'Freedom Hosting' Web Admin Gets 27 Years In Prison For Hosting 200+ Child Pornography Sites (therecord.media) 178
An anonymous reader quotes the Record: An Irish man who ran a cheap dark web hosting service has been sentenced today to 27 years in prison for turning a blind eye to customers hosting child sex abuse material. Eric Eoin Marques, 36, from Dublin, operated the Freedom Hosting service between July 2008 and July 2013, when he was arrested following an FBI investigation.
"The investigation revealed that the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material," the US Department of Justice said today, announcing Marques' sentencing. "Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement," officials said.
Flashback to 2013: [T]he FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas.
It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale...
Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."
"The investigation revealed that the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material," the US Department of Justice said today, announcing Marques' sentencing. "Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement," officials said.
Flashback to 2013: [T]he FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas.
It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale...
Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."
Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope the police are very careful.
In the past they have accused people of being paedophiles because someone stole their credit card details and used them to pay for access to one of these sites. There have been instances of wifi being open or hacked and used to view such images, as well as of computers being infected with viruses that turn them into proxies for paedophiles to use.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically the police would arrest them anyways, it is up to the court to determine if they are actually guilty.
However in practice, just getting arrested is a punishment in itself, because it stays on your record, and you taken out of work for a period of time, and often need to pay for expensive resources to help defend yourself.
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In the UK the police can use their judgement, they are not obliged to arrest someone committing a crime.
US police are also not obliged to arrest someone committing a crime. They can choose to do nothing, to merely cite or serve a warrant requesting the person to appear, to arrest then release, or to arrest then hold for arraignment. The DA's office also gets to choose whether or not to charge, and what to charge, even if the police did decide to arrest and hold. And, of course, the judge also has the option at many points in the process to reduce or dismiss the charges. I'm sure the the UK officials have s
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Marques paid for the service (hosted in France on some 400 servers) with a US-based debit card in his name, rented a US-based mailbox (forwarding to his home in Ireland), and routed his traffic through a US-based VPS. He had full control over the services and knew what his clients were hosting.
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Marques paid for the service (hosted in France on some 400 servers) with a US-based debit card in his name, rented a US-based mailbox (forwarding to his home in Ireland), and routed his traffic through a US-based VPS.
OK but...
He had full control over the services and knew what his clients were hosting.
This apparent conclusion does not follow from anything in the previous sentence.
The summary says Marques changed the passwords out from under the FBI. That demonstrates control. The details of the hosting and payment arrangements don't show anything about knowledge or control. In the current climate such arrangements are more likely to be a tax dodge than anything else.
Presumably the FBI had some means of proving Marques' knowledge, though speaking as a former sysadmin, it is more than possible
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Well, the age of consent in Ireland is 17, and that's where the guy was operating from, so the assumption must be that the subjects in question were under 17 or else it would not have been illegal under Irish law.
But yes if he committed crimes in Ireland, he should be put into an Irish jail for his crimes. No need to waste the time and money of extradition, not to mention the american taxpayer's money to keep him in an american jail. He's an irish citizen, suspected of breaking irish laws, he should be the
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Re:Virtue signaling (Score:5, Informative)
According to the indictment, it included sexual abuse of infants and young children. There were "over 8.5 million images of child exploitation material and over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos involved victims that were not known by law enforcement."
They're not going to publish the images to prove it, but 27 years in prison (about 19 after time served) plus lifetime monitoring, plus lifetime approval for use of any computer (including game consoles, tablets, phones, or other devices), plus lifetime approval for using the internet in any capacity, all coming out of a plea deal strongly suggests that they had a lot of information. The plea deal saved him from life in prison and saved victims from potentially having to testify.
According to the amended criminal complaint [justice.gov], Marques used a US-based VPS (registered in his real name) to route his traffic and maintain some level of anonymity for managing the hosting service, which was actually located in France and ran on 400 (virtual?) servers on provider OVH. Marques used a physical address located in Nevada, which forwarded mail to his Ireland address. He paid for the OVH services using a debit account from a US-based bank. All of those US links put it in US jurisdiction.
