Submitted via IRC for Antidisestablishment
The Feds Are Dropping Child Porn Cases Instead of Revealing Info on Their Surveillance Systems
The Feds Are Dropping Child Porn Cases Instead of Revealing Info on Their Surveillance SystemsHuman Rights Watch and other groups say these systems draw serious concerns.
The Department of Justice has been dismissing child pornography cases in order to not reveal information about the software programs used as the basis for the charges.
An array of cases suggest serious problems with the tech tools used by federal authorities. But the private entities who developed these tools won't submit them for independent inspection or hand over hardly any information about how they work, their error rates, or other critical information. As a result, potentially innocent people are being smeared as pedophiles and prosecuted as child porn collectors, while potentially guilty people are going free so these companies can protect "trade secrets."
The situation suggests some of the many problems that can arise around public-private partnerships in catching criminals and the secretive digital surveillance software that it entails (software that's being employed for far more than catching child predators).
With the child pornography cases, "the defendants are hardly the most sympathetic," notes Tim Cushing at Techdirt. Yet that's all the more reason why the government's antics here are disturbing. Either the feds initially brought bad cases against people whom they just didn't think would fight back, or they're willing to let bad behavior go rather than face some public scrutiny.
An extensive investigation by ProPublica "found more than a dozen cases since 2011 that were dismissed either because of challenges to the software's findings, or the refusal by the government or the maker to share the computer programs with defense attorneys, or both," writes Jack Gillum. Many more cases raised issues with the software as a defense.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 27 2019, @04:26PM (12 children)
Cops were letting cases go, because they couldn't risk exposing their stingray operations. I guess that was about 2011 - a number of articles about stingrays are dated 2011, 2012, and 2013 in my search.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Saturday April 27 2019, @04:37PM (4 children)
That's what came to my mind when I read it also.
Likely it means the same thing, they are doing/using something that won't stand up to public/judicial/political scrutiny and if it gets out, the tool's use will be curtailed and they still see protecting the method as more important than a handful of cases they can't hide its use in.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @05:24PM (3 children)
Hmm, 2012 is when the illegal spying by FBI contractors on behalf of Clinton 2016 began.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @06:31PM (2 children)
Why is this troll? When people got access they shouldn't have, the techniques started leaking to the press.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)
GOP had 2 years to prosecute all their whack-job conspiracies, did shit.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @08:06PM
You'll see, they needed to wait for this Mueller investigation to find nothing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday April 27 2019, @07:16PM
We need overreaching surveillance technology because... "Think of the children!"
Okay, we've got actual children being harmed here, provide your actual evidence "Umm, it's not that important."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday April 27 2019, @08:23PM (4 children)
As the other story [soylentnews.org] janrinok posted hinted, it could be worse than stingrays. That's to say, stringrays may violate your rights but they at least work by providing a recording of a crime. However, it's quite likely these "surveillance systems" are simply there to circumvent the legal requirements for search warrants: That is, they obfuscate what is essentially a junky man-in-the-middle packet analyzer that only detects access to known TOR exit nodes as a "pedophile detector" so when judges ask what's the search warrants are for, the officers can say "the proprietary software detected them as evil-doers" instead of "they accessed an IP" since the latter would not be sufficient evidence.
compiling...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @10:43PM (3 children)
It could be that the pedos they've caught, were using a "dark web" site to purchase/trade their stuff; those same site could be being used to do things like sell weapons to terrorists or drug gangs. They may not want to reveal that those sites are compromised so they can keep tracking the terrorist activity.
Or they may not want it revealed that it's the feds themselves running the sites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @04:50AM
I feel like I've read that somewhere on this site. They busted a bunch of people doing something with hidden services, so they somehow got control of the services and started feeding malware to computers to identify them. Was it "silk road" or one of those marketplaces?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @10:41AM
Too many years gone by between 2011 and now for it to be a sting operation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @06:51PM
or because the feds are running drugs, guns and creating fake terrorists, you mean?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @01:16PM
"Stingray" has become a generic term for any device that spies on/hacks cellular phones. The surveillance highlighted in this article was performed by software that attempts to identify individuals sharing offensive files in peer-to-peer networks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @04:36PM (1 child)
Is this what's known as a Win-Win situation?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday April 28 2019, @02:59AM
For those two parties, yes. For the rest of us, we all lose.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Saturday April 27 2019, @04:43PM
Other sources of revenue [dynamoo.com].
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @05:37PM
so they get paid via extortion, buy closed source shitware from suited whores, use it to put possibly innocent people in cages for possibly terrible crimes and when asked to prove they're not full of shit they say "let the possibly dangerous pieces of shit off the hook". sounds like the pigs in the FBI to me.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @05:59PM (6 children)
A great example was a person who, being under 18, was charged as an adult for producing child porn of himself. WTF. He's an adult, but not an adult? What is this, quantum age? It's also right up there with the death penalty for attempted suicide.
