Bitcoin child abuse image pervs will be hunted down by the IWF Blockchain forensics are being harnessed in an effort to clamp down on the trade in images of child sex abuse on the dark web. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is teaming up with Elliptic, a UK blockchain intelligence start-up, in a bid to track individuals who use Bitcoin to pay for images of child sex abuse. The IWF is …
...and this is only someone's opinion of what child porn is which may well be quite different from our opinions.
I'm sure they're right a lot of the time but I'm also pretty sure that their definition of child porn has slipped over time and while it includes what most of us would classify as child porn, it also includes things which many of us would consider harmless.
(as opposed to the generally lawful kind)
I remain perplexed by the reportedly large number of sites that will take credit card payments for this from the general public. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the card companies to, in conjunction with law enforcement, make a couple of test purchases, see to which merchant account the money goes and then shut this off, perhaps also warning the bank/reseller of card services to that "client" that if they don't buck up on their KYC then they will lose access to the legitimate sales of card services altogether.
Once you start to sanction one or two financial institutions, everyone else falls into line pretty quickly.
Yes, there will always be a few that will continue, or take alternative payments like bitcoin (this article notwithstanding) or payment via apps but I would expect most of the public would find that too much hassle, or risky and simply not bother. If you cut off the profits to those in the viler end of the trade, they'll move on to something else, hopefully less damaging to victims.
According to the MPAA, the film industry lost $18.2billion from piracy in 2005. How much would the child pornography industry lose if we let the pirates loose on them?
The MPAA figure assumes that the pirates' clients would otherwise have paid (and ignores those who download "unofficial content" but then buy the authentic Blu-Ray, vinyl etc.) and everyone else thinks that's silly. Are you proposing extending the sicko pervs' audience by introducing a class of casual paedos who watch but don't pay? I'm not sure that's the desired effect.
The proposed effect is that nobody pays and there is no financial incentive to harm children. I would like to hear a reason this cannot work that does not depend on the Shirky principle.
1) Any number from the MPAA is pretty well guaranteed to be made up; overinflated; or based upon assumptions that are a vat of steaming donkey piss. Or all three.
2) "Letting the pirates at them" would be enlarging the audience and creating demand. So apart from the possibility of some of those pirates joining the dark side; who would they be pirating for? Also if you increase the audience -which is the exact opposite of desirable- you'd also be allowing for other financial models like advertising and so on.
...also in your assumptions seems to be a bit of misapprehension as to what pirates are and do. Mostly they just strip any DRM; possibly repackage (like stripping out all the trailers and crap ads for films); and then redistribute using other channels. You still need to get hold of the source and most pirates would raze the server to the ground and/or throw what's left to the FBI if they found the source.
So pirates being pirates wouldn't help; as their usual schtick is to make stuff available. Pirates being technically-knowledgeable vengeful bastards would be more useful; except that it's too risky these days because you can risk your IP popping up on a naughty list, plus there is a risk of compromising material ending up on your computer.
Using the MPAA figures was a poor choice because it was distraction from my point. Piracy does cost the film/music industry money, but the amount it costs is widely contested. Try before you buy recovers some of the losses, and generates sales that would otherwise never have happened.
The porn industry had to find a balance between making the free stuff interesting enough to generate a sale, but tame enough that potential customers were not prematurely satisfied. Judging by the ease with which Prenda picked up customers (before becoming content producers themselves), try before you buy was not a profitable business model for pornographers. These days, it looks like profiting from porn requires ripping off other people's content to keep the costs down and using advertising or malware for the revenue stream. We already have laws to keep advertising revenue away from child pornography.
I am not convinced availability would create demand. Conversion therapy has proved ineffective, and I have yet to hear about a single IWF employee becoming a paedo. I believe Clockwork Orange style enforced viewing of hard core child pornography would mostly cause selective amnesia - subjects would have difficulty remembering arguments against the death penalty. There is evidence that internet porn reduces rape.
Cancelling copyright for hard core child porn would not have an obvious effect on the worst pervs in it for the act itself and exchanging videos on the dark net. Tracing bitcoin transactions wont effect that either.
We currently have draconian laws criminalising teens for sexting each other. People can get into trouble because they cannot prevent receiving an unsolicited picture by email.
I would like all the alternatives considered, their pros and cons discussed, and _where_practical_, tested and revised to prevent abuse before becoming law. Simple bans have often proved ineffective.
I think you're on the wrong track here because piracy is basically making things available through alternate channels. Even if you don't think increased availability would create demand; I'd have to argue with you because I believe that a small but significant number of people would be drawn in. A wider audience would definitely appear to be increased demand from the point of the producers and that's the exact opposite of what we want to happen:
- Whatever their motives for producing, an increased audience would be an incentive to produce more leading to more children being abused.
- It would lead to new possibilities, like advertising-funding (and anyone producing kiddie porn isn't going to give a stuff about advertising rules).
- You'd be increasing the size of the haystack, making the active predators harder to find
- It would work towards normalising kiddie porn which -again- is the exact opposite of what we want to happen. Which in turn is likely to encourage producers to produce worse and more perverted stuff in order to stand out.
All this, though, is assuming you could get pirates to go along; which I very much doubt you could. Piracy is also often not about the money...it's bragging rights; sticking it to the man; and indulging in a shared interest like films, books, games, music, whatever. Even if you could get this idea to fly -which you almost certainly couldn't- it would have the opposite effect of that intended.
A better idea would be to encourage hacking groups to collect evidence; but you'd have to offer some sort of time-limited amnesty for the duration of the hunt to temporarily allow them to view illegal images. You'd also have to offer some sort of bomb-proof system whereby said hackers could turn over the information without compromising themselves and their hacking activities. In a world where just the accusation of child molesting is going to totally wreck the life of the accusee whether it's true or not; people with the skills and who would be up for helping are currently going to "nope" away because it's too risky.
