That's an unrealistic approach CIs and undercover agents are needed to break apart crime syndicates because otherwise you'll end up arresting the "street level" peddlers and nothing more.
Now as far as entrapment goes there are legal definitions for it under most cases law enforcement isn't allowed to change the outcome of an event.
For example it is ok for an undercover officer to sell you drugs in a sting operation but it is not ok to come to you and convince you to do drugs and then sell them to you.
For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography.
If the fbi did not operate the server they would still have acquired it just from a different source.
The ATF sting was a pretty shitty operation with dubious legal backing but it's not an case for not running intelligence gathering or sting operation, it's just evidence that they should be planned and executed better and that certain restrictions should apply especially in cases where public safety might be put at risk.
Legal Protections against entrapment are very minimal and not what people think.
FBI routinely creates, plots, then recruits people for made up terrorism plots, then arrests them
The DEA, in partnership with the ATF, recently ran a operation where they recruited people to rob fake stash houses, then arrested the people that were coerced into the plot
Entrapment is often used in prostitution stings as well.
None of these instances are tossed by the courts, entrapment is very much alive and well in the legal system
>>>>For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography.
While true, there are some very significant problems with this. For decades now the basis of the law against viewing child pornography is that each time the image is viewed the child is victimized. Thus by running the server for even 1 second the FBI was, according to the law, victimizing children in order to catch criminals.
If you then claim is no children were actually harmed by the FBI's action then one has to start looking at the very foundation of the Child Porn laws.
Personally I think the ethical and moral position (and should be the obvious one) is that the FBI should not, under any circumstances, be distributing child porn. Period.
I think the concept of some one watching child porn that was produced in the 80's and converted from VHS to DVD is harming a child today is a bit odd one.
Don't get me wrong going after the producers of new material is very important just as it is important to go after the human traffickers that facilitate the production.
I suspect that this is not due to there being anything morally wrong with what they are doing but that instead of going after the perpetrators, which might be very difficult, we target the economy which pushes them to commit the crimes in the first place. Although it might be imperfect, from what I understand sometimes this is the best way to get results.
In a way it's similar to prostitution, where there might be nothing morally wrong with selling or buying sex, but it (potentially?) promotes human trafficking. I doubt that'd the only reason it's illegal though, at least in the US.
I think it's similar to ivory resale. It's illegal to sell ivory, and other endangered species products, even though the particular animal may have been killed before a ban. Because the market itself attracts new product.
It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.
The problem with the public outrage however is that is makes any rational discussion almost impossible
When the topic of child porn comes up, emotion takes over and logic goes away.
One of the largest problems with child porn is the actual definition of child porn. To most people when they hear of child porn, they think of a Person under the age of puberty being forced to engage in a sex act with an adult person.
However 2 17 year olds having sex and video taping it is also child porn, they can (and have been) charged with producing, and distributing said child porn
Many many many teens were arrested and convicted before states starting passing exceptions to the law, and many states today it is still illegal for a 17year old person to send a nude photo of themselves to another 17year old person, haven forbid a 17 year and 364 day old person send picture to a 17 year and 366 day year old person....
Yes, a lot of "child porn" charges are deeply stupid. When we talk about child porn rings and websites, we are not talking about those. We are talking about the "raping 8-year-olds" kind.
That's really not important though is it. If you're being prosecuted (at least in the UK) for such crimes then the age of the children and the level of the pornography is assessed and taken in to account in your sentencing. If the only image you'd acquired was a nip-slip of a teenager -- or you had a selfie with a same-age partner -- then the sentence would be entirely different to having thousands of images of pre-teen rape. Whilst USA law is often ridiculous it doesn't seem to be that lame that such differentiations aren't being made.
Where are you trying to go with this rhetorical question?
Did you? No? Then you don't have any more information than I do.
Nobody visits a darknet site called "The Playpen" to trade pics of consenting 17-year-olds. For all you or I know, the site never existed in the first place and the FBI set up the entire thing as a cover to silence dissidents. But that would be a problem with government corruption, not with the definition of child porn.
I think that's unduly reductive. He seems instead to be saying that if you were abused in the 80s, you should just get over the thought of people watching footage of it today for kicks.
Which is an interesting viewpoint, to be sure. I wonder whether he'd say the same to an adult victim of rape whose abuse was videoed and passed around for other people to get off on. That's a pretty close parallel, but it never seems to turn up in discussions like these, and I wonder why that is.
