Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  This December 2010 article from The Gladstone Observer, a regional newspaper covering Queensland, Australia, conjures up quite the picture of a demented, salivating old paedo sitting in front of his computer and using what can safely be assumed to be a false online identity with which to attempt to sexually exploit children with:

  Mum tells of paedophile's effort

  Sasha Pcino 8th Dec 2010

  A TANNUM Sands mother got the fright of her life when a paedophile tried to befriend her 13-year-old daughter on a social networking site a couple of weeks ago.

  ‘He tried with my daughter but she clicked straight away and pretty much deleted and blocked him,’ the shocked mother said.

  A spate of similar incidents has prompted her to warn other parents.

  ‘I was shocked and when I found out what he was saying I emailed … all the kids and anyone who was friends with him,’ she said.

  The man uses three different profile photos as well as a default blank picture.

  He initially adds the kids as a friend and then gets the children to play a game called Master and Slaves.

  Any conversations should be saved, for evidence, and reported to the police.

  Exerpt of a conversation:

  Daniel: ‘Hi Tiny, it’s me Daniel. Do you remember me?’

  Child: ‘My name isn’t even Tiny. Lol.’

  Daniel: ‘Ok. Sorry. Do you remember me?’

  Child: ‘No. so who are you?’

  Daniel: ‘I’m Daniel.’

  Child: ‘Why are you adding like a million girls that I know?’

  Daniel: ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

  Child: ‘Where you from?’

  Daniel: ‘How are you? Sydney, Australia. So can we be friends?’

  Child: ‘I don’t know you.’

  Daniel: ‘No but why can’t we talk on here.’

  Child: ‘We can.’

  Daniel: ‘So are you at home now, in your room? Yes or no’

  Child: ‘Yeah?’

  Daniel: ‘Alone.’

  Child: ‘Are you an internet rapist or something?’

  Daniel: ‘No I’m not. I’ll tell you why I ask, OK.’

  Child: ‘Then why are you asking if I’m at home alone in my room?’

  Daniel: ‘I’ll tell you if you promise to keep it private, OK.’

  Child: ‘OK.’

  Daniel: ‘It’s so we can play a game, that’s all. OK.’

  Child: ‘What’s the game?’

  Daniel: ‘Close the door and lock it. Have you done it?’

  Child: ‘My door is always closed and locked.’

  Daniel: ‘OK, the game is called I’m your master and you’re my slave. Do you understand me? Yes or no.’

  Child: ‘Sure.’

  Daniel: ‘So I own now. OK. So you call me master.’

  Child: ‘Hahaha. Yes master.’

  The Observer could not print the rest of the transcript due to its inappropriate nature.

  Unfortunately, not all children are going to be as clued in as the young girl in this story thankfully was, and all this as Mark Zuckerberg pushes for children under the age of 13 to be legally allowed - and therefore encouraged - to join in the Facebook fun. Facebook can’t even protect the adults on its site from its legion of vile predators, never mind keep safe the millions more kids who would inevitably be added to the already millions of under 13s on it should Zuckerberg’s proposals bear fruit. I imagine that if they do so then a lot of those new eight and nine-year-old children swooping into each other’s friend lists on the site may, on closer inspection, be found to be in possession of deep, gruff voices and sweaty, hairy hands. Little children live in an alternate universe to the rest of us and that sacred universe of innocence should be protected from all of the badness of our world as best it can; but in the Facebook system – as on the wider Internet – those evil beings that on such innocence feed can become phantoms, disappearing and reappearing at will. They can be anyone online, even eight-year-old children. And these predators have an animal-like intelligence that directs them oftentimes to the most vulnerable children on which to prey.

  There is not even an option on Facebook that allows users to specifically report creeping paedophiles or child sex abuse imagery on the site. What would it cost Facebook to add such a reporting option and to establish close working relationships with police forces all around the world to help them tackle the huge problem of the paedophiles on its site? There exists all over the website now groups and pages dedicated to seeking out the child pornography traders and swappers and reporting them to either Facebook itself (something that I have pleaded with a couple of them never to do, considering how Facebook are interested more in merely deleting the content than in getting the offenders arrested) or to groups such as the IWF or its American equivalent the Cyber Tipline (which are by far the preferable option of the two), that review the reports and report then themselves to the police if illegal content is found. Some groups using the Anonymous brand are a part of this endeavour, which shows how for some at least the idea of Anonymous has become the polar opposite of what it was during the dark days of the Mitchell Henderson trolling. While these groups certainly mean well, I fear that they could be wasting the valuable time of these organisations by getting their members to file the same reports about the same images. One report per image, profile, or group should suffice. They probably also should be told that they are at very real risk of running into trouble with the law as searching out child pornography and posting up the address links to pages containing such is illegal no matter where you are and even if you are doing it for the right reasons. But I certainly can understand them wanting to do something – anything - to help fight against this unspeakable evil. I just genuinely don’t want to see them get into trouble for it.

