Democrat suggests spying on p2p to combat child sex abuse
A DEMOCRATIC PARTY SENATOR in the US has told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that he believes police should be using special software that would allow them to spy on p2p networks, purportedly for tracking illegal activity like child sex abuse.
According to CNET, Senator Joe Biden, apparently reckons that it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" just by looking at file names. Now that sounds foolproof doesn’t it?
The special software, which is called "Operation Fairplay" purportedly offers police a "big picture" on child sex abuse files being transferred in the US. It apparently facilitates undercover operations involving p2p file-sharing applications, chat rooms, Web sites, and mobile phones, which all sounds rather big brotherish and prone to overzealous use in fields other than tracking down child abusers.
But Biden insists that its not the file sharing system he’s going after, saying "blaming this problem on peer-to-peer innovation is like blaming the interstate highway system when someone uses it to transport drugs". Hmmm… still, you have to wonder how long it will be before the DMCA get their grubby paws on this.
Still, we might be being a bit harsh here, because apparently in 2008 alone, police officers using the software managed to gather over 1,400 IP addresses that were linked to the transmission of child sexual abuse images and videos on hundreds of different occasions, according to the software’s creator, Special Agent Flint Waters.
The way the software works is that police log onto the file-sharing networks and start looking for files that appear to have keywords relating to child pornography in them. They then have to download these files to their computers, where they can then use Fairplay to track down an IP address linked to the file poster, and sometimes, if they’re lucky, even a map of where he could be.
Armed with a suspect’s IP, and the date and time of the download, police can then subpoena the ISP, requesting additional details about the user, like his name and even address. Of course there would appear to be several flaws in the logic of this method, one being that file names can be deceiving, and the second being that cyber criminals have always been fairly astute at hiding or masking their IP.
But apparently, the way Fairplay works is to gather "unique serial numbers" off the perp's computer, which it can then keep hold of to see how often the user transfers the flagged files. To date, the programmes advocates claim that it has tracked over 642,000 of these "unique serial numbers" directly to users in the US with another 650,000 untraceable.
Unit commander of the Delaware State Police High Technology Crimes Unit, Lt. Robert Moses, spoke to the commission to tell them that Fairplay had been crucial to investigators in "proactively" identifying criminal peadophiles who swap child abuse material online, and that it has even led to arrests and convictions.
If Biden gets his way, and the bill, which has been dubbed the “Combating Child Exploitation Act” would receive over $1 billion in taxpayer’s money, spread out over the next eight years. The money would purportedly go towards hiring new staff to work on combating online crimes against children, as well as for regional computer forensics labs, and grants to regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces.
Just so long as it’s used in the way it’s supposed to be, and not as another big brother tactic to spy on file sharers for the DMCA. µ
L’Inq
Cnet
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I'm sure I can't be the only person here who's seen this, but quite a few times I've gone to download something from p2p which was completely innocent (well apart from the normal p2p issues of course), only to find that someone has seeded a porn movie with the name of whatever I was after.

Obviously when I realise that no way is this Gardeners world, and Alan Titchmarsh would never appear naked, I delete the offending falsely named file.

It wouldn't take much for one of these falsely named offerings to be "really" dodgy, set the big red lights a flashing, and suddenly I'll be hauled up before the beak and find my name on the sex offenders register, aka life goes down the toilet.

The law must prove intent.

If you walked out of a bank with twice the amount of cash in a bag as you had expected (cashier mistake) , you can't be arrested for bank robbery or fraud unless they can prove you realised you had too much. The same should apply for p2p snooping.
They really should stop letting children into the US senate and house.
I've heard many scary stories about the people who sexually abuse minors, but I've never before heard the one about how they molest through the peer-2-peer protocol.
Three comments:

1) How can a unique serial number be applied or derived? IIRC the idea of hardware CPU unique IDs was shot down back in about '98. The mac address does not get used outside the local area network. So what is unique?

2) P2P networks: there is a good chance that what one downloads is not what one thinks one is downloading. So the system will log innocent people as well as paedophiles. Will a false ID be removable from the system? So far it has proven difficult to remove people from the homeland security no-fly databases.

3) I think it is kinda cool that the police are treating P2P networks like a commons. Any claim that police listing the shared files should founder on a definition of the commons. This could go to court and might be a case that actually helps define the 'net as a public space.
Without getting into specifics, I just did a test with four child porn videos on ed2k and I got some mixed results. One of the videos had mostly correctly labeled copies and the other three had roughly 40% mislabeled. The mislabels ranged from Indiana Jones to DVDShrink and most of them were unique, suggesting that they probably weren't accidental downloads.

More interetingly, I also looked at the individual hosts I was connected to and only a very small handful, 1-3%, were from the US (somewhat due to ed2k's userbase). Working on a national level to address such an international issue is problematic at best.
Thank you, you've just enlightened me as to why they are checking filenames :)

Until your comment I thought it was dumb, but IF the file is dodgy AND the filename is dodgy, there has to be intent really. I mean, if you clicked on a web link that said it was Gardeners world but the filenames in the torrent were....not..... you'd probably stop it fairly fast.

What will happen next, of course, is the scumbags will use innocuous names more, meaning the police only catch dumb people. (I'm assuming the crafty ones are more dangerous)

I'd like to hope the police also download the full file before saying it's deffo dodgy, but otherwise I'd say the procedures are spot-on - gather evidence that people's own computers will happily send to you just by asking, go through proper channels to get real info on them, and then check that the computers found are the computers they detected. Almost like the RIAA, except with rigour, and against a deserving target. Er... so nothing like the RIAA then ;)
That's right.

I've been using P2P and such services for many years, never once had I come across any 'really dodgy' material (then again I've never looked). One day I was downloading what I thought was a benign (and not even copyrighted) video clip. I went to preview some finished chunks only to find:
- It obviously wasn't what I wanted
- It was rude
- It had a minor (thankfully not in distress)

Aside from being shocked and saddened, I was panicking to get that sh*t off my machine as quick as possible.

Now by this new bill I would have been prosecuted and faced a lengthy prison sentence for downloading those chunks, as well being put on ‘that’ list – for what? How could I possibly have proven my (lack of) intent?


There are other ways of sharing ‘really dodgy’ material: encrypted files with segmented passwords and/or ‘redundant random dusting’ then archiving/renaming it. Hence this would be yet another law that punishes the well meaning without actually doing anything against the real criminals.

Perhaps this is a devious ploy by the RIAA/MPAA?
I think it's a very big problem for the US government to be spying on its citizens. I don't care if a Republican thinks it's a good idea or if a Democrat thinks it's a good idea. The government needs to stay the hell out of private citizens' business!

Where are these power-whores going to draw the line? "Alright, we're snooping for terrorists and sex offenders... while we're at it, let's make sure people aren't doing anything else we don't like."
Congress members and other government officials are probably the ones who would be caught most often by a system such as this.
What's to stop as-yet-unknown pedophiles working in these government agencies from accessing the data they want as part of their every day job? Part of the software mandates download. That means they'll have access to all of the child porn they could ever want or need, 100% free pass, with no oversight.

That's my problem with this.
if the police will be really seeding child porn movies. Wouldn't that be a strange attitude?