It seems to me that distributing such videos would have far more in common with defamation than with the original abuse. Merely having or watching them... is probably bad and wrong but not something that ought to actually be legally punishable.
Those women are personally identified so they can suffer real world embarrassment from people they know. Children in child porn are probably far more anonymous and untraceable as adults just from their images.
I think the idea of being imprisoned for viewing a picture on a website is pretty draconian. We would never stand for it if we weren't so obsessed with vilifying sexual deviants.
The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made. Perhaps the crime should be limited to paying for it, a bit like why we don't allow payment for organ donation.
> The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made.
Does it? In warez rings, new releases are the surest route to high reputation and broad access to content. I don't see an a priori reason why the same might not be true for other sorts of illicit content, including this.
Jennifer Lawrence declared that everyone who looked at the leaked nudes of her was committing sexual assault against her (or words to that effect). The idea being that by knowingly viewing "private" content without consent is invasive.
I'm not sure you can legislate it, but I found her position far more satisfying than "oh no I should never have taken the pics in the first place what a mistake to think I wouldn't be hacked".
Most people would consider it a moral wrong I'd warrant. It's like not a crime only by virtue of being a relatively new thing, and other mitigations like it being difficult to police (is there a point in making crimes you don't police and can't prosecute under).
Revenge porn will to me always be a copyright issue, and being one, it's up to those women (and men) to sue when they find someone violating their copyright.
It might normalize child pornography in someone's mind. They could keep watching it long enough to the point where it just seems like another genre, albeit the only genre that works for them. They could start manufacturing their own, to join other rings and trade.
I know it's all maybe's and could-be's, but they're maybe's and could-be's that ruin children's lives.
Most of the academic research I am familiar with suggests fairly strongly that the legalization of pornography and child pornography is correlated with a reduced rate of rape and child molestation.
That's been the argument against porn in general, and against strip clubs and against prostitution. Without good science behind it, it's just more made-up political rationalizing. You could equally argue the opposite that having access to porn satisfies people so they don't need to use real children. Without science, we can't know.
I recently saw an interview with a conservative Indian figure about porn where one man said "I'm not harming anyone by watching porn in my room" and the conservative man responded with "You might become corrupted and turn into a sex maniac". It sounded like hilariously backward thinking, but that's still how many people think of child porn.
Your argument is corrupt. It doesn't take science to recognize morality. Each and every child in a porn video is someone's son or daughter. Each and every child has value. Society chooses to make and enforce laws which dissuade deviant behavior. Erode the moral foundation of a society is to watch it crumble.
Absolutely. You are right. No science needed to identify morality. Therefore lot's of western countries are inherently immoral. Letting gay people openly kiss each other? Some states even let gay people marry. What an abomination to thy Lords rulings.
Not to speak of black people being allowed to vote. To marry without consent of their owners.
Sorry - but do you really need more examples, that arguing with an universal morale is just one big smelly pile of bullshit?
Morale and societal norms change and shift over time. We develop and there is no basic morality, just societal contracts. And that is good. We do not need an entity enforcing or dictating our morals. We need rationality to identify the right rules to live as a society and then a system to enforce these rules in the best possible way (not that we do have that in place anywhere in the world). But given your comment/idea and our current systems I rather live in our current systems. I just do not want to be ruled by some morality dictators.
Morality is personal. What you believe to be immoral is not what another person would believe to be immoral.
When government attempt to legislate morality is when atrocities and abuse occur.
To millions of people in various religions, being gay is immoral, a woman showing her face or hair, is immoral
Adult pornography is considered immoral by a large part of the population.
Instead of making a case for morality, one should use science and logic to make the case for victimization.
Each person has the self evident right to their own body, aka self ownership. We accept this has as the fundamental foundation of Human Rights.
Society through science has shown that children are mentally not equipped to make a choice to have sex as such society has prohibited adults from manipulating children into having sex. We also recognize that any time one person forces another with violence to engage in sex is a violation of their person hood. We have grouped these 2 crimes into the category of rape and created punishments for these crimes
No morality involved.
Using science should also come into play when evaluating the punishment and criminality of viewing or possessing child pornography.
