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http://www.dailydot.com/news/eric-marques-tor-freedom-hosting-child-porn-arrest/

by dil8 • 13 years ago

55 28 13 years ago

mtgx• 13 years ago

"Eric Eoin Marques, 28—the “largest facilitator of child porn on the planet,” according to the FBI".

I hope he wins the trial for that reason alone. FBI's thinking is very dangerous here. Basically what they're saying is that if they can't monitor/censor freely the content they want then you're a "facilitator" for whatever crime is happening on the network.

If you apply this logic to something else, you'll see how little sense it makes. "If you don't give us your encryption keys, or use PFS, you're a facilitator of terrorism". "If you sell guns, you're a facilitator of gun crime."

If you're an ISP that doesn't block sites that we say are piracy sites, you're a facilitator of piracy (an argument that is already used, and was also used in ACTA, too).

And I could go on and on about this. People should be calling them out on their BS argument. They're just using these arguments to crack down on anything that has remained remotely private, so they can have the total surveillance state they've always dreamed about.

tzs• 13 years ago

If you apply this logic to something else, you'll see how little sense it makes. "If you don't give us your encryption keys, or use PFS, you're a facilitator of terrorism"

That's not even remotely the same logic.

"If you sell guns, you're a facilitator of gun crime."

Nor is that.

If you're an ISP that doesn't block sites that we say are piracy sites, you're a facilitator of piracy

Nor is that.

To make your gun seller hypothetical fit the Marques allegations fact pattern, for instance, it would have to be a gun seller that is purposefully trying to sell guns to people who are looking to commit crimes with the guns, and who is touting the effectiveness of his guns at being hard to trace.

Basically, they are trying to hold Marques responsible for crime happening on his servers, that he appears to have known about and encouraged.

pathy3• 13 years ago

Exactly this.

mtgx's logic is severely flawed. The intention is, if nothing else, very important. Let's not kid ourselves, he knew what he was hosting and what kind of content he was facilitating the distribution of.

drakeandrews• 13 years ago

A better analogy might be someone selling armour piercing rounds marketed as "cop killers", espousing their efficiency at getting through standard issue police vests, with a tiny disclaimer that you shouldn't kill cops.

ds9• 13 years ago

I think you are right about the motives of the FBI, and the reasoning of the copyright cartel. However, there is a relevant difference.

The copyright "maximalists" seem to think everyone should be able to accurately detect piracy, effortlessly - but in fact it is unreasonable to expect service operators to know the names of the latest Hollywood movies, or to have any way of knowing what files are authorized by the copyright holders, for which recipients, and which are not authorized.

In contrast, there are, I assume, signs of CP which would alert any reasonable person - it requires neither special knowledge nor knowledge of other parties' business relations.

_b8r0• 13 years ago

The big problem with all of this is that despite Tor being a decentralised network, 50% of sites on Tor were centralised in the hands of one provider. For Tor, this is like Amazon EC2 permanently going down. It'll route around the problem and they FBI will have probably stopped a total number of 0 child porn consumers and authors in the process, but it'll be heralded as a success by the FBI because they'll have stopped an individual person from facilitating child porn for a short while by destroying his life and taking out a large amount of legitimate free speech in the form of collateral damage.

bkoa2• 13 years ago

Why do HN people feel the need to portray everything the US federal government goes after as a martyr for free speech? Of all the Internet-related crimes, I think stopping pornography depicting minors is one of the least controversial laws to possibly enforce. I know it's more convenient to group everything the FBI, CIA, and NSA do into an "obviously evil" bin, but sometimes you need to appreciate enough nuance to not defend all their online targets on principle. If this isn't one of those times, I don't know what is.

Just like they can always make the argument that they are protecting people with xyz questionable tactics, you can always make the claim that something on the Internet is for the purposes of free speech. That doesn't make you right, or even mean that free speech is the primary legal or moral distinguishing factor even if you are.

Kliment• 13 years ago

From what I can tell, the issue is that there has so far been no evidence that this move will do anything to actually prevent the distribution of child pornography. That is, it might be collateral damage without fulfilling its primary objective.

belorn2• 13 years ago

I think stopping pornography depicting minors is one of the least controversial laws to possibly enforce.

While it might be uncontroversial, some people would still prefer if the state used effective and evidence-based methods to prevent child abuse, rather than using ineffective, costly, and what ever method that get most media attention.

For example, mandating that schools has trained counsels at staff is a prime example in identifying and preventing child abuse. Having a trained expert which kids, parents and teachers can go to is important line of defense. New teachers should also receive basic training when studying at the university, so they can detect psychological, emotional, social, and physical signs of abuse.

Current studied methods in creating effective prevention program also includes group-based sexual abuse prevention education for children (http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/...). Sadly, the efforts in creating more effective prevention efforts is sadly somewhat low priority (see linked document).

