Surveillance Software Scanning File-Sharing Networks Led To 12,000 Arrests (nbcnews.com) 106
Mr. Cooper was a retired high school history teacher using what NBC News calls those peer-to-peer networks where "the lack of corporate oversight creates the illusion of safety for people sharing illegal images."
Police were led to Cooper's door by a forensic tool called Child Protection System, which scans file-sharing networks and chatrooms to find computers that are downloading photos and videos depicting the sexual abuse of prepubescent children. The software, developed by the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit, can help establish the probable cause needed to get a search warrant... Cooper is one of more than 12,000 people arrested in cases flagged by the Child Protection System software over the past 10 years, according to the Child Rescue Coalition... The Child Protection System, which lets officers search by country, state, city or county, displays a ranked list of the internet addresses downloading the most problematic files...
The Child Protection System "has had a bigger effect for us than any tool anyone has ever created. It's been huge," said Dennis Nicewander, assistant state attorney in Broward County, Florida, who has used the software to prosecute about 200 cases over the last decade. "They have made it so automated and simple that the guys are just sitting there waiting to be arrested." The Child Rescue Coalition gives its technology for free to law enforcement agencies, and it is used by about 8,500 investigators in all 50 states. It's used in 95 other countries, including Canada, the U.K. and Brazil. Since 2010, the nonprofit has trained about 12,000 law enforcement investigators globally. Now, the Child Rescue Coalition is seeking partnerships with consumer-focused online platforms, including Facebook, school districts and a babysitter booking site, to determine whether people who are downloading illegal images are also trying to make contact with or work with minors...
The tool has a growing database of more than a million hashed images and videos, which it uses to find computers that have downloaded them. The software is able to track IP addresses — which are shared by people connected to the same Wi-Fi network — as well as individual devices. The system can follow devices even if the owners move or use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to mask the IP addresses, according to the Child Rescue Coalition.... Before getting a warrant, police typically subpoena the internet service provider to find out who holds the account and whether anyone at the address has a criminal history, has children or has access to children through work.
A lawyer who specializes in digital rights tells NBC that these tools need more oversight and testing. "There's a danger that the visceral awfulness of the child abuse blinds us to the civil liberties concerns. Tools like this hand a great deal of power and discretion to the government. There need to be really strong checks and safeguards."
Police were led to Cooper's door by a forensic tool called Child Protection System, which scans file-sharing networks and chatrooms to find computers that are downloading photos and videos depicting the sexual abuse of prepubescent children. The software, developed by the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit, can help establish the probable cause needed to get a search warrant... Cooper is one of more than 12,000 people arrested in cases flagged by the Child Protection System software over the past 10 years, according to the Child Rescue Coalition... The Child Protection System, which lets officers search by country, state, city or county, displays a ranked list of the internet addresses downloading the most problematic files...
The Child Protection System "has had a bigger effect for us than any tool anyone has ever created. It's been huge," said Dennis Nicewander, assistant state attorney in Broward County, Florida, who has used the software to prosecute about 200 cases over the last decade. "They have made it so automated and simple that the guys are just sitting there waiting to be arrested." The Child Rescue Coalition gives its technology for free to law enforcement agencies, and it is used by about 8,500 investigators in all 50 states. It's used in 95 other countries, including Canada, the U.K. and Brazil. Since 2010, the nonprofit has trained about 12,000 law enforcement investigators globally. Now, the Child Rescue Coalition is seeking partnerships with consumer-focused online platforms, including Facebook, school districts and a babysitter booking site, to determine whether people who are downloading illegal images are also trying to make contact with or work with minors...
The tool has a growing database of more than a million hashed images and videos, which it uses to find computers that have downloaded them. The software is able to track IP addresses — which are shared by people connected to the same Wi-Fi network — as well as individual devices. The system can follow devices even if the owners move or use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to mask the IP addresses, according to the Child Rescue Coalition.... Before getting a warrant, police typically subpoena the internet service provider to find out who holds the account and whether anyone at the address has a criminal history, has children or has access to children through work.
A lawyer who specializes in digital rights tells NBC that these tools need more oversight and testing. "There's a danger that the visceral awfulness of the child abuse blinds us to the civil liberties concerns. Tools like this hand a great deal of power and discretion to the government. There need to be really strong checks and safeguards."
