Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would prevent things like this from happening.
It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent.
[edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]
A helping thought is that those that commit assault of children don't generally consider the possibility of getting caught and will use their personal phone and tools rather than technology that are safe from censorship and mass-surveillance. Sexual assault is not part of rational thinking.
The major problem is when someone want to earn money by becoming a distributor that sits between producer and consumer, like the one in the article, and those people usually do consider the risk of getting caught. There is however a silver lining in that those are quite few and tend to become major target for law enforcement and sooner or later the opsec will have a flaw. It is questionable if Internet can ever become so safe that a person can be one of a handful few that earn millions for years without giving out any clues to whom they are.
So to me this resolve conundrum. Neither criminal is likely to operate unimpeded even when the Internet become safer from censorship and mass-surveillance.
I totally agree that we should not prosecute based on being the originator. But I'm saying it is a reasonable place to start an investigation. Being able to pick a starting point for an investigation even if it just narrows the search to a neighborhood or city or even country(even if it may not totally be correct in cases of people of high technical skill) is at least a better starting point then searching for John Doe who is somewhere, presumably on the planet earth.
I'm not suggesting that we have a system where someone can look up what anyone is doing on the Internet at any point in time. I'm simply saying that if there is no way to connect an action made online to the real world such that it cannot be used as evidence against someone then anything a person does on the internet has no possible repercussions. Which I think would have some horrific consequences. Yes there is room for some abuse, and an actual implementation of any system would have to work out how to minimize this abuse, but at a certain point you need to trust your government. They have the ability to do a lot worse to a person then find out what they are browsing online.
Mixed feelings here. Serving justice based on information from unverifiable sources has some obvious problems.
I'm thinking of the following scenario: 1. More such cases. 2. Inevitably, some innocent people get targetted. 3. Politicians step in to "solve" the problem, we get some more bad internet law ("Internet Mob Control Act"?)
Hi Mike. I call it out specifically because crimes against children are a particular category of crime that deserves special attention from the community. Sextorting a business man with a picture of him having an affair and other $CRIMES 'should' be handled differently than the predator who drives a young teen to suicide or gets them to take pictures of their younger siblings, or face humiliation on a social network.
In the former (businessman example), a social network has a 'right' to refuse law enforcement and notify the user. In the latter example, it's my belief (which I understand isn't popular here!) that the network has a civic 'duty' not to inform the user and to assist how they can - as many of them do right now. My question has more to do with asking if social networks will examine the background of the $CRIME before notifying the user.
Phone companies recognize this distinction and, for example, will provide an emergency ping location when a child is in danger before any paper work is submitted, requiring in good faith that it will follow within 24 hours. If the following paperwork is not in order, they lose the ability to do that again.
It's a wonderful thing that the average HN reader doesn't have to deal with these issues, and disappointing honestly that real questions from someone who does are heavily downvoted. But hey, it's fine not to agree with my view.
I'll reply to everyone at once here since the same concern for the most part is being conveyed. 1) Regardless your personal definition of "pedophile" or "terrorist" I believe there are crimes that a solid selection of persons across humanity can agree are not acceptable. But I realize there is no universality of beliefs, so I will be flexible here. I'm actually not saying you _should_ cooperate with law enforcement, only that, accepting that the law is _supposed_ to be upholding human decency, then we _ought_ due to moral responsibility help them. But... 2) if we do that, must we also sacrifice anonymity and the right to privacy? All the examples below illustrate that what we ought to do can often get us harmed; so the solution? 3) Vigilantism on the part of conscientious Tor operators; that is, boot the offenders, release the data to the public that they are trying to keep private, and let someone else deal with them. What, you believe that some sacred law among the cyber underground has now been broken? In prison, they kill pedophiles. This is not snitching but a combination of self-preservation (getting law enforcement off your scent) and universal justice (because there must be crimes "we" can "all" agree aren't conducive to a healthy life, a progressive universe and the continuation of the species as advanced.
>'The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody.'
Not necessarily.
Exactly such a conviction didn't stop at least one guy from becoming in some sense the most notable CIO in the US and VP at a major SV company.
Of course, I expect he was better equipped than many to mitigate such things, but not exceptionally so.
Ideally, we would - as a society stop discriminating against or wholly shredding each other over petty bullshit. We'd acknowledge a whole range of stuff that currently is called at best an indiscretion or lapse in judgement as actually perfectly average, human behavior.
Obviously, that's not to say any and everything is simply 'OK', particularly if it is habitual or done with malice.
It's simply getting back to a reality where we try to hold each other to such squeaky clean ideals that someone representing them would either be so bland as to have little in common with the rest of the world or more likely, have done a great job of covering it all up.