  It also is worth asking - of ‘Anonymous’ especially - as to whether they are sharing everything they find with the cops or related agencies or if they are just taking it upon themselves to go over the heads of the police in some cases? Some groups styling themselves as Anonymous are now well-known for closing down websites hosting child pornography, but are they letting the police or some other agency look at those websites first before they take it upon themselves to close them down? Because those are real children being abused in those images and every image is a crime scene that real police need to see and pour over. It is important that every single image is entered into police databases for the experts to study – this is what leads to paedophiles being identified and children taken away from their clutches. For ‘Anonymous,’ for all its infantile bluster, isn’t going to be able to do a single thing on its own for the children in those images.

  And at least some of the Anons involved in anti-paedo actions on the Internet display what is a criminal level of idiocy on this matter. Said one of them on reporting child porn to the police (all ‘sic’):

  Ben A Wilkinson well these a few anony rooms i can point you to fighting for the same thing only having nothing to do with government there a wast of time we tend to take down the sites are self

  And:

  Ben A Wilkinson i wonna help but im not agreeing to having anything todo with the fbi or govenment aganceys

  So at least some of them want to make what is nothing more than a computer game out of ‘fighting’ paedophiles. They obviously don’t care about the actual children in the images who are being abused - they can just go on being abused for all they care. These imbeciles just want to play online computer games with the paedophiles and fuck it hampering real police efforts to rescue real abused children. Hopefully a few little pricks like Ben A Wilkinson will themselves feel the long arm of the law around their necks for their attempts to obstruct police and government efforts to save children from their abusers.

  It’s no use roving gangs of vigilantes prowling the red light district in Peadoland and temporarily drawing the curtains over some of the windows that look in on crying children sitting there in ruby-hued rooms and dressed in lingeri
e. If you are doing nothing to help rescue those same children from their abusers, and indeed like Ben A Wilkinson and his ilk actually in practise going out of your way to stop those children from being taken away from their molesters, then just take yourself and your ‘We are legion’ retardation and kindly fuck right off away from the whole thing and don’t ever come back. Because obstructing the potential rescue of children from their torturers just to fill in your own hours in the day is an unforgiveable crime. (But all real respect to Anonymous members who are working with the police’s consent against this evil).

  That said, the existence of these groups and how many of them are completely open lets me see that things are as bad today as they were back when I was actively involved against the paedos back in late 2010 to early 2011. If Facebook was really serious about tackling this crime against humanity on its site they would, as well as drastically rethinking as to how new accounts can come onto their system in the first place, have an option specifically for reporting child sex abuse images (as well as being able to report those using the site to seek for and advertise such images), along with an option for alerting them to suspected paedophiles posing as children. This could allow them to respond immediately to any reports from their user base as to such; and if they were really, really serious about this then once those reports were received and verified as real they would contact the police in the home countries of the offenders and offer to them any and all help they need to prosecute the creatures in question. Of course any such option would be abused to the hilt by the worst of the trolls, but once more that just brings us back to the problem of how simple it is to get a never-ending series of trolling profiles onto Facebook in the first place.

  The ‘micro blogging site’ Twitter with its over 500 million active profiles (let us assume that those 500 million profiles are not operated by 500 million separate individuals) has its own - reportedly very severe - child pornography problem, but it at least officially acknowledges that such a problem exists within its electronic confines and it has a special email address listed on its site for regular users to report such content to them, and another for police forces to contact them directly in relation to it. This doesn’t deal with the dilemma of how fake profiles are as easy to get onto Twitter as they are to Facebook and elsewhere, but it at least is a step in the right direction (not that it appears to have had much effect so far, with one anti-paedo activist telling me that Twitter is now worse than Facebook for child pornography). For Facebook, though, adding an option like this onto their application would be too much of an overt reminder to their users that they have a serious problem in this regard, and the company are very loath to admit that the problem is out of their control. Remember: image is everything.

  How closely they guard their image was personally illustrated to me by an occurrence that took place in July of 2011. I had established contact with the office of a British Member of Parliament and had been in regular email contact with her personal assistant, who had taken a keen and personal interest in the happenings on Facebook regarding both the RIP trolls and their fellow child abusers and torturers in the Facebook paedophile web. This good lady had contacted Facebook to relay to them the concerns that both she and her boss had about the information which I had given to them on such, and Facebook had provided her with a spokeswoman to answer her queries. An email that I had sent on to this Facebook marionette through the MP’s office detailing as to how the easily-concocted fake profiles on the system were leading to both child porn swapping and sustained campaigns against bereaved people was answered only with the same old corporate bollocks that I have come to expect of this flesh-crawlingly creepy company.

