I don't have a huge problem with this. The site was clearly only for child porn, so signing up is equivalent to, say, willingly trying to hire a hit man or plotting a robbery.
I actually think this is a good example of digital police work, as opposed to utterly indiscriminate dragnets and trying to ban or backdoor crypto. This targeted a specific criminal activity and people clearly linking themselves to it. It was not indiscriminate.
It also shows that police work is absolutely possible in a world with crypto, proving the anti-crypto doomsday rhetoric wrong.
In another story a while ago, somebody ran a fake child porn site to see who would sign up. I think they found that some of their applicants were law enforcement and researchers. So no, signing up isn't already committing a crime.
Law enforcement officers and researchers could file for their case to be dismissed by providing evidence of their reason for accessing the material.
This is an argument for privacy around criminal charges since even being charged with CP can ruin someone's reputation. Many civilized countries have this. But this is a separate issue.
I don't really understand the outrage. This is like bank thieves protesting the use of a dye pack. Or addicts complaing that cops sit outside their dealers house. People's didn't stumble on to this site, they searched it out. It sounds like the FBI infected computers that visited the site. They didnt release malware to the world to randomly scan for illegal content.
Child pornagraphy is a particularly heinous crime is today's society. So don't ever expect the courts to be lienent.
I understand that they got a warrant for the server, but can it really be so broad so that it gives them the legal right to hack into any computer that visits the site?
A warrant approach without a very narrow, extremely well defined scope, completely destroys the original point of warrants.
From the article:
> But Fieman said that the warrant “effectively authorizes an unlimited number of searches, against unidentified targets, anywhere in the world.”
That blatantly isn't a warrant. It's a new form of unlimited government surveillance and hacking. Half the comments on here are falling for the all-too-obvious: but it's for a good cause, spin. Hey, just leave your doors unlocked, and invite in the police to search every inch of your home and electronics any time they like, we'll catch far more criminals that way.
It's not an opinion, it's backed by two centuries of vast US rulings on what a warrant is: intentionally narrow in scope, no broader than absolutely necessary, well defined in its purpose and target, leaving as little room for abuse as possible. The 'warrant' granted in this example is extremely broad, almost entirely undefined in how it's to be implemented, and allowing for the targeting of essentially any person on earth. It's close to being the exact opposite of what the law has defined a warrant as throughout US history.
One of the primary complaints of the founding fathers was the abuse by the British when it came to general warrants. They specifically attempted to limit warrants just for this very reason, so abusive agents of the government couldn't turn them into general warrants.
The fact that this example warrant allowed for infinite targeting (ie had no actual specific targets in mind), means that it is not a warrant by the definition set over the prior 200 years in the US. It is an obvious general warrant, and non-constitutional.
I think you are correct in your interpretation of what the US judges and founding fathers had in mind for warrants over the course of the past 200 years. However computer networks haven't been around for 200 years, and they do change the circumstances somewhat.
The warrant in question might have a vague list of targets, but in practise it applies to any and all people that connect to these services. And it's not like you can stumble upon them by googling...
The issue isn't that the warrant did what it was supposed to do.
It's that you can issue such a warrant and target massive numbers of people regardless of whether or not you specifically suspect them. The point of the warrant system is to prevent LEOs from searching (you|your property) without knowing what you supposedly did. The warrant issued here allows arbitrary attacks against arbitrary targets, and that's not good, regardless of technology.
How does child porn stack up against torture? How about indefinite incarnation without trial for innocents, ie kidnappings? Mass murder, the indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, weddings, the a la ' double tap ' , GENOCIDE?
Heinous crimes, except I'm not forced to fund child porn, only the mass murder of Millions.
It might be cognitive dissonance. You're not forced to fund it though. Move to another country if you don't want to. Or at least avoid buying American made products or take other small protest actions that people often do when they don't like a country.
Your suggestion is like the mafia telling a store owner: "Don't like the protection tax? Move your business elsewhere". Never mind the blatant lack of "elsewhere" to go to in a real-world scenario.
That would actually the safe and ethical response to a mafia. The real world has plenty of elsewhere, they're just not all so effective for doing business in. But does that make it OK to pay for an unjust war just so you can make more money? Sounds like an argument an arms dealer could make.
