UK Child Abuse Investigators Resent Being Charged For ISP Data 241
nk497 writes "In the UK, ISPs are charging a child protection agency for access to IP user details they need for their investigations into online-related abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has paid out over £170,000 since 2006 on IP data requests related to child abuse cases, and expects to pay another £100,000 this year — enough to fund another two investigators. The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'" Surely it must cost the ISPs money to comply with such requests, no matter how official the quest.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
There is obviously a cost of some form to the ISP for providing this information, and it seems fair that this cost should be passed to the law enforcement organisations to be serviced out of their budget - this is what their budget is for. If it's not sufficient, they should lobby for it to be increased via taxation or other methods.
The telcos are already allowed to charge for providing background information - and this is as it should be. If information is made available freely and at the drop of a hat to third parties then it encourages misuse of that information and encourages scope creep to monitoring a wider population than you might originally have required.
Back to front logic (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs should not be cooperating (Score:5, Insightful)
The ISPs should not be cooperating with pseudo-government institutions who want to know the addresses of people who look at album art on Wikipedia.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like there is this imaginary fantasy that IT work costs nothing. They made 9400 requests last year, that's 36 a day or a request every 15 minutes. By my estimation, that could be the work of two people doing nothing but requests for officials. It sounds like to me that they are being charged fairly.
Indeed, innocents accused have ruined lives. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say A few pounds per person is a very small price to pay to ruin someone's life.
Many innocent people are accused and even convicted of "abuse" of children, only to be exonerated after their businesses have failed due to boycott, they've lost their jobs, they've been driven from their communities, they've spent years in jail, etc.
Costs. (Score:5, Insightful)
The costs of this seem to average out at approximately £18 per query, which is less than the amount that can be charged for a "Freedom of Information Act" request, so the ISPs definitely are not gouging the investigators.
It also definitely does cost the ISPs money to obtain the specific requests, so by any measure, they should be able to charge. If they're suddenly expected to donate their time for free "because of the children", then surely the investigators should be expected to do the same (how would they like their job to be suddenly unpaid)?
This token amount, though small, operates as one of the balances to ensure that investigations are at least slightly sane, otherwise I can see requests flying out on every person they can find, simply because there is no reason not to.
From reading the figures, the information gained from about 10,000 requests was useful in about 240 arrests. While a little on the low side for hit rate, it does show that they're targeting the searches at the moment. Long may the targetting, rather than scattershot fishing expeditions so favoured by digital enforcement agencies, continue.
First sensible decision in a decade (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the frist sensible decision which involves children in a decade. As other posters have pointed out it is not the (direct) responsibility of businesses to pick up the tab for crime fighting irrespective of how vile that crime is. This is just another one of those quasi-governmental bodies the UK is so fond of throwing it's weight around.
Personally, I'd like to see more crime fighting measures costed out like this. Perhaps if the public got to see how much these stupid wars on X, Y and Z cost they would grow up a bit and realize that there will always be bad people in the world and, with finite resources, you are only ever going to limit their number.
If the law was passed to make it free (Score:5, Insightful)
The Real Story (Score:4, Insightful)
Only a witch... (Score:1, Insightful)
This summary is a little misleading. (Score:4, Insightful)
As bad as child abuse is, what good reason is there for giving the investigators cost benefit over, say, murder and rape investigations?
Ass Gas or... (Score:1, Insightful)
Whats next? They resent having to purchase the fuel to put in their squad cars, the electricity they use, the water they use? Use bandwidth, pay for it, that includes police. It is actually important that they do so. This keeps them from just assuming everyone guitly and spamming their way across the internet and crippling networks.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
TFB. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the police can't afford to pay for the ISP's time, perhaps they simply can't afford to continue their witch-hunts against teens doing what teens do [slashdot.org] or works of pure fiction [slashdot.org].
Can ya hear the violins, CEOP?
Hey, we'd all love to see actual kiddie predators burn at the stake. But we also know that 99% of these "child protection" laws exist to make it difficult or embarassing (or sometimes even illegal) for adults to see or do things that society (C.1690) has deemed of questionable morality.
Re:Part P - you make my point for me (Score:4, Insightful)
Incidentally - I did have a professional involvement in this as a member of BSI electrical safety committees in the 80s and 90s. Did you know that the Government would not make the Wiring Regulations statutory, against the advice of their own experts, because of resistance from the electrical installers?
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
They should only be able to get this information via a court order for fucks sake. Getting away with a couple of quid per inquiry is cheap. They should stfu and be happy that they get any information at all.
Re:Part P (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Indeed, innocents accused have ruined lives. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it, the only reason they have these crackdowns is that it makes the politicians look tough, without actually hurting a large number of voters. Violence and exploitation of children is a huge problem, but the internet porn factor is only a small part. Removing kids from violent or neglectful environments is expensive and controversial. Busting a few perverts for looking at naked kids is cheap and easy. The police themselves are probably doing a good job (given the resources they are allocated), but they should be working on other things.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
More than 300 people get arrested on a single Friday night for having had too much to drink. They get to sleep it off in the cells and get released at 4am, even if the police station is 4 miles from where you actually live. All were arrested, none were convicted.
Likewise, out of those 10000 requests leading to 300 arrests, we might assume that 10 actually made it into the courts system ? And if it isn't thrown out for improperly appropriated evidence (police fishing attempts), or thrown out because the arresting office decided to stick the boot in before bundling the suspect into the paddy-wagon, maybe we might just see one conviction.