It should also be noted, that in that whole document, more strict Internet regulation is not mentioned at all as effective prevention method. Feel free to speculate widely why the researchers did not mention it.

ewillbefull• 13 years ago

Seems like a lose-lose situation for the FBI. They propose laws to spy on everyone to protect children, and people tell them to do some "old fashioned police work" instead. You know, go after the real bad guys and you don't need draconian laws to make it easier.

Then they do some old fashioned police work, and you get cynical responses like yours. They didn't warrantlessly wiretap anyone, or violate anyone's rights, to take down someone who was knowingly breaking a horrific law.

belorn2• 13 years ago

They did take down a email provider which was known as "safe" to use by activist and political refugees. By now, they will have to live with the knowledge that anything they wrote is the property of the FBI, and could be leaked at any time. It can be used by the foreign office of the USA as a barging chip, to trade spy information or get prisoners released in exchange for the information. Anyone who used TorMail or freedom hosting as part of an political dissidents campaign will now have to put their life in the FBI/USA hands.

ohashi• 13 years ago

It's weird seeing a post you made a decade ago linked in that thread on webhostingtalk :/

x0054• 13 years ago

I think this are the kind of comments that turn people away from the freedom argument. If Eric Eoin Marques is proven beyond reasonable doubt to be the operator of the freedom hosting and that he knew about the child porn content, he should be responsible for the content.

Look at this argument in real world terms. If you are an owner and operator of a motel, and you rent a room to someone who then goes on to rape and kill a girl in that room, you are not responsible for those actions. Even if you made no effort to check the identity of the renter, and accepted cash, you are still innocent, at least morally (legally, depends on the state). However, if you happen to pass by the window of that room, see the occupant killing a girl in that room, you have the moral and legal duty to call the cops.

I would never argue that the tor network, the node operators, the exit node operators, or the internet companies used to run the tor traffic would ever in any way be responsible for the child porn. Likewise, the camera manufacturers, and the manufacturers of all the hardware used to store and distribute said child porn would never be liable for that content. But, surely, the guy who rented the infrastructure to the child porn ring operators would be liable, if it can be proven that he knew for a fact that specific clients of his service used it for child porn.

Now, the reason I say specific clients is because it's not enough to argue that he knew or should have known that some of his clients used the service for child porn. AT&T knows for a fact that some of their clients use the internet connection AT&T provides for child porn, but no one would argue that AT&T is guilty. But specific knowledge equals guilt in my mind.

devero• 13 years ago

I agree, this makes sense.

fsniper4• 13 years ago

So if you are an ISP and have a router in any way used for any kind of networking over internet, you are possibly or most probably facilitator for money laundering, child porn, piracy, terrorism or any kind of online crime that's possible. Or you should have implemented resource expensive deep packet inspection and filtering solutions.

pathy3• 13 years ago

Oh please, there is a significant difference between knowingly (let's not kid ourselves) hosting such unsavory material and accidentally sending it along.

The intent of Freedom Hosting was clearly to host questionable material.

fsniper4• 13 years ago

Please there is absolutely no difference between supplying unquestioned hosting or supplying unquestioned passage for unquestioned data.

Let's put in daily means, either if you are a landlord or an hotel owner you are not obliged to question your guests criminal activities nor if you are a road provider you are obliged to question your passengers intends. This is exactly the job of the law enforcement.

If you are served for denying access to some criminal and you do not comply matters change.

In this case you are expected to take measures even if it is not your business to judge someone and you are held responsible.

Fuxy• 13 years ago

The correlation between the launch of the bank and his arrest is quite suspect. I believe the hosting was secure however the bank wasn't and it allowed the police to identify him through that. Once they knew who he was doing the rest was easy.

TerraHertz• 13 years ago

As usual, it's pretended to be all about 'protecting the children'. Yet Freedom Hosting sets up an independent, unmonitored bank (Onion Bank), and ONE MONTH LATER gets destroyed.

Actually it's all about control of money.

Anyone who thinks the government, FBI, etc gives a damn about 'safety of the children' is hopelessly naive. And is exactly the kind of person who'll be fooled when the government _says_ they are 'doing it for the children'.

This is the same government that has bought 1.6 billion rounds of hollow point ammunition (and is buying more), and also forces ever-increasing numbers or ever more toxic immunization shots on infants. While denying the Autism and auto-immune disease epidemics have anything do do with inoculations. Oh, and also cheerfully fired hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions into Irag and Bosnia, resulting in vast suffering of countless deformed children, for thousands of coming generations.

Gaol Marques and shut down Freedom Hosting to "protect the children"?

Bullsh*t.

shabble2• 13 years ago

Or, due to recent publicity surrounding internet monitoring capabilities of various agencies, they decided to move fast before countermeasures appear. If it were still a secret, they probably wouldn't risk tipping off their (bigger fish) targets to their abilities, but now it's use-it-or-lose-it.

And it'd be great PR to justify all those surveillance capabilities with the general public.

</tinfoil>

Or, it's just a coincidence.

An in-depth guide to Freedom Hosting, the engine of the Dark Net

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