I have several problems with FBI's activities, but the hoarding of software vulnerabilities is the most serious. If the FBI get knowledge of a considerable risk to people lives, they should be required to protect people rather than use that knowledge as a weapon.
I would have the same objection if the FBI had been given information about a string of armed robberies and decided to just catch the criminals after the fact. Protecting innocents and preventing that lives are ruined should take precedence of catching criminals. I can't understand how the people working on this case can live with the knowledge that criminals might have used the Firefox vulnerability to defraud elderly with ransom-ware, or steal information which are later used for identity theft.
It's more like getting a "warrant" (it's not really a warrant if it's absurdly general as this one was) that since bank robberies were happening, gives the police the right to send a SWAT team to break into the house of anyone who walks into the bank.
Why not just have a judge sign a warrant that gives the police the right to search the homes of "all bad guys?"
It would be great if moderator's actually came out and policed government clap trap accounts. But my experience is mods allow government sock puppet and ban any those who criticize government.
I'm trying to understand how this was overreaching. They legally had access to the server that this website was hosted on, then they simply logged the real ip addresses that visited the website once they had access to the server. By accessing the content on the server the FBI possess aren't they voluntarily giving up their IP. Even if it's inadvertent?
I don't see how they are unjustly violating someone's privacy in this situation.
IIRC, with the Freedom Hosting bust the FBI compromised the Hidden Services server, then used a browser javascript exploit to leak the real IPs of those who connected. So, your quoted text is very plausible.
Tor is intended to be anonymous, but not absolutely.
We're talking past each other. The way I interpreted the text I quoted, if the FBI needed to make use of a javascript exploit, then they're doing more than "simply logging".
Context is important when interpreting text. The context of the quoted text included the question of whether the judge knew, when he or she issued the warrant, that the FBI would try to break into all the computers being used to sign into the site.
The article describes how they had acquired a security vulnerability for Firefox, which they then exploited to create malware that infected computers that accessed the site.
One simple way in which I could create a ton of instant criminals is to embed a url with a page with illegal content into the frameset of a site that shows normal content but in such a way that you can't really see it.
It wouldn't take much either (reocities.com) to put this terrible plan into action, it wouldn't take much for a hacker either to pull this stunt on unsuspecting visitors of a compromised site.
Neither of those should have any implications for the visitors of the original site. Web joe-jobs are super easy to put into play.
But it must be illegal in those countries as well, right? Don't they have an obligation to tell the local law enforcement? An what about the victims of this abuse? How is that right, even if there's a legal loophole?
Oops, I'm commenting on the wrong story. I assumed this was an update to the Freedom Hosting sting of 2013, when this was an entirely new sting. They have so many similarities that I mixed the two. Thanks for pointing this out.
The same way they can sell you an illegal gun and arrest you. This is nothing new and nothing shady from a judicial perspective (barring entrapment, of course).
OK, we shed no tears for patrons of child abuse. The issue is that once we allow a state agency to trample the 4th amendment for an admittedly noble cause, we open the door to these techniques being used to dragnet for violators of any laws, just or not.
Why wouldn't the judges who signed these warrants sign similar warrants to catch suspected terrorists? What about people who visit sites that allegedlly support terrorism? What about sites that support illegal activity such as Marijuana cultivation and use? Online piracy? Trading in technology that subverts copyright protection?
Speaking of slippery slopes, this "hack" probably falls under the broader meaning of the term. They probably put some kind of Flash banner on the page, and caught all the people with improperly-configured systems.
It was a javascript vulnerability, CVE-2013-1690. After free of a DocumentViewerImpl object, triggered via an specially crafted web page using onreadystatechange events and the window.stop() API, you could execute arbitrary code.
That was the 2013 instance. The FBI did it again in 2015 and that's what this article is about. The article specifically says it's probably different than the 2013 instance.
Tor doesn't run flash by default. Also it sounds like Playpen gave information about how to stay safe from the FBI, so I don't know why people would change the Tor settings to enable flash.
Hacking is sometimes compared to criminal trespass, so when the government does it it's fair to compare it to storming and searching a physical place, which is covered by the 4th.
They had a very non-specific warrant, something not unlike automatically authorizing anyone who enters a given building to be tagged, followed, and have their homes searched covertly.
Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan in the Eastern District of Virginia, who signed the warrant used for the NIT, did not respond to questions on whether she understood that the warrant would grant the power to hack anyone who signed up to Playpen, or whether she consulted technical experts before signing it, and her office said not to expect a reply.
So we can't even be sure that a judge knows what she's doing when she's asked to sign a warrant like this. They don't have to prove competence.
Why do people have so much resentment for child porn users? The only harm they're doing is participating in a market in which other participants abuse people. It's equivalent to hating drug users for indirectly funding murderous Mexican drug gangs. Sure it's a bit bad, but HN commenters seem to be much happier with drug users than child porn users.
There's also the fact that child-abuse porn is lumped in the same basket as harmless pictures of naked children. The latter in itself it harmless - many parents take photos of their children in the bath, etc. But somehow it transforms from good to worse-than-bad if someone gets sexual pleasure from it.
The drug wars kill 1000's of people, including children used to transport the drugs as expendable mules. Nice and small to go through tunnels, you see.
But that's a consequence of the illegality of the drugs, not a consequence of the additions or the drug itself. It could be done without.
As a parent I can very much see why 'child porn users' should be on the receiving end of some discipline. The market they create is what eventually causes the problem, there is no way that their urges will not lead to trouble unless they keep themselves in check (and I'm sure plenty do).
As far as the 'hating drug users' bit goes, I don't particularly like drug users, but to me they're less of a problem than the people that make the drug laws in the first place. Drug addicts are patients just as child porn consumers are patients but in the case of the drug addicts there exists a possible world where their addiction does not have to lead to murderous Mexican drug gangs. I don't see a way in which a child porn consumer gets to have his/her kicks without having to abuse a child and that's why for me the two are different.
> The latter in itself it harmless - many parents take photos of their children in the bath, etc. But somehow it transforms from good to worse-than-bad if someone gets sexual pleasure from it.
This is the law being abused and it is a pity that this is the case. But when normal people use the world child porn they are most likely not talking about parents taking pictures of their children in the bath. If that is your view of what child porn constitutes then I'm really happy for you. Run a site where you can upload videos for a while and do the reviewing, then we'll have this talk again.
That's a good argument about drug violence being a consequence of its illegality as well as use, not just use.
I wonder then about viewers of violent crime. If anyone has watched an ISIS beheading video, are they are bad as violent child porn viewers? That seems like a closer analogy - the violence is committed for the purpose of making videos for users to watch - and presumably further some goal of attracting fighters or whatever.
Those videos are abhorrent. I would never watch one simply because there can't possibly be any gain from it. But the one thing those IS characters probably do not realize is that those videos serve yet another purpose: they dehumanize IS, and in that sense they make it a lot easier to sleep well if we decide to end that nonsense in a more drastic fashion.
After all, imagine the Nazi's taking selfies and sending multimedia out into the world about what was happening inside the concentration camps. The war would possibly have ended a lot sooner because quite a few people that were still defending the regime and were claiming 'wir haben es nicht gewusst' would have stood up to do something about it. One of those attempts might have succeeded. It would have also served as anti-propaganda in getting other nations to jump on board of the allies train sooner.
I see IS as a last ditch attempt at consolidation, if it fails they might as well not have tried hence their flaunting of all the rules, nothing left to lose.
You might not like them, but the average person probably doesn't have the same resentment they have towards child porn viewers. I've seen people openly talking about watching such videos on the internet and edited versions are even broadcast on the news. It's not a crime and it's not demonized.
Not seeing any strong reasons, I suspect the real answer is that people feel hate towards sexual deviants of any sort just as they always have. It used to be gays but now they're off limits, so pedophiles are about all they have left to hate. Maybe that combined with a bit of "think of the children!". There's also widespread hatred toward incest but it doesn't seem so severe, perhaps because when it's adults, only the former emotion applies, not the latter.
> You might not like them, but the average person probably doesn't have the same resentment they have towards child porn viewers.
That's quite a claim.
> I've seen people openly talking about watching such videos on the internet
Not around me.
> and edited versions are even broadcast on the news.
Again, not any news that I've seen.
We apparently inhabit completely different circles and cultures.
> It's not a crime and it's not demonized.
Posession of child pornography is a crime where I live.
Watching it is hard to criminalize since you can't prove who watched what so I can see why that would not be a crime and should not be a crime.