At what point does 100,000 pounds of taxpayers money and 299 peoples lives tainted due to false arrests cease to justify the successful conviction of the one person who spent too much time surfing 4chan ? Or does "won't somebody think of the children" throw a mental blanket over common sense ?
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
The examples you are mentioning are organisers requesting the help of law enforcement agencies, and therefore asked to foot the bill. Doesn't sound like the same at all to me.
Sort of, in reverse.
In this case the agency is forcing the ISPs to comply through law AND is being charged by them for it.
Fixed that for you. Sounds a fair arrangement to me. Like someone above commented, IT costs aren't free, particularly considering the volumes of requests these people seem to be making.
Re:Indeed, innocents accused have ruined lives. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why the government should be legally liable for any consequences of a failed investigation, in the same way as anyone else whose defamatory behaviour damages an innocent's reputation, who kidnaps someone and holds them against their will, who steals their money, etc. For example, in cases like this, there should probably be financial compensation, arrangement for sufficient public awareness work to restore the damaged reputation, and provision of any extra security needed in the meantime.
We must never allow a "greater good" argument to be used to justify government destroying unlucky individuals' lives.
Re:Good (Score:1, Insightful)
Also, they could save 164,000 of the 170,000 by not requesting 29 innocent people's data for each suspect they uncover.
Re:Part P (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the argument is that it's necessary to make sure any home is properly and safely wired up. If you sell it to someone else and they move in expecting the wiring to match the usual design specifications, and someone ignorant of those specifications has messed around, then... Well, I'm not quite sure what bad stuff they expect to happen, particularly if there is a record of how the new wiring was done, but I'm sure it would be very bad and nasty.
You're right, it probably originated in Brussels. But I bet our own guys pushed for it!
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Or does "won't somebody think of the children" throw a mental blanket over common sense ?
Yes, it does.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a little different when it is standardized and can be quantified within the expense structure of the organization. Records retention, mandatory reporting and so on can easily be structured and passed on to the customer.
However, specific information requests about random people is a little more taxing and difficult to cover. The record retention is the same but imagine the went above the record retention and requested a financial institution to search for all transactions that meet a certain payment size or required the medical offices to do a statistical analysis on everyone with a fever between certain dates. This would more accurately describe the types of information requests being done. They will be looking for IP's and names associated with them that either visited a certain site or sent something to a certain computer or where all the packets from a certain IP went from a certain time frame. And these requests might come in once a year or 5 times a day, you just don't know.
I see no problem with charging law enforcement for compliance with their requests when it cannot be standardized and easily expected so it can be recovered through the normal billing. The alternative would probably be more like the record retention being passed over to the agency in bulk and letting them search through the records themselves- at their own direct expense. However, this would mean that the cops would have records of every ISP customer when no evidence of wrong doing has occurred. I don't think that's too good of an idea.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Or does "won't somebody think of the children" throw a mental blanket over common sense ?
Yes, it does.
Absolutely, what are you going to answer to that?
..." is immediately dismissed and ignored after the first three syllables. People that live on these "we have to protect our children from any type of experience" are so ignorant it doesn't even matter if you speak their language or not.
"Fuck the children" will get you dirty looks and probably a visit by the coppers. Any answer other than that starting with "But wait a minute
Looking away (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll tell you something interesting: No stranger can hurt you as much as mom/dad can. Strangers are easy to single out, but no one wants to think about what goes on behind closed doors. You can get over occasional molestation a lot easier then being shut in a room for every day after coming home from school and being convinced that you're worthless.
The truth is too scary, so it has to be strangers, school teachers, etc
To all of these agencies: Thank you for all your wonderful protection from the scary strangers.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "experience" you mean being molested by someone and/or having sexually explicit photos taken of them for distribution to other molesters for wanking purposes, then yeah, I'm pretty intent on protecting them from that type of experience.
So you don't want your daughter in Playboy. That's OK.
... he had hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and was willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives just to protect you from something that never happened (again). Sure 9/11 was horrible but he didn't have to go all batshit crazy like that. Now the USA have country a huge image problem (even worse than before) despite Obama and why? All because that crazy old man wanted to protect his child America from being molested by foreigners. There you have it.
--
But seriously, I can see your point and I support it. The likelihood of child abuse on the other hand is much much lower than all the beautiful things your kids don't get to experience under constant supervision. I know it's a thin line to walk on but that's life. Risk everything, get everything. Risk nothing, get nothing. Would you rather know that your child can't be molested whatsoever (most cases happen in and around families) and doesn't get to play freely and run around for your fear of abduction until they're so old that they can't but hate you for all the interference with their lives. Or would you rather have your kid experience the world and try to live with the sub-percent chance that someone might do something to them? I don't have any kids so I can't say about myself, I'm just asking. Don't forget, your kid is way more likely to be hit by a car, struck by lightning or die of self-induced lung cancer than being molested or even abused.
I know that my parents treated me way too carefully and that I had a really tough time learning all the stuff that I missed (and that's when I met the bad people, trying to catch up quickly). Bad things happen. The only thing that's worse than bad things happening is someone overdoing his job of protecting you. Look at Ex-president Bush
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
If the ISPs and their staff are expected to do this for free, then why are the police not expected to do this for free?
Then CEOP would have no problem meeting budget, since no one there would be charging a wage!
Really, why should their budget go to police officers, while they expect private enterprise to supply them services for free?