In addition, many of the victims are likely to be US citizens and residents. That also puts it into the FBI's jurisdiction. That the victims are multinational puts it into a lot of other countries' jurisdictions, too. Absent an agreement with prosecutors in those other countries, he's technically still at risk of still more jail time.
Fuck around... (Score:2)
...and find out.
Re:Fuck around... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fuck around... (Score:5, Informative)
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The only CP source larger than FB is the FBI itself
Excuse me, but the CIA [theonion.com] would like a word with you.
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many people objected based on the premise that it would be ineffective because no one would be so dumb as to upload CSAM to an online service like iCloud.
Really? I'm not going to claim this proof is bogus. I'm going to claim your assertion that many people used this line of reasoning is bogus. In all the stories about it, I've not seen one person make this claim. I'm sure there is one or two, but "many" is just stupid on the face of it.
Dishonest analogy (Score:3)
Does this mean that Mark Zuckerberg is going to jail also? Please don't try to tell me that FB is 100.00000000% CP free. It's likely that at any point in time, there are probably at least half dozen sick fsckn idiots trying to upload to FB.
Upload some and find out what happens. Facebook will make serious attempts to stop CP. Apparently this guy in Ireland didn't. People understand assholes will misuse your platform, you can't really fully prevent all crime. People get upset when you do nothing about it. Once you know a crime occurs, we expect you to report it and comply with authorities and make reasonable steps to prevent it.
There are not enough words to express my contempt for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is a horrid shi
Sentenced to death more like it (Score:5, Informative)
Paedophiles typically don't last long in prison when the other innmates find out what's they're in for.
Re:Sentenced to death more like it (Score:4, Informative)
Paedophiles typically don't last long in prison when the other innmates find out what's they're in for.
He's facing federal charges. Federal prisons are way less violent than state prisons. His cellmate will be in for tax evasion or insider trading, not armed robbery.
Re:Sentenced to death more like it (Score:4, Interesting)
So Marques will have to be segregated or he'll receive a similar fate. Not that I think anyone would care if he did.
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Child molesters and pedophiles have a rough go and may spend a lot of time in ad seg, but they're not murdered on sight. A former friend is doing 17 years in federal prison on child porn production charges after getting arrested in 2012. He's on I think his third now, a low-security prison somewhere
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They would not tolerate a child molester or a pedophile in their presence for a split second.
Horseshit. There's no morality system that makes pedophiles a special target.
A man was stabbed to death [fox47news.com] a couple of years ago in a Michigan federal detention center after being convicted for very similar reasons to this guy
News today was that a woman in my city was stabbed over an argument with her husband about not getting a COVID vaccine. That doesn't mean arguing about not getting a COVID vaccine results in you getting stabbed. That's what's known as a false equivalence. If you want to play the anecdote game I'm sure we can find someone in a prison getting killed for literally anything, just like in the real world.
The reality is the prison system
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The Violence on incarcerated pedophiles, isn't from someone irrational side, but from their side that may be missing their kids, and worried about their safety. So a the pedophile is the target, because they target about the few things in life they really care about.
That insider trading guy, who is in jail, may have a family who he misses a lot, and worried about them, especially all the harm he did doing that stupid risky maneuver to make some more money. He is now powerless, however there is the guy that
Re: Sentenced to death more like it (Score:5, Informative)
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https://www.wdam.com/2021/09/1... [wdam.com]
"According to court documents, The United State’s motion to extradite William L. Johnson to the Netherlands was granted on Wednesday, Sept. 15."
Re: Sentenced to death more like it (Score:5, Informative)
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Because it was almost certainly OVH. OVH operates in more than just France, it's one of the top three largest hosts in the world.
And they do jack about piracy.
Depends on the country (Score:2)
Here in the UK the poor little darlings get seperated from the main prison population because as you say they wouldn't last 2 minutes otherwise. If it were up to me they'd be thrown in with the rest to take their chances.
Re:Depends on the country (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a reason why the U.S: constitutions forbids cruel and unusual punishments.
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Which is why your prisons are a breeze and no one refers to American prisons as “pound me in the ass” prisons, eh?
