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Anonymous Attacks Child Porn Websites

Discussion in 'Serious' started by lp1988, 25 Oct 2011.

  1. eddie543

    eddie543 Snake eyes

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    Like others have said these attacks may just hamper intelligence gathering by international police forces. I'm sure they are very skilled in orchestrating online attacks but I also think they are unlikely to be very skilled in sucessful law enforcement and crime prevention.

    They could report the sites to the authorities, which could lead to investigation and information leading to the arrest or breaking up of the primary creators of the CP. Because the worst issue of CP is not the dirty perverted tw@t watching it, it is the child getting abused in the making of it.

    One ring of CP makers could lead to clients or other makers.

    But now if any site attacked was useful in gathering info, creating a case or future info then that has been ruined, so in reality this atteck could have let quite a few CP makers off. The atteck is akin to using a chainsaw to make a doorframe. Or a sledgehammer to hang a picture.
     
  2. Fishlock

    Fishlock .o0o.

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    Are you trying to say the Police just rush in and don't look at the bigger picture? Don't be such an ignorant little knob.
     
  3. erratum1

    erratum1 What's a Dremel?

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    All anonymous got was some usernames :rolleyes:

    Oh and the server is somewhere in the usa, errrr the usa is a pretty big country good job sherlock.

    All they've done is let every pedo in the world know about Tor and where to go.
     
  4. lp1988

    lp1988 Minimodder

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    Good points, and two cases I have unfortunately never heard of, I still however only think they are scratching the surface.

    I do remind you that the rule where information is useless only applies if it is the police that has broken the law in order to obtain evidence, any evidence found by other criminals (like anno) can be used regardless of circumstances. so any evidence put forward from anno is useful to all agencies.

    But you did just raise my expatiations towards the police. + rep


    If all you bring to the table is insults then please take them elsewhere.
     
    mvagusta likes this.
  5. mvagusta

    mvagusta Did a skid that went for two weeks.

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    JJ raises a good point, I hope anon haven't screwed up any government operations :sigh:

    They had good intentions though, so I don't hate them for that, and hopefully their actions at least put some pressure on governments to step things up a notch.

    Maybe if anon just stuck to crashing websites, then maybe that would force child porn distributors to use peer to peer networks?
    If so, then maybe this would make it easier for the government to track down offenders?
     
  6. Fishlock

    Fishlock .o0o.

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    Rubbish. If people other than the Police break the law in order to obtain evidence it is still inadmissable. In your 'rule' if I was accussed of an assault, then went and beat up someone and forced them into giving evidence that I was using self defence, would that be alright? You imply that it would be.

    The Police have investigations with man-power bigger than your average company, utilising external agencies, and methods of operation that you'd never think were possible, spanning over months, if not years. They have a duty to do things like this, how can you think otherwise?

    Me thinks you are being a bit naive about what goes on in the world.
     
  7. Jumeira_Johnny

    Jumeira_Johnny 16032 - High plains drifter

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    Who said I was talking about the police? You're thinking about this wrong. If you are tracking stolen Russian warheads, for example, and find this haven of child pornography what do you do? You can't simply turn over everything you have to the police. Hell even the fact that you were looking for warheads is classified. To think that you would reveal how, who, where, when involving stolen warheads just to close down a kiddie porn site is silly. No, what you do is watch, note everything and then find a way to filter that part of the intel to the right people in such a way that they can use it. That alone is crazy difficult. So you make the choice to just not to. The channels by which CP is moved are used by more then just perverts. This channel in particular was a trove I bet, since it's known to a lot of very smart people who have skills and knowledge that are hard to contain. As I understand it, this was on a TOR network. That alone tells you it was of interest to intelligence agencies and it was being used by people with a greater then normal understanding of technology.

    Fact: the number of people SOLD for sex is by far greater then the number of kids affected by child porn. And a dedicated, smart, crazy person with financing can kill or affect more people with one act then the previous 2 numbers combined. The people watching this sort of thing are worried about the third. The second is way off the grid and very hard to track, and the first is a hydra that isn't really worth the time and effort to go after. Sounds cold, but there are more people raped in a day then kids in all the porn in the world. If you want to make the world a better place, you start with the things that really make a difference for the most number of people. Why spend millions doing this, resulting in what? 20 arrests? when you can go after sex trafficking and take down a network moving drugs, guns and girls resulting in way more arrests then 20.

    You worry about the little things after the big things are fixed. Angry/poor scientists from India/Pakistan/Russia are by far more scary to me then kiddie porn lookers.
     
    Last edited: 30 Oct 2011
  8. boiled_elephant

    boiled_elephant Merom Celeron 4 lyfe

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    Haven't read the whole thread, but for what it's worth I'll just say that I don't really find anon's methods troubling if they're acting in areas where the law cannot actually be effective. Sites like these still exist simply because international law about online content is so patchy and still not really being enforced in any serious or consistent way. It's a case of, if anon don't do it, probably no-one will. In those circumstances, breaking a few pettier laws by hacking and DDoSing is fine by me.
     
  9. Jumeira_Johnny

    Jumeira_Johnny 16032 - High plains drifter

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    Not true. The TOR network isn't something you can legislate. for that matter, neither is the rest of the internet. These sites exist because they are fairly well hidden in a network designed to make finding things hard. If these 40 sites were just out there on a Nigerian server, then you could say that. But they weren't.
     