> Not seeing any strong reasons, I suspect the real answer is that people feel hate towards sexual deviants of any sort just as they always have.
I don't see this either.
You can be a 'sexual deviant' (your words, not mine) all you want, it's fine with me. But the line gets drawn where children get abused and that's why possession of child pornography (and not being of a paedophillic disposition) is a crime.
> It used to be gays but now they're off limits, so pedophiles are about all they have left to hate.
That's an insanely dumb line. Gays are 'off limits' because just like pedophiles they are people first. You don't get to bash gay people for their sexuality (or your own insecurities) any more than you get to bash pedophiles. That's not the point. The pedophiles that get bashed are the ones that act on their urges in such a way that they endanger the people that we happen to cherish most, our (collective) children and their behavior in such situations makes use of the power asymmetry between adults and children (who are all but defenseless).
In that sense the outrage is no less than if a big adult guy would rape a slightly built woman. (Or at least, I would expect it to be no less, it certainly wouldn't be less for me.)
> Maybe that combined with a bit of "think of the children!".
No, we just don't expect the children to stand up for themselves. They're physically weak (in the case of child pornography there does not seem to be a lower limit on what gets people excited, it goes all the way to newborns...), they are small, they generally defer to the authority of the adults present and they end up scarred for life from these ordeals.
> There's also widespread hatred toward incest but it doesn't seem so severe, perhaps because when it's adults, only the former emotion applies, not the latter.
Incest is taboo in many cultures. There are several reasons for that (most of them good, some of them debatable) but the definition of incest is probably not what you think it is (it can involve consent and it may involve only adults). Incest is more about bloodlines than anything else.
>We apparently inhabit completely different circles and cultures.
Sorry I was unclear. I meant beheading videos. Please reread it with that in mind.
Everything you've said about child porn is only about violent child porn and other kinds of child abuse. I completely agree with you on that. What I'm concerned with is harmless child porn which people still demonize too. For example when a parent's innocent bath video gets leaked to a child porn ring. That does't transform it from OK to bad. It makes no difference to the child. Yet it does become illegal and people do hate the viewers of that video despite the child not being harmed.
> What I'm concerned with is harmless child porn which people still demonize too.
The smarter people see no problem in that. The only times those should be used under the child porn label is when they are used in collections having nothing to do with the original people involved.
I have three kids, one older, two younger. There is no way that I'd let a picture of the younger ones without any clothes on get out of my control (the older one is old enough to be his own master now), and I'm extremely protective of what happens with pictures that contain them at all. My main reason for being that careful is that the internet has a habit of destroying data that you'd like to have but it will preserve for ever data that you'd like to go away.
If it's used by someone who doesn't know the child, isn't that pretty much harmless? The only possible harm I can imagine is that the child is somehow identified and discovers it later in life and gets embarrassed by it. Sure that's not nice but it's hardly the worst crime on the internet. And even then it's surely very hard to identify young children.
Why would something have to be the 'worst crime on the internet' to be a crime anyway? Just like shoplifting is a crime so is murder. Shoplifting clearly isn't the 'worst crime' in society, but that's not a reason why we should not put a stop to it.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with all this 'oh but childporn isn't so bad', it's almost as if for some reason you feel this is a subject that needs a strong defense without showing why you feel this is the case.
I'm not going to say 'rape isn't the worst crime so let's give rapists a pass' either, absent a motive I can't find myself to side with the criminals in this case.
Though I very much would like the law enforcement officers to stick to the legal side of the line when it comes to pursuing these people simply because I believe that is how the law should work. If that gets lost then we're all complicit in the crimes done in our name and I'd prefer for society to lose out on getting a few criminals caught if that means we get to keep the moral high ground. That's a controversial point with some but it matters to me.
You seem to have given the subject a lot more thought than I ever would, but then again I don't have much reasons to think really hard about what the implications of child pornography would be. My contact with it has been limited to passing it on to law enforcement when detected with as much documentation as I could find on whoever was spreading it around and from that perspective I have very little love for child pornographers no matter what the source of their material and no matter whether or not in your were not harmed because they can't be identified. That's a very very thin bit of ice you're skating on because it all rests on what you feel is the truth. Such a personal perspective at odds with the law and with what society generally believes to be normal can lead to a lot of trouble.