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Re:Depends on the country (Score:4, Insightful)
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As a general rule, for Americans, we love vigilante punishment in our prison systems.
That includes sexual assault and murder. In the American consciousness, neither is absolutely wrong. Instead, we believe that for some people, either or both are a fitting punishment. The only thing better is if someone shoots the guy before trial and saves the taxpayer the bother and cost of due process.
We've already reached the conclusion tha
Which part of the "UK" confused you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hint, its not the USA.
As for your US justice - its the ONLY western country that still has the death sentence so go swivel on your constitution pal.
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Here in the UK the poor little darlings get seperated from the main prison population because as you say they wouldn't last 2 minutes otherwise. If it were up to me they'd be thrown in with the rest to take their chances.
Don't feed the trolls. In the USA pedophiles are only twice as likely as anyone else to be the victim of an in prison homicide, which puts their death rate at roughly 0.002% when the overall 0.006% mortality is corrected for. FYI this is an identical chance of dying from COVID for simply living in the USA.
It's hardly a death sentence.
Re: Sentenced to death more like it (Score:2)
Is that really true? Got any statistical proof of that?
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Society creates pedos and does nothing to help them not be pedos, then it creates hardened criminals and uses them to kill the pedos in the prison it created (which makes hardened criminals more hardened.)
It's murder all the way down.
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Pretty much. One could observe that many people rather have criminals of this type and then can feel all superior instead of actually doing something about the problem. Incidentally, pedophilia is not even illegal. Acting on it is. But in many countries seeking help gets you reported and can have rather bad consequences if you did _not_ act on it, so the ones affected do not seek help. With predictable consequences. Great job. It is like the "authorities" _want_ children to get raped so they can then procla
Re:Sentenced to death more like it (Score:4, Informative)
Paedophiles typically don't last long in prison when the other innmates find out what's they're in for.
[Citation Required] I mean actual reports and numbers, not just some fantasy of vigilante justice you dream about.
The death by homicide rate in the USA prison system is a tiny fraction of overall deaths of inmates, standing at 0.006%. (Cite: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pu... [ojp.gov]) That's all homicides in prison. Even if 100% of them were people getting revenge on pedophiles, that is a tiny number compared to the number of pedophiles incarcerated.
You may have been reading media reports that say pedophiles make up 15% of inmates in California, but make up 30% of homicides. But thinking this is some kind of death sentence is more a reflection of your lack of understanding of statistics.
Hint: Multiply a percent by a percent so you realise how vanishingly tiny the number of pedophiles being killed really is compared to their prison population.
Shit man at this point being sent to prison as a pedophile is no more of a death sentence than simply being a living person in the USA was last year as COVID was spreading. The death rate per person is almost identical.
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https://www.wowt.com/2021/07/1... [wowt.com]
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
https://www.newsweek.com/child... [newsweek.com]
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.... [cbslocal.com]
https://www.nydailynews.com/ne... [nydailynews.com]
https://bakersfieldnow.com/new... [bakersfieldnow.com]
Re:Sentenced to death more like it (Score:5, Interesting)
You're screwing up the statistics too.
The bit about pedophiles making up 15% of inmates/30% of the murders is for one specific prison where they ship all the inmates who are most likely to be killed.
The 0.006% death by homicide rate is for all prisons across the US.
You've mixed national statistics with statistics for one specific prison in California in a way that produces meaningless results.
One additional point that needs highlighted is that California recognized a need to have a prison specifically for the prisoners who are most at risk. If pedophiles weren't likely to be murdered in jail, they wouldn't be going to the extra expense to do that. It's not like the US prison system is known for being nice to inmates, after all.
No his point still stand (Score:3)
Muh Freedom (Score:2)
6 years for legal challenges! (Score:2, Interesting)
There's something wrong with any justice system that can let challenges like that spin on for 6 years. Its hard on the victims and its a waste of everyones time and money. They should be allowed one challenge which should be a yes/no result and if its a no they should be on next plane out.
