easy fix for the prosecution: Use parallel reconstruction. I'm sure they're on this as we're commenting here.
Once the information has been gathered, it's out there. You can't unsee it. It will always be there. Now, I don't think we should protect child porn users, but this is a general issue with mass surveillance. Laws change and suddenly somebodies actions that were once legal and are now illegal will be useful for the investigators as a basis for parallel reconstruction or just plain extortion or blackmail.
Parallel reconstruction is not so easy when the case is already at trial as you can bet the defendant will not be doing whatever it is law enforcement need to now find evidence of. Time machines are still not available.
I agree with everything you've said thus far, however, I'm still curious as to how the Π would go about reconstruction w/out using their already gathered knowledge to get warrants/subpoenas.
They could hope the ∆ was using BT and had their IP logged for downloading copyrighted material. Then maybe request a warrant for their computer that way but that seems like a stretch.
You could argue that the FBI's use case does not harm, perpeutatue, or endorse the exploitation of children any further. It would be a different story if the FBI also commissioned new content to run the site.
Could there be some kind of "allowed CP database"? I'm asking because I might donate my old childhood photos to such database. I really would not mind if someone jacked of to that stuff. If that could help to prevent some pedophile acting out their urges, it would be really great.
Unfortunately we've seen that law enforcement in the US is able to get away with doing some rather despicable things in the name of fighting crime.
Personally, I don't believe it's moral or ethical for law enforcement to commit crimes in order to catch criminals. After all, how can we defend our own morals and ethics if we're willing to ignore them for "reasons"?
> Personally, I don't believe it's moral or ethical for law enforcement to commit crimes in order to catch criminals.
I think you want to look at systemic effects and the potential for bulger-style corruption. Distribution of child porn does not do direct harm. It does harm by being a system that supports child abuse and we have collectively decided that child abuse is harmful enough to the fabric of our society that it is worth dismantling the systems that support it.
So here, the ends justify a certain scoped set of means, but also impose a duty of competence in deploying those means and a duty to stay within their scope.
Note that We don't currently have any penalties for crossing the bounds of that scope.
They don't, or rather aren't supposed to, commit crimes to catch criminals. The laws are written with verbiage indicating who can and can't do what and under what circumstances. There is no real law that just simply states "thou shall not kill" that applies to everyone in every role in every situation. And even if law were equal to ethics, I don't think most people hold ethics without exceptions to whatever general descriptions they use to communicate them.
The problem then is that you've not recorded the user committing a crime (or committing a lesser crime, eg soliciting), only them preparing to commit one.
They could have tried a con like "we lost the site, gaussed it to avoid detection, please re-upload" and collared people for distributing. Not sure how well that would go though.
I wonder how that would work as a defense for the people hosting it: "No your honor I wasn't distributing child porn by hosting this site. I was trying to operate honey pot for the officers to find."
1) Law enforcement agents are allowed to participate in illegal activity in order to catch criminals. Otherwise it'd be pretty damn easy to root out undercover cops. 2) Honeypots are not entrapment, which has a very specific legal definition. The person needs to be "normally law-abiding" and can't be otherwise already disposed to commit the crime in question. Not only that, but in most states (not sure about Federal law which would be what applies here) the defendant needs to actually resist the illegal act and be further coerced by an agent of the government.
So taking over a pre-existing site centered around illegal activity and simply seeing who uses it is about as far away from entrapment as you can get.
"As a result, the number of visitors to Playpen while it was under Government control [increased] from an average of 11,000 weekly visitors to approximately 50,000 per week. During those two weeks, the website’s membership grew by over 30%, the number of unique weekly visitors to the site more than quadrupled, and approximately 200 videos, 9,000 images, and 13,000 links to child pornography were posted on the site,”
Thank you for the link, based on the original comment I thought they added new feature/wrote new code (which is not outside the realm of possibility) but this would point to just better hardware and a better internet connection.
>So taking over a pre-existing site centered around illegal activity and simply seeing who uses it is about as far away from entrapment as you can get.//
Surely though if the site was shut down then the likelihood of the crimes being committed, that were recorded in those 13 days of operation, approaches zero? Would be interesting to see how many of these criminals when caught belong to more than one group.
A cop being undercover inside a criminal operation seems to me like a different category to a whole criminal operation being run by a department of police.
