Last year the FBI took over a child porn website on the dark web and exploited a weakness in the Tor browser to track the people who were downloading the porn. But in this year’s trial Judge Robert Bryan criticized the agents.
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In effect the FBI were acting for 2 weeks as merchants of child porn. OK, they had the best motives but does that excuse them ignoring the law and sharing this vile stuff with perverts?
I find this extremely troubling. Yes, we want these people caught and punished (and thankfully the trial is going ahead though I wouldn’t put it past a smart lawyer to get them off) but do we really want law enforcement going into the child porn business, however briefly, to do it?
They distributed pictures of abused kids. Kids who are still alive and might could have been traumatized by the experience, and may not want their pictures out there for random people to wank to.
Nobody’s harmed when cops sell an eightball of sugar or a pound of oregano except the purchasers, and dealers in the area who might see a drop in sales due to the heat when the sting operation is revealed. Which is win-win as far as the law is concerned (debate re:the inanity of drug criminalization aside).
I’m unsure of the legal ramifications. My own feeling is that the children were victimized more from the creation of the pornography than its distribution. If it helps the FBI helps catch those who produce it, it may be for the greater good.
I’m biased. I tend to think the FBI goes too far on on lot of their investigations. Like, when they bust a Muslim “terror cell”, where eight out of ten people in it are FBI agents or informers, and the Feds provide the intel, and the explosives, and suggest targets, and prod people to act. Then they claim credit for stopping a “major event.” Mmm mmm yeah sure.
In this case, it might not be the same level of entrapment, but here we have the FBI as the actual victimizers. They are the ones peddling porn of real people, not coke, as mentioned above. The coke doesn’t care if it gets sold. Plus it gets confiscated after the arrest. Can they be sure all the kiddie porn was recovered? Or did the pedos give it to other people before they got busted?
In that they only caught 3 people, after distributing it to at least hundreds if not thousands of others, and the 3 that they caught were the low hanging fruit of people that don’t know how to clean their computers effectively, I think the FBI did far more harm than good here. At the very least, they let others know that the FBI is looking into these sites, and that they need to make sure that they keep their computers well cleaned.
Sure, hopefully these three guys that were caught downloading and viewing cp should spend some time in repayment to society for their small contribution to the demand side of such things, but anyone who thinks that the actions of the FBI have actually accomplished anything constructive is being overly optimistic.
If this in any way helped to track down the producers of cp, I would feel entirely different, as that is a different level of victimization, and a higher level of enforcement is applicable in that case. The problem is, is that this will in no way shape or form help to track down the original creators.
Yeah, I caught that on a re-read. Been a busy day. Was actually coming here to correct myself on that, but was too slow.
In any case, they still only caught a small fraction of those who used the sites, the low hanging fruit of people who don’t know how to protect themselves from such things. They have also warned any potential users of such media that they need to be more cautious in the future, so that they are not caught as easily as these were.
18 U.S. Code § 2258B provides that no criminal charge can be laid against an electronic remote computing service provider when the provider is doing certain functions, including § 2258A’s law enforcement assistance functions.
So I’d say that’s why: if nothing else, the law provides a safe haven for a server host cooperating with law enforcement.
Which makes sense: if you, a server admin, find child porn on your company’s cloud server and report it, do you think that you and your company are also criminally guilty?
Yes, they go too far. If the FBI was distributing the nude photographs stolen in the iCloud hack in 2014 without the consent of the people involved, we’d agree that is morally wrong, yes? Well it doesn’t become more moral just because the people they’re distributing nude photographs of are underage rape victims.
I think the re-victimization argument is hollow. It may have been improper from a legal standpoint but those children were getting re-victimized daily by the perpetrators that were caught. Clearly law enforcement has to take reasonable steps to find these criminals and prosecute them including possessing and viewing child porn themselves. They may also have identified victims not yet known and prevented further and much worse victimization. I don’t see any bad intent from the FBI outside of the legal situation. It doesn’t seem to be entrapment.
Mmmmm . . . probably not. The crime was committed on the server as well as on the PC of the user accessing the material.
A more interesting question is: can one warrant simultaneously authorize the search of an unlimited number of other computers?
There’s the particularity requirement, although there is precedent to interpret that broadly. (US v. Karo, which authorized a search of “wherever the locator beacon is placed.”
Not necessarily. If they got the images indepedently, yes, but I see a distinction between that and finding the extant distribution point and watching it.
So the courts cant even use it as evidence?:dubious::dubious::dubious:
Of course LEO and the DA can possess it for law enforcement purposes.
But yes, the FBI went too far.
Since, what they were catching is mostly harmless perv masturbators, not actual predators.
Mind you, I agree that making kiddie porn must be illegal, and I can then understand why selling or passing it on it has to be. But there are ways of catching these dudes without going to extremes.
Just like the cops use fake drugs when they’re posing as drug dealers, so too could they have used fake child porn when posing as child porn peddlers. They didn’t.