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A Tor of the Dark Web

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Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid prosecution? Being in possession of child pornography is a crime. If you personally identified these torrents, then you are essentially confessing. There is an interesting story in "Three Felonies a Day" where an employer discovers child pornography on an employee's computer. They contact their attorney, and the lawyer deletes the offending contact to protect the company. He then alerts authorities t…

After re-reading: you avoid prosecution by not being a large enough offender, or by offending in a jurisdiction where law enforcement is not trained to catch you. Not all that different than avoiding prosecution as a recreational drug user when the cops are too busy going after bigger fish. There's a lot of time and resources spent in between the time of identifying that an IP address is broadcasting CP to having all…

I meant how do you avoid prosecution when analyzing these images for the purpose of catching the people spreading them? There is no "fair use" for contraband. Therefore, it would be hard to build a company around technology for stopping child pornography.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#92
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is utter nonsense. I don't even know where to begin. Technically, you can say whatever you want, but you cannot expect to avoid persecution (or prosecution) if you do.

You can begin wherever you like, but you aren't going anywhere. If it was nonsense, it wouldn't be happening non-stop on 4chan and lots of other places. The only people iirc who've gotten in trouble there are those who've confessed to actual crimes. For instance, the kid who broke into Sarah Palin's yahoo account, or the guy who stood in a box of burger king lettuce. It's easy to track people down, but simply doesn't…

4chan has bans, and authorities are frequently called when illegal content is posted. Try again.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid prosecution? Being in possession of child pornography is a crime. If you personally identified these torrents, then you are essentially confessing. There is an interesting story in "Three Felonies a Day" where an employer discovers child pornography on an employee's computer. They contact their attorney, and the lawyer deletes the offending contact to protect the company. He then alerts authorities t…

After re-reading: you avoid prosecution by not being a large enough offender, or by offending in a jurisdiction where law enforcement is not trained to catch you. Not all that different than avoiding prosecution as a recreational drug user when the cops are too busy going after bigger fish. There's a lot of time and resources spent in between the time of identifying that an IP address is broadcasting CP to having all…

Taking your example of image analysis, companies in this space will build applications that - for instance - identify which images of the 10,000 on a bandit's computer are all the same kid. The software company would use sample images of clothed kids to demonstrate how it works, then only law enforcement would input confiscated CP images to do the analysis.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#94

A word of advice for those living under truly oppressive governments - do not connect to Tor directly (nor to a Tor bridge, to be on the safe side). Get a cheap VPS/EC2 abroad and use SSH tunnel to connect to that and from then onwards - to a Tor bridge. The reason is that, if connecting to Tor directly, security services will be able to figure out you are using Tor (although not what you are using it for) and may ta…

By the same logic, won't they be able to detect SSH tunneled traffic too?

There's a world of difference between "citizen spotted using SSH" and "citizen spotted using Tor".

In the first case you are just one in a huge number of people using SSH to avoid sniffers. With Tor the authorities know you're doing something you'd rather not be seen doing. It's a much, much bigger red flag.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid prosecution? Being in possession of child pornography is a crime. If you personally identified these torrents, then you are essentially confessing. There is an interesting story in "Three Felonies a Day" where an employer discovers child pornography on an employee's computer. They contact their attorney, and the lawyer deletes the offending contact to protect the company. He then alerts authorities t…

After re-reading: you avoid prosecution by not being a large enough offender, or by offending in a jurisdiction where law enforcement is not trained to catch you. Not all that different than avoiding prosecution as a recreational drug user when the cops are too busy going after bigger fish. There's a lot of time and resources spent in between the time of identifying that an IP address is broadcasting CP to having all…

Example of what private companies can do - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/facebook-photodna-m...

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#96
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you have a basis to make the assumption that the forum leads to more predation. What if it works the opposite? We know that violent movies lead to lower violent crime rates, because the criminals who would be out committing violent crimes are instead enjoying going and seeing this movie. The same could be true of people who might otherwise act on their intentions for predation, but are instead satisfied…

The US DOJ has released this excellent memo on why child pornography is illegal, despite the lack of an "obvious" victim (you've probably seen arguments along those lines for why it should be legal if you read Slashdot or Reddit at all): [HUGE TRIGGER WARNING FOR DESCRIPTION OF ABUSE] http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/downloads/ReluctantRebe... The basic reason why the "give them a safe outlet" arguments don't hol…

Why doesn't it work the same way with violence? Violence on the screen does not "normalize the behaviour".

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#97
post #27

Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.) GOD. There are seriously forums full of pedofiles sharing pictures and - maybe worse? - their stories and wisdoms. Maybe out of utter fascination, I spend about few hours on there and I felt like I want to murder all hu…

freely allowed to say really anything Well, that's allowed on the normal internet for the most part.

Try openly writing about your plans of assassinating some high-level official. You won't last a day.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#98
post #27

Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.) GOD. There are seriously forums full of pedofiles sharing pictures and - maybe worse? - their stories and wisdoms. Maybe out of utter fascination, I spend about few hours on there and I felt like I want to murder all hu…

I can add to disgust: 50% (unsubstantiated claim) of these people are active duty federal and state officers, sitting behind their boring desks in their boring offices across the country.

Seriously, though, if you think about it from this perspective then you'll agree that Tor is a great thing. Instead of working knee deep in the dirt, risking their real lives finding highly suspective local small groups of child abusers and infiltrating them, officers can do their jobs sipping lattes under air conditioner and risking no more than their avatars.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#99
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US DOJ has released this excellent memo on why child pornography is illegal, despite the lack of an "obvious" victim (you've probably seen arguments along those lines for why it should be legal if you read Slashdot or Reddit at all): [HUGE TRIGGER WARNING FOR DESCRIPTION OF ABUSE] http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/downloads/ReluctantRebe... The basic reason why the "give them a safe outlet" arguments don't hol…

Why doesn't it work the same way with violence? Violence on the screen does not "normalize the behaviour".

Actual videos of killed/shot people probably does, too.

Re: A Tor of the Dark Web

#100
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US DOJ has released this excellent memo on why child pornography is illegal, despite the lack of an "obvious" victim (you've probably seen arguments along those lines for why it should be legal if you read Slashdot or Reddit at all): [HUGE TRIGGER WARNING FOR DESCRIPTION OF ABUSE] http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/downloads/ReluctantRebe... The basic reason why the "give them a safe outlet" arguments don't hol…

Why doesn't it work the same way with violence? Violence on the screen does not "normalize the behaviour".

Well, if you'd read the memo you'd be able to answer that question :)

It goes on about it for a bit, but here's a good passage:

"There are other insidious dynamics of this crime, discounted by Mr. Hansen: the impact of the content on the viewer, and the impact the collectors have on each other. In his article, Mr. Hansen quotes Mr. Stabenow, who essentially suggests that child pornography laws are wrongly concerned that the images goad the consumers to commit future crimes: “People who watch movies like Saw and Friday the 13th are being titillated by the act of torture and murder ... That doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and commit torture and murder.” The analogy does not hold water, principally because no one who watches Saw believes that the images of violence are actually happening, where in child pornography images, real children are actually being abused. Furthermore, what is the point of any pornography if not to stoke the fires of sexual desire."

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