"lack of corporate oversight" (Score:2)
Yel, let's all praise corporate Big Brother!
--.--
This is an entirely new level of corporatist insanity.
Re: "lack of corporate oversight" (Score:4, Insightful)
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The balance is certainly off at the moment, where several people who are definitely good guys are currently in jail for the crime of offending politicians.
This article shows a good use of the tools, and as you mentioned, this looks like a case where they are doing it correctly. At least according to the story the tool is used as a starting point looking for specific violations (rather than fishing for everything then back-filling whatever fits), followed by using those results to help establish probable cau
Operation Blown Now. (Score:2)
Everyone reading this story from NBC who is or might have been involved is deleting their software, terminating memberships and deleting evidence. Also, someone is now developing something not vulnerable to this tool.
But hey, NBC got their story.
Re: Operation Blown Now. (Score:2, Troll)
These scumbags know what they're doing is sick. They're broken and addicted. They're not deleting anything. Their ID is already on a sorted list. Good riddance.
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This is the real issue. We're not mature enough as a society, and we don't have strong enough protections for the common person to avoid accidental use, misuse, and outright abuse from organized surveillance. Doing an end run around warrants by letting private companies create databases of personal information is only more evidence of our disregard for what little protections we do have.
Worse yet, there are plenty of bad actors willing to use our children to push organized surveillance on us, and destroy th
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If you understand what they did, it is not "organized surveillance". They scanned the public IP range for torrents and similar, when they found them they searched for files they recognized from child porn rings. When they found publicly visible files, they monitored the broadcast information to see how popular the torrent was. They cross referenced lists of which machines were used in many CP torrents. They used it to get their warrant.
People may not realize that torrents on public ports are publicly visibl
Re: "lack of corporate oversight" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but that might not always be the case. Anything that "think of the children" always has ramifications for adults in curbing their freedom of speech.
Like, really, a lot of pictures of naked children, exist, because of facebook. Facebook has moms and dads all uploading photos of their kids, in any state of dress, doing things that can range from cute and funny to "ha ha, that's so inappropriate" , of course people who have a fetish for that content, will collect that stuff along with exploitative images.
The people who are actually producing child porn, aren't always adults either. Minors in bad situations may make it themselves to try and get out of their bad situations. You will never really be sure what the context of any specific image or video is, which is why humans have to review these kinds of videos, and you can't have people reviewing videos of explicit content while the laws are worded in a way that doesn't exclude the reviewer, but you also don't want a reviewer to be collecting it themselves either.
Like the problem with eBay's PI (Prohibited Items) department is that someone has to look at the listing, and sometimes the listing might be for something that is illegal, and even looking at it, or having the video/image puts that reviewer in legal peril.
Unfortunately people will almost never push back against "think of the children" laws, because to do so paints them as the villain. (Where opposing abortion or medicare for all is villainous, it's not explicitly targeting children, just everyone.)
Like if anything, laws regarding underage children need to be separated between "content that is of actual children or can be confused for actual children (eg video games with children models) versus "this can't possibly be confused for real children (Manga, Anime, Video games like "The Sims" or "Second Life")
With content of actual children, it further has to be separated between things a child does to another child (eg no adult was involved in producing it) and those that are done by an adult (eg a family member, teacher, or someone with power over them) with predatory intent. Children do things to each other all the time, sometimes by being goaded into it, and sometimes because they want to show off, and that includes flashing each other's junk to each other with no sexual purpose behind it. With current generations of smartphones and how kids will have each others numbers/email/snapchat/etc (Snapchat is used by porn artists a lot) , there's a lot of unintended consequences all around if you make the defining aspect the split between age 17 and 18. People who have older boyfriend/girlfriends of only a few months, can easily get the other in hot water, or put them in hot water if they decide to break up. That's where a lot of revenge porn comes from.
Revenge porn comes from having a falling out with someone and then finding their photos they don't want to share and then sharing it with people removed from context. Sometimes that's stuff that was mutually shared and sometimes that is stuff that people don't quite understand the ramifications of creating. One shouldn't be punished perpetually for crap they did under the age of 18, and shouldn't be punished for having friends under the age of 18. However the way laws are written, the second you're 18, you're not allowed to know anyone under the age of 18, because you put yourself in peril from any communication with them and put them in danger if that person under the age of 18 reads more into a conversation than what was intended.
