Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites Child abusers are latching onto new methods to distribute paedophilic material online, according to an annual report by the Internet Watch Foundation. The study, published on Monday, reports that paedophiles are ‘disguising’ websites to appear as if they host only legitimate content. However, if an internet user follows a …
The fact that "ordinary online users had still found this content" suggests it wouldn't be simply typing in www.example.com/kiddieporn, rather more likely to be "visit pages in this order then click link X". This could use cookies, session IDs or simply dynamic pages based on Referrer: headers to set up the "breadcrumbs".
Reminds me of the port knocking security method in a way.
Or it was just a very long url which somehow got randomly uncovered (someone shared / typo'd?)
for example:
google.com/linux/users/x3+_34312123/kerpow
No one is going to deliberately type that in, and if nothing linked to it, no one would ever "guess" it either. They likely also look at the referer, and will only display if you came from a specific page previously. (Or none at all maybe?).
Eitherway, good job IWF, nice to see that someone seems to be able to keep up with the changes in technology.
Do give people a little credit, please.
If you enter www.something.com/smut into your address bar, you'll see only relatively innocuous smut.
To get the hard stuff, you have to arrive at something.com/smut via a link from www.evilredirection.com/nothingtoseehere/certainlynotkiddies, and that link in turn will only appear if you come to that page via a link from www.whyareyoulookingatme.net, which can only be accessed via paymenow.biz.
I googled for something arcane that was article of commerce and about half the hits were for homosexual paedophile sites. There was no hint of slease in what I was looking for, no double entendre.The local nick gave me the email addy to report it to, I did, and that was that. Easy.
John Edwards.
I stumble across this stuff from time to time, maybe three times in the last five years. Just put it on CEOP. There's no need to get hysterical or to overreact.
(Then find him not guilty in court so you can cut his filthy sicko balls off when he's got out of the pub after celebrating his acquital.)
I know this is not the case here, but it is easy to search for something quite innocent and then discover that your search term is an euphemism for something nasty.
From personal experience, I suggest that when searching for information on the atomic bombs used in WWII, it is not advisable to use their code names as the search term.
Well not simultaneously anyway.
"I know this is not the case here, but it is easy to search for something quite innocent and then discover that your search term is an euphemism for something nasty."
I wanted to know if latex paint would bond to the paint that'l already on my garage, so I though I'd do a search on latex bondage.
A UK news item I read recently told the sad tale of a community-minded man reporting a stumbled-on paedo site. His laptop has been confiscated and he is subject to an order that he is not allowed to be alone with his daughter. I expect he will be exonerated one day.
He might be able to afford a new laptop. The damage done to himself and his relationship with a little girl who is, somehow, supposed to understand why she suddenly needs protection from her harmless dad is unimaginable.
We need Social Services. Children need them. Could they please, though, take off the hobnail boots. I don't imagine that anyone who read that item would be inclined to do the right thing in these circumstances in the future.
That case was relatively local to me, and a week or two after I saw it reported, it was reported that the laptop had been returned and the restrictions ended.
The man, it seemed, might have had his laptop exploited by Malware, and used as a distribution site. I don't claim expertise on such things, but most of the news media are capable of getting computer stuff badly wrong. Are Social Services any better at understanding the story they have?
I should really post a :-) when I'm being ironic, I got loads of down arrows there. My humour was so dry, even I found it unfunny.
I've always thought social services was the way the government provided jobs to women and useless people who couldn't do anything but were middle class, and expected to feel valuable.
I'm surrounded by social workers from Lord Laming's constituency. He, or so I read, smashed down the doors of a man whose daughter complained on a custody weekend with dad, that her mother's new boyfriend was molesting her, or something like that, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Laming,_Baron_Laming and he's about as senior as it gets.
He's got a CBE, and honorary degree in "Science", and is in the house of lords, and the best thing that they can write about him on Wikipedia is that he wasn't jailed for incompetence.
It's about as funny as taking an expert in scottish history and making him chancellor of the exchequer.
I thought they'd been disguising their sites for quite some time, it is quite a logical step after all
also
However, if an internet user follows a particular digital path they will be able to view vile images and videos of children being sexually abused.
I don't know why, but this sentence seems very Daily Mail. I suspect it's the use of the word vile, we all know the images and the actions are vile so why include it? Probably being a little over picky here though.
