Child sex abuse image peddlers dodge UK smut filters and demand Bitcoin payments The implementation of network-level filters by all of the UK's biggest ISPs has contributed to a worrying side effect: it appears to be forcing peddlers of child sexual abuse images to seek different ways of distributing the illegal material. Apparently these increasingly include hacks into the websites of businesses whose …
Well they've been overcollecting on everyone for the past decades and the agencies don't seem to have stopped many soviet invasions, nor terrorism, nor crime, never mind abuse?
An article in the Economist this week even thinks that GCHQ might have the world's largest collection of pornography by now, having overcollected the Yahoo! (& probably other) webcam streams - where upto 11% of these streams were pornographic. Economist further mentions that GCHQ as a military defence organisation has no UK legal right to hold/view images of pornography, extreme pornography or kiddie pr0n scum images. They are not Law Enforcement, so might be sued! I can't see it happening tho'
Well I asked my MP to ask for an investigation of GCHQ's Yahoo intercept, and he is usually quite receptive to ideas, I can only hope the idea of people being spied on in their most intimate moments is enough for him to put this higher up on his agenda (he is a decent bloke, even if he does like the idea of national service)
Frankly, I don't want them to.
Child porn is reprehensible, but it's already been used as an excuse to limit so much of our freedom that we needn't add to it by giving NSA and GCHQ free reins. I'd rather have a kiddie porn peddler get away than have GCHQ expand its powers even more.
Shirley Ms Smith has just supplied reasonable doubt for anyone being prosecuted for distributing sicko stuff.
"Yer honour, mine was a benign $HOBBY site but evil people hacked it so they could distribute their filth. Even Ms Smith of the IWF has noted the trend of innocent people like myself being victimised in this fashion."
If the counter-argument is that, "the images were on your server therefore you're guilty of possessing said images", then there's going to be a not insignificant number of (genuinely innocent) small businesses coming to grief.
Which is why if I ever happen across some, I'm not going to report it. I don't want every hard drive in the household seized as part of an investigation. The witch-hunters have shot themselves in the foot here: Stories of overzealous prosecutions and trial-by-media are now well-known enough that even the innocent are afraid of them.
"No one's got "computer hackers" in there yet, which is a massive opportunity missed. Perhaps chuck "cyber-crime" in there too, and namedrop Lulzsec/Anon for good measure."
"Bitcoin users are heavily armed East European drug-peddling Muslim paedophiles, coming over here, stealing our jobs and living in £1m cyber-crime funded houses, using money from Bitcoin to fund Anon and Lulzsec, as well as engaging in terrorism and, when they aren't busy computer hacking, they stop weekly bin collections while making teen mums pregnant. And they give you cancer, and are entirely to blame for climate change."
Howzat?
"Chuckle - almost perfect. Maybe you could add they bitcoin users were responsible for the 2008 crash and hope that people are too ignorant to realise that it was in it's infancy then."
"Bitcoin users are heavily armed East European drug-peddling Muslim paedophiles, coming over here, stealing our jobs and living in £1m cyber-crime funded houses, long suspected of being involved in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, using money from Bitcoin to fund Anon and Lulzsec, as well as engaging in terrorism and, when they aren't busy computer hacking, they stop weekly bin collections while making teen mums pregnant. And they give you cancer, and are entirely to blame for climate change."
"Bitcoin users are heavily armed East European drug-peddling Muslim paedophiles, coming over here, stealing our jobs and living in £1m houses, using money from Bitcoin to fund terrorism and stop weekly bin collections, while making teen mums pregnant. And they give you cancer, and are entirely to blame for climate change."
Or something.
Yes it's a strict liability offence, but you are over simplifying. Or you don't even begin to understand the law and it's procedures. You would not necessarilly be charged because they were on your server. The police and the CPS do excercise discretion strange though it may seem. Even were you to be charged there would still be a court case and the argument in that case would hinge around the definition of possession.
If you did not put the images on your server and were not aware that they were there could the prosecution prove that you "possessed" the images? Again, yes it is a strict liability offence, but intent is never ever trivial in court proceedings.
I don't think strict liability offence means what you think it means.
I think it is you who does not understand:
> If you did not put the images on your server and were not aware that they were there could the prosecution prove that you "possessed" the images?