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Yes, but that might not always be the case. Anything that "think of the children" always has ramifications for adults in curbing their freedom of speech.
Like, really, a lot of pictures of naked children, exist, because of facebook. Facebook has moms and dads all uploading photos of their kids, in any state of dress, doing things that can range from cute and funny to "ha ha, that's so inappropriate" , of course people who have a fetish for that content, will collect that stuff along with exploitative images.
The people who are actually producing child porn, aren't always adults either. Minors in bad situations may make it themselves to try and get out of their bad situations. You will never really be sure what the context of any specific image or video is, which is why humans have to review these kinds of videos, and you can't have people reviewing videos of explicit content while the laws are worded in a way that doesn't exclude the reviewer, but you also don't want a reviewer to be collecting it themselves either.
Like the problem with eBay's PI (Prohibited Items) department is that someone has to look at the listing, and sometimes the listing might be for something that is illegal, and even looking at it, or having the video/image puts that reviewer in legal peril.
Unfortunately people will almost never push back against "think of the children" laws, because to do so paints them as the villain. (Where opposing abortion or medicare for all is villainous, it's not explicitly targeting children, just everyone.)
Like if anything, laws regarding underage children need to be separated between "content that is of actual children or can be confused for actual children (eg video games with children models) versus "this can't possibly be confused for real children (Manga, Anime, Video games like "The Sims" or "Second Life")
With content of actual children, it further has to be separated between things a child does to another child (eg no adult was involved in producing it) and those that are done by an adult (eg a family member, teacher, or someone with power over them) with predatory intent. Children do things to each other all the time, sometimes by being goaded into it, and sometimes because they want to show off, and that includes flashing each other's junk to each other with no sexual purpose behind it. With current generations of smartphones and how kids will have each others numbers/email/snapchat/etc (Snapchat is used by porn artists a lot) , there's a lot of unintended consequences all around if you make the defining aspect the split between age 17 and 18. People who have older boyfriend/girlfriends of only a few months, can easily get the other in hot water, or put them in hot water if they decide to break up. That's where a lot of revenge porn comes from.
Revenge porn comes from having a falling out with someone and then finding their photos they don't want to share and then sharing it with people removed from context. Sometimes that's stuff that was mutually shared and sometimes that is stuff that people don't quite understand the ramifications of creating. One shouldn't be punished perpetually for crap they did under the age of 18, and shouldn't be punished for having friends under the age of 18. However the way laws are written, the second you're 18, you're not allowed to know anyone under the age of 18, because you put yourself in peril from any communication with them and put them in danger if that person under the age of 18 reads more into a conversation than what was intended.
I am very naive. Is child porn, children experimenting with children, or Adults with Children or both? Which one? I am also wondering if a obsessed person gets gratification from the photos, or are the photos a trigger for other activities? Can the photos serve as a limiter for other obsessive activities?
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It really does help if you read all the way through to the end.
At least all the way through to the end of the first line of text.
Re: "lack of corporate oversight" (Score:5, Interesting)
lets protect child porn downloaders and child abusers
You are conflating two different things.
There is no evidence for a causative effect between viewing CP and abusing children.
The evidence actually leans in the other direction. Countries with more permissive CP laws tend to have less child abuse. CP can give a pedo an alternative release.
There is also evidence from the world of adult porn. Men who are "porn addicts" are often socially withdrawn and don't engage with women. That is viewed as dysfunctional, but in the case of men attracted to children rather than adult women, it is what we want.
We can create CP with CGI, deep fake technology, or adult actors posing as children. Make it available and it is likely that abuse of children will decline. Japan has gone the furthest, even making child-like sex dolls (illegal in America), and Japanese recidivism rates have fallen.
Re: "lack of corporate oversight" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: "lack of corporate oversight" (Score:2)
Fine. See a psychologist and get a prescription, then you are allowed to possess and not distribute CGI CP for ... therapeutic reasons or whatever. That might be a net benefit to society, maybe, I'm not a psychologist. Otherwise if a bunch of kid sized sex dolls are detected in the mail to your address, or certain downloads, red flag, your ass gets investigated.
There's no way to expect anyone to condone that crap openly and freely because it muddies the waters between therapy and profiting from child abu
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See a psychologist and get a prescription, then you are allowed to possess and not distribute CGI CP for ...