It could also work in the other direction preventing people from acting out. If you look at one path you can probably find people that became more violent from playing grand theft auto. But, looking at the other path more (or less) people may become less violent from playing GTA.
There are sites out there with pictures and videos of people being tortured and killed freely available for download. Also animal crush videos is a thing. Very disturbing stuff - I accidentally clicked on one link on 4chan. I don't want to elaborate on what it was, but I closed it immediately, almost vomited, and I am very careful about clicking random internet links from now on. Surely this stuff is not any better than child porn and there are people who enjoy looking at this material so why don't we ever go after the people sharing this stuff?
This is just where society originates from, instincts allowing for the forming of social contracts.
For example if you exchanged resources with another party (your wife) for drugs and hugs, both sides would want for this contract to last.
So you need a third party, which can be forced by both sides to enforce the contract.
Enter the pedophiles and gays. Your wife is going to make certain you hate them and she can switch of that hate, via sanctioning there existence (e.g. church/political inclination). That instinct-switch is as important to her, as beauty is to you.
Now, ten years into a cellphone society, where even thought offenders soon will be blatant obvious by constant NN observation all that remains are the instincts.
The function is gone, but the gears of this bio-machinery still churn on.
I miss those days, where i still felt burning hatred for some Gears and was involved in affairs of the species in general. Life was so much easier if one just glued arguments to what one feels.
I looked into this whole messy affair, because one of those bastards tried to get on my younger brother when i was young. And for such there should be punishment, even a lifetime in prison.
But though crimes, like a deprecated bio-machine, masturbating to a Victorian child-labour-sweatshop , to prosecute those is foolish.
Does this comment read like written by a (not very well programmed) NLP script - or is it only me not understanding a single bit about what the (alleged) author tries to convey?
Parent is arguing that sexual assault of children is evil, but viewing CP is OK. There's also something about enforcement of heterosexual monogamy through scapegoating. And a general misogynistic undertone. Yes?
I always wonder if these kind of comments (they seem common amongst conspiracy theory debaters and on-line political extremists) are ever understood by any of their peers, or if it is just the author.
It bewilders me that this comment makes perfect sense in someone's mind.
To add to this: using an entrapment defense happens way more on TV than in reality.
For starters, to even use the entrapment defense in most jurisdictions requires the judge's permission, which is rarely granted. Second, the burden is on the defendant to show that they would never have engaged in the illegal behavior at all without the police.
E.g., if the police physically threaten or blackmail you into selling drugs, you might have a case. If they simply pester you on the phone a bunch, probably not.
In this case, the FBI didn't force anyone to visit the child porn site, so it's not entrapment. What's up for debate is whether the harm of disseminating the material outweighs the benefits of catching more users.
It sounds to me like these sorts of events are ways to hit metric targets within the bureaucracy.
Why aren't they doing a divide and conquer type approach that would kill these underground communities? Advertise big bounties for snitches and undermine whatever holds them together.
Or do you disagree that the legal foundation for making the act of viewing/possession (not making or distributing) Child Porn is based in the idea that simply having the child porn is re-victimizing the child depicted
Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 111
"the sentencing judge, who
stated “it is a clear reality . . . that every time one of
these web sites is opened and every time
one of these images is viewed, additional harm is visited upon the victim. "
That seems combative. Were I to say it, I'd try to source it.
But I would be interested to hear a knowledgeable opinion on whether the "viewing is new harm to the victim" argument is often employed against producers and distributors, rather than consumers. The argument that distribution makes a market for producers to satisfy would seem much stronger here.
>>>The court quoted academic research, which concluded that “Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place.”
---
United States v. Blinkensop, 606 F.3d
1110, 1117 (9th Cir. 2010) (affirming the sentencing judge, who stated)
>>> “it is a clear reality . . . that every time one of these web sites is opened and every time one of these images is viewed, additional harm is visited upon the victim.
-----
FBI and DOJ routinely state the same in Sentencing, victim impact, and other official court and prosecution documents and activities
The idea that simply viewing child porn victimizes the child, is infact the legal foundation for its prohibition
"For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography."
That was one of the core questions here - why logins went up 350% under the control of the FBI. Was there any advertising, inducements?
And "part of the role of of maintaining a non-suspicious facade was uploading new material for members".
I believe that was answered, the FBI simply ran it on better and faster hardware, with better uptime.
