundle allows scripts by default.
The best diet is the one you can actually stick to. The best birth control is the one comfortable enough to use. The best anonymity software must be usable enough for Joe Average.
If the situation is high-stakes, TBB comes with NoScript installed. And you should probably get a burner laptop, do all your web browsing off TAILS, and randomly change your physical location.
- Vlad Tsyrklevich: http://tsyrklevich.net/tbb_payload.txt
- Gareth Owenson: http://owenson.me/fbi-tor-malware-analysis/
- My own analysis based on running it in PANDA: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1jpln2/... (you can also get the recording of the shellcode executing and step through it here: http://www.rrshare.org/detail/26/ )
It's not big, and we have a pretty good idea what every piece of it does.
Of course, I suppose we don't know that the malware it used in this case is the same as the one in the Freedom Hosting case, so I guess it would be nice to compare and contrast them.