That's not a Daily Mail style hysterical reaction. I genuinely don't understand how (a) anyone can want this stuff in the first place and (b) how they could be willing to harm a child to get it even if they do.
Is it a biological thing? Are some people simply wired to find something attractive that they shouldn't? Or is it some deep psychological complex? In either case, I don't even understand how such people can organize enough to network like this since they all ought to be so ashamed of their actions that raising their interests with other people should be impossible. I get the technical How of this story. But the Why is just beyond comprehension to me. (Thankfully, I suppose).
If you went back a few decades (or to the right country even today), you could replace 'peadophillia' with 'homosexuality' in that kind of sentiment.
I'm not quite sure what point I'm trying to make by that - certainly not to defend it in any way!
I think, or at least from my understanding, that what you are trying to say is that it is a matter of ethics.
Depending on the period in history and the country, homosexuality is/was considered as ethically unacceptable. Today it has changed and is now acceptable ( well at least in some countries).
Peadophillia, is considered as unacceptable almost everywhere and therefore we treat these people as criminals. If peadophillia were ever to become acceptable, just as homosexuality did, then they would no longer be treated as criminals because "ethically" the consensus has changed.
I could have used the right for women to vote, smoking, free speech. polygamy and a multitude of other values that have changed "ethically" throughout history.
Peadophiles are only as digusting, dangerous, ( add your own adjectives here) as society has defined them to <ul>currently<ul> be. When Society changes its mind then the adjectives no longer have any validity.
Ethically society evolves, whether it be in the right or wrong direction, although I can't really see the ethics of peadophilia being changed.
( Please do not mis-read the line about treating homosexuals as criminals, this is/was a fact not my personal thoughts).
Sexuality is not a straightforward topic and the debate about it's cause is far from over. I'm inclined to agree with people like Cynthia Nixon and Bert Archer. It's also a dangerous path we go down to state "born this way" because it can give sick people a justification and a place to hide.
When you consider such things as heterosexuality, bisexuality, bestiality, paraphilia, objectophilia, fetishism and pedophilia (not passing judgement on any of these) - it's probably better to avoid sexual classification altogether and just understand humans as sexual beings that get aroused by certain things - and are able to 'learn', 'adapt' and become addicted to these as they do with other behaviours.
Of course there is also genetic predisposition to consider - but as with something like smoking - you can be predisposed to smoking but not born a smoker. This is why personally I can consider a pedophile is 'sick' in need of psychological help; Also that it is a criminal choice to sexually abuse a child.
On Topic: Much as I dislike the existence of the IWF, it's good to see some good use coming from it and actual irl children getting saved, not just some guy going to jail over pics on his computer.
I know of at least 3 cases of child abuse (long past, children are now adults). I suspect the online presence is minute compared to the underlying problem. The problem with the internet (and print or any other media) is that it can turn isolated individuals' actions into an industry which feeds and supports those actions.
A pedophile who feels a particular way deserves support and help (and I don't mean given a sandbox of cartoon images with which to indulge themselves). A pedophile who acts out their impulses has to be sanctioned by society. Just as a kleptomaniac should be given support, but their stealing results in sanctions. Whatever the natural impulse, there is always a choice which can be made when it comes to actions and indulging an impulse makes it harder to resist next time. A woman deserves to be protected from denigration for being a woman, but I'm not sure that a love of clothes-shopping should be similarly protected.
Part of the problem is that certain lobbies have conflated "what I am" with "what I do," which makes it easy to transfer the legal protection given to people to the actions that they choose to undertake. That has gained them immense legal protection against people who might say mean things, but it has also made it easy to roll-up abhorrence for an action with hate for the individual performing the action. That might be handy for sound-bite politicians and hate-mongers, but it squashes rather than enhances reasoned debate about how to treat those who differ from the mainstream.
"You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals," is the frivolous, recent and prevailing attitude presented at school and re-enforced by popular media. Unfortunately, on the Discovery Channel, many of the young are killed and eaten.
Of course we all feel that pedophilia is wrong, but that's a dangerous basis for values. If I feel differently then my point of view is just as valid as yours. If two wrongs don't make a right, then 65m wrongs don't end up right either. Legal perhaps, but not right. Without a rational basis action, we end up swaying between trying to protect everything (actions, speech - ending up with tyrannical laws) and lynch-mobs out to impose "what all of us here think."
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> Child abuse can never be.
