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Comment by kauffj | Hacker News Reader

> On two different occasions I contacted the FBI about the project and offered to provide full sets of data that I had collected.

The FBI twice rejecting a set of information that could have reasonably led to the arrest of several pedophiles seems like a big mistake.

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Personally I'm glad some random guy can't hand off a whole bunch of IPs to the FBI and tell them they're all pedophiles. I'm sure it would cost thousands of dollars to sift through the data too, and would be pretty useless seeing as the guy wasn't hosting child porn.

Besides, taking down these pedophiles might be "fun" to some people, but if you really want to help children you need to go after the people producing/hosting child pornography.

> In this particularly disturbing case, a father of three hints that he is willing to share pictures of his children.

> npt@hotmail.com: hi im a married dad of 3, i prefer girls from pt to jb. I’m looking forward to joining in and sharing in the community

A little later in the article there is an entire section devoted to his findings that many visitors of the site were predators seeking to do more than look at photographs. In addition,

> Many visitors offered photos from their “private collection” as a means to bribe me for entrance to the website. They took care to note that the material they were offering me was original.

Isn't that pretty much what the author was doing? Offering child porn to people on tor? How do we know the people contacting him weren't trying to honeypot him?

> None of the websites contained any illegal content. Since I am not a legal authority (nor an expert in the law), I had to scale back the content. No illegal pictures nor files existed on any of the sites. In fact, each site contained exactly one image – a decorative background image to give the site a bit of flair (hidden service sites are notoriously lean). None of the honeypot sites explicitly offered to provide illegal content and instead, served to lure the user in by a vague promise of what may be found behind the locked door. Admittedly, this was a huge disadvantage over a FBI-driven honeypot and likely the reason why many visitors did not register and quickly moved on after landing on the home page.

Later on he explains,

> Scans on the server dropped and some of the users who opted to run the software appeared to be government or private researchers.

If he wasn't explicitly offering child porn then how can he assume people who visited his honey pot were looking for child porn if they didn't explicitly state it? Sure the guy offering pictures seems like a pedophile, but what about the others?

More than one offered pictures and in fact, according to other sources, seems to be a frequent method for pedos to prove to the hidden service operator that they are indeed "legit".

you wasted valuable time and resources of law enforcement. good on you

"but if you really want to help children you need to go after the people producing/hosting child pornography."

Who says the people viewing it aren't abusing children?

Who says the people commenting on HN aren't abusing children?

"full sets of data" seem to include Tor exit node IP addresses (public information that you can obtain from the Tor directory service) and a few possible real IP addresses—but not ones he can directly tie to any actual CP. As he says, "Admittedly, after introducing the security scanner, traffic patterns changed. Scans on the server dropped and some of the users who opted to run the software appeared to be government or private researchers. Most visitors were reluctant to run the security scanner." Later he says that between 4 and 7 percent of his registered users ran the scanner. He never says how many registered users he had, and never said how many uploaded child porn or could be directly connected to it (and how many of those ran the scanner)

I'm not surprised the FBI turned him down.

I have already shut down the VM but I believe there were around 550-650 registered users in 14 days. Around 40-60 new registrations per day. Total registrations for counterfeiting+drugs sites: 8. Since the article went out, someone pointed out to me that one popular pedo .onion site has 90,000 registered users.

He said he CONTACTED the FBI twice, but does it actually say if he was rejected or simply ignored?

If a person contacts the FBI to say they have evidence of terrorism, pedophilia or money laundering, the first thing that happens is that the snitch gets put on the watch list and gets a wiretap.

source?

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