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The Independent reports that hacktivist group Anonymous, in a project named Operation DeathEaters, is calling for help in its fight against international pedophile networks, or what it calls the “paedosadist industry” and has issued a video instructing activists on how they can aid in the operation. The Anonymous project is intended to break what it says is a conspiracy of silence among sympathetic politicians, police and mainstream media to downplay the full extent of the online child sex industry. “The premise behind OpDeathEaters is to expose high level complicity, obstruction of justice and cover-up in the paedo-sadist industry in order to show the need for independent inquiries,” says Heather Marsh, an online activist who is helping to co-ordinate the operation and describes herself as an “old friend” of Anonymous. The Anonymous database, which will be hosted on the GitHub online repository, promises to collate cases from all around the world, cross-referencing connections within sub-groups including the police, armed forces, schoolteachers, politicians, media, academics and religious organisations. The database’s ultimate purpose has yet to be fully determined, but in the first instance the group says it wants to shut down the child-sex industry by “dismantling the power structure which held it there” and by “educating to create a cultural change”.
The group is calling on volunteers to help with the ongoing work, which has been divided into three steps. The first is about collecting “all the factual information,” second is to “share that information as widely as possible,” and the third step is “to set up an independent, internationally linked, inquiry into all the areas which do not appear to have been investigated properly.” Activists point to the muted media coverage given to a recent case in Washington DC in which Michael Centanni, a senior Republican fundraiser, was charged with child sex offences after investigators traced transmissions of child pornography to his computers in his basement. The case was not covered by The Washington Post or the New York Times, and was only picked up by a local NBC affiliate state and The Washington Examiner, a small conservative paper in the city.
According to the court filings, Centanni was found in possession of 3,000 images, many apparently filmed in his own bedroom, including one showing a man raping a five year old girl.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday January 27 2015, @12:29AM
Horrific child sexual abuse does happen, and is abhorrent. I want the people who do it out of society and in prison.
But, there's a history of cases where it's alleged and in the end, it turns out to never have happened. Sometimes it's for revenge, and sometimes it's completely imaginary. Go read about the McMartin Preschool case. The allegations were so lurid that many people said that there had to be something to it, just because what was alleged was so huge and unbelievably that no one would or could tell such a lie.
Yet, there was no evidence that it actually happened. In fact, there was a series of cases in the 80s and 90s that ruined people based on repressed memories that were recalled (Often under substantial pressure from the "therapists") that were ultimately shown to be false. Likewise, anonymous allegations that incriminating materials were on a computer can be faked even more easily.
In the McMartin case, there was a legal system that at least was some sanity check on what was alleged.
With anonymous, not only is there no way to face the accusers, but by definition the accusers are unknown. This invites group dynamics to make it spiral the same way that the witch trials of the past did. Without the checks and balances of a legal system (even a decrepit one), it can descend into a mob action targeting those who society dislikes. It might start out tightly aimed at only those of high political office, but almost certainly it would devolve into revenge and political advantage seeking.
As an example, imagine the worst political consultant of a party or group you dislike. For a US example, Karl Rove. Or if you don't like the Democrats, James Carville. If that sort of charge started getting thrown at those they were working for, do you for a minute think they would hesitate to gin up phony countercharges against opposed politicians if for no other reason than to muddy the water? The chances of anything resembling justice coming out of it would be nil. Are you confident the MPAA would be above targeting a European member of the Pirate Party, for example? It would, of course, be anonymous, and just as credible (and unanswerable) as any of the other allegations.
We've seen it before in politics. Just go back and look at the McCarthy era, for example (again, a US example. It's what I'm most familiar with).
Bad as child molestation and child pornography is, a self appointed, unanswerable star chamber is at least as bad.