Quoting from the Criminal Justice Act 1988:
* * * * *
160 Possession of indecent photograph of child
(1) Subject to section 160A it is an offence for a person to have any indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child in his possession.
(2) Where a person is charged with an offence under subsection (1) above, it shall be a defence for him to prove—
(a)that he had a legitimate reason for having the photograph or pseudo-photograph in his possession; or
(b) that he had not himself seen the photograph or pseudo-photograph and did not know, nor had any cause to suspect, it to be indecent
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/33/part/XI/crossheading/possession-of-indecent-photograph-of-child
* * * * *
Note where it says "It is a defence for him to prove" ie a person is *assumed* to be guilty *unless* they can prove that they didn't know the images were there and they hadn't seen them!
I hate all strict liability offences, I find them most un-democratic, more like you will find in a dictatorship. We need to revoke all strict liability offences, keep the offences but remove the strict liability, intent is very important in any law, without intent is there a crime (except maybe carelessness?)
Strict liability is just a stupid, stupid concept. Everything about it is just horseshit, because it was designed by the horses asses that are disguised as politicians.
All those laws are political stunts so somebody can big themselves up. What's really interesting about strict liability cases, is they cost just absurd amounts of money to prosecute. It doesn't require an All-Star legal team to dump 95,000 pounds of sand in the courts Vaseline. Although the cases usually proceed as planned, the resource use just skyrockets. If nothing else there's an economic argument to phasing out strict liability rules.
Nice idea, but after a while someone who looks very much like a trader in child abuse images will get off with it because the jury couldn't be convinced completly about intent - and the resulting media outrage would leave any politician with hopes of reelection no choice but to close this 'loophole' and bring strict liability back.
But what do you mean he very much looks like a trader? If by that, you mean evidence, then that would be enough to convict.
A jury are not required to be convinced completely, but beyond reasonable doubt - no different to any other crime.
Individual politicians do not have the powers to pass new laws. They can make some media-friendly soundbites, without actually doing anything of real consequence.
"The police and the CPS do excercise discretion strange though it may seem. Even were you to be charged there would still be a court case and the argument in that case would hinge around the definition of possession."
So the police can charge you if they feel like it. If they want a high profile case. Or if the Mail has just run another batch of stories. Or if there's been another case like Saville and they've been told to jump on everyone possible.
There will be a court case? Really? In an atmosphere of hysteria it is extremely common for people to wrongly be found guilty. Look at the number of IRA cases that were reversed many years later because they were blatantly unsafe convictions.
And if you do manage to get found innocent, the mud will stick forever. You will ALWAYS be the person who was charged with child porn but managed to get away with it. Anyway by the time the case grinds through a lot of the damage will already have been done.
It's a bit like the fines ten years back on having illegal immigrants in the back of your truck. One chap heard a banging after he'd entered the UK and realised he had acquired some stowaways. Turned round and dutifully pulled back into Dover to hand them over to immigration and received the exact same fine as if they'd found them in the truck without his cooperation.
That set a precedent of there being zero reason for a truck driver to do the right thing. If they're in the country they might as well pull over into a quiet car park, let them out and say nothing.
Thankfully the High Court found in favour of a class action and pointed out to the Home Office that such a policy was not only bad for business but counter-productive in an environment where you rely on the good will and cooperation of the drivers. Rather than "Us and Them" being Immigration + Truckers vs. Clandestine Entrants, "Us and Them" now referred to Immigration vs. Truckers. Which is retarded.
Although the fines are still in place (up to £2k per entrant), they decide how much they'll actually ask for based on the steps taken to secure the vehicle, your level of cooperation, whether the fabric of the vehicle had been maintained to deter illicit entry, etc, etc.
I think we should definitely ban Bitcoin, used only by terrorists and paedos and not by normal fun-loving consumers of mass-commercialised entertainment. While we're at it, we should ban the Internet and mobile phones, as apparently paedos have been known to use these means of communication too.
However, if you really enjoy spying on strangers in various states of undress and arousal in the privacy of their own homes, may I suggest applying for a job at GCHQ?
Say you want to pay Mr Porno for some kiddie-pix with Bitcoin. Mr Porno generates a unique long sequence of characters (an address) in his Bitcoin Wallet. He tells you to transfer money from your wallet to that address.
