Anonymous Hackers Take Down Child Porn Websites 481
chrb writes "According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin #OpDarknet, including personal details of some users of a site named 'Lolita City,' and DDoS tools that target Hidden Wiki and Freedom Hosting — alleged to be two of the biggest darknet sites hosting child porn."
Brain explode (Score:2)
Wow- maybe they can do something good, afterall! Hmm... wait, my brain is going to explode now. Moral........compass...........is............frelled . . . .
Re:Brain explode (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easier to think about them as an unguided mass that will attack targets at random. Sometimes the targets are assholes and people will cheer for them, but that doesn't make them freedom fighters. They reverted back to trolls some time ago.
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Your "understanding" of Libertarianism is truly warped. What you describe is anarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy [wikipedia.org] , not Libertarianism.
And no chance of mistaken identity... (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, who wouldn't use false credentials if they were into that sorta thing? Someone is gonna get wrapped up in a lynching who doesn't have the foggiest idea as to why, watch. It's a PR stunt to try to make Anon look like more than a group of petty thugs, as if their ideals deserved attention or merit. Frankly, they can all DIAF.
Tabloid Newspapers (Score:3, Funny)
The quality of the journalists for Tabloids will be tested with this one, how will they manage to spin this into saying it was an awful tragedy and no one thinks of the children? Assuming they don't just say hacking causes cancer, or something.
Covering up (Score:3)
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Well, so they took down those "porn" websites, but one has to ask, why the authorities have done nothing, preferring to sit on their backsides? Politicians or police using such sites and they want to cover it up?
My guess would be a matter of jurisdiction - can't take down sites outside their country.
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No it's easy to leave them up and use them as the excuse for internet censorship. Like we are doing in Australia.
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Re:Covering up (Score:5, Insightful)
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TFA says they released a list with thousands of identities of pedophiles that haunt these sites. Why don't the authorities of the countries they reside in arrest them? Not many governments condone raping children.
Re:Covering up (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope your name is there, then you might think twice about the cops arresting people from some random list.
Cops have to gather hard evidence before arresting people, for good reasons.
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Re:Covering up (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. Quality of Slashdot readership is steadily going down.
These were TOR [torproject.org] sites. That means that the hosting servers are near impossible to track because the TOR network is meant to allow for anonymous hosting.
Subsequently, unless you manage to globally packet-inspect the entire Internet (which is the very thing that the child-porn crusaders advocate, along with introducing a totalitarian global police state to "protect the children") or somehow crack in and identify the location of these servers from whatever data is within, you cannot even tell what country they are in.
Freedom Hosting is an extreme libertarian host service, with 0% censorship rules, which is meant to host sites of political dissidents and other web contents that is likely to get you killed by a mob of raving religious lunatics for breaking whatever taboo in whatever nut-infested country you happen to live.
So Anonymous cracked into some sites hosted on Freedom Hosting and defaced them, stole some meaningless login ids (like those of people logging in with the names of their least-liked politicians or neighbours) and did not even get the IP addresses of the servers or the users because on the TOR network they would be meaningless.
End result: upgraded and hardened CP sites on TOR.
This action defines the very concepts of "pointless", "futile" and "counterproductive". Which not very surprising since it is usually the fate of all vigilante witch-hunts in the long run ...
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Other than death by disease and damaged internal organs, I'd have to say - I still don't agree with you. The emotional health of a child is part of their life and is directly at risk.
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No. TOR webhosts are usually virtualized environments where the only thing accessible to the user account is the TOR router, i.e. virtual IP address.
You would not only have to root the webhost but also break out of the virtual machine to get to the underlying real hardware host and its real IP address.
Freedom Hosting sites were rooted before and not just by Anonymous but by International Law En
Hidden Services (Score:2)
Verification? (Score:5, Insightful)
How are we even going to know whether or not this is true? Nobody in their right mind would try to verify whether those sites were taken down or not, and even if they did, they sure wouldn't talk about it publicly, what with the risk of the cops showing up just for visiting those sites. Anonymous can pretty much say whatever they want about this with impunity.
Re:Verification? RTFA. (Score:2)
"Members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement are claiming responsibility for taking down more than 40 secret child-pornography websites and leaking the names of more than 1,500 members of one of the illegal sites."
