Pentagon Workers Tied To Child Porn 253
finalcutmonstar tips a Boston Globe report on details released today of Operation Flicker (PDF), an investigation of subscribers to child porn websites, which seems to have implicated a number of government employees in sensitive positions. Quoting:
"Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports. The investigations have included employees of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which deal with some of the most sensitive work in intelligence and defense — among other organizations within the Defense Department. The number of offenders is a small percentage of the thousands of people working for sensitive Pentagon-related agencies. But the fact that offenders include people with access to government secrets puts national security agencies 'at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military installations,' according to one report by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service from late 2009."
No Story here (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I think it's an elaborate sting gone wrong. You've got someone in the pentagon doing cyber black ops and tracking down people who buy this stuff to take care of the problem in an "extra-legal way." It was just that Operation Flicker stumbled upon this black project and caught people who are already working a sting. It's the beat cop busting the undercover narc agent.
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the government doesnt actually care about child porn
Re:No Story here (Score:5, Funny)
Did you rtfa? The government loves child porn!
Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When you say "No story here", you should actually have said "no CHILD PORNOGRAPHY story here", because, if you (or anybody else) would have bothered to read the PDF of the case, it is evident that the government and law enforcement were not investigating child pornography, but SUSPECTED child pornography. This is evident by the fact that:
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This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the government?
Did you read the case studies in the linked PDF? I didn't think so.
These people had clearance because of the rooms they needed to walk through but didn't have any real access to data. One was a telephone repairman at a military base. Others were mid-level office workers who had to be in secured areas for office work.
These weren't high level operatives. Just the low-hanging-fruit of the justice system.
All this proves is that there are A LOT of pedophi
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Has it been clarified exactly what was meant by "child porn"? The laws have been so politicized recently that the term is starting to cover all sorts of things, right up to and including models who are just a shade under 18.
Re:No Story here (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think the issue with celebrities is not one of some sort of conspiracy cabal of rich and powerful, but one of human nature.
Someone who is famous and well known is a HUMAN. Their fans and friends identify with them and recognize their humanity.
Some guy from the news doing exactly the same thing is very very easy to dismiss as "DISGUSTING MONSTER".
It's a simple fact that in child sex cases, the family of the offender often feels the trial and sentencing are too harsh, but it is much less known that the victim often feels the same way.
Some people file this under something strange like Stockholm Syndrome, but in my opinion, it's simply the fact that the victim almost always knows the offender and sees him as a human. It is then hard to demonize him to the extent that society at large is capable of doing.
Think about it, if your brother/cousin/bestfriend were found tomorrow with 600 images of naked children on his computer, could you really feel the world was a better place if he was given 18 years in prison?
No, you would probably like to see him punished, but in a humane and justifiable way... say... with a year's house arrest.
In my opinion, that's what's happening here, not some right-wing conspiracy junk.
Re:No Story here (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably quite right in some ways, but it is interesting because just yesterday I was reflecting on the "Peewee Herman" incident where he was identified at an adult theater. Now whether or not he was touching himself was a detail I care little about... or even the fact that he was watching legal adult porn in a theater properly designated as such. What I found most astounding was that people were all over the fact that much of his work is for the entertainment of children.
How ODD is it that people who work with children or for children are somehow supposed to not have any sexual interests of their own? I guess we should all freak out if someone has more than one child! After all, after having a child they engaged in SEX! What perverts!
No, the realities here are still not quite sorted out because people don't know how to put them into perspective or rank them in terms of severity. So we see crimes where none exist and little to nothing where it does. We have contextual bubbles of stupidity all over... yet another point I was meditating over the other day. (How people can be very sensible and logical in their every day lives except when certain context comes into play... say their religion for example. Then exceptions galore come into play... no critical thinking, no questioning for truth.)
And yes, it is most definitely easier to condemn someone you don't know than it is to do it to someone you do. It's all relative... friends and relatives.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, you mean people with high security clearances that work for the government can also be disgusting perverts??
Quick, we need to revise the process to make it to where only god fearing Christians that have sex for procreation only can get government clearances!
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, you mean people with high security clearances that work for the government can also be disgusting perverts??
