"Sexting": a disturbing new teenage trend.
posted by Caduceus on Mar 26, 2009 - 129 comments

Through his Webcam, A Boy Joins A Sordid Online World Justin Berry got a webcam when he was 13. Within an hour of his setting it up, a pedophile found him. More followed. They paid him, and he performed. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and lots of gifts, including webcams with better resolution which his new "friends" ordered him from his (presumably now abandoned) Amazon wish list and an apartment from which he could perform and not be bothered by Mom. He soon was persuaded by his "fans" to make lucrative in-person appearances so they could molest him, and he also started his own personal subscription service. More inside...
posted by spira on Dec 18, 2005 - 152 comments

Microsoft collaborates with the Department of Homeland Security, Interpol, and the Canadian Mounties to produce the ultimate people-tracking database, mining email aliases, "chat room" logs, and arrest records. This open-source software developed by MS Canada will be given away free to police departments, says the company. "The initiative was the result of a January 2003 e-mail sent to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates from a member of the Toronto Police Service sex-crimes unit, asking for help in battling child pornography," reports the Seattle Times. "The billionaire, known for his philanthropy in the area of AIDS research and education, called on Microsoft Canada to develop software that would aid police officials." Buried in the enthusiastic accounts of how the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) will nail "child sex fiends" is any consideration of how such a system could -- and will undoubtedly someday -- be used against such lesser offenses as drug use, sharing illegal music files, or discussion of political beliefs that could be construed as supporting "terrorism."
posted by digaman on Apr 8, 2005 - 36 comments

Child Pornographers Using Small Storage Drives. Small drives like this are giving the police quite a bit of trouble. One of the more interesting quotes from the story, "Even if the photos are encrypted, computer forensics specialists can break through most encryption schemes these days anyway."
posted by banished on May 29, 2003 - 33 comments

A crackdown in Texas. America - land of the free. And to guarantee that freedom, everyone has to be constantly watchful. Like the photo store clerk from Eckerd who dutifully reported a Peruvian-born couple's lewd shots of their infants to the Richardson (Dallas/Texas suburbs) police. The photos showed the parents' two infants bathing naked, lying together in bed with their mother (again naked) and the 1-year-old Rodrigo suckling his mother's (naked) breast. So the couple was arrested -- the maximum prison sentence for the crime in question being 20 years -- and the children taken away. (verbatim k5)
posted by The Jesse Helms on Apr 20, 2003 - 77 comments

Is this naturism, photography or soft-core child pornography? If you search for photographers like Sally Mann or Jock Sturges you'll come across this entirely legitimate purveyor of naturist books and videos. In the Fifties and Sixties nudist magazines, like Health and Efficiency, were an excuse for looking at naked bodies. Now that porn is legal, have nudist publications made a comeback as an excuse for looking at photographs of naked children? Their website is itself well concealed - the front page looks innocent enough but, the further you click into it, the more unsettling it becomes. Or are we all becoming to paranoid for our own good? (I'd say NSFW)
posted by Carlos Quevedo on Nov 9, 2002 - 110 comments

Advertisers accidentally linked with kiddie-porn. This was never a problem in print advertising. Looks like some big advertisers got caught when buying run of network advertising. Chevron's not very happy about it.
posted by Salmonberry on Jan 9, 2002 - 4 comments

Were you ever a member of AVS, the Adult Verification System? If so, the Feds have you on a list of potential pedophiles. I remember AVS from the mid-1990s; they were one of the easiest ways to generate revenue from an adult Web site, using the same business model as AdultCheck does today. A very few of the hundreds of sites AVS "fronted" for contained child porn, and the owners of the service are now in federal prison as a result. Even though they knew differently, federal authorities claimed that they had "dismantled the largest-known commercial child pornography enterprise ever uncovered," and for the past two years have been sending offers of child porn to some of 30,000 people on the AVS membership list, the vast majority of which have no interest in child porn.
posted by tranquileye on Nov 15, 2001 - 19 comments