It's not an address in the sense that it points to a particular computer or even email address. It's simply a long sequence of numbers and letters. Mr Porno could have generated it from any computer in the world. The address contains nothing that relates to Mr Porno's location, his current ISP, or his IP address.
You tell your Bitcoin wallet that this address now contains the Bitcoins you are paying. They disappear from your wallet, and that information goes winging its way across the Bitcoin network where every Bitcoin client running gets a copy of it and adds it to its database.
For everyone else it's just a bit of data that increases the size of the database on their hard drive a teeny bit. But when the Bitcoin client that has that address in its wallet receives the update, bells ring and the wallet is updated with those Bitcoins. The money has been transferred.
Everyone knows what address it was paid to (because everyone gets a copy of the data). But nobody knows what computer it went to, because it's the actual wallet that counts. If Mr Porno carries his wallet around on a USB stick, he could be logged onto any computer in the world with a Bitcoin client, and his wallet will be updated with the coins when the transaction is recieved. If he comes over to my house and plugs his USB stick into my PC and then copies the wallet to my Bitcoin client, the Bitcoins will end up in his wallet.
None of this can be tracked because client location is meaningless. It's about as impossible to track down as an individual using a pay-once disposible mobile phone. And now you should be realising why Bitcoin a) keeps increasing in value, b) will continue to increase in value and c) never die.
Thanks for the response. (And no thanks to the person who modded me down for asking a question).
It still seems precarious to me. Essentially it seems to depend on no person or point in the chain being compromised. If they link one wallet to dealing in child porn, presumably they can get a list of all the other wallets that have been linked to it by either giving or receiving money. At that point, they've got a whole web of wallets to investigate and not only could they shut these down, they can track down where one or more of those wallets have transferred Bitcoins to a service that exchanges them for money, they can find other dealers in child porn who consumers have paid for with the same wallet as they purchased elsewhere. And the moment someone is seized for child porn and the investigate the hard drive (or the USB stick), they'll find a matching wallet and that's another end point they can start investigating from.
Essentially, it appears to be a very public web of transfers with the key point of security being that you can't pin any of the nexi in that web to real world locations or people. But actually when you start from the other end (a few locations or people that you have found), that web presents you with a very clear view of how extensive a network is, how much trading and money is involved and helps you pin down where it's been changed to real money. It's valuable information nonetheless which helps any investigation.
All of which is great. I want people to track down child porn and eliminate it. I just don't see that this is a silver bullet to protect paedophiles as some seem to think. Cash would be far better in most ways so long as people trust each other to honour a deal after payment - which is presumably the same as with Bitcoins - you can't cancel a payment in Bitcoins like you can with a credit card.
>>"And now you should be realising why Bitcoin a) keeps increasing in value, b) will continue to increase in value and c) never die."
I really don't think most people involved in Bitcoin are paedophiles nor that the rise in Bitcoin purchase price is because of its use in trading child porn. Or even criminal goods of other kinds. You can buy drugs in any Western city fairly easily with traditional money. Most of the rise in purchase price of bitcoins is because people see it rising and think it will continue to rise and so speculate. I find your suggestions that the sudden rise in Bitcoins is because of people trading in child porn offensive to most people who use it / mine it. You also sound like a real zealot with things like "and that's why it will never die", to be honest. I think only a zealot would have started using child porn dealing as an argument for Bitcoins being valuable.
@h4rmn0y
I'm sorry if I offended you with my (alleged) connection between the price rise and paedophilia. That's not what I intended to say at all, which is the problem with writing on a forum and not discussing face to face. On the contrary in my opinion the recent boom in Bitcoin value is solely down to the Cryptolocker ransomware that made it's first appearance September last year.
The point I was trying to make is that Bitcoin's underlying anonymity makes it one of the best untrackable ways of moving money around so far. This makes it incredibly attractive to those involved in criminal activities - which of course includes (but is not limited do) paedophiles. The criminal fraternity is using it at the moment, has been for some time, and will continue to, not for it's speculative value, but for payment of services.