They try and avoid this. A friend-of-a-friend recently applied for full UK security clearance (or whatever it's called). A man in a smart suit visited my friend for a "background check". Every other question was about the guy's sex life -- number of girlfriends, whether he ever cheated, if he looked at porn, what kind, and so on. The defence guy said he didn't care what the answers were, but they needed to know whether someone might try and blackmail the friend into revealing secret details. A person with many partners but who's open about it is fine, someone with a very secret hidden relationship isn't.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Certainly appropriate for the UK, who has been burned many times by closeted gays that are hooking up on the side. All Russia had to do was get a nice pretty boy to sit next to their target and they had a solid lock on the target. You would be surprised the lengths these folks went to in an effort to try to keep their secret live a secret.
Not sure how much the US has been burned by this sort of blackmail, but several UK incidents managed to make it out into the tabloid press.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Have a read of "The leaky establishment" it's got some entertaining musings on the subject.
essentially anything secret can be used as blackmail fodder.
In fact there should be no set list of things which forbid security clearance since anything on the list automatically adds a risk.
lets say ... drinking Russian vodka was considered grounds to loose security clearance tomorrow.
Some foreign agent gets a photo of you with a bottle... well now they have blackmail material.
etc
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not sure how much the US has been burned by this sort of blackmail, but several UK incidents managed to make it out into the tabloid press.
US folks who spy for foreign countries tend to do it for the money . . . see Aldrich Ames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_ames [wikipedia.org], John Anthony Walker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker [wikipedia.org].
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US folks who spy for foreign countries tend to do it for the money
And oddly enough - not very much money at all. For example, the Walker article says he was one of only a handful who got over a million, yet even that is doubtful with the NY Times estimating it to be more like $350K. Looks like Ames didn't even make half a mill either. Its like these guys are playing high-stakes games but only getting chump-change for it. Maybe there is something to the idea that people in government don't know how to run a business...
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They don't get paid much because after they accept the first envelope they have lost all negotiating power... This isn't like working for the mob where you can take your chances turning the baddies over.
Also, we are talking about spies. I can envision the conversation now:
"Yes, comrade, I promise not to do anything ostentatious or out of the ordinary for a low paid government employee such as myself.. It's just that I need at least ten million dollars to stuff beneath my floorboards so they will stop squea
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Brilliant! Here's your prize, a gem quote in The Economist from Vladimir Putin about not deporting British spies from his country, when they were caught, "using a transmitter hidden in a rock":
"Mr Putin argued there was no need to extradite them: 'If these spies are sent out, others will be sent in. Maybe they'll send some clever ones that will be hard for us to find.'"
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I sometimes wonder when I hear about spies being deported... why?
A spy you know about is a hundred times more valuable than a deported spy or a replacement spy.
Once you know about a spy not only can you avoid them getting important data, they can be fed carefully flawed data.
Tweek a few numbers subtly in a secret algorithm for controlling a reactor before giving it to the spy and wait for the meltdown.
Report troops moving west rather than east and watch as your enemy deploys in the exact wrong place.
etc
etc
e
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Take another look at spy swaps. It isn't the spy swap that is important. It is the surrounding political scene. The spy swapping people are making a point, or they are gaining something else. The spies are pretty much unimportant, in and of themselves. Pawns in a massive chess game. A really important spy is still little more than a pawn.
This most recent spy swap still has me baffled, because I can't see who gained what. It looks like both sides have egg on their faces. But, one or both sides gained
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The tactic you are describing was used very successfully by the Allies during World War II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Cross_System [wikipedia.org]
Operation Fortitude convinced the Germans that another invasion army was about to attack in Pas de Calais shortly after D-Day.
The V-weapons deception steered the rockets away from central London, by reporting false impact locations.
Even Hannibal used such tactics (false campfires) when campaigning against the Romans. It's actually amazing how old these tactics are .
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Every other question was about the guy's sex life -- number of girlfriends, whether he ever cheated, if he looked at porn, what kind, and so on. The defence guy said he didn't care what the answers were
Where this article and your story intersect, I don't quite believe the defence guy...
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet the GOP purports to be hardcore family values... and maybe they are, in the raunchier sense of "hardcore". But when push comes to shove, it clearly means nothing to them. As long as they toed the party line up until then, they're fine.