Moving forward, I actually think we get to that point one way or the other. I don't think information security has much hope of keeping up with our increasing connectedness, sharing (intentional or otherwise) and growing trail of digital footprints.
If you think 'innocence' matters you are part of the problem.
All internet mob's need to be stopped.
I think this author is part of the problem. It's possible they are trying a tactic of gradually disarming the internet mobs, but it doesn't feel that way.
Yeah, but we don't want "elimination", we want justice. And we have set up a procedure for delivering justice which cannot be dismissed as "bureaucracy". The laws and procedures for enforcing them have been developed taking into consideration tons of matters and responding to tons of real world feedback on how to be improved.
They are not perfect, far for it, but for the scope and extend that they cover, they are way better than what any vigilante jerk's version of "elimination" or "payback" is.
For example what stops me of adding your name in the exposed list of names, and ruining your life? I don't even have to do it with malice, maybe I'm just a nut that I am convinced that you too are a pedophile and see the addition of your name as justified.
When accusing someone of a crime that serious you tread with care. There is no 'undo' button on that operation.
I can sneak large numbers of files on to your computer without your notice (you'll have to trust me on that one, I'm not going to explain here how for obvious reasons, but if you want we can correspond by email about it, I'm sure I'm not the only HN'er that can think of tricks like that but I don't want to give the less capable ideas), one phone call later to some anonymous reporting facility and you'd be in a world of trouble.
It shouldn't be that easy to ruin somebody's life.
If a case isn't iron clad why spook the suspect (after all, simply monitoring them would give you hard proof or reason enough to drop the case quietly, maybe issue a warning that the guys card was cloned, which after all is what the police was for).
In the current system you might as well be guilty, even when you are not.
I personally hate child pornographers with a vengeance, for very good reason (they occasionally use my websites as their means of transportation), but I hate sloppy police work even more.
First, these people have not necessarily done anything illegal.
But let's say your facebook suddenly has "accidental" porn searches for "big black gay cocks". Or your picture mysteriously turns up in a set of pictures for Occupy Wall Street (dirty hippy!) even when you were not there.
However, the only good about this is that the more revelations come out the more courts and people will ignore internet "evidence". And that's as it should be.
This is an attempted moral panic that while obviously disgusting should be an extremely low priority in a resource constrained law enforcement system. Unfortunately it gets play because it's a boogeyman that people who want to control and monitor online activity generally can make use of. Every cent that goes to "combatting" this is one that doesn't go to solving actual violent crime against kids, and in any event the whole enterprise is as futile as confiscating people's colored pencils.
Set up a honeypot and refer people for investigation, fine. But let's not waste any additional resources or destroy additional freedoms for what is essentially a made up issue.
I think what's especially aggravating is the degree to which privacy and security are under assault to supposedly protect against something like this. Good people lose privacy and what not. Bad people just keep on doing terrible things and seemingly just getting away with it.
One day I hope to bridge law enforcement and the tech community over the massive CP problem. I know there are many talented people here that would contribute solutions if they only had access to the right information and knew they could build something to help.
For now you'll have to take my comment at face value, but you would be shocked at the number of major offenders in each community - and I'm not talking about the Sex Offender Registry. Too few sheriff's offices take advantage of funding for internet crimes against children, and just as few prosecutors pursue these cases. If your local law enforcement doesn't make it a priority, you won't hear about CP arrests in the paper. That doesn't make it any less of a problem.
I encourage tech companies on HN to send someone to http://www.cacconference.org in Dallas to join the likes of FB, Google, and Yahoo! for education on the topic, or contact me. In the future there will be more I can share.
To your comment: Wouldn't entrapment laws cover this?
I would have no problem with a site (run by the police) offers recycled CP/allows others to upload (ala youtube) then tracks really active users (say, 10+ hard core downloads or 1 verifiable homemade upload) for a long time while rounding up the ones that are abusing their own children.
In court the police would have to prove motive, etc.. But a good event log table should do the trick.
If I happen to get emailed CP spam, that is one thing, but when you can prove that a person clicked on button A then button B then button C and searched for "...", that is pretty good evidence in my eyes.
Egh. I really wish there was an easy way to shut this shit down without massive internet privacy invasion.
It's gently worrying that some people have their ode titites stolen, and one use for those stolen identities is to register an account on a website sharing images of child sexual abuse.
Let's hope law enforcement are careful about arrests.
For entire classes of online crime, from a purely data perspective I wonder if providing a way to anonymously report a crime would help? Things like extortion, cheating spouses, lewd photos, revenge porn tend to be quite embarrassing, and perhaps pursuing justice isn't worth getting exposed. But knowing names, emails, patterns, and other details might help at least paint a better picture of the true nature of online crime.
It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent.
[edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]
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