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"So not only are you for cruel and unusual punishment"
Aaah, nothing like a nice straw man when you don't have an argument eh? :)
"Unfortunately the civilized world moved on from unreviewable and unaccountable judges a while ago"
You do realise that ALL appeals use a judge? So how would you do it, best of 3? If it eventually ends up at a supreme court (or equivalent) judge who can make the final decision then when not start out with him in the first place?
Take your time.
What (Score:2)
"Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement,"
Are there really that many millions of images of child porn? If that's true I'll be honest, it's a little worrying. That's a lot of people taking pictures.
Re: What (Score:2)
All factors considered, probably around 50k but just a quick guess.
I did some quick math but it got deleted trying to login from my shitty internet. probably only 1k are produces for this site with 9k consumers. Then we have to guess on how many offline people collect child pornography. So scaled that by 5. Other websites might exist but likely are significantly fewer in usage statistics considering online communities flock together. So the biggest stat of uncertainty is offline paedophiles...
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Re: What (Score:2)
Victims as you pointed out are spread overtime. This probably is a much smaller number than something like revenge porn but larger than the worst forms, involving rape+death. The users of such sites I fear are likely not all paedophiles. A large number maybe be investigators or one-time users. In the latter group, you have people who just are too curious about what you can see on the internet. Also, I doubt those people all have accounts and IP addresses are worthless for determine this usage. Even those wi
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There probably is a huge amount of disgusting child porn in the world.
But, the bias and culture reflected in the laws, may increase the "raw number" in surprising ways. E.g. in Denmark porn was made legal in 1969. Any porn -- all restrictions was lifted. This means that sexually explicit photos involving children was legal for a (small) number of years, then the law was changed to limit legality to "above 15 years of age". For a long number of years, it was legal to create porn, soft porn, and sexually sugg
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There probably is a huge amount of disgusting child porn in the world.
That's because there's a huge amount of children in the world. And a huge amount of people in general. The Internet had already made bizzare things commonplace decades ago. Think of anything and there's probably a huge amount of it on the Internet by default.
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In the UK there is a legal test - if images are sexually suggestive. So photos of kids at the beach, nudists on holiday etc. are generally okay to possess. There is periodic outrage about it, e.g. some years ago an artist put on an exhibition that included her kids naked at the beach and the newspapers went nuts, but the police weren't interested.
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The law varies from country to country.
Some countries have a legal age as low as 12, possibly even younger? In other countries it can be as high as 21.
Some countries outlaw all pornography irrespective of the age of the participants.
What's legal in one country can quite easily be illegal in another, but something hosted online can be accessed equally well from any country. So what can we do, go to the lowest common denominator to ensure that any hosted content is legal everywhere? That would eliminate a lot
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I find myself not wanting to think about that.
Except maybe in the form of gross parody where most of the sites turn out to be FBI honey traps and the other are run by pedophiles who are protected by the FBI because they deliver them occasional trophy victories .
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Considering that pretty much any picture of a child not in a burka can by now be considered child porn due to the "I know it when I see it" consideration... probably yes.
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Are there really that many millions of images
Some factors to consider:
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There probably are. One creepo can take a whole shitload of pictures, given enough time, and there's been quite a bit of time passed since the invention of the digital camera.
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"Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement,"
Are there really that many millions of images of child porn? If that's true I'll be honest, it's a little worrying. That's a lot of people taking pictures.
You want worrying? Think about how many people raping children do _not_ document what they are doing. The ones taking pictures must be a small minority. The ones uploading them must be an even smaller minority. And there is the actual problem. Stuff on the Internet is pretty likely the smallest part of things and the one that going after is least relevant.
Not the brightest (Score:2)
Such as this guy. He'll probably have to serve his 27 years in segregation because pedophiles wouldn't live long in the ge
Re:Not the brightest (Score:5, Insightful)
He'll probably have to serve his 27 years in segregation because pedophiles wouldn't live long in the general population.
Everyone keeps saying this, but as a point of order, nothing in the linked article says anything about this dude being a pedophile. The crime he actually committed was "if the cash is there we do not care." The fact that the court paperwork says "bad pr0n" is a technicality and one can make a fairly likely guess that he wasn't cooperative with the police. If he'd rolled over and helped them locate his customers, he probably wouldn't even have been in the news.