If the Dollar value of Bitcoin plummets tomorrow and never comes back, then miners and speculators will lose the millions they thought they were going to get, and I believe Bitcoin as a commodity will die. But Bitcoin as a transaction medium will still exist and (once the price stabilises, no matter how low) will be used again. If you think about it, it doesn't matter if 1BTC is worth $600 or less than a tenth of a cent, so long as the price is stable, you can pay people with it. You just pay them with more coin. But since there's 12M in circulation at present that's not a problem. In fact the more stable the price is, the more it will be used by those involved in criminal activities. If governments ever get round to banning its legitimate usage, then the only people left using it will be criminals, because although you may be able to stop people openly dealing in Bitcoin you can't stop use of the Bitcoin network or shady individuals converting BTC to and from cash (which was the point of my "suitcase" comment earlier).
But I'm not a zealot. I'm not even a miner. Although I did buy 0.05 BTC for £27 a month ago, that was the first time I ever created a "wallet" or installed any Bitcoin software, and I've not bought any more since (and don't intend to). But my job does involve me in IT processes and the way people interact with them, and as such I find Bitcoin very interesting indeed, both from an IT aspect and a social one. So know thine enemy.
I'm also a 52-year old married man with two children under the age of 18, and 3 grandchildren, so I honestly don't have sympathy for paedophiles.
>>"I'm sorry if I offended you with my (alleged) connection between the price rise and paedophilia. That's not what I intended to say at all, which is the problem with writing on a forum and not discussing face to face. On the contrary in my opinion the recent boom in Bitcoin value is solely down to the Cryptolocker ransomware that made it's first appearance September last year."
I think I picked up the wrong emphasis from your post. I hope you can see how I did that, but my apologies for having a go at you. Thanks for the level and interesting reply.
I find Bitcoin very interesting, but mainly from a technical and economic point of view. I've encountered some very aggressive proponents of Bitcoin recently and they may have primed me to expect it. I think it's very likely we will see something along the lines of Bitcoin long-term. I think on balance of probabilities it wont be Bitcoin but something that is along similar lines. It most likely will be a number of them. But I also expect a lot of those currently interested in it to go away when it loses its value as a speculative investment and also as governments put in place stricter measures to deal with it and regulate it. Which will be good for the currency, but bad for those that view it as sticking it to authority.
Sort of. Bitcoin transactions are public, but the identities behind the accounts are not, and it's trivial to create a new account. That means it is possible to identify people, but takes a little detective work.
eg: You buy a file from some dodgy internet guy. All anyone sees is that address A paid address B. Who are those addresses? Not obvious. But an investigator could keep tracing, and determine that address B in turn paid address C, and address C paid address D... and that address D got a lot of payments, so it's probably important. A little asking-around finds that D is the holding pool for an exchange that buys and sells bitcoins for dollars, and they can then confirm that C was one of their incoming disposeable addresses, and that the person who sent them bitcoins via C from B was doing so in exchange for dollars at a known paypal address.
There's a lot of information you can get hold of, especially if you know enough about data mining and crawling to gather up a pool or known addresses to use as reference points.
Where does it say that?
Go back, reread, comprehend.
What they are saying is they have switched to using legit sites & insisting on bitcoin payment, where as they have normally used hacked porn sites (the preferred method). After all, your'e less likely to say, I was visiting www.gaysexslavebitcheswithdonkeyanddolphins.com and was redirected to kiddie porn, than I was visting wwwfluffykittenresuce.co.uk and was redirected.
As usual when the technical bar is raised less tech savvy criminals are weaned out and we are left with the more competent criminals.
And as the criminals are networked, we used to catch those tech savvy criminals through the incopetent ones. Now there's less chance of catching the smut peddlers.
Lets name this the "Cameron effect". Stricter control on the web means safer commerce for criminals.
It's okay : just so long as the government are seen to be doing something, it'll be alright. It doesn't actually matter if the things they do make matters worse. After all, the government and its officials will always judge success by 'activity' rather than 'results'. Your average voter (which is all they are interested in) isn't going to understand the subtleties of this, as long as 'Dave' is seen to be taking some kind of measures against pronographers and nonces, they'll vote for him. The fact that it's going to do absolutely no good whatsoever - irrelevant. This situation was totally and completely predictable. As a wise person once said "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers..."
When they tried to block access to dodgy film downloads, it just meant the chavs on the local estate learnt about proxies.
