Another mistake
That thing I said the other day about how humans are a mistake. One branch of that mistakenness is the taste that some humans have for torture and cruelty as a form of entertainment. Take Andrew Picard, former Etonian, for instance.
Andrew Picard, 18, was found to have more than 2,000 pornographic images of children as young as two years old, including rape and bestiality. The images were found on his computer at [Eton] after Picard, then 17-years-old, shared the illegal material in an online chat room with an undercover police officer, The Daily Mail reports.
…
Judge Peter Ross said: “This defendant Andrew Picard was a privileged young man. His family are clearly wealthy enough to send him to school in Eton. Quite how you found your way into this unpleasant world Mr Picard, the world of chatrooms and exchanging this material, is not clear to me.
“Why you did it, doctors and others have sought to explain- the emotional difficulties you had, issues around your sexuality… It has been said that you and your family have suffered deeply as a result of your arrest and public exposure. Your family didn’t deserve that but it is a consequence of this sort of offending.”
“All too often in these courtrooms, we see the internet and chatrooms providing a degree of assumed detachment in terms of what is said and the material that is viewed. Please make no bones about it, these are children, some of them very tiny and they are being abused and tortured simply to provide sexual gratification, mainly, to adult males.
“All over the world, too often in the third world, children [are] being made objects of the most appalling abuse. It forms a currency and you played a part in that. You were seeking to obtain your own sexual gratification.”
That shouldn’t be a thing. Rich men and boys in the rich parts of the world shouldn’t have a taste for looking at the torture and abuse of children.
Oh hell!
‘Defending, Sallie Bennett-Jenkins QC said that Picard had been undergoing psychological treatment with psychiatrists and doctors in relation to the crimes. She said: “This is a young and very able man who has hopes for the future. He was able to have this opportunity [to seek help] and this was something Andrew sought for himself, by himself.”
‘Picard was spared jailed and given a 10-month sentence, suspended for 18 months and with a mental health treatment requirement.’
As with Turner at Stanford, this kid’s history should be scrutinized as thoroughly as possible. You don’t ‘just stumble’ into behavior like this on this scale. The specific violations cannot be assumed to exist in a vacuum.
As teacher I went on a course about this a couple of years ago. You don’t stumble onto this looking for porn on google. You have to really want and seek it out. These are very focussed people.
That sentence. Ten months. Suspended. For getting your jollies off the abuse of toddlers.
Huuuuh?
Asswipe Persky has met his match.
Someone with more tech expertise: why is this garbage so hard to block on the web, even the dark we?. We’ve got Faceblot with face recognition algorithms that can put names on strangers. We’ve got endless tracking. We’ve got AI that can make some sense of pictures. [I’ve actually worked on this and I know the limitations, but even so.] Put all that together and it seems like it ought to be possible to block at least a big chunk of the avalanche. Not a priority, I’m guessing.
Re Quixote/why so hard to block:
This kinda is my wheelhouse. (Mumble) years in networks, network security, mostly more at the crypto end, but have done work with and for people doing various intrusion detection things, too:
Long story short: complicated. Partly, like blocking malware, it’s a guns/armour race. Partly jurisdictional, legal issues. Where in the network would you even put something detecting this stuff (even assuming the users are dense enough to pass it around unencrypted)? Can’t just watch _all_ the traffic, generally; generally we call this warrantless surveillance. Not really practical at any volume for any really smart AI, beyond this, anyway; too many packets, not enough silicon So you need probable cause, all that. At which point again: jurisdiction, staffing. Server’s in Tajikistan or whatever, maybe you don’t even know where it is if they’re using onion routing well. So law enforcement catches users. In their own jurisdiction. When they get lucky enough to know where to look.
(Network technologies have opened _many_ such cans of worms, incidentally. I like that people pay me to make this stuff. And some days I wonder if I should maybe advise them to go back to cans and string.)
(This said: I think commercial services like Facebook and Twitter probably could do more about this, abuse, so on. They can always put it in the EULA, if it’s not already, so there goes one obstacle, anyway. There, it’s probably also: we make enough money caring as much as we do.)
I get the impression that many organisations don’t take network security seriously enough.
Some time ago when banks and building societies were setting up web access I taught one week intensive courses on how to do this. We went through everything, setting up a web server and database, setting up users and user accounts, using cookies to set up sessions in the web browser, etc. and everyone set up his, or very rarely her, own server. We always left security, and I mean real security like how to detect intruders not just how to set up accounts with passwords, until the last day. This was not because it was unimportant but because if you did it any earlier there was always some idiot who would lock themselves out of their server and they would as likely as not be the sort who would think it was my job to ignore everyone else and help them set up their system again.
But we then had to face the problem that many people would want to leave early on the last day. Sometimes people who had come by plane had booked an early flight because they assumed nothing important happens on the that day even though the course literature specifically pointed out this was not the case.
What came as a surprise to me was the number of people who didn’t think security was important; they thought of it as something you could add on later if you had any problems. Building security in at the beginning makes life much easier. It can never be foolproof but if you also have a security focused attitude and do things like look through server logs to see if anything unusual is happening then a lot of problems can be avoided. But all this costs money and you only notice lax security when something goes wrong. Also from the point of view of those setting up the system they can give the impression of greater efficiency if they do not spend time on things which have no obvious visibility. The temptation to skimp on security is even greater if they are not the same people who will be responsible for maintaining the system. Besides which, it is always possible to blame breaches on the incredible genius of so-called “hackers.”[1]
As for tracking stuff across the net it can be enormously difficult. I am one of those people who has a visceral dislike of spammers and so I occasionally try to track them down so I can annoy them back. But an email that purports to come from Japan may well have a ‘Return-path’ field pointing to an address in Brazil, and its envelope[2] may say it comes from somewhere in Taiwan. So where does it come from? Uzbekistan maybe?
Footnotes:
[1] As a Free Software geek, I object to the term being misused to refer to such people.
[2] This can be seen by the mailserver, but not (normally) by the end user.
Well, yes, there is the whole onion routing thing, and this “even assuming the users are dense enough to pass it around unencrypted.” And the other technical problems commenters mentioned.
You’re right that it’s technically pretty far out on a limb.
I guess what annoys me so much is I don’t even see them doing the non-technical stuff: making sure the laws leave no loopholes, have sensible, useful EULAs (instead of the ass-covering drivel we have now) and enforce the damn things to stop people — which includes women! it includes children! — being victimized.
But, yes, technical can of slippery smelt. I take your point.
After this all blows over in a few weeks the Old Etonian network will find him some lucrative niche where he can be protected from further interference from law enforcement – perhaps a junior position in the Cameron government. In the meantime have the adult Old Etonians in government and the security services now given up their little pastime of rendition of victims to Uzbekistan and other unsavoury locations and torturing them to death?