Vast Pedophile Network Shut Down In Europol's Largest CSAM Operation (arstechnica.com) 61
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow. Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."
Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release. KidFlix going dark was the result of the biggest child sexual exploitation operation in Europol's history, the agency said. Operation Stream, as it was dubbed, was supported by law enforcement in more than 35 countries, including the United States. Nearly 1,400 suspected consumers of CSAM have been identified among 1.8 million global KidFlix users, and 79 have been arrested so far. According to Europol, 39 child victims were protected as a result of the sting, and more than 3,000 devices were seized.
Police identified suspects through payment data after seizing the server. Despite cryptocurrencies offering a veneer of anonymity, cops were apparently able to use sophisticated methods to trace transactions to bank details. And in some cases cops defeated user attempts to hide their identities -- such as a man who made payments using his mother's name in Spain, a local news outlet, Todo Alicante, reported. It likely helped that most suspects were already known offenders, Europol noted. Arrests spanned the globe, including 16 in Spain, where one computer scientist was found with an "abundant" amount of CSAM and payment receipts, Todo Alicante reported. Police also arrested a "serial" child abuser in the US, CBS News reported.
Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release. KidFlix going dark was the result of the biggest child sexual exploitation operation in Europol's history, the agency said. Operation Stream, as it was dubbed, was supported by law enforcement in more than 35 countries, including the United States. Nearly 1,400 suspected consumers of CSAM have been identified among 1.8 million global KidFlix users, and 79 have been arrested so far. According to Europol, 39 child victims were protected as a result of the sting, and more than 3,000 devices were seized.
Police identified suspects through payment data after seizing the server. Despite cryptocurrencies offering a veneer of anonymity, cops were apparently able to use sophisticated methods to trace transactions to bank details. And in some cases cops defeated user attempts to hide their identities -- such as a man who made payments using his mother's name in Spain, a local news outlet, Todo Alicante, reported. It likely helped that most suspects were already known offenders, Europol noted. Arrests spanned the globe, including 16 in Spain, where one computer scientist was found with an "abundant" amount of CSAM and payment receipts, Todo Alicante reported. Police also arrested a "serial" child abuser in the US, CBS News reported.
Whoah (Score:3)
They disbanded [Five Eyes country of your choice]'s government?!
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And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
They accomplished this without the need to compromise end-to-end encryption.
Hm...
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Just like every other darknet site that's been taken down.
If there are any that had their encryption cracked, it's such a small percentage that I can't name 1.
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79 arrests is pretty shit given the size of the operation.
Needing NSA level network access to trace IPs and blockchain analysis to try to find exchanges to subpoena slows things down quite a bit.
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They followed the money. That is a lot easier. Incidentally, that is why this was never and will never be a big business. Even if some people like to lie about that.
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I absolutely don't think that government should be able to break encryption.
Aside from privacy reasons it's a pretty dangerous thing when our financial transactions rely on encryption.
But, the fact that they were only able to identify 0.1% (1,400 of 1.8 million) of users makes it seem like encryption in this case did protect a lot of evil people.
If anonymous (or even semi anonymous) payments weren't possibly this would probably have lead to more arrests.
I keep telling you guys (Score:3)
It's Peter File - not "pedophile".
https://youtu.be/fTaKDnSIb4c?s... [youtu.be]
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Sophistication (Score:1)
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Follow-the-money is as old as the idea of a police investigation and typically works well because nobody wants money created out of thin air. This principle even works (with some limits) for crapto.
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Some of us use it for illegal stuff that's not nearly as evil.
I like having a relatively safe place to purchase drugs (far more reliably do I get what's advertised, and can stick to the same quality vendor and there are reviews to help find a new one when one gets busted. Far more reliable than local plugs).
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The numbers don't add up (Score:4, Insightful)
The article claims that there were 1.8 million users, 1,400 suspects and 91,000 videos. My guess is that the 1.8 million number is made up. So either they managed to identify ~0.1% of the users, and the average user uploaded 0.05 videos, or much more likely the site had less than 10,000 users.