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I wondered about that. Did he know what was on the servers or did he consider that none of his business?
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Did he know what was on the servers or did he consider that none of his business?
As a practical matter, I'd surmise he did. Proving it in court might be a different matter. And even if you did prove it, the actual crime represented by that knowledge depends on jurisdiction, I'm sure. If I'm a farmer and someone is cooking meth in one of my fields, and I don't know about it, I guess I'm OK - but in some jurisdictions, maybe I have a duty to check up on what's happening all over my property. If I do know about it, does that make me guilty of meth cookery, of conspiracy, or just of some ne
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If you want to run such a server and stay out of jail it would mean you are compelled to monitor everything people put on it. And if it is encrypted, to refuse it.
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Well, there are nuances here aren't there? Who was "running" the "server"? If I rent VMs in the cloud, my clients are running the VMs and I am running the hypervisor. If my clients are storing and transmitting encrypted content that's unreadable to me at-rest or in-transit (which is a very normal state of affairs in hosting), I clearly don't have knowledge of what exactly they are doing. But if I want to stay out of jail, I need to have a published "no illegal stuff" policy and I need to prove that I enforc
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I got stuck on 'hypervisor'! Is that what Geordi's visor is called in TNG?
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I guess I do that sometimes, the unexpected pun thing.
But yeah this legal part means that the setup of the servers has to be adapted to it. It has implications on encryption since then you can't monitor directly.
Apple wanted to start monitoring file content on the iphone itself because everything gets encrypted on upload.
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But yeah this legal part means that the setup of the servers has to be adapted to it
It's completely legal to run a zero-knowledge server farm where you have no access to your customer's data. (There are some edge cases, for example if you're providing voice telephony services you'll have to permit access for legal wiretaps). It's completely legal to connect such a farm to the dark web, also (or to allow your customers to tunnel their slice of your service onto the dark web). One of the benign use cases often quoted for this is the whistleblower/journalist use case - there has to be a way f
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I think I get the general idea. You don't have to be proactive but you have to be reactive. The exact interpretation of awareness may vary.
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If you run servers that host a significant amount of content, it would take quite considerable effort to monitor the content flowing in and out - especially if there are lots of users and lots of new content being uploaded.
That also assumes that the content is accessible to you, the content may be encrypted such that the server is merely serving encrypted objects to users, who are then decrypting it. As the server operator you might not have the key, and thus cannot see what the data contains. This is proba
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Why in the US? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't understand why he was extradited to the US. He's Irish, I'm sure what he did was just as illegal there. Why wasn't he prosecuted where he was living while committing the crimes?
Another commenter wrote:
Paedophiles typically don't last long in prison when the other innmates find out what's they're in for.
The US justice system is broken. The US allows assault, rape and even murder to take place inside of prisons. This has been happening so long, and with such regularity, that people accept it, and even joke about it. Think about that for a minute.
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I don't understand why he was extradited to the US. He's Irish, I'm sure what he did was just as illegal there. Why wasn't he prosecuted where he was living while committing the crimes?
There are lots of possible reasons for this and knowing which ones contributed to this would require inside knowledge. The most obvious one is that, well, it's possible what he did is either not illegal in .ie or is very hard to prosecute successfully there, e.g. a high burden of proof. Maybe you need to prove that he had personal knowledge of every single image on the server for which you wish to receive a conviction. Or maybe the sentencing guidelines there are far more lenient for crimes of this kind. Or
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I don't understand why he was extradited to the US. He's Irish, I'm sure what he did was just as illegal there.
That is how extradition works. You don't typically get extradited for something which isn't a crime in your home country.
That said he wasn't being prosecuted by the Irish, this was the FBI tracking a case which lead to him, hence the extradition. You don't just say "oh he's a national of another country, let's stop our investigation and just leave it to them".
The US justice system is broken.
Yes, but don't feed the trolls. The other commenter was talking out of his arse. Pedophiles makes up 30% of inmate homicide statistics and 15% of tota
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I don't understand why he was extradited to the US. He's Irish, I'm sure what he did was just as illegal there.