  10. StingLikeABee

    StingLikeABee What's a Dremel?

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    From an outsiders perspective, I wouldn't blame you for thinking this. I wouldn't blame you as we only see the end result of these investigations, the court cases. That doesn't mean that the law enforcement agencies are not taking child porn seriously, or are not trying to tackle the problem though. Gathering intelligence on any criminal organisation can take months or even years to accomplish. When I say any I do mean any, be it organised violence, drug trafficking or in this case the distribution and manufacture of child porn. Mountains of information are usually gathered as part of the investigations, and this needs verifying, cross referencing and decisions need to be made on how valuable the info is. Even with mass resources, this takes time, and any rushing can lead to mistakes being made, which could see the investigations crashing and burning. We also have several law enforcement agencies here in the UK, who gather intelligence on organised crime, not just the police. I can say with absolute certainty that the distribution and manufacture of child porn is extremely high on the agenda of those who are tasked with combating it.

    You are wrong on this point. Before I tackle the legalities, I'm going to discuss your claim that evidence from Anon would be useful to all agencies. Let's think about this from the paedophile's perspective:

    Peter the pervert is a member of a child porn ring. He was a user on one of the websites that Anon attacked. He has been uploading porn as well as downloading, so he is a valuable target. He reads the news about the attacks, so does everything he can to distance himself from the website(s) he has used. He decides to lay low. He used aliases whilst on-line, proxy browsing and all other forms of identity masking available to him, so he knows the data that Anon has is going to be of little use to any law enforcement agency. If he lies low long enough, he knows he can just create a new alias on another child porn ring. This time though, he is even more careful to try and eliminate his digital fingerprint.

    So taking the above example into account, what benefit has this brought to the law enforcement agencies? Are the actions of Anon just going to make things much tougher in catching Peter the pervert? I would say most definitely YES.

    No let's turn to the legalities of the evidence that Anon gathered. Anon is a collective of anonymous hackers, and I seriously doubt that any member would be willing to testify in court as to how they gained the evidence. This is an important consideration, as the onus would be on the prosecution to show how the evidence was sourced, and by whom. If they could not do this, then it could result in the chain of custody being seen as broken and the evidence being deemed unreliable. I would suspect that any decent defence lawyer could have the evidence thrown out in a matter of minutes due to this. I'm pretty sure there would be other ways for a defence lawyer to argue against the evidence being accepted.

    I think Anon would have spent their energy much better by staying covert, and monitoring the websites in question. If they come across any useful information, they could then pass it over to the relevant authorities. I'm sure this could have resulted in a much more productive outcome than the one we see now. Anon's actions make me question their motives to be honest. Was this more of a publicity stunt? A juvenile attempt at "look what we can do"? From where I'm sitting, it looks that way. Child porn is an evil that we should be stamping down on at every opportunity, but there are ways and means of doing so, to bring the best outcome, can we say that this was one of them? I don't think so.
     
  11. lp1988

    lp1988 Minimodder

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    If a thief steals a box from a persons house and finds it to contain child porn, delivers it to the police then that IS admissible. I am not quite sure how your example is to work in any way, any testament that came from force is inadmissible if the person whom was threatened at any time expresses that he or she was under force.

    Sorry I didn't use "law enforcing agencies" everywhere. But I am not doubting that there are plenty of people trying to find these people, my point it that the agencies are under certain rules that makes their job far more difficult. (rules that exist for good reasons but that is for a different discussion)

    (BTW the average company has less than 30 employees last I checked, so I certainly hope they have far more manpower at their disposal)

    I was not trying to access the quality of the evidence, just that "stolen goods" so to speak can be used to prosecute the original owner, sorry that I gave the impression of anything else. I have no background to judge the material itself as I only have a very shallow education in law (mainly private law), and no specific knowledge of the inner workings of the courts in different countries.


    A point worth considering, was it just a PR stunt, just for fun or an actual attempt to do something good.

    Sad but true, even more sad that Child molestation and rape is considered "little things"
     
  12. Fishlock

    Fishlock .o0o.

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    Okay, I see where you are coming from now. This is a matter for the court to decide, it isn't always admissible. Besides that, this scenario would never happen. No sane person would admit to burglary for the sake of someone being done for possessing pictures of children.

    You are absolutely right. Legislation does exist that makes the job much harder, RIPA and EHRC being the main two. However, your original post was implying that you think little of the Police and the investigation that they do, and I do not think that is right or fair, unless you can come up with some good examples to the contrary (and lets not start bleating on about the riots, protests, etc).
     
  13. erratum1

    erratum1 What's a Dremel?

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    The thief could have put it in there, or even planted the box, or a whole aladins cave of stuff.

    With anon snooping around sites they too could have planted stuff.
     
  14. Awoken

    Awoken Gazing at the stars

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    ...and the police have done such a wonderful job so far. They would be very quick to admit that they do not have sufficient resources, skills or knowledge to deal with this problem and the internet is a huge grey area when it comes to state authority and law.
    IT knowledge in the general populace is still ahead of the state's organisations, why else would agencies be running such an agressive recruiting strategy at present? The gap won't be this wide forever but for now we're stuck with it.
     

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