Whilst that is true, the definition of "child" - and therefore "child abuse" - does rather depend on where you are.
If you have sex with a 13-year old in the UK, that's child abuse. The same occurrence in Japan is probably lawful. In many European countries, sex with a 14-year old may be lawful.
In Saudi Arabia, there is no age of consent - the requirement is only that the couple be married, and there is no legal age limit on marriage.
So whilst it is right to get hot under the collar about children being abused, we do need to realise that *our* definition of same might not tally well with someone else's defnition.
Vic.
In the UK the legal age for Marriage was 12 for Girls and 14 for boys until 1929 when it was raised to 16. Other european countries were much later, even into the 1970s. Consent for Marriage could be given as early as 7.
Modern health provision has greatly extended lifespans, and we no longer need to breed at a young age, we can allow our children to have a much longer childhood, even in the early 20th century life expectancy was only around 30 years, though much higher if you made it past 21. For the gentry the need to ensure the heir and spare, and the daughters for alliances is no longer an issue.
Attitudes to child protection have changed markedly for the better over the last 100 years, childbirth, child and infant mortality has dropped in the western world. In fact I think, I'd raise the legal age of consent to 25, well perhaps not. There are still places in the world where, once a child has passed puberty they are considered an adult, thankfully not in the UK anymore.
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In the past it used to be easy. People who looked at child porn were bad and vile, because real children were usually abused for it's production. Now it is not so clear, as what is now termed a child 'abuse' image has changed over time. First it changed to children just in their underwear shot with a telephoto lenses, could be an 'abuse' image. Then it changed from meaning someone under 16 to someone under 18. So all those Sun readers looking at 16 year olds posing top-less like Lindsey Dawn Mackenzie, were now pados. Then it became any depiction of anyone who gave the 'impression' of being under 18, or in the presence of an under 18 year old, even if a stick drawing. So the 'abuse' in a child abuse image became contradiction since the 'child' may not be a child but over the age of consent and therefore able to consent to the activity or not even exist at all to be abused.
Also the usage for the term paedophilia changed. It used to mean an attraction to pre-pubescent children (the clinical definition), an attraction that is obviously hard to understand / empathise with. Now you can be a paedo if caught looking at a depiction of a 17 year old. That is not as hard to understand, as the age of consent laws say that it is not illegal or wrong to find people over the age of 16 attractive (though some may find it creepy if there is a large age difference), or do naughty stuff with them, just don't take pictures or make a drawing of what you did, as only then are you a paedo.
My point is that in the past it was hard to understand how paedophilia could exist as it was so deviant from normal behaviour, but today it is not so hard to understand as the term has been so perverted, from it's original meaning, to be something that is used to describe behaviour that is no all that deviant. Now the same term is used to describe someone having impure thoughts about a 1 year and also someone having a sexual picture of busty 17 year old. It has now completely lost it's disgust value (at least to me). Now when I see a report saying 'peado caught', I reserve my disgust until I find out what they were actually caught doing. I wish others would do the same.
The use of 'abuse' is rather emotive too. It suggests that all pedos get kicks from hurting or demeaning the children in sick ways, rather than simply that they are turned on by children . People get kicks abusing adults too, so I think there's a distinction to be made between those who want to own/control/dominate, and those who are attracted to, whoever the 'target' is.
For instance a picture of a naked child taken while they play in the paddling pool is not actually harming the child; the way pedos are stereotyped however suggests they only share photos of kids being raped/tortured/etc.
I think a lot of paedophiles were abused themselves as children, and are caught up into perpetuating what was visited on them. - "man hands on misery to man". They must also be some of the loneliest people on earth, which I suppose is part of the motivation for "sharing". The sad thing is that there is so much hysteria and revulsion over this topic that there is almost no sensible discussion of treatment, any treatment centres get shut down because no-one wants them in their neighbourhood and the whole thing gets driven underground.
All this fuss... and three children were rescued. How many were abused by members of their own family (with no intention of making photos)? How many were killed in car crashes? Or bullied to the extent where they try to take their own lives? Or shot in the head by crazed Islamic fundamentalists...or equally crazed American soldiers?
Don't get me wrong, castration is what online paedos deserve, however there are many things that harm children; why is it that we seem to be blind to some of them while running around like headless chickens over others?