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Why do you think more would upload?
I doubt more than 1 in 20 tik tok or YouTube users upload a video, and they aren't potentially outing themselves for serious felonies when doing so.
Is there any reason to believe crypto is less secure than that? And perhaps the vast majority of user used the low fidelity version or moderated to better protect their privacy.
Your estimation of identifying 1/8 the users seems really high to me. If there were only 10k users it'd likely have stayed under the radar is think.
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The article claims that there were 1.8 million users, 1,400 suspects and 91,000 videos. My guess is that the 1.8 million number is made up. So either they managed to identify ~0.1% of the users, and the average user uploaded 0.05 videos, or much more likely the site had less than 10,000 users.
At first glance, maybe, but when I thought more about it, I concluded that one upload per 20 users is not entirely unrealistic. Bear in mind, though, that I'm making a *lot* of assumptions that may or may not be valid, so take this with a grain of salt.
My first assumption is that most people who watch porn in a fetish category likely don't actually engage in that type of sex in real life, and I'd expect that to be doubly true for child porn. Assuming that assumption is valid, we can safely say that the nu
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My guess, then, assuming that most consumers are not producers, would be that 90,000 videos is roughly the total number of CSAM videos that are in wide circulation, or at least that it is on the order of maybe a few hundred thousand. And from there, it seems likely that the 1400 people arrested so far are likely people who uploaded new content not previously known to law enforcement.
Rereading the summary, that doesn't match with the claim that only 39 child victims were protected. So that doesn't explain why that number is so low.
Maybe the 1400 people arrested were people whose identities were more easily unmasked for some reason? People who uploaded content in general? People who were stupid enough to download and run a .exe file? People who were running a vulnerable browser?
Or maybe they aren't done. I'm kind of expecting that to be the correct answer, but guessing here, since t
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If you think 1.8 million is implausible for a single dark web site, then like most people you're probably not familiar with social dark matter. [lesswrong.com]
Note that there should be a difference between "CSAM" and "underage porn", but activists have pushed for the second to be labeled as the first. I would guess that there are millions of teens doing various perfectly legal activities *ahem* every single day, but if they should make a record of it with their cellphone then they are "producing CSAM", and if they inten
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The article claims that there were 1.8 million users, 1,400 suspects and 91,000 videos. My guess is that the 1.8 million number is made up. So either they managed to identify ~0.1% of the users, and the average user uploaded 0.05 videos, or much more likely the site had less than 10,000 users.
Not at all. Compare it to literally anything else penis related. How many active uploaders are there on Pornhub compared to people who just watch movies? It is completely realistic to assume there's a factor over 1000 difference between content creators and content consumers. Likewise it's perfectly reasonable to assume that they put all their effort into going after the uploaders. If you have 1.8 million users it stands to reason that you'd sort them by who is most active and work down the list. That's a l
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The world's stupidest statement made by anyone in the history of the universe, ever:
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Also note that they identified a total of 39 current victims. So unless each of these victims was raped by around 45'000 people, something is badly off with the numbers given.
My guess is the 1.8 million is a direct lie and they just went for the largest number they thought they could get away with. It is not like anybody can verify that number independently. Classical FUD.
Kryste! (Score:2)
I mean, what would cause an adult to be interested in kids that way?
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I mean, what would cause an adult to be interested in kids that way?
Statistically? There's a strong tendency [cambridge.org] for men who were sexually abused as children to go on to sexually abuse people later in life.
So the whole "feed them to a wood chipper" answer might make folks feel good about themselves, but it kind of misses the mark when about a third of them were victims themselves.
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Someone's personal backstory might explain someone's predilections, but unless they are incapable of knowing right from wrong they are culpable and they deserve whatever sentence the court throws at them. And they should count their blessings that woodchipper or mineshaft aren't sentencing options for such heinous crimes.
