An international operation against child sexual exploitation, supported by Europol and led by the State Criminal Police of Bavaria (Bayerisches Landeskriminalamt) and the Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime (ZCB), has resulted in the shutdown of Kidflix, one of the largest paed...
Does it feel odd to anyone else that a platform for something this universally condemned in any jurisdiction can operate for 4 years, with a catchy name clearly thought up by a marketing person, its own payment system and nearly six figure number of videos? I mean even if we assume that some of those 4 years were intentional to allow law enforcement to catch as many perpetrators as possible this feels too similar to fully legal operations in scope.
Illegal business can operate online for a long time if they have good OpSec. Anonymous payment systems are much easier these days because of cryptocurrencies.
This has nothing to do with privacy! Criminals have their techniques and methods to protect themselves and their "businesses" from discovery, both in the real world and in the online world. Even in a complete absence of privacy they would find a way to hide their stuff from the police - at least for a while.
In the real world, criminals (e.g. drug dealers) also use cars, so you could argue, that druck trafficking is a side effect of people having cars...
Well, it does have to do with privacy and security, it just doesn't matter if it's legal or not for them. These people (in the US) always make a point that criminals will buy guns whether it's legal or not, but then they'll argue they need to destroy privacy because criminals are using it. It doesn't make sense, but it doesn't need to because honesty or consistency aren't important.
This particular platform used tor. It doesn't mean all platforms are using privacy centric anonymous networks. There are incidents with people using kik, Snapchat, Facebook and other clear net services to perform criminal actions such as drugs or cp.
With the amount of sites that are easily accessed on the dark net though the hidden wiki and other sites. This might of been a honeypot from the start.
On the contrary, why would they announce that they seized the site? To cause more panic, and to exaggerate the actual situation?
In addition, that last point should be considered because even if they used these type of operations, honeypotting would still be considered illegal. So Ultimately what is stopping the supreme power to abuse that power on other people?
No judge would authorise a honeypot that runs for multiple years, hosting original child abuse material meaning that children are actively being abused to produce content for it. That would be an unspeakable atrocity. A few years ago the Australian police seized a similar website and ran it for a matter of weeks to gather intelligence which undoubtedly protected far more children than it harmed and even that was considered too far for many.
"That would be an unspeakable atrocity", yet there is contradiction in the final sentence. The issue is, what evidence is there to prove such thing operation actually works, as my last point implied - what stops the government from abusing this sort of operation. With "covert" operations like this the outcome can be catastrophic for everyone.
I am not talking about CSA, I am talking about video material of CSA. Most countries with marriage ages that low have much more wide-spread bans on videos including sex of any kind.
As for prosecution, yes, it is still illegal if it is not prosecuted. There are many reasons not to prosecute something ranging all the way from resource and other means related concerns to intentionally turning a blind eye and only a small minority of them would lead that country to actively sabotage a major international investigation, especially after the trade-offs are considered (such as loss of international reputation by refusing to cooperate).
It definitely seems weird how easy it is to stumble upon CP online, and how open people are about sharing it, with no effort made, in many instances, to hide what they're doing. I've often wondered how much of the stuff is spread by pedo rings and how much is shared by cops trying to see how many people they can catch with it.
it can hide in plain sight, and then when you dig into someones profile, it can lead to someone or a group discussing CSAM and beastility, not just CP. like a site similar to r/pics, or porn site. yea sometimes you stumble into a site like that, but it seems to occur when people search for porn outside of the Pornhub and affiliates sites. remember PH sanatized thier site because of this. last decade there was article about an obscure site that was taken down, it had reddit like porn subs,,,,etc. then people were complaining about the csam, and nothing was done about it. it was eventually taken down for legal reasons, thats not related to csam.
I can definitely see how people could find it while looking for porn. I don't understand how people can do this stuff out in the open with no consequences .
yea its often hidden too well to be easily found out and authorities might want to gather evidence so they let it accumulate then they pounce. one of the sites was mostly inneundos and talking about commiting it, but not actually distributing the material, they co-opt certain images to pervert it. other deviancies like beastiality were also present.