Now, one wonders how this ties in with warrantless wiretapping. I said the Dems aren't as vulnerable on the sex front-- not that they're not blackmailed, extorted, or bribed in other ways. In all of Congress there are perhaps as many as three Senators and a handful of Representatives willing to seriously annoy the national security industry when it matters.
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Huh? Of the 3 Republicans you mentioned, there was one alleged gay and two men with women on the side. These are your examples of closted gays and "diaper wearers" in the Republican Party? Mark Sanford resigned. Larry Craig actually resigned, but took it back.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Mark Foley, but then, he did resign, so I guess that wouldn't fit with your theme.
Spitzer resigned, true. He had lots of powerful enemies on Wall Street, he was seriously weakened by "Troopergate" and was under inv
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
They were just thinking of the children. Isn't that what you want your government officials to do?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Go pro and enter the priesthood?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that people with security clearances are disgusting perverts, the problem is that people with security clearances are security risks. As an example, you'll find it difficult to get a clearance if you've declared bankruptcy or even just have a lot of unsecured debt because it makes you more susceptible to bribes. The same thing is true here. If a foreign interest were to find out you were downloading child porn, an offense where just being accused can cause your life to crumble around you, it would be trivial for them to blackmail you into revealing secrets.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, if, as you say, merely being accused could cause your life to crumble around you, all someone has to do is threaten to accuse any random person. It isn't really relevant whether that person actually committed the crime in question if the mere threat of an accusation is enough to cause someone to turn traitor.
Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman, the fear of the terrorist boogeyman, the fear of the "Big Brother" boogeyman, or any other such thing. FDR had it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Come on, this is nonsense. Every person that breaks the law fears being exposed, if we wanted to avoid that we'd have to either not have criminals or not have laws. What if one of the guys at Pentagon is secretly a murderer, wouldn't that be blackmail material? Would you like to strike that law too? Have a mistress/child on the side your wife doesn't know about? You just expect everyone to be cool about adultery? That quote is nothing but armchair-quarterback psychology, reality is that there's plenty people and things you should fear and defend yourself from, including war. It's been roughly 65 years since the last world war, the Romans pulled off 207 years of Pax Romana before decending into war and chaos. It's way, way too early to call off WWIII and that we'll all live happily forever after.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
You misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that being accused of having kiddie porn is so stigmatized that even people who DO NOT have kiddie porn could be blackmailed by the threat of being accused of having it. Unlike all those other crimes you mention, the burden of proof in the mind of the public when it comes to child porn is remarkably low. It pretty much boils down to "Somebody said he/she did, so he/she did". That degree of stigmatization is inherently dangerous. Period.
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Agreed. Child porn is pretty unique in this regard. It's the cultural/legal equivalent of yelling "FIRE" in a crowded.... society.
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Heck, anyone famous will simply be written off as quirky, but everybody else is viewed as a soon-to-be violent rapist murderer.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Even with no evidence? Even when the accusations are false?
Are you one of the masses that keeps their head up their ass, only to pop it out long enough to watch highly sensationalized news stories warnings us about all the pedophiles and terrorists out to get you and your children.
Maybe it's time that you actually become informed and apply some critical thinking. The person who said that it's the equivalent of yelling "fire" is dead wrong. It's more like yelling "witch!" Terrorists and pedophiles are our new boogeymen. The US has a long tradition of making "witches", whether they were legitimate concerns or not. Communists, homosexuals, socialists, satanists, drugs, illegal aliens, rock 'n' roll, and now the sex criminals and terrorists.
I hate to say it about my fellow Americans, but we're a bunch of paranoid, over-judgmental, overreacting, intolerant, lynch-mob forming loonies sometimes. In the names of protecting freedom and protecting our children, we're on a path of insanity.
Don't get me wrong here, I believe in protecting the children from abuse, but what I don't believe in is making this issue so emotionally charged that it becomes absolutely devastating for someone to even become *falsely* charged with it.