In other words, those people that have vast collections of nude pictures of other peoples children will not have to count on my sympathy if they start brandishing excuses like the ones you listed.
I feel it needs a strong defense because many people seem to actually treat it as the worst crime on the internet. And more importantly, many people are locked up and have their lives destroyed because of committing this crime. The perpetrators are often vulnerable people themselves and nobody seems to want to stand up for them. In some cases they're not actually harming anyone but still get severely punished for it, both by the law and by the hostility of most people in society. I personally feel that the severe way we treat them is mainly because most people have a hatred for sexual deviants of any sort and the "causing harm" is a convenient excuse to justify extreme punishments and hostility. If that's true, then our society is no better than it was when we treated gays that way.
Consensual incest between adults who don't make babies is illegal in the UK. That sounds like another "hate the perverts" kind of law. If it was about bloodlines, we'd be doing eugenics but we aren't.
Don't forget about the teenager who was charged simultaneously with being a producer & victim of child porn due to hostile courts Virginia, I believe. An 18 & 17 year old (or close to it) couple texting each other.
You say that like it's even remotely comparable or germaine. A big fat red herring is what this is.
Returning to the point, you may not like it, but the law says it's legal to set up sting operations by serving child pornography. The ethics are certainly debatable, but you have your answer as to why it's being done: CP is a commodity, not a physical person, and that's fair game for law-enforcement in the same way as guns, drugs and blood-diamonds are fair game.
Most countries with mature legal frameworks frown upon entrapment and do not allow it's use in law enforcement, but then again most countries don't have a political system based on the individual with the most donations and corporate backing becoming president either.
69 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 30.1 ms ] threadI actually think this is a good example of digital police work, as opposed to utterly indiscriminate dragnets and trying to ban or backdoor crypto. This targeted a specific criminal activity and people clearly linking themselves to it. It was not indiscriminate.
It also shows that police work is absolutely possible in a world with crypto, proving the anti-crypto doomsday rhetoric wrong.
This is an argument for privacy around criminal charges since even being charged with CP can ruin someone's reputation. Many civilized countries have this. But this is a separate issue.
Child pornagraphy is a particularly heinous crime is today's society. So don't ever expect the courts to be lienent.
When you have a police force that sees itself as above the law, then you have a very big problem.
They got a warrant. It's exactly what they're suppose to do.
I understand that they got a warrant for the server, but can it really be so broad so that it gives them the legal right to hack into any computer that visits the site?
From the article:
> But Fieman said that the warrant “effectively authorizes an unlimited number of searches, against unidentified targets, anywhere in the world.”
That blatantly isn't a warrant. It's a new form of unlimited government surveillance and hacking. Half the comments on here are falling for the all-too-obvious: but it's for a good cause, spin. Hey, just leave your doors unlocked, and invite in the police to search every inch of your home and electronics any time they like, we'll catch far more criminals that way.
You're telling me your opinion. I would like to know how you don't think it's a warrant by the definition of the law.
One of the primary complaints of the founding fathers was the abuse by the British when it came to general warrants. They specifically attempted to limit warrants just for this very reason, so abusive agents of the government couldn't turn them into general warrants.
The fact that this example warrant allowed for infinite targeting (ie had no actual specific targets in mind), means that it is not a warrant by the definition set over the prior 200 years in the US. It is an obvious general warrant, and non-constitutional.
The warrant in question might have a vague list of targets, but in practise it applies to any and all people that connect to these services. And it's not like you can stumble upon them by googling...
It's that you can issue such a warrant and target massive numbers of people regardless of whether or not you specifically suspect them. The point of the warrant system is to prevent LEOs from searching (you|your property) without knowing what you supposedly did. The warrant issued here allows arbitrary attacks against arbitrary targets, and that's not good, regardless of technology.
Heinous crimes, except I'm not forced to fund child porn, only the mass murder of Millions.
I would have the same objection if the FBI had been given information about a string of armed robberies and decided to just catch the criminals after the fact. Protecting innocents and preventing that lives are ruined should take precedence of catching criminals. I can't understand how the people working on this case can live with the knowledge that criminals might have used the Firefox vulnerability to defraud elderly with ransom-ware, or steal information which are later used for identity theft.
Why not just have a judge sign a warrant that gives the police the right to search the homes of "all bad guys?"
I don't see how they are unjustly violating someone's privacy in this situation.