This was touched upon in the book 'Freakonomics'. The actual risk of danger is overshadowed by the horror/disgust of the possible outcome e.g. John and Mary won't let their little girl play at her friend's Ashley's house, as Ashley's father has a gun and the girls might find it. and start playing with it. She can, however, go and play with Kaitlin, whose family has nice house with a pool. This is despite the fact that apparently, the pool is 500 times more likely to kill their daughter than the gun.
The headline "Little girl dies in pool accident" evokes commants of "What a shame" and feelings of sadness. "Little girls dies after playing with friend's father's gun" causes outrage and horror and a determination to get tough on guns.
Steve
Well to put it bluntly in the words of Ray Wyre.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/08/psychology.ukcrime
"Because they like it."
It's not your thing. It's not my thing. It is however *their* thing.
An observation that *could* be made of all of the paraphilas. The difference is its effect on the object of their "affection".
You feel disgust. They feel arousal (and *possibly* some disgust). You don't have to understand *why* but you do have to understand they don't see the world the way do.
It's easy to understand when you remember one thing. When they say "abuse vile abusers disguising vile abused abuse abuse abusive abuse depraved rape torture abuse abuse abuse victims abuse abused Exploitation abused abuse abusers" you have to mentally substitute the Virgin Killer album cover, i.e. the one picture we actually know fits their definition of a "child abuse image".
Personally, I don't find that picture horrifying. I don't find it erotic either, but I can understand why someone else might... especially if that darn broken glass wasn't here.
In all seriousness, I'm sure there are some genuinely horrifying pictures out there, but if I were to take a guess (which is all I can do, since IWF et al won't tell us and we can't legally look for ourselves) I was say the album cover is actually a far more typical of the average "indecent image of a child" (to use the actual legal term for a change) floating around out there.
In which case it makes perfect sense.
That of course would suggest the problem was at a pretty low level and IRL you'd be better off training local Social Services departments to improve their ability to spot "care givers" whose behavior is "inappropriate", as you'd probably find most child molesters are too busy molesting to make videos.
As the Americans realized *decades* ago *most* abuse is not by Mr Random Perve, but by someone the child sees regularly.
This is one of those problems that IT can help a *bit* but the root cause is *people*, not pictures.
I've been using the Internet heavily for the past 15 years or so. I use it as the source for pretty much all of the information I consume whether it's about gaming, work stuff, news, history - anything (yes, even porn) and I have never in my life come across these kind of sites, which "normal" users apparently "stumble" over all the time.
Maybe I need to get out my tinfoil hat but I really doubt whether they actually exist or whether it's all just made up by the likes of the IWF. If it was SO common then I'm sure I'd have stumbled across it in my time.
Also, why would a pedo put pictures and videos up on websites anyway? Surely they'd use forums or peer to peer? Setting up a website would imply they were trying to make money but from the description, the content was freely available so where is the motivation? It makes no sense.
The only plausible reason I can think of is that these sites are all actually honey pots set up by other agencies.
In any case I agree with other commentators here about there being a disproportionate focus on sexual abuse, to the extent that violence with no sexual motivation is increasingly seen as "ok". Very dangerous.
Also it seems like police only care about porn and not even those who commit the crimes. In any chavvy area you'll see 20-odd year old guys with 13 year old girlfriends but nothing gets done about them.
What a crazy world.
I dont want to sound harsh here - but that is a serious perception problem you have there.
a) there are some really sick people out there (and for what its worth I do think sick in the medical sense)
b) while I have no doubt that some people would share for free - there is also a significant amount who are looking to commercialise it (Op Ore in the UK was based on credit card transactions).
c) its really hard to actually understand just how many people are out there doing normal things, I have no rational way to visualise several billion people. When you operate at that scale randomness results in people ending up in all sorts of odd places purely by accident (its like being a permenant tourist). I dont think anyone is suggesting that all sites like this get found accidentally - but to suggest that none could be is very naive. More to the point, just because some people out of the billions do come accross this material you really cant generalise it to you should have (it reminds me of a kennel owner I once say complaining that they hadn't won the jackpot in a dog food competition - just because you buy 100x more of a product than an average person makes very little practical difference when looking at the total size. Sure a probability of 1x10^-8 is much better than 1x10^-10 but you still have a snowballs chance).
I've sat in CEOPs presentations and met some of the guys who work there, I also have kids. I've no idea if its the best or most economical way to catch peodophiles but I certainly dont want them to stop.
