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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @07:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-decryption-required dept.

The US Department of Justice managed to unravel an infamous dark web child-porn website, called "Welcome to Video", leading to the arrest of 337 people in 18 countries. They managed to do this not by breaking any encryption that was used but by tracing the Bitcoin transactions the site used for payment, and following the money. From CNN's report:

For almost three years, "Welcome To Video" was a covert den for people who traded in clips of children being sexually assaulted.

There, on the darknet's largest-known site of child exploitation videos, hundreds of users from around the world accessed material that showed the sexual abuse of children as young as six months old.

Then it all began to unravel.

On Wednesday, the United States' Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed how it had followed a trail of bitcoin transactions to find the suspected administrator of the site: A 23-year-old South Korean man named Jong Woo Son.

But the case is much bigger than just one man. Over the almost three years that the site was online, users downloaded files more than one million times, according to a newly unsealed DOJ indictment. At least 23 children in the US, Spain and the United Kingdom who were being abused by the users of the site have been rescued, the DOJ said in a press release.

More coverage here, here, and here. The indictment for Jong Woo-Son is here. From Schneier on Security.


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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday October 29 2019, @06:31PM (1 child)

    by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday October 29 2019, @06:31PM (#913372)

    Shutting down sites like this is not unambiguously good. I'm not going to go digging in all the articles to see if someone's already made this point, but there is a hint right there at the end of the summary:

    At least 23 children in the US, Spain and the United Kingdom who were being abused by the users of the site have been rescued, the DOJ said in a press release.

    Yes, those 23 abused children were saved by the existence of this web site. If it hadn't existed, the product of their exploitation would still be out there by other means, but law enforcement may not have been able to save them.

    In some ways, a pseudo-open child pornography network is better for victims than the closed networks that preceded Tor. This is because law enforcement can more easily find content they can use to track down victims.

    It's a double-edged sword, though: law enforcement can find it more easily because prospective customers can find it more easily. This kind of network has the potential to explode access to child porn customers, which would be terrible. But it also has the potential to explode law enforcement access to victims.

    What it comes down to is whether you care more about protecting kids or punishing sickos. I sincerely hope that law enforcement as a whole is focused on the kids, not the sickos, as it balances whether to take down this kind of site.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @11:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @11:52PM (#913504)

    The kind of nuanced view has no place in the mainstream discussion.

    However, it is likely that the feds are operating or participating in many of the sites. Shutting down a site after arresting most of the users will drive others into honeypots.