Porn Site Gave Federal Agents Free Rein

Frosty Piss writes "The operators of a notorious porn site Free6.com granted federal agents administrative access to the site, giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public and private chats in an effort to identify users trading 'a significant amount of child pornography.' Though some bloggers have speculated about whether law enforcement officials have secretly been given administrative access to sites where users have been known to post child pornography (like 4chan), the Free6.com arrangement is apparently the first such compact to be disclosed by investigators."

Re:throw away the key!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, actually. I've worked with them. In spite of the hatred spewed by the anarchists, the ones I've worked with were very professional, cared deeply about their country and the people they protect, and were honest with me. That being said, I ran everything through legal to make sure.

So. They found a lot of evidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

So. They found a lot of evidence. Did they actually solve any crimes? I'm being a bit facetious here.

Child porn is regarded as a crime. IMHO, it ought to be regarded as evidence. If it were legal to posess the evidence, as long as you reported it to law enforcement, then it seems like it would be easier to catch the people that actually shoot the vids/pictures.

As it stands, if I'm taping and happen to catch a shooting in progress, there can be all kinds of blood and gore and stuff; but I'm not guilty of anything simply by being in posession of the tape. Everybody knows that, and most will willingly shares the tape with enforcement so they can convict the bad guys.

OTOH, if I found a tape by the side of the road, stuck it in my VCR and it turned out to be kiddie porn I'd be immediately guilty of posessing kiddie porn. Knowing that, simply destroying it is a likely reaction. It could be that the tape is the only clue they have that would lead them to save the lives of the subjects involved; but because the EVIDENCE is illegal to posess, that won't happen.

Torn? Grease that slope!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not.

The FBI overstepped.

When we start saying to ourselves, "Well it is to protect children, then it's OK." or "We're under attack and we need to prevent another 9/11" or "We need to take everyone's name down in order to stop this meth crisis!" or whatever, we start a slippery slope.

Think the "slippery slope" is an overused argument? Remember that when you are being felt up by a TSA guy because you were randomly selected for more screening - even though you did absolutely nothing to warrant such extra screening. Or coming into the country and having a some grunt with a badge and gun rifle through your laptop or even seizing it.

In our societal rationalization for these intrusions and spying by our government, we are just greasing that slope.

Better yet, you want to "protect the children"? How about "random" searches of people hard drives or monitoring of all your electronic communications? Or searching people's homes just to make sure they're not making any bombs. They'll do it randomly to make sure they're not singling out any ethnic or religious group.

The IP you were assigned for that day was linked to someone who visited a porn site at one time - doesn't matter that you had it only on one day and were on the Sunday Christian Prayer site. Nope. Someone had it while they were looking at "Young Hairy Fucking Girls". Gotta seize your computers for a full forensic analysis and search your home for any contraband.

Re:I guess they wanted free porn.

[TheFlamingoKing]

You're going to have to cite your "belief". Most studies I have seen have shown that an increase in pornography has resulted in a decrease in rape and child sexual assault.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/#ixzz17eM23WmL [the-scientist.com]

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.

Re:I guess they wanted free porn.

[CookieForYou]

Is there seriously any child porn "industry"?

I know it existed in the 1970s. You could buy it in the back room of bookstores in Manhattan, apparently.

But wasn't most child porn distributed via USENET? How does one go about paying for distributed copies of base7 encoded binary files? And if there was no money being exchanged, should it be legal?

Interesting questions without real answers...

Re:I guess they wanted free porn.

[clone52431]

False on multiple levels.

First of all, very little money actually changes hands anymore. Secondly, very few pedos do it for money (statistically speaking almost all abuse happens by relatives or family friends, i.e. crime of opportunity, not for profit). Thirdly, the ones who do try to make money tend to get caught. Fourthly, sharing their personal stuff at all is asking to get caught, so all the more reason they don’t want to sell it or give it away.

Source, assuming you can still access it (it was on wikileaks... good luck with that)... and probably also somewhat NSFW... http://www.google.com/search?q=wikileaks%20%22my%20life%20in%22 [google.com]

Re:I guess they wanted free porn.

[shutdown -p now]

Purchasing these materials certainly would encourage further production and hence further harm to children.

I would like to point out, however, that we do not use this argument in all cases where it should apply equally. It is illegal to torture-kill someone, but it is perfectly legal to possess or commercially redistribute a recording of such a killing.

Heck, there are plenty sites on the web with various recordings of beheadings and other gruesome executions from Afghanistan, Chechnya etc, and some of those have ads on them, so they directly profit from the views - but I haven't heard about any proposals to ban that practice. I wonder if it's because no-one (?) faps to such videos? Or because no kids are involved?

Ironically, I think that a video in which a child is brutally murdered would, ironically, be quite legal to sell, so long as no nudity is involved.