  ‘I can’t really comment on this gentleman's opinions. I can say that we take fake accounts and trolling very seriously indeed and we take a number of proactive measures to both prevent fake accounts being set up and monitoring pages which are likely to be at risk. We use both our highly trained and global user operations team and advanced technology solutions to prevent and remove fake and troll accounts,’ was the drone-like reply to a detailed report in which I, anticipating such a response, had in the first place called bullshit (in a very civil way) on all the corporate crap spewed out there.

  So not even in a one-to-one contact with that MP’s assistant could Facebook acknowledge in a human way the very real problems which it has been consistently failing to properly address. Instead, its roboworker just automatically reached for the PR booklet so as to find and then regurgitate an automated response to the concerned party. Asked then to speak to me directly, the spokeswoman refused and, rather unsurprisingly, sent word to me that any concerns I may have about content on Facebook could all be best allayed if only I would use the report button. Because the report button is the fucking answer to everything. I only wish that there were a report button which I could use to report Facebook to someone and have its account closed down. I found myself, not for the first nor last time, wanting to rip Mark Zuckerberg’s throat open and vomit into it every stinking, horrible thing that I had witnessed on Facebook.

  In September 2011, media in Ireland, Britain, and further afield was abuzz with the news that the father of a 12-year-old girl from Belfast was suing Facebook for failing to keep his daughter, who was in care, off the website, where, says the father, she had been approached by numerous older men seeking sex with her on a number of accounts which she had opened. This case attracted no small amount of attention, with some commentators speculating that if the suit were successful and Facebook were found to be failing in its duty to keep underage children off the site then it could possibly lead to it being blocked by the British government. The spotlight then being shone on Facebook got even brighter when because of the high-profile nature of the case hundreds of others complainants from around the UK soon joined in the same action, which was being handled by Derry City solicitor Hilary Carmichael.

  Said Ms Carmichael: ‘It's not just one child who is in danger from paedophiles on Facebook, thousands of children are in danger. Something must be done to protect them. We want Facebook to sit up and take notice.’

  But just one month after the announcement of the case that very possibly could have cost Facebook dearly, and in what could be said to be very strange timing indeed in relation to someone who was taking on the world’s 9th most powerful person and one of its richest, Hilary Carmichael was suspended by the Law Society, the body which regulates lawyers in Northern Ireland, over non-payment of tax. In December that year her business was put up for sale by that same body, and by the next April she had been declared bankrupt because of it all, something which she said had left her unable to practice law ever again.

  ‘I simply could not pay all of my tax bill,’ said Ms Carmichael to the Belfast Telegraph. ‘There were a lot of bills to be paid and given a bit of time I could have paid my bill. The Inland Revenue were happy to give me time but as for the Law Society, they were having none of it.’ The lawsuit against Facebook was never heard of again. If you were an even slightly sceptical person you might begin to suspect that someone within the Law Society was suddenly able to afford to buy themselves a really nice new sports car that year. (And this is the same Facebook than hundreds of millions of people willingly submit all their personal information to.)

  Because Facebook really don’t react well to criticism as to how they deal with the monsters on its site. They don’t read these bad reports and think to themselves: ‘How best can we improve on this?’ They read them and think: ‘How best can I shut this prick up?’ When Lydia Cacho, a highly respected and quite famous anti-paedophile activist and journalist from Mexico, dared in October 2011 to very publicly attack Facebook for not doing enough to combat child pornography trading on its site, she was able to report that the company reacted, not by trying to do better, but by closing down her own personal Facebook page. So they’ll stand for paedos running loose like wild beasts on their site, but by god they won’t stand for criticism about it.

  If th
is book gets noticed, I fully expect them to exert much more energy into attacking me and its contents, probably in sneaky, underhand ways, than they will in trying to fix the very real problems that it hopefully will raise. Honestly though, I would love that because I’d just go and write another book about the whole matter. And I’d love for them to drag me into court too so I could prove the case against them. That would be a dream.

  So let me just say it out straight: Facebook is failing abysmally to stop the child pornography trading going on openly on its site; it is failing abysmally to prevent paedophiles using fake profiles on its site with which to groom large numbers of children for sexual exploitation; and, probably most egregiously of all, it has not been – despite its false claims to the contrary – working anywhere near as closely as it could be with the police forces of the world to help them tackle the paedos who have nested within its digital walls. They certainly do claim that they are doing all they can to help the police in this. The cold, hard evidence says otherwise.