Collecting images is harmless. Persecuting these people is in fact harmful. It's also expensive and pointless. Yeah, I get that they are weird perverts, but they aren't harming people. (or, if you really believe that, is possessing a photo of the World Trade Center collapsing somehow equal to murdering a couple thousand people?)
I knew a wonderful person who had his life ruined by this shit. He ran a productive company, had a nice family, and was generally a valuable member of society. That shouldn't be destroyed just because he got curious about naked girls.
People are killing themselves due to this persecution. Once you are an unemployable sex offender who can't live anywhere because all houses are within a mile of somebody's at-home day care, you might as well commit a bunch of crime or kill yourself -- what difference does it make? Life is toast, all over some digital data that never hurt anybody.
(Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday April 27 2019, @06:40PM
I remember your Tweets. I remember. You tweeted in Michael's Journal (and other). About how you're friend had started a VERY SUCCESSFUL very profitable Company. But, they came after him about the Child Porn. And he killed himself. Very sad story. And, totally unnecessary. We're listening, we hear you. And I think we've been much too tough on our Porn Criminals. Like we have with so many Criminals. Look what happened in Texas the other day. Bill King, sometimes referred to as John King, this guy was 44 years old. Not so young. But, not too old. And they killed him for a crime he did 20 years ago. Horrible crime, it's known as murder. But, so long ago. And he had a very rough life before he did that one. He was raped many many times in Prison before he did that murder. And possibly the murder was his way of getting back at those guys that raped him so much. Who knows? We don't know. And now we never will!!!!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @07:22PM (4 children)
Please go away.
MDC was virtuous.
You don't add insight or meaning or useful information to this conversation.
We get it. MDC turned in "your buddy" and now you, er, "your buddy" can't own a business and make $1m/year.
Go start a new life somewhere else, where the registry won't out you for your past actions. And keep away from the kids this time.
Go away from soylent, and go away from where you live now. Start a new life, find some meaning. Stop harping about MDC's vigilantism. He's dead.
PS - "nobody is hurt by images" - MDC was hurt when he found images of himself, actually. And other child victims who were only confused and photographed - not touched! - have ended up emotionally and mentally harmed, because it turns out that as adults we often remember our childhoods, and it's quite possible to have an understanding of reality that includes new takes on one's past. So, to recap, fuck off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @09:38PM
If a bear copies child pron to a USB drive in the woods, is anybody emotionally hurt?
No? Well fuck you, then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @12:06AM (2 children)
I consider that pervert to have been a friend, but yes he was more. I worked at his company. The place hasn't been the same without him, and thus I am personally harmed. I miss him. The guy had a passion for the business, unlike the generic corporate warm bodies who have come after.
Given the schizophrenia that MDC suffered from, maybe those pictures didn't exist. If they did exist, maybe MDC took them of himself while in a disconnect from reality.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 28 2019, @04:58AM
You really want to go to Hell, don't you...?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @07:16AM
Are we not all disconnected from reality?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday April 27 2019, @07:25PM
- citizen
- what
- we total surveillance nao
- but that gives you too much power, "give me six lines from the most honest of men and I will find something to hang him with"
- but think of the children
- oh ok
Time passes
- feds
- *pew pew* what
- hey hey friend here, why u no think of the children
- because that would compromise our total surveillance
If there ever was a proof that children are an excuse...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @08:47PM
That's pretty filthy thing then.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Saturday April 27 2019, @09:01PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 27 2019, @09:46PM (1 child)
And that's why stupid criminals get caught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @03:34AM
Perhaps. But what if Alexa misunderstands what someone in the house said?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28 2019, @08:51AM
If you want knowledge, just look for tests. Don't expect that there are no test of such surveillance systems, especially when upscaling effect may clog all stuffed routers (with an avalanche of non-reportable packets) and networks. There are a few security researchers over the Internet who got strange behaviour of their hardware, totally unexplainable, and this behaviour stopped when something interesting happened, like putting a brand-new notebook in Faraday cage. I found 3-4 of them, they write a bit chaotically, but summing up there are common things:
- It looks like it works on radio, not on the network.
- Backdoor on CPU is since Coppermine.
- There is a bus (?) backdoor in post-VGA GPUs, since PCI adapters. One researcher (Yes, this one known from Virut botnet) reported messing with his CD-ROM drive in Pentium I computer when PCI board was present.
What should definitely be done is to try to explain to GNU/Linux devs that not everyone has the latest hardware and in the vision of Intel ME, UEFI and externally driven CPU supervisor mode not everyone wants to buy it.