There is no evidence that CGI CP is harmful, and it is likely helpful. So there is no justification for stigmatizing it and making it harder to obtain. You are just propping up the market for illegal kiddie porn ... which is much more likely to be real rather than CGI.
Otherwise if a bunch of kid sized sex dolls are detected in the mail to your address, or certain downloads, red flag, your ass gets investigated.
That is idiotic. You are persecuting the people who are making an effort to deal with their affliction in a harmless way.
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child-like sex dolls (illegal in America)
I really doubt that is illegal here, in fact I'm inclined to call BS.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/0... [nytimes.com]
Given virtual child pornography is legal, it doesn't make any sense that a doll/mannequin/whatever would be illegal, especially when you follow the legal theory of the ruling, which is that the government doesn't have any jurisdiction over what you can imagine in your head. You probably just won't find anybody manufacturing them here due to nobody wanting to be known as "that guy that makes child sex dolls"
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child-like sex dolls (illegal in America)
I really doubt that is illegal here, in fact I'm inclined to call BS.
You are correct. They are not illegal. I misremembered the CREEPER Act, which would have banned them. The bill passed the House but never passed the Senate and never became law.
Child sex dolls are illegal in the UK and Australia.
Sexbot legislation [wikipedia.org]
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Depends where you are. The UK widened their definition a few times in succession, each time justified by the government as closing 'loopholes.' Currently it doesn't just ban the obvious child abuse images, it also bans any material which gives the 'impression' of a child, and artistic depictions. They even go so far as to ban sexual depictions of non-human characters, if the characters have child-like characteristics.
A very common practice in the UK is for parliament to over-prohibit things, and then depend
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Have they defined what child-like features are?
This is the same reason why hate speech laws will never work in the long run -- they ultimately can't be clearly defined by laws and whether they're enforced ends up just being how somebody perceives it, even when their perception doesn't follow a reasonable person standard.
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Let me see... Coroners and Justice Act 2009. It's pretty big, because it's one of those stuff-it-all-in laws that covers a lot of different areas. Chapter two, section sixty-five.
(5)“Child”, subject to subsection (6), means a person under the age of 18.
(6)Where an image shows a person the image is to be treated as an image of a child if—
(a)the impression conveyed by the image is that the person shown is a child, or
(b)the predominant impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child d
Re: "lack of corporate oversight" (Score:2)
That's because they know anyone buying porn DVDs these days is shady as hell.
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I totally disagree. I never really wanted to do any sort of woodworking. Then I found this channel [youtube.com]. Since then I've been investing in woodworking tools and enjoying trying all kinds of things that I never thought of before.
I like to check out pornhub every now and then. ...Ok, everyday. ...Ok, a few times a day. ...Ok, BRB...
I like to see what's in fashion and that. Did you know that these young chicks today are giving rim-jobs regularly? It's like the rim-job is the new blow-job. Makes me want to go
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Re: (Score:1)
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No, let's protect the one guy who didn't know how to properly secure his computer so it got used as a VPN by one of the actual criminals.
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Soundslike law enforcement is wise enough to investigate before they pull the trigger on a warrant.
In the US perhaps, presumably through fear of lawsuits, but not in other countries. Look at the horrific Operation Ore [wikipedia.org] in the UK for example, where people who'd had, for example, their credit card info stolen and used to buy child porn were arrested and prosecuted as pedophiles. Thousands of people were falsely accused, hundreds of children forcibly taken from their parents, and there were several dozen suicides. It was basically pot luck whether a random person could end up being prosecuted as a pedophil
Could you at least read the f***ing summary (Score:3)
In other words they think they're safe because they're not posting on Twitter or Facebook or paying a subscription fee.
Sounds good. (Probable vs certain) (Score:3)
> They have made it so automated and simple that the guys are just sitting there waiting to be arrested
Sounds like downloading a ls porn, images of prepubescent kids being sexually abused, is really bad idea.
> The software is able to track IP addresses ... as well as individual devices. The system can follow devices even if the owners move or use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to mask the IP addresses ...
>>can help establish the probable cause needed to get a search warrant.
Yep, that makes sense. If a third generation iPad Air in a certain house is downloading a bunch of child porn, that sounds like probable cause to have a look at the 3rd generation iPad Air in that house.