I do not believe the FBI continued to operate it as is on the criminals hardware, I believe they took possession of the "server" then likely imaged it and spun up a new instance of the site on the FBI own servers, these servers likely had much better specs, and a much better connection to the internet.
Sit 100 people down in front of a button that will detonate a nuclear weapon in a major city on the other side of the world (where no one they know lives). Tell them to decide whether to push the button or not.
If you understand human psychology, I hope you understand how there is an excellent chance at least one person would push the button. Possibly 5 would. Possibly more. Simply because the opportunity is presented to them on a silver platter.
Does that mean those people are actively seeking out how to detonate a nuclear weapon? No, of course not. Should we actively seek out people with such "inclinations" and deal with them preemptively?
If you say we should, what happens when your particular mental tic is deemed a danger to society? Who deems what is a danger? Are you so sure you are entirely safe? So were many people in societies of ages past, under Mao, Stalin, Hitler, etc.
Your counterfactual is inapplicable. We're not talking about people who just stumbled over an opportunity one day. We're talking about people who went looking, and many of whom employed strong opsec in so doing. That doesn't happen by accident.
Its quite easy to stumble upon dodgy search results without trying. Watersports for example often comes up with search results that are nothing to do with what I am looking for. Paddles.net used to be a spanking fetish site (I was looking for a kayak magazine when I discovered that).
An ex-collegue said he attended a talk where they explained that images are often hidden under layers in a word document. You may be unaware that you have illegal on your machine.
Again, we're not talking about something that happened by accident, or about sexual interests which are somewhat abstruse but entirely lawful to pursue. I'm not sure what you imagine it adds to the discussion to raise points that aren't germane to the matter at hand. But perhaps they are and I merely fail to see how. Perhaps you'll elucidate the connection.
> If the fbi did not operate the server they would still have acquired it.
I'm a little dubious of this brand of logic. The one that goes if X was not supplied they would just get it from the <potentially slightly harder to find &/or riskier> place.
Perhaps, but surely the point is to reduce the incentive by making it harder/riskier - as making it impossible is generally not a viable option?
That's an unrealistic approach CIs and undercover agents are needed to break apart crime syndicates because otherwise you'll end up arresting the "street level" peddlers and nothing more.
Too bad. Police work isn't supposed to be easy. If it is, that means you're living in a police state.
I love this casual implicit assumption that the existence of large-scale crime syndicates with nothing in practice to fear from the law is in no way noxious to society. Tell me more.
Some might say that your description could basically be used as the dictionary entry for "police." It's been suggested that they're the best-armed gang on the streets, if not the best-disciplined.
They're certainly beyond the reach of the law, at least by the standards the rest of us are held to.
Overall, I think the police catch a lot of heat and resentment for the actions of their political bosses. Like corporations and unions, a community usually gets the police force it deserves. Unfortunately, that's no consolation to the individual citizens who cross paths with them.
A good start on repairing relations with the police would involve holding them to higher standards of behavior than the rest of us are expected to exhibit, instead of lower ones. I think most good cops would agree with that basic sentiment, since they're the ones who behave as if it were already the case.
Ultimately, though, when the government decides to launch an impossible war on drugs, terror, pornography, or some other abstract noun, the police will have to do the inevitable dirty work, and they will have to take much of the blame for the consequences. The real problem here isn't the FBI agents running the servers, but the administrative and legislative bosses they answer to.
I dunno. It sounds like on the one hand, you're blaming police officers and departments for problems which have origin in corruption at a pay grade well above theirs, and on the other, you're defining (or would define, perhaps) any attempt by police forces to influence, rather than merely execute, policy, as stigmatic of a police state. Seems like a bit of a Catch-22 to me.
It is a Catch-22, definitely. At some point you get into the whole "Nuremberg defense" thing.
There is little practical difference between the Black Marias described by Solzhenitsyn and what happened to Freddie Gray in the back of a van in Baltimore. But how can we fix that sort of thing at an institutional level, when supervisors, prosecutors, judges, and juries insist on going easy on the actual perpetrators? That's the sort of question I'm compelled to ask when the FBI comes around, hat in hand, to ask for even more surveillance and enforcement powers.
> There is little practical difference between the Black Marias described by Solzhenitsyn and what happened to Freddie Gray in the back of a van in Baltimore.
You horrify me, sir. You truly do.