I thought they were supposed to be controversial (Score:5, Interesting)
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They're not "supposed to be" anything. In fact, if you try and put them in a box, a certain subset will go out and do the opposite just to demonstrate that you can't, in fact, predict their actions.
NO THEY DIDNT (Score:2, Funny)
http://www.vatican.va/
still up
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man, you can't do that to me!
I have mod point and I don't know whether I should mod ou insightful or troll...
Keep up the good work. (Score:2)
Child porn people are one of those groups I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for. If Anonymous wants to lay the beat down on their ass I hope the cops let it slide. I know it's not just or legal, and it only encourages them, but this time I just don't care.
If someone told me a child molester died in a tragic car accident, you can bet I would dispute the word 'tragic'.
I've never killed a man, but I've read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction.
~Mark Twain
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Child porn people are one of those groups I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for.
If someone told me a child molester died
Is there evidence that the users of these sites were actually molesting children, rather than just looking at pictures or videos of other people doing so? It is hard to defend someone who likes child pornography, but we do not want to start accusing those people of far worse crimes they may not have committed. Many of these sites were apparently publicly listed (from the wiki), which makes me doubt that there was much new "material" on them (i.e. someone who shares new child pornography images is someon
Great PR tactic (Score:2, Insightful)
This tactic could work if it they relentlessly keep doing it and gets it publicized. Fighting pedophiles is tried and true way to win support for almost anything.
Next time some politician attack Anonymous:
- Oh you are attacking Anonymous?
- How come you, they are protecting our CHILDREN!
Why are people surprised? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how you justify the Sony attacks but I'm sure it had something to do with corporat
Re:Why are people surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they're targeting The Hidden Wiki, how is that "having a conscience"? The Hidden Wiki is not a porn site, it's a wiki site which has links to other hidden sites. It's like DDoSing Google because they are a "child porn website"...
But is the evidence legal? (Score:2)
It's important to remember that just because Anonymous takes responsibility for something, it in no way means it's the same collective of individuals responsible for some other action under the name. That's both the advantage and disadvantage to using that umbrella to cover your actions. There was just a news story the other day of Anonymous hacking another police station. Can people find justification for that nearly as easily as shutting down child porn? What stops a judge from charging an individual
For those who don't like vigilantes... (Score:3)
People seem to be confused as to who Anonymous are (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't go against child porn sites because they are illegal. They couldn't care less about that. They go against child porn sites because they are immoral (at least from the perspective of the vast majority).
The vast majority also acknowledges that sites like The Pirate Bay are illegal, but the morality of these sites and their users is rather neutral, if not positively.
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, to play devil's advocate here, the primary purpose of a representative democracy—the government style that most of us in the western world hold dear—as opposed to a direct democracy is to prevent tyranny of the majority. The fact that something is seen as wrong by the majority does not inherently mean that something should be prevented, much less that it must be.
You're going to need a stronger argument than "the majority consider it immoral". The majority considered homosexuality immoral just a couple of decades ago. The majority considered having whites and blacks eat at the same table to be immoral not long before that. So to argue that attacking someone for immorality is okay in general requires arguing for segregation and gay bashing. Your criteria are way, way too loose here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that child porn is a good thing. I'm just saying that if you're going to argue that vigilanteism is acceptable, you need to come up with a much better argument than the presumption of harm to children. You need to prove that the people attacked by the vigilantes (including the users whose names were revealed) caused or planned to cause harm to children, at an absolute minimum, and that they were beyond the reach of legitimate law enforcement, and that not acting would have caused or greatly increased the risk of immediate harm.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Really ? Then why does it sounds like asc-e ? :-)
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, FTP is most decidedly designed around the sharing of files, and it (like The Pirate Bay) is completely agnostic as to whether they're 'illegal' or not.
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
Protocols in general are content-agnostic. Unless you want to argue that sharing any kind of content (even by content producers/owners) is illegal, no protocol is inherently illegal.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P protocols, the most widely-used probably being WoW's patch system.
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Protocols in general are content-agnostic.
So are torrent sites. If you post an Ubuntu torrent on The Pirate Bay, they don't take it down because it isn't infringing.
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Indeed, keep the dark side clean, even Jotunheimen has standards.
Before making grand sweeping statements, how do you know you know about everything they have done, I found the HBGary thing highly amusing by the way.
