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from the purveying-porn-for-profit-and-prosecution dept.
As Ars has reported, federal investigators temporarily seized a Tor-hidden site known as Playpen in 2015 and operated it for 13 days before shutting it down. The agency then used a "network investigative technique" (NIT) as a way to ensnare site users.
However, according to newly unsealed documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI not only temporarily took over one Tor-hidden child pornography website in order to investigate it, the organization was in fact authorized to run a total of 23 other such websites.
Security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told Ars that "it's a pretty reasonable assumption" that at one point the FBI was running roughly half of the known child porn sites hosted on Tor-hidden servers. Lewis runs OnionScan, an ongoing bot-driven analysis of the Tor-hidden darknet. Her research began in April 2016, and it shows that as of August 2016, there were 29 unique child porn related sites on Tor-hidden servers.
"Doing the math, it's not zero sites, it's probably not all the sites, but we know that they're getting authorization for some of them," she said. "I think it's a reasonable assumption—I don't think the FBI would be doing their job if they weren't."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @04:27PM
That's because it's easier to throw "nobody"* pedophiles at the mob to satisfy their anger than to actually stop "real" crimes (e.g. arrest the people who actually raped those kids or took advantage of them, or actually fix major issues with the country).
Normal folk masturbating to normal porn seems reasonably harmless. You can say it objectifies people etc but the more dysfunctional people satisfying their urges via porn instead of actually breeding the better it is in the long run isn't it? Seems to me you should actually encourage such people to use porn and stick to it. In my opinion the world would be a far better place if only the wonderful well-adjusted people were having sex and reproducing while the other bunch stuck to porn. The last I checked we don't have an under-population problem. Way past the time for quality and not quantity.
So it seems to me that if a pedophile is sticking to porn and hasn't even been getting close to children then he's no danger at all. Apparently there are some pedophiles who never get near to children, just like there are male nerds who'd be virgins forever despite being very attracted to girls ;). And those types aren't going to harm their "targets" - their targets wouldn't even know they exist. Millions of horny male guys wank off to stars and porn stars. Only a very tiny few of them pose a threat if any.
* There are pedophiles who are nobodies and there are pedophiles who are favored or in positions of power. Not as much happens to the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_case [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley_scandal [wikipedia.org]
If Mark Foley doesn't go to jail for lusting after underaged kids and only having sex with them when they are older, why do other pedophiles get put in jail for lusting after the underaged if their supposed "victims" never even know of their existence and likely never would if the pedophiles weren't exposed publicly (e.g. ignorance is bliss vs "OMG this perv was wanking off to a photo of me when I was underaged!")?