"...I've no idea if its the best or most economical way to catch peodophiles but I certainly dont want them to stop..."
Which is fine if CEOP focused exclusively on catching actual child abusers. But they don't: they typically go after the low-hanging fruit - the lonely men looking at pictures on the interweb, usually anonymously, almost never (by the IWF's own admission) on a commercial basis. Arresting some sad bloke at 5 in the morning for never going near an actual child, never paying for child abuse, but nevertheless ruining his life, ending his job, making him homeless, rendering him a social outcast and possibly even chucking him in jail seems to me a wholly disproportionate punishment for the crime of 'looking' - especially when one considers the pathetic nature of sentences handed out to, say, drunk drivers (you know, people who actually kill children).
CEOP might like to slap itself on the back for its 'safeguarding' (whatever that might be, apart from the latest catchword so very popular at child protection seminars), likewise the IWF, but in real terms they both know that 'commercial child porn' is all but a myth (and wholly non-existent in the UK). I still remember the infamous days of Operation Ore when one would regularly find self-important, wholly belligerent police offices quite prepared to publicly claim that the 'child porn industry' was worth $100's billions annually. Well? Was it? Or was that just a figment of some over-zealous copper's imagination?
There is, and always has been commercial child exploitation of one kind or another, and it has its presence on the Internet. As to its value, who knows, any more than a true value can be put on any criminal commercial activities. Big numbers are politically expedient to both the zealots and the ambitious, they grab headlines and budget, for a good cause, and this is normal behaviour for the politically astute, not just in public service, either. The people who consume illegal services provide the market, do you think criminals are not going to use the latest routes to market for their products when they can. Criminals traffic in illegal commodities, be it powder, person or media, and some do it interchangeably, if you are capable of selling drugs to primary school children, then I doubt there is much of an ethical leap to child abuse of other kinds.
CEOP has a tough job, and not all its results bare its name, they liaise with and provide intelligence to national and international forces, GMP et al. might kick down the door, but CEOP's always there or thereabouts as well.
Criminals of any kind are very secretive, and getting better at evading detection, just as the detectives are getting better at detecting.
> If it was SO common then I'm sure I'd have stumbled across it in my time.
I completely agree. After all, the Internet is very small and pretty static, and I have been using it for a while, so if I haven't seen anything on it myself, it's rational to infer that it's not there.
For example, I have never accidentally seen a picture of a koala on the internet, so it's perfectly safe to assume that there are no pictures of koalas on the internet.
Crap argument. If it's common, then statistically any heavy internet user should come across it at least once.
I also have never had this happen, whether doing legitimate searches or looking for (non child) nudity. Although maybe searching for porn is the least likely way to find this stuff since Google/police are monitoring that side of things so carefully?
...But this appears to be yet another IWF puff-piece; "look how much better your lives are since we started interfering".
Paedophilia is a problem that needs to be tackled, but is the IWF actually any cop at doing so? It has always struck me more as a sop to the Daily Fail than any serious attempt to prevent kiddie pron :-(
Vic.
I imagine that you, and by extension we, are not allowed to know the answer to that question as having to prove things in such a contentious areas would remove the ability of the various agencies to tell us how bad things are and how they make such a difference.
FTAOD I'm entirely against child abuse, but also not stupid enough to believe that it is ever possible to eliminate all such activities worldwide.
So, what these muppets are saying is that on what maybe quite legit web sites there are caches of illegal content held in paths not indexed by the main web site - and this is (shock horror!) a noo terror and they need more funding to combat it.
Get real - people have been hacking CMS' and stashing illegal content for at least a decade.
This is only making the news because the IWF want some extra funding. Its not news, its a funding application by a private firm from the public purse.
Well it's three better than zilch, but not a lot to show for all the effort that's been put in.
Btw, wtf is a "digital path"? Why can't this woman say what she means in plain English, or doesn't she know what she's talking about? I would take "accessed directly" to include any url whether or not the target page is linked in.
It might help if you understand that the phrase "child sexual abuse images" is the name given to all forms of what was previously known as "child pornography". The name was changed because it was felt that the term "pornography" legitimises it in some way. So CSA covers any image that contains a child and which a court or jury may find "indecent". This covers everything from fully clothed children posing provocatively to child rape.
