US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps

This whole thing is horrifying, but the last paragraph is especially disturbing:

Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are "six children living within his fourplex alone" on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.

Even more disturbing is it said he was also producing content.

Does this go to show that authorities needing backdoors to everything in order to do their jobs is actually kind of nonsense?

The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily, which is a bit scary. I don't see anything about a computer.

Although it doesn't appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.

It seems irrelevant whether this person is using encrypted channels if they failed to maintain anonymity. If they distributed material and leaked any identifying info (e.g. IP address), then it would be trivial for investigators or CIs to track them down.

Prison is too good for anyone who keeps child sex abuse images.

Lots of conjecture in the comments about how he got caught. Too bad nobody read the article.

Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots

...

he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.

All the privacy apps in the world won't save you if you're uploading pics to a cloud service.

saw a headline the other day about the gov't tracking people on tor using Google ads

It is also because of people like him that laws like Going Dark become plausible to the eyes of the politicians and the masses

the fool! you can't use ROT-104 encryption against 4 cores!

a heavy vehicle driver for the US military

That's an odd way to describe a soldier. It's not really surprising when violent people do violent things.

Lol, I still don't know why people like CSAM :v