It's like "sex criminals" in general. Whenever you hear stories about sex offenders, the media always tries to blow it up to be that sex offenders are a bunch of child rapists. It's bullshit. They completely gloss over the fact that the whole sex criminal registry system is broken, and does not make any distinction between the real dangers and those guilty of minor offenses that should have never gotten them on the registry! Where are the sympathetic news reports about what a rough time sex offenders have in today's society? Nowhere, because people would revolt at such an idea. They'd have a hissy fit about sympathizing with the offenders, even when these are sex offenders who were put on the list for things like mooning someone during an argument, public urination when they were drunk, being nude in a place that they believed they were not being observed, having consensual sex with a minor who had misled them into believing they were older than they were, having consensual teen sex with someone 2 years younger than them or sexting eachother. We don't want to believe that though. We want to believe that they are a real danger that we've on the a leash. Now we can sleep soundly.
Sadly, similar things happen in the realm of child pornography. I've read of a grandmother who was prosecuted for creating child pornography when she took what she thought was a cute picture of her grandchild who happened to have been nude at the time. People have been prosecuted for having works that courts previously had determined was legal, based not on the legality of the work, but what the court *believed* the person was a pervert based on other legal behavior such as owning a copy of the novel Lolita.
And don't get me started with the fear of terrorists and prosecuting prankster kids for making "bottle bombs" now....
So, yes, some things are so horrible they deserve a stigma, but not everyone that has been a victim of this stigmatization has done something horrible. Did the people in this story do anything horrible, or could these cases be exaggerated and essentially be a witchhunt. Honestly, I suspect it's a little of each, but that really doesn't matter because our justice system likes to apply as much punishment as we can to people.
We seem to be stuck in the mindset that all of our problems can be solved if we just cast a bigger net.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
There is a grandmother on the east coast who took pictures of her grandchild playing int he tub, a common occurrence. She was charged and convicted of child porn when she took the pictures to be developed. The DA didn't care about the details.
There is a girl in her early 20's who was caught sending naked pictures of her self to her boyfriends cell phone when she was 15 or 16. She was convicted of manufacturing and distributing child pornography and is now labeled as a sexual offender, was forced to drop out of school due to laws against sexual offenders and proximity to children and couldn't go to college (who would accept her?) and generally had her life fucked up because she took naked pictures of herself and shared them.
Child Porn and the zeal to which people combat it is zealotry at it's worst. All one would have to do is send such a picture to someone's phone or email and it doesn't matter how it got there, congratulations, your life is going to get ruined.
The problem with our Child Porn laws and pursuit of justice thereof, is that even Law Abiding citizens who do not deal with Child Porn fear even the accusation of it because whether actually guilty or not, merely having pictures of their children, other innocuous evidence such as porn with college teens in it, or no evidence at all, is enough to destroy their lives. In addition to the fact that jury's are completely ignorant and harsh against alleged perpetrators.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was just thinking this.
The GP said "even an accusation" and I was thinking "someone doesn't have to be guilty in order to accuse them!!!"
So the problem isn't the people downloading it, so much as the way that it's perceived.
I recall India is currently voting on legislation to make child sexual abuse the only crime in the country that sets a "guilty until proven innocent" precedent.
Frightening!
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Thus, one could reasonably argue that stigmatizing child porn in the way our society does is, in and of itself, a national security risk. Indeed, paranoia in any form is a security risk, whether it's fear of the kiddie porn boogeyman
There was a front page story on Slashdot this past week on what it is like to monitor the hard-core porn traffic online. To sum it up, quickly, child pornography is not what the geek in his sexual innocence imagines it to be.
In local prosecutions there have three distinct and m
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
disgusting perverts??
god fearing Christians that have sex for procreation only
What's the difference? The guy who claims not to be perverted is many times the biggest pervert of all.
How they did it (Score:5, Funny)
NSA just copied the child porn whenever anyone sent it over the net. The NRO took the pictures themselves, as the original pornographers were setting up the shots. And DARPA set up a contest in which they got teams from the best universities in the country to compete to make child porn meeting their criteria.
Re:How they did it (Score:5, Funny)
And DARPA set up a contest in which they got teams from the best universities in the country to compete to make child porn meeting their criteria.
Ah, the lesser known XXX-prize.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Wouldn't xxx-prize be more appropriate?
What percentage of the workforace? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way that this would really be interesting is if the number of people caught, as a percentage of those employed at said facilities, was greater than that for the greater population of the country.