Regards,
Loki
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I believe the word you were trying to use was Vigilante.
Damn the AutoCorrect!
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe the word you were trying to use was Vigilante.
Damn the AutoCorrect!
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
If his hammer breaks when trying to hammer in a normal nail, he most certainly will.
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Nope. The carpenter will blame the carpenter's helper, who actually cracked the handle of the hammer two days earlier.
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A good carpenter never blames his tools.
That's right. He blames his apprentice instead.
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I've never run a spell check on anything I've written, ever.
I make spelling mistakes very occasionally but would rather that than delegate such a basic skill of language.
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Astroturfers and shills are liars of the worst kind. They deserve to be tarred and feathered at every occasion.
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Insightful)
when the cops abuse their authority with impunity in front of everyone and there's no repercusions
when the rich and powerful get more rich and more powerful by trampling on others in complicity with self serving politicians
when the judges consider smoking pot and stealing food way worse than ruining the economy of a nation in the name of profits
yes, vigilance must come
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A DDOS, if properly executed, is the digital equivalent of a sit-in. If the machines used were hacked however, it's a lot harder to justify. But if you run a public server, and the public decides to all use the server at the same time, it's hard to classify that as vigilantism.
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Its not a sit-in.
When you try a sit in you take one place. When you DDOS you're using much more resources on purpose. So is the equivalent of sitting in and bringing 100 extra spaces with you.
a mob is just as guilty as a single criminal... (Score:2, Interesting)
A DDOS, if properly executed, is the digital equivalent of a sit-in. If the machines used were hacked however, it's a lot harder to justify. But if you run a public server, and the public decides to all use the server at the same time, it's hard to classify that as vigilantism.
Really? Seriously? Dude...if it is illegal for a single person to take down a website, what kind of perverted logic makes it legal for a mob to take it down? Your sit-in analogy fails -- a sit-in is just another mob, in the eyes of the law. It is not legal for a mob to do anything that is not legal for an individual to do. More to the point, the organizers of a sit-in can be charged with conspiracy, incitement, mayhem, creating a public nuisance, vandalism, and in my great State of Arizona, even murder
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At a sit-in one occupies a space owned by a for-profit company without spending a significant amount of money. This space could be used to generate a normal stream of revenue if customers were able to purchase goods or services and move along. By preventing the proprietor from bringing in a normal amount of customers' money, sit-ins definitely result in a loss of revenue and likely tack on an added cost; it takes a few bucks more to ventilate and condition a building full of people than to hold an empty bui
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Informative)
A DDoS attack is also a cowards protest because it removes accountability. Whereas people partaking in a sit-in are accountable for their actions, they can't hide.
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Interesting)
Laws don't apply to the powerful, so why respect them at all?
Obey or disobey as expedient.
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murderers kill people, therefore we should too?
ok.
Actually, no--this is much closer by analogy to self-defense. Murderers kill people, and so when a murderer seriously threatens your life, it is okay to fight back.
The difference is that here the harm is much more diffuse, so more difficult to quantify, and the same things that creates harm have redeeming value as well. However, realistically, that thing is so institutionally entrenched that it is hard to see meaningful change being accomplished through the expedient of writing your Congressperson, for ex
Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude -- climb down out of the ivory tower for a moment. You are over-analyzing a very simple, straight forward situation. If it is not morally allowable for one person -- a single, solitary hacker let's say -- to take down a website (deface a system, in your terminology) why would it be morally allowable if a bunch of people conspired to do the same thing? Your attempt to mitigate the immorality of the act by diluting it over the number of conspirators, or diluting the harm done by spreading the damage out over society at large is interesting, but de Tocqueville and Mill, the architects of modern political philosophy and Utilitarians to the core (especially Mill,) rightly rejected that approach to the formulation of legislation and (in the case of de Tocqueville) the administration of justice. Indeed, in every jurisdiction that I am aware of, conspirators are all equally guilty; it follows that there is no safety in numbers if one is committing an immoral act.
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If the only reason you don't kill people is because you respect "law" but don't respect "people", please explain that logic.
If someone is deserving of death in your eyes, why does "law" restrain you and to what purpose?
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So vigilance actions are ok now?
I don't support them, but I sure as well don't support people who take it to their own hands to commit crimes like viruses and DDOS just because other people did wrong. They all should be taken to jail.
