- Released a useless list of psudonyms extracted from the forum's DB.
- Claim to have used a timing attack against Tor to find the physical location of the machine hosting the CP, without providing any details. Tor is vulnerable to timing attacks but I don't think any are trivial enough for any "Anonymous members" to handle.
- Also, if they had the level of access to Freedom Hosting's server which they claim to, they should have reverse-connected across the non-Tor Internet and located the machine (and presumably the machine's hosting provider and datacenter) that way. Given the amateur-looking setup illustrated in the Anonymous press-releases, I highly doubt the Freedom Hosting machine was firewalled from connecting back across the normal Internet.
- Then Anonymous removed the machine from service so it can't possibly be located by real law enforcement and the real owners can't be found.
It sounds like this is a net loss in any kind of real battle against CP - I'm all for removing obvious distribution points for CP when they're found, but doing so in this manner makes it much harder to track down and prosecute the actual producers and consumers of child porn.
Also, the linked article is poorly researched and written - The Examiner doesn't report anything; it's a pay-per-pageview CMS that anyone can write for, with limited-to-no editorial oversight. The original author should be cited instead.
This isn't a comic book. Whether or not you think Anonymous are mostly good or mostly bad, there is a simple fact about them: they are humans. You are aware that people are not strictly good or evil right? Most hardened criminals still love their kids, and most regular Joe's have asshole moments or have even committed crimes! (think, half the people in the us are guilty of using illegal drugs at some point, half have driven drunk, and so on).
I'm sure if anonymous tracked down the stuff and told the police they would all have been arrested for child porn themselves, as this seems to be well on the side of "going to jail", based on precedent previously set by prosecutors all over the US. Further, (because details are lacking) if the server and/or the viewers are not in the same country, full prosecution becomes quite difficult.
But whatev, they did a bad because they are anonymous. No credit to them for stopping something that proper authorities were apparently ignoring or completely ignorant of -- either way those authorities were being completely ineffective.
Would you prefer it if they had taken more steps to locate the machine and find the owners, then turned that over to law enforcement? If they had done so, would you still prefer they had done nothing and let the authorities handle it? Also, would you regard it as a net win if they took down a majority of CP distributors this way (feasibility aside)? I'm really curious about your position.
- Downloaded a bunch of child porn.
- Released a useless list of psudonyms extracted from the forum's DB.
- Claim to have used a timing attack against Tor to find the physical location of the machine hosting the CP, without providing any details. Tor is vulnerable to timing attacks but I don't think any are trivial enough for any "Anonymous members" to handle.
- Also, if they had the level of access to Freedom Hosting's server which they claim to, they should have reverse-connected across the non-Tor Internet and located the machine (and presumably the machine's hosting provider and datacenter) that way. Given the amateur-looking setup illustrated in the Anonymous press-releases, I highly doubt the Freedom Hosting machine was firewalled from connecting back across the normal Internet.
- Then Anonymous removed the machine from service so it can't possibly be located by real law enforcement and the real owners can't be found.
It sounds like this is a net loss in any kind of real battle against CP - I'm all for removing obvious distribution points for CP when they're found, but doing so in this manner makes it much harder to track down and prosecute the actual producers and consumers of child porn.
Also, the linked article is poorly researched and written - The Examiner doesn't report anything; it's a pay-per-pageview CMS that anyone can write for, with limited-to-no editorial oversight. The original author should be cited instead.