Re:Sounds good. (Probable vs certain) (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of them are probably innocent. I stopped using eMule years ago because there is so much illegal stuff on there, and often it's disguised as other things so you have no idea until after you download it. An episode of an old TV show you can't find anywhere else or a PDF of an old magazine turns out to be something nasty.
Of course I used a VPN and encrypted storage but still the risk is too great. Even if they do eventually find you are innocent after checking your computer you still had your door smashed in and all your stuff taken and combed through for months and years.
You don't keep searching for child rape terms (Score:3)
Quoting TFA:
-- ...
Cooper had used one of the file-sharing programs monitored by the Child Protection System to search for more than 200 terms linked to child sexual abuse, according to the complaint.
Carly Yoost demonstrated the system, starting with a dashboard that showed a list of the "worst IPs" in the United States, ranked by the number of illegal files they had downloaded in the last year from nine peer-to-peer networks. No. 1 was an IP address associated with West Jordan, Utah, which had downloaded 6,
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You would hope so but I wonder if lessons really have been learned from all the times before where they just arrested everyone and tried to sort it out later. 12,000 arrests is a lot of people.
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A _lot_ of time has been invested into it (rightfully). It's 12,000 over 10 years. 1,200 a year, so 100 a month. This is world wide.
Given that there are going to be a lot of investigations going on, and this tool seems like it's one of the strong ones in the arsenal, I'm thinking the figures seem fairly sane for a rigorous investigation, given the candidate cohort.
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We would hope that the officers working this are intelligent, well-trained professionals.*
We know that the screen shows search terms, number of known child porn files downloaded, and sorts by priority. Meaning we know it's fairly easy for officers to concentrate on the particularly bad guys.
We don't know that they do, but normally people do what's easy, and apparently this system makes it easy to right in this regard.
> arrested everyone and tried to sort it out later.
The article and even the summary say
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Interesting that it groups the results by IP address. Given that IP addresses are shared and over time will be used by many different people that's a bit worrying. So the people who made this software understand this fundamental issue with their software? Do the cops?
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As noted in the summary, one of the first steps cops have to do after pulling a report from this software is ask the ISP who had the IP at the specific timestamps that the files were downloaded. So yes, the cops understand the time is important, and even if they didn't understand that the ISPs do. The ISP can't give them an address without being given a timestamp.
> So the people who made this software understand
I spent several years making software to protect user accounts by noticing when someone else
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Timely reminder that while in theory this stuff works in practice mistakes are easy to make and ruin lives: https://iaingould.co.uk/2020/0... [iaingould.co.uk]
Someone made a mistake copying down an IP address and the wrong people got raided.
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Btw, I know that more often not, you and I see two different viewpoints on most controversial issues. That's cool.
This article is about stopping people who rape five year old kids. You don't have to fight FOR the child rapists just because I approve of locking them up. You don't have to ALWAYS try to do the opposite of whatever you think I'd do.
I get it your "team" argues for cutting babies heads off as they're born, because I think it's horrendous, but you really don't have to do that.
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I'm not disagreeing with you just to be a contrarian. What worries me is that the police are largely unaccountable. Have you heard of Operation Ore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Note that as well as many adults dying of suicide because of that bungled investigation, many children were wrongly separated from their families. The police's zeal for protecting children ended up doing immeasurable damage to many more.
Operation Ore was based on credit card information and commercial child exploitation. This is
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I would agree that the right thing to do, unlike Operation Ore, is get a warrant to search the computer, not arrest the person based on this evidence. That appears to be exactly what they're doing.
> This is just some IP addresses gathered from P2P networks and converted to subscriber information
Please understand as we discussed earlier, it's not just IP addresses. It's more along the lines of:
A CentOS 6 system with this IP running Firefox 74.3.1 with Lightspark 0.7.2 and Vietnamese set as the most prefe
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I think even searching the computer is too much. It requires the person to be raided and their equipment taken, itself a very traumatic and disruptive process, on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence.
Imagine the neighbours seeing the dawn raid on your house, and then having to explain to your boss that the work laptop was confiscated because the police suspect you of downloading child pornography. That's the kind of thing that leads to suicide.
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Oh and I should add that's one of the better scenarios, if you have kids they could be taken away while the investigation plods along too.
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> their equipment taken, itself a very traumatic and disruptive process, on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence.