New angle (Score:3, Interesting)
Since ordinary child porn stories don't capture the public's attention as much as they used to, sensationalists must now seek a fresh new angle: Child porn is so prevalent it can even be found at the highest branches of our government! Never mind that it's only a small number of employees, and that being a government employee doesn't make you an inherently good person. Just look in this direction... this is what we want you to see.
Not that I want the gory details but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...anything from a glamour shot of a naked 17-year-old girl to a child being sexually abused could be classified as "child porn".
And whilst I don't consider either to be particularly healthy in a civilised society (if it's consenting adults doing stuff to each other that other adults look at then let them get on with it), there's clearly a great difference between the two extremes.
Re:Not that I want the gory details but... (Score:5, Informative)
...anything from a glamour shot of a naked 17-year-old girl to a child being sexually abused could be classified as "child porn". And whilst I don't consider either to be particularly healthy in a civilised society
That 17 year old, you know in most of the world you could legally be banging her right? Just don't take the glamour shot...
Is it endemic to a certain type of person? (Score:5, Interesting)
After reading the article, I'm left in a lurch on whether I should be concerned or not. On the one hand, there are some personality types who work in those 3-letter agencies being associated ostensibly with some pretty shady business but without more information on the positions these people had, we will be left making fallacious assumptions. From the 2 instances I have had to turn in people for child porn on their computers to the FBI, I noticed that both seemed normal and likable enough most of the time, but gave off a secretive vibe when they brought their laptops down for repairs, or we had to do a manual upgrade.
One got caught when he forgot to bypass the VPN login when he was away on a business trip. I got paged at 3 am after a long night partying at a rave and it kept going off till I got up 20 minutes later and I was still receiving pages when I arrived on site along with the CIO of the company. The FBI arrested him when he flew back into Phoenix the next morning.
The other one was less dramatic, we were getting ready to partition all of our laptops to dual boot W98 and 2000 because we could not get some legacy software for our inventory system to work in 2000. When we wrested it physically from his hands after him telling us as HR he did not need to check inventory we discovered 5 Gigs of unallocated space that shouldn't be there because we used Norton Ghost, suspicious we made a FAT partition in the space non-destructively and proceeded to recover 10's of thousands of images of child porn.
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Well, the shell script the head IT guy insisted we use would only scan the C: D:\ and A: looking for violations of our company's policies for copyright infringement etc, so a lot of people in the company partitioned their disks and named the partitions like X: or something to get around us bitching to them about Mp3s or running unsupported programs. This was not the first guy who handed us a laptop with ( if I remember ) 20 gig hard drive with a few gigs unallocated which we recovered files off of, mostly
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I agree that the whole story sounds very fishy, but some parts could make sense. In a government or corporate mono-culture environment, there are cases where everybody in a particular group has exactly the same sized hard drive. There are also cases where the executable software that should be on the machine is a pretty well known list, and the size of the individual files shouldn't vary much, so how much unused drive space should be there is a pretty reliable value. And you get cases where a large deviatio
Idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not it's acceptable to have the criminally perverted working in the pentagon, I think it's discouraging to have people that dumb working in critical positions. How can people in high-security positions be that clueless about what information is available about them?
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It is obvious you have never worked in a govt job.
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What surprises me (Score:4, Interesting)
What surprises me about all these child-porn-bust stories is how many people are looking at it. I would have figured less than a thousand in the whole country.
Re:What surprises me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The population of the USA is roughly 300,000,000. You thought that only 1 in 300,000 would look at cp?
Yes.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I assume that this isn't merely a vice - that there's something seriously wrong with the way these people are wired. Like serial killers, who I likewise assume are quite rare.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume that this isn't merely a vice - that there's something seriously wrong with the way these people are wired. Like serial killers, who I likewise assume are quite rare.
