Yeah, you won't find stories about that one in the news. But assuming it didn't get purged (and these things are wont to vanish), there were plenty of discussions / archives of the site. They used an obscure UN program to claim "partnership" with the UN by agreeing to abide by some set of principles, posted something to a UN website by virtue of that program and later got dumped when they were exposed.
The site itself was fake. The profiles were clones of each other, the images were mirrored images harvested from the web (to hide from reverse image search, but they weren't that clever because the mirroring was obvious).
The whole thing was basically a scam to make out JA as a pedophile, after which they ran off claiming to have been threatened. However, no part of the story held together.
Given how much work went into framing someone as a pedo and it got blown up publicly, it's kind of weird that it never hit the news.
The short version is that someone appears to be trying to frame Julian for pedophilia with a tall tale of a cam girl who just happened to let her little sister go on camera and a porn site that nobody has ever heard of that started operation that partners with the UN for reasons I cannot even fathom.
So, a site was made by a pedophile, they got that guy, and then kept the site online so they could make further arrests of people who viewed the site.
That's a massively different picture than what you get by reading the article, and the headline 'FBI's deep web child porn ring'. It wasn't FBI's child porn ring, it was this guy's child porn ring.
Not only that, according to Buzzfeed they got in touch with the Bahama police force and no complainant ever came forward: https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-bizarre-story-o... (The Buzzfeed article is a good summary of the problems with the allegations in general.)
If I read this right, the perpetrators used Facebook and other social networks to trick kids into sending them sexual pictures. How is it a website which allows for this to happen still operational? Won't somebody think of the children!
I remember when I was an administrator on Wikipedia, many years ago, there was a website called Perverted-Justice (PeeJ, I think). There was some sort of dispute about it, I can't recall what it was about.
However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my username.
It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!
This powerful "pedophile network" is likely politicians who shopped online at Tesco in the early 2000s and had their credit card numbers used by criminals for fraudulent purposes, and likely got caught up in Operation Ore and falsely accused of having purchased child pornography online. Thousands of people in the UK were raided by police and had their life destroyed over this, and the majority were entirely innocent.
At the time the News of the World, a Rupert Murdoch owned tabloid,
was stoking the moral panic over pedophiles and creating an atmosphere of fervour over this issue. Maybe other News Corporation owned media worldwide might have started this whole panic around child pornography in the first place, in the early 2000s? With Murdoch seeing the Internet as a large threat to his dominance over the media?
And rooting out hidden enemies within is typical of what happens during a moral panic. Same with McCarthyism. In reality it's very unlikely that there are pedophile networks within the UK government.
I recall when I was in Wikipedia that perverted-justice.org (or PeeJ for short) accused me of supporting paedophiles, and a whole bunch more. Luckily, I had been against the "Childlove Movement" article and wanted it changed significantly, and when they saw that they published an apology.
Stalking can ruin reputations - it was a hell of a scary thing.
I was wondering exactly the same. There doesn't seem to be any independent corroboration of his claims either, which to me seems quite suspicious.
As far as I can see, there was no contrition from this guy for the crimes he committed. He even tried to defend his stash of horrific child pornography, claiming that it was a 'victimless crime', making himself out to be the victim instead. I think it's not out of the question that he would continue to fabricate such a world view to try to garner sympathy from others.
There was so much CP on Tumblr I wonder if it wasn’t an elaborate honeypot. It was sooo bad and over the top. People have no idea. There’s also been a lot of CP on Instagram, including child sex trafficking rings advertising their wares. Backpage was the largest single source of child sex trafficking operations in the US and many in LE knew it for years before it was finally shut down.
I’ve unfortunately seen far too much of what people don’t believe is out there. That’s what I get for helping anons “dig”. As they say “nothing is beyond our reach”.
In 2004, a District Attorney in the Netherlands was targeted by a crime reporter. Near the DA’s home, this reporter had found a computer that the DA had discarded, and which upon examination was found to contain sensitive information and ‘child porn’. He was never arrested, and two years later, the State decided not to bring charges, they concluded that all the material had been downloaded from mainstream websites. The affair did damage this person’s reputation, and he quit in 2004.
My wife has done some work with child exploitation organizations around this exact problem. Sadly, this is not a surprise at all. I’d venture that maybe 5% of the posts they report are removed, and the offending accounts are essentially never punished.
To make matters worse, given that pedophilia and child porn is now tied up with QAnon, some of her peers have started to have their accounts banned when they report this stuff, as apparently they’re being caught up in an anti-conspiracy filter.
Thanks, this is the one I was thinking of. Couldn't remember his obscure nickname. I remembered the capture rate in the child pornography group wrong, but the point stands :)
Reminds me of a website I came across years ago where you had to tell a paedophile from a computer science professor. It really was sometimes quite different to tell.
The most disturbing and disappointing part of the whole story is how it spread without even the slightest attempt to do any journalism work, and now that the truth was uncovered hardly anyone is publishing or updating originals with corrections and retractions: http://www.techmeme.com/130801/p52#a130801p52
"Three current Tor employees—two of which agreed to be named on the record—have confirmed that they personally know the authors of the alleged victim statements on the site, JacobAppelbaum.net. Although they continue to maintain anonymity for the authors of the stories, these Tor employees are now publicly vouching for the site’s authenticity, which Appelbaum has called into question.
Andrea Shepard, a senior Tor developer, confirmed to the Daily Dot that she was in touch with at least one of the victims on the website several months ago. Alison Macrina, a Tor employee and advocate as well as the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, also vouched for the authenticity of the anonymous victims' statements.
"It’s related to something that started happening in earnest about three or four months ago," Macrina said. "Which is simply that people stopped being afraid to talk to each other about Jake. That’s how I heard from some victims.""
The site itself was fake. The profiles were clones of each other, the images were mirrored images harvested from the web (to hide from reverse image search, but they weren't that clever because the mirroring was obvious).
The whole thing was basically a scam to make out JA as a pedophile, after which they ran off claiming to have been threatened. However, no part of the story held together.
Given how much work went into framing someone as a pedo and it got blown up publicly, it's kind of weird that it never hit the news.
reply