Personally, I don't think "we saw you search for child porn and then download multiple files of prepubescent kids getting raped" to be "very flimsy". Just my personal opinion.
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You keep making up new shit that didn't happen.
They got a search warrant for the specific device that downloaded the child porn.
They got a search warrant for the specific device that downloaded the child porn.
They got a search warrant for the specific device that downloaded the child porn.
They got a search warrant for the specific device that downloaded the child porn.
They got a search warrant for the specific device that downloaded the child porn.
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They didn't see that, the saw an IP address possibly doing that.
Pee Wee Herman that happen to him (Score:4, Informative)
Still, given what we know about prosecutorial misconduct it's scary to think about.
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I used to rename shit I was downloading on emule in order to avoid DMCA emails. For example, I'd rename Adobe Photoshop to Playdobe Rotochop right after I started downloading it. That worked every single time, I'd never see any notices after renaming shit. Sure, you could have always followed the MD4 hash, but the scanners were never really clever enough to do that. Converse to that, you could dd 1kb from /dev/urandom to a file and name it Adobe Photoshop and you're guaranteed to get an email from the BSA (
Can't work that well... (Score:2)
The Vatican, ayatollahs, etc are still around.
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Not sure I see the civil liberty concern (Score:1)
At the end of the summary, it talks about the concern over civil liberties...
But these are images on a public sharing system, that people are connecting to and downloading content. They were always rolling the dice on downloading very illegal images, all that has changed as that better an better tools have been developed for cataloguing who has downloaded what from public sharing networks.
If there's any civil liberties discussion to be had, it's maybe around the legality of specific images. But that's a v
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Critics of the software say that indicates that it could be searching parts of the computer that aren't public, which would be a potential Fourth Amendment violation.
THAT is the problem.
Cops are buying license plate data (Score:3)
On the one hand if a private company hacks a computer to get something illegal and then sells it to the police they've committed a crime, on the other hand you can bet your ass they won't be prosecuted.
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it could be searching parts of the computer that aren't public,
"Could be" means it's speculation. It could also be a distributed system of calculations for a mad scientist working on antigravity. It could be the solution to our energy problems. It could be your ex-wife.
But it's not any of those until there's proof.
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I think the bigger concern is that we are targeting the wrong people. I agree that child porn should be illegal, but I think the government has some backwards priorities when they allow it to exist as a honeypot so they can arrest a bunch of people downloading it rather than going after those who distribute it. It's a lot like the problem of cops going after drug users rather than drug dealers. It's easier and leads to more arrests, but it does less to solve the problem.
Allowing child porn to exist on the i
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You dont think reducing the demand by arresting the users thereby putting dealers out of business for lack of demand in an answer?
No. That strategy doesn't work with drugs or prostitution. Why would CP be different?
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Downloading free torrents doesn't do much to help content producers.
Oh I know you downloaded Frozen 2 just to see if you like it before you bought it. But then you never bought it.
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Re: Not sure I see the civil liberty concern (Score:2)
What is the crime you see the government committing that is worse than the mass production and distribution of child porn? That they run the servers for a few months to gather evidence?
This is the lesser evil of just letting these people continue what they've been doing. If you have a better idea that will still put these subhumans behind bars you should share it.
The world is an ugly place sometimes and yes in this case the ugly means does justify the ends.
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My better idea is that in a world of finite police resources, 100% of effort should be dedicated towards the much harder job of tracking down and prosecuting people actually abusing children themselves. These massive operations are geared exclusively towards nailing people just for having what they're distributing. That should not be the highest enforcement priority,
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when they allow it to exist as a honeypot so they can arrest a bunch of people downloading it rather than going after those who distribute it.
No one is forcing anyone to download child porn just like no one is forcing people to do drugs. The people doing this are going out of their way to find this stuff.
It's a lot like the problem of cops going after drug users rather than drug dealers.
By going after the users, police are doing two different things. 1) removing those who purchase which reduces demand and
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The civil liberty concern isn't that pedos can't get their pedo on, it's that (for example) cops might just decide to go ram-rod their way into whoever's home happens to be associated with 71.47.22.124, and maybe that person was running a tor exit node or didn't secure their WiFi.
