Is this ethical: police running a child abuse forum

[elysepopplewell]

Hi all,

I've been doing some reading on the www. today and wanted to hear your thoughts on this (and if the discussion is good I'll link it to HSC legal threads)..

Link to article is here and I suggest a read.

For just under a year (terminating September this year) the world's largest child porn (from hereon known as child abuse) forum was being run on the dark web by Australian police officers, in an effort with police officers from Canada, US, and Europe.

It was a website where users shared videos and photos of under age (read: non-consenting) people. The article goes into detail, but to summarise: the police obtained the passwords of the forum administrators, then impersonated them to gain the faith of the site's users. The site has now been terminated and several charges have been laid against users. So essentially, the police claimed the need to facilitate the site in order to gain enough evidence to prosecute. I'm sure you can imagine the international aspect of a site like this, so it was a huge project called Operation Artemis.

Ethical issue:
A mother of one of the children on the site said her child should not be used as bait, and if she is, she should be compensated. Admittedly, the thought of my child being on the site under police control, even if it ended in greater prosecution, makes me queasy. What the police officers did was legal, with police officers being given exemptions from typical laws regarding the facilitation of child abuse in order to prosecute crimes. The police officers weren't there for personal gain - projects in alignment with this one has lead to 1000 prosecutions and 500 children being identified and removed from this kind of abuse.

So, what do you think? As I said it makes me queasy, and I hope there's support for these officers to move on from the disturbing content that they've seen on a personal level.

Does anyone think the site should've been shut down as soon as it was overtaken, instead of prolonged and facilitated for nearly a year?

Edit: Not sure if I've stressed this enough - but I'm not here to criticise the movements of these officers. i'm genuinely interested in the way people ethically navigate this upon hearing about it, because it really left a mark on me and I thought about it for quite some time.

[Aaron]

The way I view it is really quite simple: If it wasn't going to happen on that specific site, it would happen somewhere else on a site that police don't have control of. We are never going to stop things like this happening, the complexity of the web & tech available now has ensured that.

If you look at it from this angle, there is actual action happening here (e.g. sick predators and paedophiles being jailed for their crimes using real evidence), as opposed to them posting and sharing on a site that no one in a law enforcement capacity can influence for good (albeit a very very small 'good').

Obviously if there was an alternative (e.g. immediate shutdown and prosecution of participating individuals), then that would be ideal. However.. it's never going to happen. One site goes down, another ten pop up.

[elysepopplewell]

The way I view it is really quite simple: If it wasn't going to happen on that specific site, it would happen somewhere else on a site that police don't have control of. We are never going to stop things like this happening, the complexity of the web & tech available now has ensured that.

If you look at it from this angle, there is actual action happening here (e.g. sick predators and paedophiles being jailed for their crimes using real evidence), as opposed to them posting and sharing on a site that no one in a law enforcement capacity can influence for good (albeit a very very small 'good').

Obviously if there was an alternative (e.g. immediate shutdown and prosecution of participating individuals), then that would be ideal. However.. it's never going to happen. One site goes down, another ten pop up.

Really interesting - and I agree. If you place yourself in the position of your own child being on the site, can you maintain the same stance? Or, if it were you as a child?

Personally, I'm trying to, and ideally I'd still see it the way you've placed it above, but I just cannot say with confidence I'd still be as pleased with the operation.

This is all personal reflection and probing of course, no pressure for *anyone* to answer.

[Aaron]

If you place yourself in the position of your own child being on the site, can you maintain the same stance? Or, if it were you as a child?

Of course not. I think if anyone was personally affected by something like this, it would change their mind. I work with kids on a daily basis and I feel sick just thinking about the fact that there are these types of sickos (I know, very loose language and I do apologise) out there.

However I can see why they have done what they did given it is extremely difficult to build up evidence for things that happen on the 'dark web'. The fact that it's so easy to hop on a VPN that you can spend a few bucks on to appear as if you're somewhere else in the world, whilst having all of your activity encrypted. Or something like Tor which bounces your connection around the world making it practically impossible to trace back.

I think another thing that needs to be considered (in addition to what I was speaking about above re: VPN's/country changing), is the laws in place which differ from country to country. For example, who is liable if a video/image is posted? The person posting? The facilitator (website/community owners etc)? Servers are physical and they are hosted in a certain country which may or may not hold the same beliefs or laws as a country like Australia. For e.g. if a server is hosted in Russia, is the content hosted bound by Russian law? Probably.

Just a thought from a tech point of view

[elysepopplewell]

Of course not. I think if anyone was personally affected by something like this, it would change their mind. I work with kids on a daily basis and I feel sick just thinking about the fact that there are these types of sickos (I know, very loose language and I do apologise) out there.

However I can see why they have done what they did given it is extremely difficult to build up evidence for things that happen on the 'dark web'. The fact that it's so easy to hop on a VPN that you can spend a few bucks on to appear as if you're somewhere else in the world, whilst having all of your activity encrypted. Or something like Tor which bounces your connection around the world making it practically impossible to trace back.

I think another thing that needs to be considered (in addition to what I was speaking about above re: VPN's/country changing), is the laws in place which differ from country to country. For example, who is liable if a video/image is posted? The person posting? The facilitator (website/community owners etc)? Servers are physical and they are hosted in a certain country which may or may not hold the same beliefs or laws as a country like Australia. For e.g. if a server is hosted in Russia, is the content hosted bound by Russian law? Probably.

Just a thought from a tech point of view

Thanks for your thoughts Aaron - very much aligns with my own!

[Russ]

When people ask questions about the underlying ethics of whether it's right to do something 'bad' to achieve something 'good', I usually look to examine the reasoning used. A good friend of mine likes the work of Kohlberg, who asked a lot of similar questions to evaluate those processes and might be interesting for anybody struggling with questions posed in this thread

In short

More detail

[Lumenoria]

Of course not. I think if anyone was personally affected by something like this, it would change their mind. I work with kids on a daily basis and I feel sick just thinking about the fact that there are these types of sickos (I know, very loose language and I do apologise) out there.

However I can see why they have done what they did given it is extremely difficult to build up evidence for things that happen on the 'dark web'. The fact that it's so easy to hop on a VPN that you can spend a few bucks on to appear as if you're somewhere else in the world, whilst having all of your activity encrypted. Or something like Tor which bounces your connection around the world making it practically impossible to trace back.

I think another thing that needs to be considered (in addition to what I was speaking about above re: VPN's/country changing), is the laws in place which differ from country to country. For example, who is liable if a video/image is posted? The person posting? The facilitator (website/community owners etc)? Servers are physical and they are hosted in a certain country which may or may not hold the same beliefs or laws as a country like Australia. For e.g. if a server is hosted in Russia, is the content hosted bound by Russian law? Probably.

Just a thought from a tech point of view

I AGREE so much

[elysepopplewell]

When people ask questions about the underlying ethics of whether it's right to do something 'bad' to achieve something 'good', I usually look to examine the reasoning used. A good friend of mine likes the work of Kohlberg, who asked a lot of similar questions to evaluate those processes and might be interesting for anybody struggling with questions posed in this thread

In short

More detail

Really really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for sharing those links!