Your comparison is flawed, in that you're comparing people who look at CP—not actual child-molesters—with people who actively go out and commit murder. Better comparisons would be child-molesters vs. serial killers, or CP consumers vs. consumers of violent media (e.g. books and/or movies about serial killers—a very common theme in certain genres). The former compares crimes; the latter compares the associated vices. In both cases the number of otherwise normal individuals eager to simply w
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It's possible that you also might be making assumptions as to what constitutes this. There are some things that fall into this category that you might even be surprised by (I couldn't *quickly* find the links to examples of all the stories I've heard of in the past, but did include some)
I've heard stories of people being prosecuted under cp laws for:
- Cartoon porn (such as sexually explicit Simpsons images [bbc.co.uk]). Hey, technically, isn't Maggie over 18 by now? I kid!
-
- Photos by parents or a grandmother [opposingviews.com] of
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Re:What surprises me (Score:4, Informative)
I think there's reasonable evidence from a series of population surveys that around 0.5% of the population is attracted to kids, exclusively or primarily. That's about 1.5 million in the US, 35 million in the world.
Most manage to live a pretty normal life without doing illegal stuff, but even if 10% of those people do get porn at some point, that's still 150,000.
How many get caught? :-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
question is, what defines a kid. Someone prepubescent, or someone just starting to develop forms (lolita complex anyone?)?
if its the latter, we are looking at society disagreeing with our genes.
the funny thing is that mammals are most likely rigged so that a female will want a older male, as that indicates survivability (makes one wonder why human males shave, as balding and beard are indications of age), while a male will want a young female as she is more likely to survive giving birth (and plenty of them
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CP probably includes nude jailbait. I'd say at least 10% of men with internet access.
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CP probably includes nude jailbait.
Yep. Well, except for the nude part. And the jaibait part.
An ordinary photo of a fully clothed married 17 year old involved in a routine public soccer game is criminal "child porn" if the court interprets the image as sexually suggestive and deems it to lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".
Actually I'm not even quite sure if there is any upper age limit on "child porn". There was a big fuss over the difficulty of getting convictions when the pe
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Not in this case. Quoting from the article:
Besides, just because it could also
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try putting up a list of every fetish and sexual preference you can come up with, then add "have sex with budding 12 year old" to the list. Now without considering legality and punishments, make up own deviancy ranking in terms of questions like "would I rather do scat sex or have a woman fuck me with a strap-on?". If the 12 year old is at the bottom of the list when you're done then you got really odd tastes, lack imagination or is great at lying to yourself. Now take a look around and see how many people
it's common, and it's a sexual orientation (Score:4, Interesting)
According to a document posted by Wikileaks, a company from eastern Europe that sold subscriptions to child erotica (nudity, but no sex) around 2003 was getting 15 million unique visitors to its main page per month.
It is hard to know the actual numbers, as research in this area is suppressed, but it would appear that among men:
90% are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls.
20% to 30% are attracted to girls at least as much as to women.
3% to 10% are exclusively attracted to girls.
Figuring approximately 300 million in the USA, and roughly 50% male, this means:
120 million sometimes attracted to girls.
30 million to 45 million attracted to girls as much as or more than to women.
4.5 million to 15 million are exclusively attracted to girls.
This does not include boy lovers or female pedophiles, so the true numbers are larger.
You've got to stop believing the media and the government. They lie.
Re:it's common, and it's a sexual orientation (Score:4, Insightful)
90% are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls.
[Citation Needed].
Not saying you are wrong but it's a bit higher than I would expect and I would really be interested in reading the source.
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I think you are talking a different subject (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks to all those private equity firms like the Blackstone Group, who have funded and/or bought up vile organizations such as Corrections Corporation of America, Prison Realty, Geo, etc., Korporate Amerika now has a ready supply of slave labor.
Especially with the thoroughly corrupt judicial "system" and the absolutely corrupt and degenerate Supreme Court!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OR, there is an extremely large number of closeted pedophiles and it IS, IN FACT, a very small percentage of them that are dumb enough to get caught.
To be honest, I think that is the most likely case. There is nothing about being a pedophile that would make someone stupid or ignorant of the law and stigma, or the risks, and there is nothing to indicate that this is some sort of government conspiracy to screw over innocent people.
Research indicates there are likely approx 1.5 million pedophiles in the US (a
For everything else, VISA (Score:2)
A lot of times you read in the paper that they rounded up a large number of pedophiles due to the fact that they paid with a credit card. How can people be so stupid to think that this is in some way untraceable?
