[tor-talk] Tor and child pornography

[Ben Tasker]

> I think it's pretty clear that when someone puts on the list a complain
about a popular hidden service being attacked,
> and refuse to give any information about the identity of the hidden
service due to "legal", e.g. traffic shaping attacks
> recently, it will be a child pornography operation.

Personally, I think you're making unfair assumptions there. If someone
comes on the list and says "I can't access abc.onion" then that email
address is publicly linked as being operated by a visitor to abc.onion. It
might be that the content of abc isn't all that objectionable, but isn't
legal wherever they're viewing from, it could also be that the person
simply doesn't want to be "publicly" associated with the content, again,
despite it being legal.



> It is well known that Tor onion sites are a haven for this,

And yet the Parliamentary Technology Group recently noted in a report that
most paedophiles, in fact, do not use Tor because they find it too slow.
It's commonly stated that that kind of content exists on hidden services,
and it certainly does to some extent, but a haven? Hidden services aren't
exactly crawling with it, especially in comparison to things like Freenet.
See also the Reddit thread (sorry haven't got a link to hand) where a self
confessed child porn consumer talks about his experiences trying to find
new content on Hidden Services.

The research you refer to also had a number of concerns about methodology
and findings raised. Not least that the methodology they used would have
been positively affected if LE organisations were (as they almost certainly
do) regularly checking if known sites were still online

> Is it really appropriate to use the tor-talk list to encourage child
abuse? I do not think so.

Here, I agree with you. But I'm not sure I agree that that's what's
actually happening, at least not on a sizeable scale.

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 4:15 PM, <e347c518 at ghostmail.com> wrote:

> I think it's pretty clear that when someone puts on the list a complain
> about a popular hidden service being attacked, and refuse to give any
> information about the identity of the hidden service due to "legal", e.g.
> traffic shaping attacks recently, it will be a child pornography operation.
> It is well known that Tor onion sites are a haven for this, and research
> has shown a lot of hidden services use is related to these sites.
>
>
>
>
> Is it really appropriate to use the tor-talk list to encourage child
> abuse? I do not think so. Obviously there is not much that can be done
> about these immoral websites due to the nature of Tor, but as the wider
> community of users of Tor, should not specifically helping child
> pornographers fix or protect their hidden service onions.
>
>
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-- 
Ben Tasker
https://www.bentasker.co.uk