We agree, I think - I hope - that our current system of rule staggers under an enormous burden of corruption, which if not addressed will continue to expand until it bears us all under. And we agree, I think - I hope - that this is something which would better be prevented than otherwise.
But to equate what happened to one man, himself and his fate far from usual in myriad ways, with what happened as a matter of official policy under a regime that murdered thirty millions of its subjects simply because they were inconvenient? Where is the sense, or the value, in this? You have succeeded in horrifying someone who has otherwise considerable sympathy for the point you sought to make, although not so much the lack of nuance with which you did so. What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
What effect do you imagine yourself likely to have on someone who does not start out with such sympathy?
I can only recount the emergence of my own point of view. It's 1990-something, and I'm killing a Saturday afternoon in a used-book store in Austin, somewhere near the UT campus. Wow, lots of dust on this one. I'll bet nobody's touched it for 20 years. I've heard of this Solzhenitsyn guy, wonder what it's about? Didn't he win a Nobel? I guess for $1 it's worth a shot.
And then, a few months later when I got around to reading it: Wow, I used to think that the Russians were like the Nazis or something, a bunch of inhuman demons, maybe a barbarian race that evolved from a worse sort of ape than the rest of us. But they aren't. They really aren't. They're just like us. They are us. And the stuff in this book didn't really happen because of differences in politics or religion or economics or communism versus capitalism or whatever. It happened because the Russian people allowed their political system to dominate their judicial system. The courts were their last line of defense, and when they fell, the rest was inevitable.
The best time to stop the Black Marias would have been before the first one rolled out. The next best time was just after the first one rolled out. Either way, it didn't happen, and now I see the same thing happening here in the US that led to the events described in the Gulag Archipelago: the political subversion of justice.
It seems to start with the elevation of the cult of law enforcement as a privileged class, or at least that's something that tends to happen in the early stages of metastasis (to use Solzhenitsyn's metaphor.) In Russia, the rationale was the struggle against counterrevolutionary forces and the bourgeoisie. In the US, it's the War on Terror, Drugs, and Kiddie Porn. I don't see much difference.
So, yeah, horror is an appropriate expression when you think you can see a map like this starting to unfold.
I fear we've badly misgathered one another, and I regret to say I don't really see any purpose my further involvement might serve.
I will say this: perhaps the most striking feature I observe in your analysis is that everything in it is very simple. I wish I had more often observed reality to be so.
Somalia is a failed state run by divisional chieftains and warlords with military weaponry. In other words, it's all police.
That aside, how surreal is it to argue in favor of the application of equal justice for all under the rule of law, only to have "herp, derp, why don't you move to Somalia?" thrown in your face as a counterargument?
I suggested it because it's equally fallacious of you to equate police with "warlords with military weaponry". You can use all the fancy nostalgic buzzwords you want, but ultimately if the law has no bite, nobody will honor it. That bite is called enforcement and it's done by police. Get over it.
> I suggested it because it's equally fallacious of you to equate police with "warlords with military weaponry".
I agree. Do you think perhaps it might be of some value to argue this point in a way that's not trivial to dismiss for valid reasons? I think perhaps it might be of some value. Feel free to continue to caricature yourself for the benefit of unsympathetic interlocutors if it pleases you to do so, but please also consider the possibility that you might argue more effectively by doing otherwise.
Exactly. It's not a one size-fits-all deal here. We're talking about a honeypot that is only accessed by people knowingly harming the welfare of others - as opposed to harming themselves (which is why I think drug honeypots are terrible, particularly for small quantity, personal use purchases).
Entrapment, at least in my mind, just doesn't enter the equation when you're operating in an environment which is difficult to access, siloed from the public, and known to be populated exclusively by dangerous criminals.
Now as far as entrapment goes there are legal definitions for it under most cases law enforcement isn't allowed to change the outcome of an event.
For example it is ok for an undercover officer to sell you drugs in a sting operation but it is not ok to come to you and convince you to do drugs and then sell them to you.
For the most part wether the fbi was operating this server or not the people who visit the server came there out of their own free will in an attempt to acquire child pornography.
If the fbi did not operate the server they would still have acquired it just from a different source.
The ATF sting was a pretty shitty operation with dubious legal backing but it's not an case for not running intelligence gathering or sting operation, it's just evidence that they should be planned and executed better and that certain restrictions should apply especially in cases where public safety might be put at risk.