To be honest, I see this as pure Darwinism. Disregarding the fact that they are pedophiles, I strongly believe that people who do such stupid things should not be in a job of consequence.
agreed - wrong people for security work (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not opposed to child pornography. It is ludicrous to believe that possession of a photo inherently causes harm. We used to laugh at people who objected to being photographed because it stole their soul - now we jail not only the photographer but anyone who can be proven to have seen the image.
That said, I wonder how these guys got work in Security. I mean, everyone knows that the paysites are mostly FBI honeypots, and - incidentally - the FBI has even put new child porn into general distribution v
It's unbelievable how can this be? (Score:2)
Several dozen contractors and high level officials at the pentagon? It hardly seems credible. What if it's a frame up?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about these specific departments, but a bit of research might yield surprising results when it comes to CPS. I remember several cases in Florida alone... Don't take my word for it though, it's more believable when you find out for yourself.
Authority likely makes one believe they are above the law... And while I wouldn't assume there are more pervs in these areas than anywhere else, those that are pervs have a tendency to think they can get away with it. Because more often than not, they can
Re: (Score:2)
Those are good points, but they scare the cr*p out of me.
This implies that the pentagon gives out high level security clearance to dumb mouth breathers (doing that at the pentagon no less).
Do these people not get any training on proxies, What not to do with email and all that stuff that goes along with a high level security clearance?
No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up )-:
Need a lawyer for the terminology (Score:2)
The 94-page report (Yes, I read it; feel free to hound me off slashdot.) repeatedly refers to alleged subscriptions (via PayPal!) to "predicated child pornography websites".
What does "predicated" mean in this use? Does it mean that the question of whether the Home Collection sites were child porn or not had not yet been settled by a court?
Or is there some more obscure meaning?
Fire them (Score:2)
If they think that normal citizens that could had watched some of that material, even if was just following the wrong links, or collects anime and related artwork deserve punishment, they must give the example in a big way
Will somone please... (Score:2, Funny)
...think of the children!
Wait, not like that you sick bastards!
Now it all makes sense (Score:3, Funny)
Finally, the real explanation of why they're so antsy about getting hacked by Gary McKinnon.
Re:Child porn laws (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless they actually abused children that is.
Anything that is forbidden/taboo/illegal/embarrassing is blackmail fodder.
Even if it was made legal it would still be socially unacceptable and almost as good for blackmail.
there are arguments to be made but that's a weak one.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, maybe not. I rather suspect that the taboo is predominantly because people naively believe that pedophilia is rare. It isn't. Roughly one in twenty-five people in the U.S. show some predisposition to pedophilia, and if you include teenagers in the mix, it jumps to... well, pretty much every adult male I've ever met who isn't lying. Given those numbers, I think it's likely that the social stigma would diminish significantly if people did not fear going to prison if found to be part of that one in
Re: (Score:2)
oh the real shit's gonna hit the fan when the Japanese perfect sex-bots and shortly thereafter someone produces a line designed to cater for paedophiles.
then there'll be some real witch hunts and crusades.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
if you include teenagers in the mix, it jumps to... well, pretty much every adult male I've ever met who isn't lying.
You probably mean ephebophilia [wikipedia.org] is more common. It's a bit saddening that there are people out there who would literally equate a 40 year old man that wants to nail Miley Cyrus with a 40 year old man that wants to nail a 5 year old.
Either way, I imagine that it's a bit of a Gaussian type of curve instead of something like a 1 in 25 figure. Through my late teens and early twenties, I've had different friends of different ages that all had their upper and lower limits, and each was different. It's kinda
Re: (Score:2)
(2) So the government should employ every single person required to do any high security level work it requires? That's practical and completely feasible.
(3) As AC notes, this is a standard term used to discuss people suspected or charged with a crime. To state a person is guilty before the result of a trial proves that guilt leaves the author open to a defamation suit, particularly if the person is found innocent.
(4) Yeah. People are that fucking stupid. And not high school drop-outs either... Ph.D.'s are
Re:Summary snipping (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The next thing - is Contractors with high level security. I know they meant officials included in that, but why on Earth would you give a Contractor high level security clearance? I wouldn't trust them further than broom closet.