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Someone's personal backstory might explain someone's predilections, but unless they are incapable of knowing right from wrong they are culpable and they deserve whatever sentence the court throws at them. And they should count their blessings that woodchipper or mineshaft aren't sentencing options for such heinous crimes.
It's worth repeating that having a predilection does not need to be followed by acting on it - just like you said. Many of us have the occasional urge to beat the crap out of someone - or worse. but we don't. Or seeing some attractive woman, and grabbing her and having our way with her whether she wants to or not. Why? Because we're not supposed to. Just like we're not supposed to be kiddie diddlers. Acting on antisocial or antimoral impulses is lack of impulse control.
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If they don't act on it then they're not going to get charged or convicted of anything are they? So it's a moot point. The question of culpability comes into play for people who ARE committing crimes, either engaging in abuse, or getting off on it, or facilitating others to do so.
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I mean, what would cause an adult to be interested in kids that way?
Statistically? There's a strong tendency [cambridge.org] for men who were sexually abused as children to go on to sexually abuse people later in life.
So the whole "feed them to a wood chipper" answer might make folks feel good about themselves, but it kind of misses the mark when about a third of them were victims themselves.
Why I would feel better about myself for saying "feed them to a wood chipper" is beyond my knowledge. But isn't it fun to decide that a person is a pedo because they were abused. And then there are women. I often have to check the predators list for one of my organizations. There are women on it too, despite the common narrative.
Outside of my SO who is younger than me - after I got out of high school, I was mainly attracted to older women. well, I suppose I was then too, but I was kind underage, yaknow?
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But isn't it fun to decide that a person is a pedo because they were abused.
I mean, it's also possible that men who have some other characteristic that makes them ripe for abuse also makes them become abusers. Correlation is not causation, and all that. But the pattern is surprisingly strong.
And then there are women. I often have to check the predators list for one of my organizations. There are women on it too, despite the common narrative.
What's interesting is that the whole correlation where abuse victims are more likely become abusers exists *only* for men. Female abuse victims do not show a higher propensity for becoming abusers. I'm not sure why that is, but I have a feeling it may have something to do with biology and b
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If anything, we should be harder on those who victimize others despite having been victims themselves. They should know better. If they don't, they need to find out.
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While you have a point, also consider how we would treat someone who, after being robbed, decides to go and steal from others.
If anything, we should be harder on those who victimize others despite having been victims themselves. They should know better. If they don't, they need to find out.
It's an interesting question. To my knowledge, no such correlation exists, so this is purely hypothetical. And there's a part of me that agrees with you. There's also a part of me that recognizes that being a victim of abuse, crime, etc. changes people. I remember how angry I became after somebody stole my camera bag out of my car while I was parked at church. If I had found out who it was, I would probably be in jail right now. If something that minor can cause that much of a psychological change in
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/o\ | \o/ (Score:1)
79 arrests, high five. Oh wait, 1,799,921 to go...
Master criminals these are not (Score:2)
People condemn the dark web but in a way it's like a honey pot that catches a lot of criminals including some very sick people. That's because they're generally not security conscious and they do very stupid things with regard to revealing their IP address, making payments or whatever. And in the case of these perverts, for many it would not be hard to trace a blockchain to the institutional ledgers that received it in the first place. Maybe some people found a way to "tumble" their coins making hard to tra
TOR needs to drop hidden services (Score:2)
This post [lawfaremedia.org] does a great job of explaining how TOR can function without hidden services and the societal cost that allowing TOR to provide "hidden services" functionality has cost to human civilization.
TL;DR there is no need to compromise the E2E encryption of TOR to remove the bad stuff. What's needed is for TOR to remove the hidden services functionality because there is no moral or legal defense of a system whose main use case is to allow the publication of content that is not legal under even 1A case law.
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TOR has never been about E2E encryption as it's sole purpose. It's about preserving as much anonymity online as possible.
If all you care about is E2E encryption, just use HTTPS
and yet (Score:2)
they missed DJT
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Wait, was that Trump or...?