That is how extradition works. You don't typically get extradited for something which isn't a crime in your home country. That said he wasn't being prosecuted by the Irish, this was the FBI tracking a case which lead to him, hence the extradition. You don't just say "oh he's a national of another country, let's stop our investigation and just leave it to them".
Actually, that's exactly what you do. The usual definition of extradition is "one country demanding the return of a fugitive who is alleged to have committed a crime in that country." Since someone brought up Assange, let's take that example: he published documents from outside the US; he was never in the US, and certainly never committed any crime in the US. When someone flees the country, then you have an argument for extradition. Assange didn't, so the US application for extradition should have immediate
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You don't typically get extradited for something which isn't a crime in your home country.
Actually, that's exactly what you do.
You get extradited to the country where you committed the crime, but usually don't get extradited if it wouldn't have been a crime in the country you're [potentially] being extradited from if you had done it there.
Re: Why in the US? (Score:2)
Tell me why, why, why .. (Score:2)
He paid a high price for having a TierA passport.
"Marques, a dual national citizen of the United States and Ireland,"
https://www.justice.gov/usao-m... [justice.gov]
Re: Why in the US? (Score:2)
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Ireland is not exactly a banana republic country. I'm sure if the guy committed crimes under irish law he would already be facing a long sentence there.
Ironic? The jury is still out... (Score:2)
But the new Websters dictionary already has his photo
Did the hosting provider know? (Score:2)
I browsed all the linked articles but none of them actually explain what the perpetrator actually did. Did he not pay attention to the sites that were being hosted? Or did he willfully ignore them? Is it law that a hosting provider must monitor the web sites that are housed on their servers?
...sentenced... for turning a blind eye to customers hosting child sex abuse material
What constitutes "turning a blind eye?" If I host a web site on the Microsoft Cloud, does Microsoft scan the site to see what it is hosting? Do they check the domain name and go "Oh, lolita, that must be something
Re:Did the hosting provider know? (Score:5, Informative)
What about Slashdot posts? What responsibility do the owners of this web site have if I posted something illegal?
In the US this is very specifically covered by the Communications Decency Act section 230: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 [eff.org]
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What constitutes "turning a blind eye?"
Probably being informed that the activity is occurring, but then doing nothing about it, potentially but not necessarily including never going to look to see if the activity is occurring.
Some of the articles mention that the guy ran some scam websites from his own hosting service, so this is obviously not some good guy. But I am unclear to what level a hosting provider is responsible for the content that a 3rd-party hosts.
AFAICT ignorance is a defense but only if it's a sustainable argument, and it isn't that if you've been notified. I don't know whether he was or wasn't notified that there was CP on his servers, but it would be surprising if not.
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Also, where does the chain of liability end?
rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France
So is that company also liable?
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I don't know, were they warned? If so, probably.
Did he know? (Score:5, Interesting)
University net admins noticed the spike in traffic and eventually traced it to this lab's usenet news feed node. It was dishing out, redistributing alt.binaries.erotica and all the sub genres, to many dozen nodes. Its gopher and ftp servers were running at full speed 24/7. This GA's credentials were on all the config files and change logs. He could have been in serious trouble. But he was very credible when he admitted getting help from the former grad student. The ex student was well known to the HoD. Reported as a creep by others before.
I imagine FBI would not have been as understanding as the HoD.
Common Carrier? (Score:2)
And nothing (Score:2)
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya.
The one group that generates near universal revulsion. Well, unless they're committing their abuse while being a Priest / Pastor / Youth minister. Then society, especially the "flock" at that church, disgustingly enough, still will blame the victim.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Can the FBI even do that? ie. Infiltrate a server in a foreign country, accuse somebody of something illegal there, then try to extradite them back to the USA?
Isn't that operating a little bit outside their jurisdiction?
Re: (Score:2)
Historically the FBI has done some nasty things, often outside the law. But due to their power structure they can get away with a lot.
While the FBI does a lot of good, they do cross the line and do some really bad stuff too.
Re: (Score:2)
He hosted them,
He took a peek,
Thus he knew,
He visited,
He uploaded,
He was 0dayed.