Since everything is better with a car analogy, it's like those red light cameras that popped up everywhere in the last couple of years. Unless it also has a really clear picture of the driver, all it proves is that your car (or so
Lost in the technology. (Score:3)
They have a large database of hashes of bad pics, for example lets call one of them pornpic1.gif
They see a file out there with the same size but named legalporn1.gif and decide to track it. So they have to download the file, to at least memory in order to get the hash. I don't know of a technology that allows you to get a hash of a network transmitted file without downloading it.
Then how do they.track through the VPN and with a person switching wifi connections through various ISPS.
Lets go with the very simple setup. A person at home using no VPN , who uses their desktop computer to connect to a HTTP website. Even then they would need access to either the server or the client or they are doing a MITM attack. it would explain how they are just requesting all ipad 3 since they just have the user-agent string.
Re:Lost in the technology. (Score:4, Insightful)
For torrent, it's trivial - both magnet links and .torrent files contain the hash of the content. So you must get the hash before you could even try to get the content. No problem there - no content needed.
For protocols that do not provide a hash without getting the content:
First, the software can provide the search terms. Only for results that come up for clear child-porn searches, it would be needed to download at least some of the content once for thr relevant URLs.
With a 1 MB image, you could download the first 1kb, 8000 bits, and check the hash of that first. That first 0.1% of the file is pretty good at distinguishing; 8000 bits is unlikely to match perfectly by chance.
The relevant statutes typically including wording such as: ...
--
It is an affirmative defense to prosecution that:
âthe conduct was for a bona fide educational, medical, psychological, psychiatric, judicial, law enforcement, or legislative purpose;
--
Fourth Amendment does not exist anymore. (Score:3)
Every Fourth Amendment challenge of the use of the technology has failed in federal court.
The USA is now a police state [wikipedia.org]. Thanks to the wars on drugs, terrorism, child porn, drunk driving, I am stopped at 11AM by a police barricade asking, "Papers Please!"
Fortunately, I am a white guy so I can give a teeny tiny bit of push-back - "Uh, why are we being stopped?"
"Governor (R) wants to check seat-belt usage."
"Only on this road?!"
The Fourth Amendment and the rest of the Constitution is nothing but a fucking piece of paper now. And for the gun nuts - without our other Civil Liberties, the Second Amendment is just a temporary favor granted to us for the time being.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think the 4th amendment applies if you traffic humans in the back of an open truck, with them chained to the sides of the rails. I don't think it applies if you mail a postcard with a threat to the president on it. I don't think it applies if you set up a cocaine stand next to your daughter's lemonade stand.
All of these things are public acts, with no expectation of privacy. Packets on the Internet are like little postcards. The 4th might reasonably be applied to encrypted traffic in transit, as
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"Rights have limits."
No they do not. Privileges and license have limits. Rights do not have limits. If there are limits they are not Rights, they are licenses.
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On those grounds you may edit the Wikipedia entry on Fundamental rights [wikipedia.org] to reflect your point-of-view, but I doubt your edits would stand for very long.
That rights have limits seems common sense, even if the rights are only restricted due to contention with somebody else's rights. That rights may be restricted, as the article states, due to "compelling state interest" is something with which you may disagree, but it doesn't alter that fact that rights may have limits and still be rights.
Privileges and lice
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I don't know what kind of warped world you could live in, to think that the state is the origin of rights.
If you don't believe in a Creator, then you could legitimately claim
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4th Amendment doesn't apply to things you put out in public which is why police can trawl through your garbage providing you can is out on the street without a warrant.
The service collated openly accessible information, i.e. stuff you publish to the wider community without knowing it to establish probable cause, then the police go get a warrant.
Not only is this not a 4th amendment violation, it's actually a text book example of processes being followed in a legal way.
You want to talk violated rights, take a
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But it doesn't matter anymore because the Fourth Amendment was neutered on 9/11/2001.
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search non-public parts of the accused computers.
False. At no point are police searching anything you haven't made public. They do not have access to your computer. The only thing they see are the files you made public. The only evidence they have that links to you is the IP address you shout out across the internet along with resulting fingerprinting details.
It's as much of a 4th amendment issue as a police officer knocking on your door and asking you if you have kiddy porn and you replying yes.
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search non-public parts of the accused computers.
False. At no point are police searching anything you haven't made public. They do not have access to your computer.
Wrong. They get a warrant to search non-public areas of the accused's computer. It's in the article.
