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 https://www.vg.no/spesial/2017/undercover-darkweb/?lang=en
Breaking the dark net: why the police share abuse pics to save children
She expresses concern upon learning that the police themselves did share child sexual abuse images. "I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong for them to commit criminal acts during undercover operations. My concern is not about them breaking the law. My concern is whether we get enough information about the balance in what they do. If the site is used to facilitate the actual abuse of children and the police continue to run it, I question their ability to strike a balance", she adds.
Australian feds took control of by far the biggest CP sharing forum on darkweb history, and ran it for longer than its original operators did, even posting CP themselves in doing so.
Some other choice quotes (it's a long article):
>While the young Canadian unsuccessfully tried to find help to control the desires he felt, the American kept them shut inside. He was afraid any doctor, psychologist or counsellor he consulted would have to report him if he admitted being sexually attracted to children.
>According to Task Force Argos, the number of actual people was far smaller, probably in the tens of thousands. Roughly 100 of them were known as “producers”, sexual predators who film children being raped and share the videos in online forums.
>During a so-called “controlled operation” we get permission from a judge to act in ways that normally would have been considered illegal. We are given the right to commit certain criminal actions and we are exempted from prosecution because we are investigating specific crimes, explains Griffiths.
>– It is worrying if the police “outsource” investigations to a country where police have freer rein, at least if it’s done intentionally and systematically. But the legal picture is unclear.
>ON JANUARY 3RD, 2017, Task Force Argos published WarHead’s monthly update. [...] The message was concluded with: «I hope that some of you were able to give a special present to the little ones in your lives, and spend some time with them. It’s a great time of year to snuggle up near a fire, and make some memories.» He ended the update message, as required, with two child abuse images. "Could this message be seen as encouraging sexual abuse?" VG ask. "Well, there’s no ... I mean, you know", says Griffiths. "Things can be read between the lines, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re encouraging anything. We may have talked about sexual abuse in a number of different forums and platforms, but we would never encourage abuse."
>It sounds like the police tell one story about how damaging the images are when others share them, and another story when the police share them. That’s a kind of hypocrisy I really don’t like. But this sheds light on the argument that any and all sharing of such an image is abuse. If the police say they’re only sharing images that have been shared before, it means the police do not think all sharing is harmful, says Hessick.
>"Isn’t there a risk that people downloading such images will develop into abusers?" "Abusers are abusers. People who have a desire to abuse children will abuse children no matter what", Rouse says.
>On 25 October 2016, two weeks after Argos took over the site, an unidentified user created a discussion thread featuring images of an eight-year-old girl being raped. By August of this year, the post had been viewed 770,617 times – all while the police were running the website.
>Canadian police say they have identified and saved “a dozen” children and referred some 100 cases to other countries. Task Force Argos The Argos Task Force itself declined to provide numbers to VG. "The media tends to use such figures as “weapons” against us and our colleagues around the world, and we don’t want that", Griffiths tells VG. Also uncertain is the total number of children identified and rescued. Professor Hessick wonders about the missing numbers. "If they conduct investigation without even checking if the people have been arrested, it’s hard for Argos to argue that such police operations are necessary. I worry the police apparently think they don’t need to justify an operation like this", she says. |