I've acted as a prosecution witness in some of these cases. In each one, the worst images were what I would class as distasteful, but I doubt whether the children (i.e. anybody under the age of 18) were actually physically or mentally hurt. A large proportion of the images were originally (i.e. when taken by the photographer) quite innocent, e.g. from nudist beaches. And, even though there is adequate case law to show that an image must be indecent in and of itself (and not in the mind of the beholder), people are still being charged and prosecuted for viewing them.
I read that dumbed-to-the-extreme, and I think... referer tracking. Perhaps www.some-decoy.com/stuff/ returns a plain site on the history of box collecting, unless your referer header mentions pervyforum.com, in which case you get the smut. That way pervyforum.com can be just a few k in size and thus more easily avoid suspicion, and some-decoy.com can handle the high-bandwidth stuff. It still seems quite impractical though, so I think either I'm failing at the smarting-up or else the CEOP is simply lying. Again.
I think that's exactly what they meant, but it took me a while to figure that out, and I only really got it because I heard it in different terms elsewhere.
You know how there are all these porn portals nowadays? They have a bunch of thumbnails, but if you click one, 9 times out of 10 it takes you not to a larger image, but a whole new site with still more thumbnails. Someone claimed--I think it was on one of those advice sites--that they ended up seeing child porn that way. They panicked and closed the browser but then (very foolishly, IMHO) decided to go back and report it. But upon checking the last few sites in their history, they found nothing but legal porn. I'm guessing that's the kind of scenario we're talking about.
It seems like there would almost have to be a stable "inner-sanctum" to these sites in order to actually get paying customers. But since most people would turn back at first sight of child porn, I suppose that part wouldn't normally be reported, and it could be on whole different server.
Next time I stumble into porn portal land, I'm gonna have to check if the legal sites work that way too, it actually makes perfect sense that you'd show a different set of images to the guy coming from the milf site versus the bondage site, or whatever.
Many have tried to undermine the truth that there are out there an unknown number of serious and serial paedophiles whose obsession/compulsion leads them to use every possible avenue to achieve their aims. The campaign to relax guard has now born fruit in the Protection of Freedoms Bill Part V where, as it becomes law, we will discover that it will allow someone who is barred from working with children and whose barring is discretionary to work with children if they are supervised. The government says supervision is all, and denies the existence of 'secondary access' as relevant - that is, a child meets an adult in a regulated setting, that person is supervised so is not screened for being barred, and the child forms a bond of trust - that child and that adult can never meet outside that setting can they. Like my grandson, 5, today when he spotted a favourite teacher walking to the shops, ran ahead and held her hand. If I'd not been there ... now that teacher is checked under current rules, we know she is not barred. Thanks to 'spiked' and 'important children's authors' and others, and a government no more inclined to listen on this (including to Lord Bichard, Lady Butler Sloss, the NSPCC and a coalition of front-line bodies) than to anyone else on much else, we now will have a situation - the employer won't know, the other staff and volunteers won't know, parents won't know, the kids won't know but may be the first to find out the hard way. The person will go undetected even though the information is there and may never be revealed. Well done, 'spiked', 'important authors' and coalition yes-men.
Ahh, the VBS.
I worked on it, and agreed with it entirely. Admittedly, the more you sell it the more you believe it, but it wound the Daily Mail and Telegraph up a treat, which made everything worthwhile.
Also, one of the last decent projects that a contractor could earn a crust on without having to do any real work, or at least demonstrate a deliverable....
One of the things about VBS is that is was about the suitability of a person to work with children or vulnerable people in general. The IBB were responsible for actually barring a person, and you could be barred for more than abuse.
You also would have your registration suspended whilst you were investigated, and as many a teacher will tell you, the complaints are often spurious, and malicious. You could be barred because of your criminal record, which might be anything from theft to drug dealing, even to the level of cautions, which by the way also come up on CRB checks.
As paranoid granny proves, it wouldn't matter why someone was barred, she would assume the worst, and probably tell all her friends. It wasn't long before VBS went into development that someone was lynched because he was thought to be a pedophile.
The good thing about VBS was it was a once only application process, that then monitored your criminal activities, rather than CRB checks which are required for each organisation you work with, and need to be repeated regularly to the financial benefit of Capita. The bad thing was that once you were on it, you were on it, and it would have been very easy to widen the scope to cover just about any offence. Drink Driving conviction, sorry mate not having you teach my children, and so on, just a matter of a minor tweak to the law and the system.
