User4/draft/TOR, the NSA, and CL security
TOR, the NSA, and CL security
Towards the end of 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron explained during a BBC interview that he had ordered the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British outlet analogous to the American CIA, to work with the National Security Agency of America in a joint operation to find a way to arrest those accessing child pornography in the "Darknet".
His actual words were, "There's been a lot in the news recently about the techniques, ability and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community, in GCHQ and the NSA in America. That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after these revolting people sharing these images [of child abuse] on the dark net, and making them available more widely"
By Darknet, one should know that he is talking about the anonymous Tor network (https://www.torproject. org). It is helping political dissidents worldwide evade ISP censorship and communicate anonymously to debate about human rights. However, David Cameron is right that there is also crime going on within the Tor network. This brings up an essential question:
why are those creating child pornography and/or distributing it on Tor the number one target for law enforcement instead of those killing youths by selling them drugs?
The answer is that, by targeting child
porn in Tor, it is easy to convince
the population that any measure
they take curtailing liberties is for
the greater good. Even if all they
accomplish is to shatter confidence
in the Tor network and harm
human rights activists' only means
of secure communications to protect themselves from repressive
governments, it would still be
heralded as a worthwhile effort.
Targeting child porn is also a way for the big spy agencies to justify the illegal wiretapping of the whole world and get people to accept that reading their emails, listening in to their phone calls, and tracking their every move is for the just cause of stopping child porn. Even better, by defining cartoons and photos of kids in the bath as "child abuse images", they make it sound dramatic enough that nobody will be able to say anything against it without looking abominable.
This is not the first time that GCHQ, originally created to protect UK national security from foreign governments and terrorists, is given the task to act against child porn. Just last year during a UK Parliament public hearing, the director of the UK's eavesdropping nerve center revealed to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee that they work with the Child Exploitation Online Protection Agency, stating that "in terms of working with them to uncover the identities and track down some of those who are involved in online sexual exploitation of children within the UK, including from overseas."
It was also GCHQ who assisted British police with cracking the password of the notorious UK child abuser Ian Watkins, who, if the press is to be believed, was storing child porn online with the notvery-clever password "ifuckkids".
Alicelovers Magazine-Issue-3, Feb. 2015, p.15