Critics of the software say that indicates that it could be searching parts of the computer that aren't public, which would be a potential Fourth Amendment violation.
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Exactly. They get a warrant ergo not a 4th amendment violation. Everything prior to the warrant is public information.
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The USA is now a police state [wikipedia.org].
Every government is a police state. You didn't even read your own Wikipedia link. Quoting the first sentence from Wikipedia:
"A police state is a government that exercises power through the power of the police force."
So yeah, the US has a police force. That isn't bad.
Re: Fourth Amendment does not exist anymore. (Score:2)
A Constitutional amendment is probably out of the question in todayâ(TM)s political environment but when has the constitution stopped congress? Congress is perfectly happy with defacto bans. The $200 stamp act was equivalent to about $5000 when it was passed. Readjusting the stamp act for inflation and adding pistols, âoeassault riflesâ or whatever else they want to add would basically outlaw guns for all but the extremely wealthy.
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Smart, young Americans are cleaning out my local gun store. Many are first time buyers and Democrats. Many of those get quite irate when they are told that there is in fact a waiting period for handgun purchases, contrary to the bullshit Hollywood is spewing. Thank goodness most of them can't get ammo for their new purchases. Because that has been cleaned out as well. Or we would be looking at a number of NDs in many of our most liberal cities.
really strong checks and safeguards (Score:1)
Let's just use it on them, check on every cop and congressman, and their lobbyists, why not? There are a bunch of pervs in positions of authority that we need to get rid of also. Let's make sure nobody has the advantage
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A recent example: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/03... [cnn.com]
So an insanely small problem then. (Score:4)
From the headline
Inside the surveillance software tracking child porn offenders across the globe
Assuming this is an effective tool, and lets be honest it probably is since most people aren't that secure or tech savvy. That means 12,000 out of 7.8 billion Ok lets only include people with access to the internet 4,648,228,067 (https://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) so that is 0.0003% of the population are even into child porn, or 3 in a million people over 3 years. or 1 person per million per year. Assuming they are all men 2 out every million men, clearly cause for alarm.
from (https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty/hunger-and-obesity/how-many-people-die-from-hunger-each-year) 3.1 million children die from hunger each year.
good strategy (Score:2)
Fuck the government (Score:1)
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facial recoginition for children (Score:1)
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Don't know how successful or if anything came out of it.
Child Protection System (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like they are doing a great job protecting and rescuing those copies of bits. The children must be so relieved.
How Does it Get Around VPN? (Score:2)
How does it get around VPNs?
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That part is probably bullshit. If they could really do that I don't think they would be dumb enough to boast about it like this. The truth is they own the Tor network and are probably mostly nabbing people who think they can't be tracked if they use Tor.
For a VPN they'll have to do the work of asking for their cooperation in finding the user, something that is far from impossible. Whatever system they claim to have it's not automatically tracking across VPNs though.
Heard that one before - Tiversa (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.newyorker.com/maga... [newyorker.com]
Perfect cover for blackmail or destroying your enemies.
Can someone explain this VPN business to me? (Score:2)
I do remote access (among other things) for a living. Using one of the many "no log" pay facilities (although there was that story on /. yesterday about that Chinese provider and that log thing...) the source and destination IPs are NATted, one on each side of the VPN facility. The data in motion is encrypted, thus rendering the hashes useless on the wire.
Barring LEO control of one of the endpoints or the VPN facility or compromise of the crypto, I fail to see how the VPN is compromised. The only thing I
Different countries, different rules (Score:2)
Imagine if a crazy middle-east country would go after anyone who just downloaded regular porn and wanted to extradite those people and punish them by death.
How certain? (Score:3)
A perfect system that does that seems OK - the images are on a public server. But how difficult is it for someone to spoof IP addresses and make it appear that an image was uploaded from a different computer? What other corroborating evidence is required?
In addition to various attacks like "spear fishing", does this create a possibility of framing a factually innocent person for child porn distribution? Keeping in mind that some innocent people may not be very skilled at cyber security.
Hack someones computer and put a few CP images on it. Then fake an upload, or do the upload from the hacked computer. Where does that leave them legally? This scanning program makes the problem worse because the hacking victim's upload will be automatically detected, it doesn't require anyone to tip off authorities (which might look suspicious).
How can you distinguish between an innocent person who had been hacked, and a guilty person who claims that they must have been hacked.