It seems close to entrapment; perhaps like going to an alcoholic rehab centre and offering alcohol around. Sure they could get it somewhere else but cutting off their supply should have been helping them reform already.
Surely that's the rationale behind targeting suppliers of illicit goods. If the argument is "the users will just get it elsewhere" then you should target the users and remove the demand.
This leads to the failure mode wherein all those predisposed to commit crimes of a certain nature aim to become undercover police officers tasked with combating those crimes.
Then they can commit their favorite crime with impunity, at the expense of those too dumb to become cops first.
No one can be above the law. No one. If an undercover officer commits crimes to avoid breaking cover, the police department is culpable, and must pay some penalty. Since a corporate entity can't be jailed, I'm not certain what form of punishment would encourage it to minimize those lesser crimes committed in pursuit of the "big fish", but it is very clear that impunity is dangerous, destructive, and corrupting.
Can a cop commit rape or murder? Normally a cop is only allowed to do minor illegal things that aren't on the level of directly harming a person. Since the government argues child porn directly harms the child (as otherwise it would be protected by the first amendment), a cop should not be allowed to engage in activities related to it.
On a related note, why doesn't the mafia just require any suspected cop to commit rape of some target. Or are cops allowed to go that far?
Police in Norway is absolutely allowed to break the law to be able to catch the real culprits and not just the visible parts of criminal networks.
Here [1] is a case from April where the police imported 12 kg of cocaine as part of a deal with a man trying to smuggle the cocaine. The result was that they got the whole cell of Albanian smugglers and not just their german scapegoat.
I think you can build a better case for police buying, or offering to sell, drugs in order to catch criminals than this. Cocaine that isn't actually insufflated doesn't harm anyone. The FBI distributed images of child abuse which are illegal to own or distribute because, so the theory goes, the child is further abused every time someone new sees it. Therefore the FBI was complicit in further abuse of those children. Whether or not LEOs are allowed to commit crimes as part of an investigation, that crosses a serious ethical line. We wouldn't tolerate cops posing as hitmen and committing actual murder to keep the ruse up. Why should we tolerate this?
> Earlier this year, federal judges in Massachusetts and Oklahoma made similar rulings and similarly tossed the relevant evidence. Thirteen other judges, meanwhile, have found that while the warrants to search the defendants' computers via the hacking tool were invalid, they did not take the extra step of ordering suppression of the evidence. The corresponding judges in the remainder of the cases have yet to rule on the warrant question.
It's nice to see checks/balances work every now and then. It's also refreshing to see public figures stand against "thinking of the children" when rendering judgements about our freedoms. My only concern is that it's still a narrow technical ruling, only invalid because the judge issuing the warrant did not have the authority to do so (it targeted people outside their jurisdiction), and while it's relatively easy in the physical world to constrain your search, it's much more difficult on the digital world unless the warrant is extremely narrow in scope. Once you've gotten access to someone's personal computer, you're going to get all the things, not just the child pornography. I would consider it the equivalent for getting a warrant (hand-wave the actual execution) to mount a GoPro your target and record their life, combing through the footage to find details relevant your case, but I fear a "hack their computer" warrant would be/is much easier to obtain.
I think that a warrant that allows the exposure of your IP address through intrusive software that exploits a security weakness is valid, assuming that you receive the software after visiting a site and performing a criminal action. It's suitably narrow, and allows further (appropriate) searching.
The alternative (that I can't say that I mind too much, either) is to prohibit ever catching Tor users no matter what online criminal activities they perform, assuming you can't get their real IP through other means.
Generally I'd like to see something like an "Internet District" court with technically trained judges that have jurisdiction over warrants on the internet.
Well we're already that :-). But leave the internet-level stuff to judges who focus on that, instead of the one closest to some random fbi office. At least that way the judges can see & learn how these things play out, and give some informed judgement that has a chance of setting good precedents.
To me, the slippery slope seems to be, how do you know that all the exploit did was obtain the IP address, and not add or alter files on the filesystem, or allow the system to be further compromised by other parties?
I don't think a warrant for specific information changes that calculus; collecting additional information outside the scope of the warrant would be illegal regardless.
45 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 91.6 ms ] threadOnce the information has been gathered, it's out there. You can't unsee it. It will always be there. Now, I don't think we should protect child porn users, but this is a general issue with mass surveillance. Laws change and suddenly somebodies actions that were once legal and are now illegal will be useful for the investigators as a basis for parallel reconstruction or just plain extortion or blackmail.
