An international operation against child sexual exploitation, supported by Europol and led by the State Criminal Police of Bavaria (Bayerisches Landeskriminalamt) and the Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime (ZCB), has resulted in the shutdown of Kidflix, one of the largest paedophile platforms in the world.
The most effective way to shut these forums down is to register bot accounts scraping links to the clearnet direct-download sites hosting the material and then reporting every single one.
If everything posted to these forums is deleted within a couple of days, their popularity would falter. And victims much prefer having their footage deleted than letting it stay up for years to catch a handful of site admins.
Frankly, I couldn’t care less about punishing the people hosting these sites. It’s an endless game of cat and mouse and will never be fast enough to meaningfully slow down the spread of CSAM.
Also, these sites don’t produce CSAM themselves. They just spread it - most of the CSAM exists already and isn’t made specifically for distribution.
Who said anything about punishing the people hosting the sites. I was talking about punishing the people uploading and producing the content. The ones doing the part that is orders of magnitude worse than anything else about this.
I’d be surprised if many “producers” are caught. From what I have heard, most uploads on those sites are reuploads because it’s magnitudes easier.
Of the 1400 people caught, I’d say maybe 10 were site administors and the rest passive “consumers” who didn’t use Tor. I wouldn’t put my hopes up too much that anyone who was caught ever committed child abuse themselves.
I mean, 1400 identified out of 1.8 million really isn’t a whole lot to begin with.
Not quite. Reuploading is at the very least an annoying process.
Uploading anything over Tor is a gruelling process. Downloading takes much time already, uploading even more so. Most consumer internet plans aren’t symmetrically either with significantly lower upload than download speeds. Plus, you need to find a direct-download provider which doesn’t block Tor exit nodes and where uploading/downloading is free.
Taking something down is quick. A script scraping these forums which automatically reports the download links (any direct-download site quickly removes reports of CSAM by the way - no one wants to host this legal nightmare) can take down thousands of uploads per day.
Making the experience horrible leads to a slow death of those sites. Imagine if 95% of videos on [generic legal porn site] lead to a “Sorry! This content has been taken down.” message. How much traffic would the site lose? I’d argue quite a lot.
It doesn’t though.
The most effective way to shut these forums down is to register bot accounts scraping links to the clearnet direct-download sites hosting the material and then reporting every single one.
If everything posted to these forums is deleted within a couple of days, their popularity would falter. And victims much prefer having their footage deleted than letting it stay up for years to catch a handful of site admins.
Frankly, I couldn’t care less about punishing the people hosting these sites. It’s an endless game of cat and mouse and will never be fast enough to meaningfully slow down the spread of CSAM.
Also, these sites don’t produce CSAM themselves. They just spread it - most of the CSAM exists already and isn’t made specifically for distribution.
Who said anything about punishing the people hosting the sites. I was talking about punishing the people uploading and producing the content. The ones doing the part that is orders of magnitude worse than anything else about this.
I’d be surprised if many “producers” are caught. From what I have heard, most uploads on those sites are reuploads because it’s magnitudes easier.
Of the 1400 people caught, I’d say maybe 10 were site administors and the rest passive “consumers” who didn’t use Tor. I wouldn’t put my hopes up too much that anyone who was caught ever committed child abuse themselves.
I mean, 1400 identified out of 1.8 million really isn’t a whole lot to begin with.
If most are reuploads anyway that kills the whole argument that deleting things works though.
Not quite. Reuploading is at the very least an annoying process.
Uploading anything over Tor is a gruelling process. Downloading takes much time already, uploading even more so. Most consumer internet plans aren’t symmetrically either with significantly lower upload than download speeds. Plus, you need to find a direct-download provider which doesn’t block Tor exit nodes and where uploading/downloading is free.
Taking something down is quick. A script scraping these forums which automatically reports the download links (any direct-download site quickly removes reports of CSAM by the way - no one wants to host this legal nightmare) can take down thousands of uploads per day.
Making the experience horrible leads to a slow death of those sites. Imagine if 95% of videos on [generic legal porn site] lead to a “Sorry! This content has been taken down.” message. How much traffic would the site lose? I’d argue quite a lot.