So you propose nationalizing Boeing, Bell, Lockheed Martin or indeed every one of the 200+ companies on this list?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_contractors [wikipedia.org]
Any and every one of them likely has high level clearance for some employees for some field.
Re: (Score:2)
> shit that was more likely than not the product of abuse
I hate to blur your black and white understanding of this, but what about a 17 year old girl who takes a picture of herself nude and sends it to her 17 year old boyfriend, who thinks it's a good idea to post it on 4chan after they break up?
The guy is a jerk, but there was no child abuse.
Re: (Score:2)
There is apparently some evidence of a difference in brain structure that shows up on MRI and where there is a difference in brain response showing up on fMRI. One of the problems with this subject is that it would be almost impossible to come up with a test that is both convincing and legal. The other problem is that although high-resolution MRI scanners exist (9.4 T, as opposed to the usual medical 2.5 T), they are unimaginably rare - only three such high-res scanners exist - and they exceed FDA limits on
Re: (Score:2)
FYI: The term "child pornographers" (or more generally, the term "pornographers") refers to people who produce, not to those who simply consume. Similarly, I enjoy photography, but I am not a photographer (and don't even own a camera).
Child pornographers who limit themselves to people who are over 18 would, by definition, not be child pornographers.
If we rephrase this as: "why do people who are attracted to child pornography view child pornography?"... well I think that is relatively obvious.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like a nonsense pop-psych answer. If we consider more societally acceptable imagery, namely killing and murder, lots of people like to watch it but very few have actually done it. As for why they can't stick to 18 and older... I su
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and I'm rather sure that people who steal bread are completely unrelated to having hunger. They just like to do illegal things.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm rather sure child pornography/abuse is completely unrelated to the sexual orientation choices of mature adults.
Well, research shows that you're an idiot. :-)
Just because you want it to be different doesn't mean it is. Simply accepting the fact that pedophilia is a sexual orientation like many others doesn't automatically make it acceptible and justified. It simply underscores the fact that humans who find themselves attracted to kids aren't "fundamentally broken". Research doesn't back that up at all. In fact, research indicates that the majority of them are profoundly normal in almost every way.
The image of a d
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the pretty severe
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on what you mean by "abused". By most people's opinion, a 10-year-old is unable to give consent because (s)he lack maturity to make that decision for himself, but if you read pedophilia advocacy, they don't agree - they believe a child's consent is as valid as an adult's.
Personally, I think most people are right, although I find the age of consent in the UK (16) to be more sensible than 18.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me point out one thing that you might be partially correct about.
More than half (the FBI estimated around 60% in a paper in 1999) of child abuse that goes to trial IS, in fact, situational. It is an otherwise normal person doing something bad that they normally wouldn't do, under unusual circumstances.
However, the group "pedophiles" and the group "child molesters", while overlapping, are not equal. Many pedophiles never abuse children. Many who abuse children are not pedophiles (by a strict diagnostic
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to assume a pedophile is inherently evil and in control of their urges. Not even regular heterosexual people can control their urges reliably.
It happens to be kids for them, which sucks. Imagine if you could only get a boner from kids, with the world persecuting you, and being unable to just switch. So much pressure on pedos will surely make them go insane faster, meaning more potential danger for real kids.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, OK. I can understand the idea that a pedophile's sexual preference could be "underage" as opposed to "male" or "female", but isn't it a more natural human trait to take care of or protect the immature of our species rather than exploit or abuse them?
Yuhuh. And isn't is a more natural human trait to have sex with the opposite sex, rather than with your own?
Nature .... evolution ... they're all about variety. Rule 34 exists for a reason, you know.
Re: (Score:2)
Frankly, the people in the linked PDF were folks like telephone repairmen and low level office workers. I doubt this was some sort of big publicity stunt. We're talking a dozen or so people here, nobody who really means anything to the organizations they represented....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://blog.silive.com/weather/2008/08/coppertone.jpg [silive.com]
Oh noes! Does this mean everyone who ever saw this ad campaign from 50ish years ago should be shot?
The only thing that needs to have a bullet in the head is anyone with that kind of thinking (hypocrite alert!).
Re:Just wow. (Score:4, Insightful)