VBS was never fully implemented, and then scrapped, but the whole CRB thing is up for renewal, it's probably Capita's to loose.
At risk of going off-topic slightly, the issue is with CRB's is down (mainly) to OFSTED and other mentals.
A CRB disclosure has never been either a certificate of good conduct, or 'clearance' to work with kids and oldies.
The sole purpose of a CRB disclosure is to allow employers/volunteer organisers considering whether or not to place someone in certain activities to have full sight of certain information to allow them to make an informed employment decision. That's it. You could have a string of motoring convictions as long as your arm, and there'd be nothing to stop an employer taking you on as a school minibus driver if they especially liked the cut of your gib.
Then ofsted went 'kin mental and deemed that every man and his dog needed a CRB check in some sort of half-arsed bid to enforce some sort of gold standard, despite the DSCF guidance at the time being crystal clear that they didn't. As one civil servant pointed out to me, "If we wanted to enforce a higher standard, we'd have put in the guidance!"
As I pointed out to many a journalist, the simplest way to cut down on CRB checks was for people to simply stop doing them.
Funnily enough, no one ever printed that bit...
(Full disclosure: I run a legit, non-CP TGP network.)
Far away from the safety of xHamster & RedTube, there are porn sites with a load of images, arranged in a grid. These images are a wall of links, commonly referred to as a "thumbnail gallery page" or "TGP". Before this practice started happening - about 2 years ago - it was an easy way for pervs to make a bit of cash. Set up TGP - add scraper to backend - get paid for referrals - profit. This is still how MOST of the TGP industry works. The overheads are nearly non existant, the work required is minimal, but the profit margins are enormous. 5000+ refs a day is not uncommon, and at £0.005 a referral, it adds up.
in order to access the illegal images the "legit" images need to be clicked in a certain order. This has nothing to do with the /path/to/file on the server - on the first visit, you will see normal, 18+HC images, but when you hit the "right" link sequence, the nature of the TGP's images changes, and I don't think I really need to tell you how.
On the technical side, most of these TGPs in which the sequence is common are on the same dedi or VPS so it's easy to correlate who has completed the sequence by examining the logs. The sequences are usually shared via known, trusted parties via Tormail / Countermail; however obviously they can be stumbled upon by accident.
Before I get called a "pedo sick fuck" - my niche is gerontophilia & chubbies; and I block these kinds of sites out of the network as soon as I'm informed of their practices.
From the BBC report on this @ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17510776
"Overall in 2011, the IWF said, the number of sites selling child abuse images seemed to have declined."
"The report revealed that the number of sites trying to make money out of selling images of abuse was in decline. In the past two years the IWF had identified 998 unique sources of material. In 2011, only 440 of these were active and no new "top level" source had been identified."
Of course what gets the major play / headlines? 'Pedos have found a new method to abuse your kids, run for the hills'. Total FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt). That same tactic used to get everyone in a constant state of fear about terrorists.
I caveat the decline could be that the material is being moved where somewhere the IWF cannot see it, like TOR etc. The the fact that this 'good news' get so little play is down to the IWF having to justify their reason for existence. If this material is decreasing, good news, they run the risk of getting less funding.
Shame on the register for falling for this obvious spin.....
e.g. A 15-year old boy and girl are sleeping with each other. Therefore they are both vile, filthy paedos. Then one has a birthday and is now 16. They are still a vile, filthy paedo but the other one suddenly isn't overnight. They then turn 16 are suddenly both are beautiful young lovers.
Of couse, if they lived in another country, then neither of then might have been paedos in the first place. Or they might still be.
Or if they were on a cruise ship crossing into national waters they might both have been transformed to/from vile, filthy paedos instantaneously.
See? Black and white.
getting arrested for seeing CP?
IIRC CEOP's budget is around £4m per year so that's about £1.14m per child saved (not all of them in the UK).
Meanwhile the average rate at which children die at their hands of their parents in England and Wales remains (according to an NSPCC report) around 1-2 a week, as it has done for 30 years. Not molested. Murdered.
Naturally CEOP/IWF funding will *never* be cut due to the media stoked resulting outcry ("Last line of defense against Internet pervs to be closed! No child will be safe online!" yadda yadda).
What is the *real* objective? Looking like you're doing something? Stopping people viewing this stuff? Saving the children whose abuse provides the raw material?
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