Running a Dark Web pedophile honeypot

The "this is how it starts"-narrative is not necessarily true. While Germany has strict privacy rules for victims and criminals - media cannot show their faces or their last names and so on - I do not see that it is the country that has problems with its agencies and military-industrial complex being out of control and censoring stuff on their behalf.

If there were photos of me being raped as a kid I would want to see the rapist get punished and like-minded people forbidden to watch them. I do not think that it is moral to hurt people in concrete cases because of an abstract (debatable) threat to the values of a society. What do these values even mean if you do not have the mercy to grant victims this right?

You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.

I agree, thats kinda stupid. Pedophiles will use it anyway, but legitimate users will not.

Firstly, so - the writer is geek_slop? - let me get this straight about you?:

· You adopted a girl at some point.

· You are not law enforcement, and are not authorised by them in any way.

· You disclose, here in this webpage, that you ran a hidden service site, via Tor, explicitly for paedophiles.

· You have admitted the above, to the FBI.

· You haven't considered what child protective services' post-adoptive services might think of your doing this?

Um, I am a trifle concerned that you may have let your emotional investment get in the way of good research, or good sense, thinking this vigilantism through to its logical conclusion.

Secondly, I think I'm enough of an expert on the topic of malware to say that the software, designed to cause a privacy breach upon whomever runs it and to disguise that purpose so that they may be tricked into running it voluntarily, is definitely malware: what is technically known as a "Trojan Horse", essentially doing the same job as the FBI's "CIPAV", but worse.

Thirdly, I've spoken with law enforcement on this topic before, in the context of discussing anonymous networks like Tor. They are frequently displeased about vigilantes ruining their operations by doing shit like this - it makes the paedophiles more paranoid and careful, actively disrupting ongoing law enforcement investigations.

Fourthly, it's not valid research. geek_slop doesn't appear to be familiar with how Tor actually works, in fact, they actually list the wonderful exit nodes they got, apparently unaware that the list of exit nodes is public and by design doesn't tell you anything at all about the visitors to your site. Web crawlers (including "Dark Web" - a wording which is another sign that the author does not have a strong background in anonymous networks - it's correctly "onion site" now, formerly "hidden service") naturally find related sites that link to each other, if you're going by links, which they might have done. If they're neutrally HSdir crawling, most of them are dead (because they're ephemeral services created by a P2P chat app?). We know all that from previous research (Dr Gareth Owen, University of Portsmouth, Tor Hidden Services and Deanonymisation, 31C3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdeRmlj8Gw ).

Finally, this crawler might in fact be the exact same "dumb crawler" I previously identified as doing repeated HSdir directory service lookups (instead of caching) while refreshing paedophile sites, causing disproportionate load on the Tor network's HSdir services and strongly skewing Dr Owen's results on this topic (if it's not yours, it's probably IWF's). So, um, thanks for that.

BBC Panorama had an excellent episode exploring these very questions. At least I think it was Panorama. I tried searching for it but all I get are hits about Jimmy Savile.

They found a young man who selfidenties as a pedophile, who was actually willing to go on camera and talk about his desires and urges. It was quite fascinating, and I do see many parellels not just to the war on drugs but to homosexuality as well.

We aren't treating these people in a humane way, and IMO we are making the problem worse by perpetuating a Wich Hunt.

If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other. You are committing a crime.

See how that's silly?

There are people who watch animated child porn and they are ruled as criminals even though no actual child was directly harmed.

There are people who watch snuff films, where people actually are killed, and the viewers are not breaking the law in most states.

Perhaps you would argue that snuff film viewing should be illegal, or that watching Game of Thrones should be illegal because it portrays rape, violence, murder, etc.

To me, it's clear that there is a distinct difference between watching that content and in producing it. Sure, if you actively encourage it to be produced you're breaking the law (same as if you try to convince someone to make a snuff film, you're breaking the law).

It's really not that simple and the laws are not consistent here.