Whenever children, especially child pornography are involved, the spoken opinion of most of society is "yes."
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A witch hunt... for the children!
Re:Vigilances (Score:5, Insightful)
tail end of that witchhunt remains very harmful (Score:5, Interesting)
It remains virtually impossible for adult males to befriend children. (Friendships between adults and children used to be pretty common, even in the USA.)
As one example:
Neil Wilkes was a teacher in Manchester, England who had a close relationship with an eight year old girl he taught. He got on well with her and with her family.
But someone decided it was "inappropriate" for a man to befriend a girl, and launched a formal investigation into the relationship.
There was no evidence that Neil Wilkes had done anything wrong.
All the same, Neil lost his job and the girl's family was frightened into breaking off all contact.
On October 20th 2010, Neil Wilkes went to a quiet tourist spot, sent a text message to the girl telling her "I love you and I always will", doused himself with fuel, and set himself on fire.
http://www.thejournal.ie/teacher-sets-himself-alight-after-texting-i-love-you-to-girl-8-2011-03/
It is clear to me that the obsession with child pornography and child abuse is intended to break down the trust between generations, provide an excuse for controlling and monitoring all expression, and firmly cement the power of the ruling class. This panic also provides employment opportunities for a predatory class of therapists and an entire child abuse industry.
Thanks to the manipulation of the public consciousness and abusing the public's natural concern for the well-being of children, the prohibition of child pornography has provided a means for the ruling class to do whatever it wants. Want to eliminate a rival? Just claim they had child pornography on their computer. No one will investigate it, because investigating it would constitute a crime - so everyone must take their public servant overlords' word at face value - and the public accepts this without question.
We don't even have proof of what typical child pornography looks like. The claim is that it is all horrific images of rape and abuse, but ordinary citizens - even reporters - are not allowed to see for themselves. It seems more likely that it is mostly pictures of happy children wearing little or no clothing, because most guys don't get turned on by pictures of real abuse - but how could we find out? The public goes along with the farce, because they have been conditioned to hate pedophiles so much that they don't care whether their victims are even pedophiles, much less whether pedophiles or child pornographers are actually doing harm.
However, we do occasionally get a window into child pornography convictions. Here are a few young ladies speaking out against the conviction of the man who took their photographs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2xfzmcOPg0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ogJhlOw9U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqKEybfBPAs
This case is illustrative of two points: First, that many of the models do not feel harmed, and secondly that much "child pornography" consists of pictures of clothed children. It certainly gives the lie to the traditional narrative.
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We should use the same approach for terrorists/terrorism then. Oh wait...
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Re:Vigilances (Score:4, Interesting)
It's fine until a pediatrician has her home attacked, like what happened in the UK. We may well complain about injustice at the hands of the authorities, but vigilantes are far more likely to target the innocent.
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But in this case, the target is correctly identified.
Excuse me if I don't shed a tear.
>but vigilantes are far more likely to target the innocent.
Citation needed, as they say on Wikipedia.
--
BMO
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If you were working for anonymous, and wanted to screw someone over ,how difficult would it be to add someone's name to the list ?
It's easy to convince a group of people to lynch someone. History is full of examples like that.
While i think it's a good thing they took down those sites, i wouldn't trust the data just because it came from Anonymous.
That raises another question : how do you know it's Anonymous, and not some copycat ? ( I'm sure it is the real Anonymous though , but how can you know for sure ?)
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This is a DDoS. It's not a lynching. Comparing a DDoS to a lynching devalues and denigrates the memories of those who were actually lynched.
I'm sorry if I can't find some sympathy, but I can't. Nope, not even a smidge. And coming from a background on the internet where we used to take care of our own problems, I don't even see this as abnormal or even slightly unethical. There are those who should suffer the Internet Death Penalty, and child pornographers and their deliberate have always been on that
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I accidentally a word there.
Insert "enablers" after "deliberate"
--
BMO
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But in this case, the target is correctly identified.
Excuse me if I don't shed a tear.
but vigilantes are far more likely to target the innocent.
Citation needed, as they say on Wikipedia.
False positives plus false negatives == injustice for all. Cf. "friendly fire." I don't want anyone who aims as badly as you do on my side.
["Citation needed" == "idiot". Never heard of IxQuick (or Google ...)?]
