Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse • Hacker News Board

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#341

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #164

ipaddr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/201...

I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.

Are you talking about the link in your parent comment? It's a judgment that overturns the guy's placement on a public registry. (He does seem to be placed on a different registry not accessible to the public.)

He is appealing his placement on the registry on three grounds:

1. He can't be guilty of a qualifying offense, because he has no prior conviction;

2. The officer who put him on the registry did so solely on the basis that his risk of reoffending was "moderate", when it was also necessary to find that he posed a "moderate" danger to the public;

3. He did not in fact pose a danger to the public.

And the judgment rules against him on argument 1 while ruling for him on arguments 2 and 3, nullifying his registration.

Given that this judgment overturns a judgment below, it is evidence that you can be placed on a public registry for purely spurious reasons. That's what happened originally, and it's what was affirmed in the judgment below.

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#342

Post by butlike » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #30

Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living? > "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire. > The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender. There’s a…

I mean, from the sound of it you start out with literally a picture, so hindsight is obvious, but they didn't know who was living in that house until really close to the end.

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#343

Post by MarsIronPI » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

Ancapistani wrote: post #119

phire wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all. The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination. The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of…

I hav heard this many times, but never found a single example - and I’ve looked. Everyone I’ve researched on the registry richly deserved it. I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.

> I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.

When I was in high school, our school police officer once gave our class a talk about how to stay off that list. He strongly warned us against sending nudes, because he claimed 18-year-olds getting nudes from their 17-year-old girlfriends was a common way for 18-year-olds to get on the registry.

So, no it's not a concrete example and it's not as non-sexual as public urination but it's still a thing cops are telling young adults to take seriously.

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#344

Post by butlike » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #129

phire wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't know who the child was, yet alone the mother. All they had were photos of an unnamed girl being abused.

I didn’t understand that part. The child has a mother, why wasn’t she reported missing?

There's also a long dark road down "just because they birthed you doesn't mean they want to parent you."

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#345

Post by butlike » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

habinero wrote: post #282

4gotunameagain wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ? There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..

> nice, timid guys were friendzoned There's a reason why "nice guy" is a stereotype. The people who describe themselves like this aren't nice or timid, but insecure, angry and judgmental. They tell stories like "women like assholes" to avoid coming to terms with the idea that they're unlikable.

1,000,000% this

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#346

Post by butlike » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

4gotunameagain wrote: post #198

bloppe wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just take off those glasses and everyone will realize you're secretly hot

Oh this is not a spiteful view of the world, I've been quite lucky with my love life, thanks.

I think it was a quip on movie tropes

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#347

Post by brabel » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

habinero wrote: post #276

brabel wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.

Please don't treat half of the people on this planet as if they were some alien species. Treat people like people.

People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#348

Post by NoGravitas » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

lambdaone wrote: post #267

gnarlouse wrote: post #133

On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other. On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."

None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society. What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?

Nothing wrong was done by the police here -- it's all good old-fashioned detective work. But they wanted to have Facebook use facial recognition to find the victim among all the photographs on Facebook. And that actually would have gotten them results faster, because finding the identity of the victim was enough to break the case, in the end. But it also would have been a very bad precedent in terms of surveillance.

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#349

Post by costco » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

This wouldn't have helped here but there is a related field of research called hotel recognition. Many of these videos are filmed in hotels so being able to recognize if it was a Mariott or even better a non chain local hotel can be very helpful to investigators. They basically train CNNs that learn to pick up on the bathroom fixtures or kind of bedding used by different hotels. One researcher in particular has done a tone of work on this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mNoB9SgAAAAJ&hl=en

I wonder if you could get the interior of every house from Zillow/realtor websites and then do something like this for every house in the country... Clearview for bedrooms?

Re: Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

#350

Post by edgineer » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

alsetmusic wrote: post #323

dhosek wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing d…

> an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live I listened to a podcast that talked about this encampment years ago. The people living there are quite literally trapped. They aren't allowed to move to another city because of their parole and the city they are in has no other location that isn't within some distance of schools, playgrounds, etc…

The only case of public urination -> sex offender which people can point to is Juan Matamoros. He claims this, but the actual case is too old to verify it, and we should not take his word for it.

Arrested in Massachusetts in 1986, charged with two counts of open and gross lewdness, sentenced to two years.

As of [0] lived in Florida, and was in jail for violating probation on a charge of cocaine possession with the intent to sell.

From the article: Paul Mishkin, the Boston lawyer who represented Matamoros in 1986, could not recall details of the case this week, but said it was clear the judge considered the incident very serious.

“He [Matamoros] told his side of the story to the judge, but clearly there was evidence that made the judge disagree,” said Mishkin. “A two-year sentence in this incident is a fairly severe sentence. You’d have to think there’s evidence to support that.”

[0] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2007/03/21/long-ago-charge-t...