"Whatever their motives for producing, an increased audience would be an incentive to produce more leading to more children being abused."
Not necessarily. Some pedos KNOW it's wrong but can't help themselves (it's like an psychological addiction to them; if they don't appease it, they go nuts), which is why they tend to keep to very closed circles of like minds and only engage in strict tit-for-tat exchange. In this case, they're only motivated to produce more stuff to keep up with their buddies and will limit their content because their circle is closed in any event. Plus for some, once they commit, it eases the craving for a while, so there's no rush to keep doing it.
"According to the MPAA, the film industry lost $18.2billion from piracy in 2005. How much would the child pornography industry lose if we let the pirates loose on them?"
There are those in the industry who do it for its own sake, usually for psychological reasons. For them, money is secondary to the act itself and therefore would not act as much of a deterrent. Indeed, some of the most salacious content tends to be kept in closed-circle exchange-only darknets: no money changing hands.
On some level you have a good point, there is a definite disconnect between the logic used with regard to child pornography and any other type of media. But as far a s solution, even a non-serious one, I think you're missing a key piece of information. Child pornography is already being pirated extensively1. And to a certain extent, existing laws encourage this.2
1In a substantial number of "guy arrested for naughty pictures" stories, it turns out that the pictures were acquired through peer-to-peer file sharing, indicating that the content was almost certainly not payed for.
2Despite the above, paying for it is even more risky, due to the money-trail. And child pornography already effectively has no copyright protection, since bringing a lawsuit would result in the producer going to jail.
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It is a little harder with Bitcoin. But eventually, the BTC owner has to convert the Unreal into the Real-- the low hanging fruits (the ones who convert to Real quickly) can be caught before BTC fragmentation causes the trail to chill out. Thus the involvement of Exchanges, which can be pressured by the plods into revealing who is behind the curtain.
Of the 68000 URLs, how many are actually police stings?
Yeah, they're mostly police sting sites. And men are evolutionary hard-wired to find 13-18-year old girls attractive, it's usually an exercise in political power and sensationalism - not a legitimate cause. I'm sure that some real creeps get caught. But most of them are websites run by cops, popping up in ads and clicked on by people who are not really guilty of anything but being human.
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I wonder if one of these sick fscks embedded a child porn image into the block chain itself. It could be done I believe and would make all the fools out there with the full block chain (and many partials) on their computer have a copy. BTC is grand (until 2020 when the 1.1 million coin flood will make each BTC worth about as much as an Argentina peso).
So what if they do? If I sent you an email that had a PDF attachment that included an undisplayed encrypted JPEG child porn you would "have" child porn on your computer, but if you don't know its there or how to access it, so what?
The problem wouldn't be one guy doing it for one image, it would be a bunch of them deciding to outsource their distribution problem by embedding many many images in the blockchain. They only need tell each other where it is and how to decrypt it, which they could also do via bitcoin (especially if money is changing hands) or via other methods like embedding the location/key info in spam emails. The Message ID header would be perfect for this.
Who knows, maybe this is already happening and the authorities just haven't caught on yet. As always it is the dumbest criminals who are caught, the smartest ones always stay ahead. If this was being done, kiss bitcoin goodbye - it already has an association with criminal activity in many minds and something like this certainly wouldn't help. Anyone who wanted to ban it would have the perfect excuse "think of the children!"
I was under the impression that Bitcoin can't be tracked. Presumably they use some pretty complex data analysis to track people down? And they say this provides 'actionable evidence'. Just how are they going to explain all this to a jury clearly enough for a conviction?
Or are they just going to say "The computer says he's guilty so that's it"? Like in Operation Ore. And in that case how many years and ruined lives before they admit to the bugs in the analysis (that they'd known about for ages but kept quiet)?
Rather problematic either way.
"I was under the impression that Bitcoin can't be tracked. "
The Bitcoin blockchain is a public distributed ledger, every single transaction is in full public view. The problem is associating a Bitcoin address with a physical person (you can have as many you want, people even generate a new one per transaction) .
I suspect what they are doing here is monitoring transactions until they hit an exchange (to convert into other currency), at which point they will pressure the exchange for information on their client. Likewise anyone who buys bitcoins which are then used to buy said nasty, they can trace back to the exchange that sold the coins, and likewise ask for details.
This of course, only works if the crims actually exchange the Bitcoins in a jurisdiction that is cooperative, and don't make use of tumblers and other such stuff to hide the trail.
Where are the cases of people making money from child abuse images?
Look at the darknet take-downs that have taken place in the last few years. Drug markets are processing billions in bitcoin, this is widely reported. Can you find any mention of bitcoin profits being seized from a pedo site owner?
This is a myth being perpetrated by the IWF to justify their activities which ultimately harm the freedom of everybody. This is the same body that blocked the entire UK's access to wikipedia over 1 image of a 11yo girl standing naked, and only got reversed because of pubic outcry. This is the same body that cause UK ISP's to block more of the internet than the famed 'great firewall of China'.
Bitcoin is obviously a huge threat to the establishment, instilling fear in the general public that its core principle of anonymity is broken and you will go to prison for using it is an attempt to undermine confidence in the currency, and what better veil to sell it under than to "save the children".
The basic idea is a reasonable one, but I worry that this will result in innocent people being accused, much like credit card records did in Operation Ore. Suppose I exchange cash for bitcoin, and then use it to buy a toaster from someone who in turn uses it to buy child pornography. Or conversely profits from child pornography (assuming such really exist) find their way into my bitcoin tip jar—either incidentally or as a misdirection—and I cash that out. I'm not at all sure I trust the likes of IWF and their new friends to be able to figure out that I actually had nothing to do with the crime.
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