Ignorance like this is a large part of the problem with the world.
They could hope the ∆ was using BT and had their IP logged for downloading copyrighted material. Then maybe request a warrant for their computer that way but that seems like a stretch.
Shouldn't the agents running this site be charged with child pornography distribution? Or are they above the law?
This would be a full blown investigation against the police in this country (Norway), but here entrapment is illegal too.
Is this too weird idea for HN?
Personally, I don't believe it's moral or ethical for law enforcement to commit crimes in order to catch criminals. After all, how can we defend our own morals and ethics if we're willing to ignore them for "reasons"?
I think you want to look at systemic effects and the potential for bulger-style corruption. Distribution of child porn does not do direct harm. It does harm by being a system that supports child abuse and we have collectively decided that child abuse is harmful enough to the fabric of our society that it is worth dismantling the systems that support it.
So here, the ends justify a certain scoped set of means, but also impose a duty of competence in deploying those means and a duty to stay within their scope.
Note that We don't currently have any penalties for crossing the bounds of that scope.
IMO it does, both to the user and the subjects of the pornography.
It's most likely the lesser harm compared to the original creation; though I'm not sure you could certainly say that in absolutely all situations.
For example always throw a server error AFTER a user entered its credentials. This way you can still track users.
They could have tried a con like "we lost the site, gaussed it to avoid detection, please re-upload" and collared people for distributing. Not sure how well that would go though.
So taking over a pre-existing site centered around illegal activity and simply seeing who uses it is about as far away from entrapment as you can get.
"As a result, the number of visitors to Playpen while it was under Government control [increased] from an average of 11,000 weekly visitors to approximately 50,000 per week. During those two weeks, the website’s membership grew by over 30%, the number of unique weekly visitors to the site more than quadrupled, and approximately 200 videos, 9,000 images, and 13,000 links to child pornography were posted on the site,”
The defense lawyer says otherwise, but he's the defense lawyer.
Always good to have the source of info so that context can be applied correctly.
Surely though if the site was shut down then the likelihood of the crimes being committed, that were recorded in those 13 days of operation, approaches zero? Would be interesting to see how many of these criminals when caught belong to more than one group.
A cop being undercover inside a criminal operation seems to me like a different category to a whole criminal operation being run by a department of police.
It seems close to entrapment; perhaps like going to an alcoholic rehab centre and offering alcohol around. Sure they could get it somewhere else but cutting off their supply should have been helping them reform already.
Surely that's the rationale behind targeting suppliers of illicit goods. If the argument is "the users will just get it elsewhere" then you should target the users and remove the demand.
Then they can commit their favorite crime with impunity, at the expense of those too dumb to become cops first.
No one can be above the law. No one. If an undercover officer commits crimes to avoid breaking cover, the police department is culpable, and must pay some penalty. Since a corporate entity can't be jailed, I'm not certain what form of punishment would encourage it to minimize those lesser crimes committed in pursuit of the "big fish", but it is very clear that impunity is dangerous, destructive, and corrupting.
On a related note, why doesn't the mafia just require any suspected cop to commit rape of some target. Or are cops allowed to go that far?
Here [1] is a case from April where the police imported 12 kg of cocaine as part of a deal with a man trying to smuggle the cocaine. The result was that they got the whole cell of Albanian smugglers and not just their german scapegoat.
[1] http://www.dagbladet.no/2016/04/28/nyheter/innenriks/kokain/...
It's nice to see checks/balances work every now and then. It's also refreshing to see public figures stand against "thinking of the children" when rendering judgements about our freedoms. My only concern is that it's still a narrow technical ruling, only invalid because the judge issuing the warrant did not have the authority to do so (it targeted people outside their jurisdiction), and while it's relatively easy in the physical world to constrain your search, it's much more difficult on the digital world unless the warrant is extremely narrow in scope. Once you've gotten access to someone's personal computer, you're going to get all the things, not just the child pornography. I would consider it the equivalent for getting a warrant (hand-wave the actual execution) to mount a GoPro your target and record their life, combing through the footage to find details relevant your case, but I fear a "hack their computer" warrant would be/is much easier to obtain.
The alternative (that I can't say that I mind too much, either) is to prohibit ever catching Tor users no matter what online criminal activities they perform, assuming you can't get their real IP through other means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America%3A_World_Police