Not so: one of the primary purposes of TOR is to hide the user's IP address.
Tor is intended to be anonymous, but not absolutely.
Context is important when interpreting text. The context of the quoted text included the question of whether the judge knew, when he or she issued the warrant, that the FBI would try to break into all the computers being used to sign into the site.
It wouldn't take much either (reocities.com) to put this terrible plan into action, it wouldn't take much for a hacker either to pull this stunt on unsuspecting visitors of a compromised site.
Neither of those should have any implications for the visitors of the original site. Web joe-jobs are super easy to put into play.
"Instead, the FBI ran Playpen from its own servers in Newington, Virginia"
Why wouldn't the judges who signed these warrants sign similar warrants to catch suspected terrorists? What about people who visit sites that allegedlly support terrorism? What about sites that support illegal activity such as Marijuana cultivation and use? Online piracy? Trading in technology that subverts copyright protection?
Welcome to the slippery slope...
Indeed :)
http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/fbi-tor-exploit/
Can you expand on how they broke the 4th? There's nothing that indicates they broke the 4th from what I can see.
Search warrants are not supposed to be that easy.
Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan in the Eastern District of Virginia, who signed the warrant used for the NIT, did not respond to questions on whether she understood that the warrant would grant the power to hack anyone who signed up to Playpen, or whether she consulted technical experts before signing it, and her office said not to expect a reply.
So we can't even be sure that a judge knows what she's doing when she's asked to sign a warrant like this. They don't have to prove competence.
My understanding has it that physical warrants cannot say "I'm going to search this building, and also any other buildings I find mentioned there."
There's also the fact that child-abuse porn is lumped in the same basket as harmless pictures of naked children. The latter in itself it harmless - many parents take photos of their children in the bath, etc. But somehow it transforms from good to worse-than-bad if someone gets sexual pleasure from it.
But that's a consequence of the illegality of the drugs, not a consequence of the additions or the drug itself. It could be done without.
As far as the 'hating drug users' bit goes, I don't particularly like drug users, but to me they're less of a problem than the people that make the drug laws in the first place. Drug addicts are patients just as child porn consumers are patients but in the case of the drug addicts there exists a possible world where their addiction does not have to lead to murderous Mexican drug gangs. I don't see a way in which a child porn consumer gets to have his/her kicks without having to abuse a child and that's why for me the two are different.
> The latter in itself it harmless - many parents take photos of their children in the bath, etc. But somehow it transforms from good to worse-than-bad if someone gets sexual pleasure from it.
This is the law being abused and it is a pity that this is the case. But when normal people use the world child porn they are most likely not talking about parents taking pictures of their children in the bath. If that is your view of what child porn constitutes then I'm really happy for you. Run a site where you can upload videos for a while and do the reviewing, then we'll have this talk again.
I wonder then about viewers of violent crime. If anyone has watched an ISIS beheading video, are they are bad as violent child porn viewers? That seems like a closer analogy - the violence is committed for the purpose of making videos for users to watch - and presumably further some goal of attracting fighters or whatever.
After all, imagine the Nazi's taking selfies and sending multimedia out into the world about what was happening inside the concentration camps. The war would possibly have ended a lot sooner because quite a few people that were still defending the regime and were claiming 'wir haben es nicht gewusst' would have stood up to do something about it. One of those attempts might have succeeded. It would have also served as anti-propaganda in getting other nations to jump on board of the allies train sooner.
I see IS as a last ditch attempt at consolidation, if it fails they might as well not have tried hence their flaunting of all the rules, nothing left to lose.
Not seeing any strong reasons, I suspect the real answer is that people feel hate towards sexual deviants of any sort just as they always have. It used to be gays but now they're off limits, so pedophiles are about all they have left to hate. Maybe that combined with a bit of "think of the children!". There's also widespread hatred toward incest but it doesn't seem so severe, perhaps because when it's adults, only the former emotion applies, not the latter.
That's quite a claim.
> I've seen people openly talking about watching such videos on the internet
Not around me.
> and edited versions are even broadcast on the news.
Again, not any news that I've seen.
We apparently inhabit completely different circles and cultures.
> It's not a crime and it's not demonized.
Posession of child pornography is a crime where I live.
Watching it is hard to criminalize since you can't prove who watched what so I can see why that would not be a crime and should not be a crime.