So it is not surprising that methods to bypass the filters have already been found for this kind of truly dodgy stuff. The more laws are made, the more the criminals get inventive with their solutions, and the only person to suffer are the innocent home users.
And "borrowing" space from another website is certainly not new. The first one I saw was in the 1990s at a company I worked at. The FTP server got hijacked to host warez over the Xmas holiday. Too many websites are maintained by an amateur who does not realise he needs to keep up to date on his site and keep an eye on it. And, of course, he has a stupidly simple password "because there is nothing important on the website!!". I have seen sites of clients and others hacked in a silent way to install extra files. Usually this kind of thing only gets flagged up when download quotas suddenly change. The worst one is when on shared hosting you find your site has been compromised due to a security issue with someone else's site...
These really aren't decent filters are they? Basically they seem to hinge on a URL black list maintained by a human agency. Given that this is as underground an activity as you will find on the internet (except maybe http://ncm.org.uk) it stands to reason that URLs and IP addresses will change as fast as a very fast thing indeed. As such the black list will be out of date as soon before it even makes it onto the servers.
These filters are much more about being seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something. Which most of the time seems to be the major job of government these days.
So how long will it be before we read about 'phishing' and other malicious emails circulating where the links start pointing to these 'hidden' caches of material and payload downloads to your machine. Followed by another to the hapless/hopeless victims asking for payment to remove.
Or worse, no warning. You just find out if you need to have your machine services for any reason.
Trying to convince police authorities that you were the victim of a scam could be a problem.
Have they only just discovered that naughty people have been hacking small business websites to host their junk? e.g. viagra ads etc. They've been doing it for years - just look at the links in any spam e-mail. Half the time they go to a deep directory in www.my-little-dog-groomers.de or similar.
And interestingly about half of the hacked sites seem to be running wordpress...
"We fought a single issue saying that we need to inconvenience everyone with default filtering for all, having achieved this aim we have found that it has no effect whatsoever on CP, and so we still need funding. In fact, we need some more funding, as the bad guys are getting sneakier"
Well it's obvious to me that the big corporations & therefore their shill's who work in government and the media have a problem with Bitcoin and will seek to destroy it, and not really about peado's
In this surveillance state that we are living in, they will be asking ISP's to block bitcoin next
everything is ok, folk's keep spending your money in the shops it's good for the economy
Kind of blatant but how many will even bother to look at this objectively once confronted with the gist of "child porn bad"
Obviously the use of "blah blah whatever we dont like is funding terrorism/drug trafficking/human slavery" has started to wear off it seems and now the primo number one excuse to be wheeled out to demonise whatever the goverment and their employers the ultra rich dont like or cant control
And by stressing that its a "foundation" so that people wont guess at it following government requests and directives is about as done to death as ham salad sandwiches
I am sure nobody promised the IWF more resources. government support or wider powers if they demonised bitcoin and linked it to paedophiles planting the seed of derision and opening the way for (a steady) path towards government control of or banishment of bitcoin
I suspect that next they will be linking it to that top secret sub internet thingy whos name I can never remember if they havent already once they feel that public opinion is sufficiently negative towards bitcoin and then
one day
eventually
we will be faced with such gems as
"A recent government study has found that its mostly terorists and anarchists that make use of democratic elections in western coutries"
"A recent "independant" study has found that how much a man drinks is directky proportionate to the likelyhood he is gay, similar links have also been found to the faster he drives the more likely he is to be gay and that extreme sports interests are usually a way of hiding subconcious homosexual urges"
I think the real story here is
"Government active seeks ways to eradicate bitcoin"
or......
"Child sex abuse image peddlers dodge UK banking and credit card charges"
If the pervs were using credit cards or normal money would that be a story? Would it even be worth mentioning as we could hardly ban credit cards or ban real money
Is the real problem here not that the crims are paedos but that they are exchanging money without banks and the owners of said banks getting their cut
After all we KNOW that banks are happy to fund terrorists, revolutionaries, the nazis (even jewish banks), criminals of all types and flavours, human slavers, drug traffickers, corrupt governments, governments actively perpetrating genocide etc etc
So I can understand that they must feel slighted by the idea that paedos dont ALSO want to bank with them and give them a cut of their earnings
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