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I'll ask this - what's the likelihood of one of those users using false/stolen information? If they're already participating in that industry chances are good a decent percentage are actively trying to cover their tracks. It wouldn't be a far leap to see how innocent people could get hurt by something like this.
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What Anonymous did here is something I heartily condone of, but it still doesn't make me like them, they've simply pulled way too many stupid things over the years.
I don't, it would have been much more effective to have turned what they had over to the FBI. The FBI would have put people in prison, Anonymous just tipped off the purps that their cover wasn't deep enough. Anonymous is good at making a lot of noise but all the "bad guys" have to do is wait until their ritalin soaked ADHD brains gets bored and they move on to something else.
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Considering Anonymous' past history, I'd say it's likely that part of the reason they did it was to shame the FBI. After all, why hasn't the FBI shut the sites down and arrested the pedos themselves?
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How do we know that the FBI didn't intend to? How do we know they hadn't seeded the ranks with people investigating their actions.
Anonymous did a disservice to everyone.
First, they've drawn attention to that particular site. They've provided names, where people could, for example, use Google to see what other sites they frequent. So they have just opened up this underworld to more people who may be casually interested. And I suggest that it's not in your best
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In this case
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So vigilance actions are ok now?
Wouldn't that depend on who you ask?
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TechLA either think childporn is good OR he just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of people fighting for a good cause.
False dilemma. Perhaps he just doesn't want to run the risk of vigilantes harming innocents (they may target the right people sometimes, but not always). Or some other reason that hasn't been thought of. Who knows?
Re:Ah to have such a simple mind (Score:5, Insightful)
For fucks sake.
Anon didn't just take down CP sites. They are attacking Freedom Hosting, which hosts many other sites, because they refuse to comply with Anon's orders.
And this is why vigilantism is dangerous - because it's riddled with collateral damage since the attackers answer to nobody.
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>I mean isn't anonymous pretty widely recognized as being associated with the child porn website 4chan?
Yes, in the same way that Princeton University is widely recognized as being associated with The Jersey Shore.
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Most of the graduates from Princeton that I've met are just like the cast of Jersey Shore.
Re:Wierd (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope (Score:4)
4chan is hardly a child-porn website. Just that if you allow anonymous image postings, the child porn trolls soon follow. You might as well call Slashdot the GNAA hideout. Or a libertarian website.
Anontalk is a "splinter" group that does heavily favor free speech, totally unrestricted free speech... trouble is that there really isn't that much to speak about in the west except endless silly conspiracies. The only really censored type of speech is related to child porn. So... what do you? Either you have free speech and child porn is part of it, or you don't. Yahoo by the way hosts far more child porn, depending on what you call child porn? Does the art of David Hamilton qualify? It does for some.
Any posted child porn is quickly removed of 4chan but the nature of a public board is that the users really create the content. 4chan has a board for beautifull women. It USED to be mostly asian models because 4chan is a copy of the japanese 2chan board. But over time more and more people used it who had an almost insane hatred of anything non-white. Now the board is filled with "amateur" (read to ugly to be paid) western women. Users deciding content.
So is 4chan about porn then?
If you consider lolcats porn, then yes. 4chan is better known for endless lolcats then child porn which frankly in quite a few years of occasional use I have only seen in the form of deleted posts. Then again, I never ventured into /b/
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But over time more and more people used it who had an almost insane hatred of anything non-white.
Only on /new/, which was deleted. /b/
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Fuck that. Child-rapers, while *perhaps* having been victimized as children, still had a choice as adults. They chose wrong.
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We need to control these people, but assuming their brains are physiologically capable of making that choice just makes people want to punish them pointlessly.
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Maybe we like punishing them because we're sadistic bastards ourselves and find child pornographers a conveniently defenseless target we can abuse freely.
After all, who would dare defend them?
Some say aggression is a basic need, and if it is why not go after creeps that nobody likes anyway?
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So are you saying it is better to let the cycle continue and not stop the pedophile? I hope not.
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Just wow (Score:2)
Insane much? Child porn is now a right if you have been abused?
Even a UN human rights advocate wouldn't go that far... yet.
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Couldn't you say the same thing about homosexuality?
And wouldn't possession of eg. movies containing violence also count as a declaration of war on society, and social laws?
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Your post is philosophically incoherent.