> Not seeing any strong reasons, I suspect the real answer is that people feel hate towards sexual deviants of any sort just as they always have.
I don't see this either.
You can be a 'sexual deviant' (your words, not mine) all you want, it's fine with me. But the line gets drawn where children get abused and that's why possession of child pornography (and not being of a paedophillic disposition) is a crime.
> It used to be gays but now they're off limits, so pedophiles are about all they have left to hate.
That's an insanely dumb line. Gays are 'off limits' because just like pedophiles they are people first. You don't get to bash gay people for their sexuality (or your own insecurities) any more than you get to bash pedophiles. That's not the point. The pedophiles that get bashed are the ones that act on their urges in such a way that they endanger the people that we happen to cherish most, our (collective) children and their behavior in such situations makes use of the power asymmetry between adults and children (who are all but defenseless).
In that sense the outrage is no less than if a big adult guy would rape a slightly built woman. (Or at least, I would expect it to be no less, it certainly wouldn't be less for me.)
> Maybe that combined with a bit of "think of the children!".
No, we just don't expect the children to stand up for themselves. They're physically weak (in the case of child pornography there does not seem to be a lower limit on what gets people excited, it goes all the way to newborns...), they are small, they generally defer to the authority of the adults present and they end up scarred for life from these ordeals.
> There's also widespread hatred toward incest but it doesn't seem so severe, perhaps because when it's adults, only the former emotion applies, not the latter.
Incest is taboo in many cultures. There are several reasons for that (most of them good, some of them debatable) but the definition of incest is probably not what you think it is (it can involve consent and it may involve only adults). Incest is more about bloodlines than anything else.
Sorry I was unclear. I meant beheading videos. Please reread it with that in mind.
Everything you've said about child porn is only about violent child porn and other kinds of child abuse. I completely agree with you on that. What I'm concerned with is harmless child porn which people still demonize too. For example when a parent's innocent bath video gets leaked to a child porn ring. That does't transform it from OK to bad. It makes no difference to the child. Yet it does become illegal and people do hate the viewers of that video despite the child not being harmed.
The smarter people see no problem in that. The only times those should be used under the child porn label is when they are used in collections having nothing to do with the original people involved.
I have three kids, one older, two younger. There is no way that I'd let a picture of the younger ones without any clothes on get out of my control (the older one is old enough to be his own master now), and I'm extremely protective of what happens with pictures that contain them at all. My main reason for being that careful is that the internet has a habit of destroying data that you'd like to have but it will preserve for ever data that you'd like to go away.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with all this 'oh but childporn isn't so bad', it's almost as if for some reason you feel this is a subject that needs a strong defense without showing why you feel this is the case.
I'm not going to say 'rape isn't the worst crime so let's give rapists a pass' either, absent a motive I can't find myself to side with the criminals in this case.
Though I very much would like the law enforcement officers to stick to the legal side of the line when it comes to pursuing these people simply because I believe that is how the law should work. If that gets lost then we're all complicit in the crimes done in our name and I'd prefer for society to lose out on getting a few criminals caught if that means we get to keep the moral high ground. That's a controversial point with some but it matters to me.
You seem to have given the subject a lot more thought than I ever would, but then again I don't have much reasons to think really hard about what the implications of child pornography would be. My contact with it has been limited to passing it on to law enforcement when detected with as much documentation as I could find on whoever was spreading it around and from that perspective I have very little love for child pornographers no matter what the source of their material and no matter whether or not in your were not harmed because they can't be identified. That's a very very thin bit of ice you're skating on because it all rests on what you feel is the truth. Such a personal perspective at odds with the law and with what society generally believes to be normal can lead to a lot of trouble.
In other words, those people that have vast collections of nude pictures of other peoples children will not have to count on my sympathy if they start brandishing excuses like the ones you listed.
There are things the government can legally do which the private citizen cannot.
There must be moral limits or not? This is terrible!
You say that like it's even remotely comparable or germaine. A big fat red herring is what this is.
Returning to the point, you may not like it, but the law says it's legal to set up sting operations by serving child pornography. The ethics are certainly debatable, but you have your answer as to why it's being done: CP is a commodity, not a physical person, and that's fair game for law-enforcement in the same way as guns, drugs and blood-diamonds are fair game.