this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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So your advice to any organization seeking to minimize illegal activity is to willfully ignore any trace of it?
"I swear, officer, I was just searching for CP to catch OTHER people!"
It would be just as pathetic as that scene from Something About Mary. "Yeah I was just going to pee, too!"
Maybe they had some kind of legal sanctioning to do it, but holy crap, I wouldn't want that in my search history. I would hope software like that has some mechanism where if people search for certain words it results in an automatic reporting to some FBI API somewhere. I actually know of a couple of people who got caught with that stuff. One got 25 years. The other jumped bail and they eventually caught him. I'm not sure if he's been sentenced yet but I bet he'll get double of what the other guy who cooperated got. Those people are creepy AF and nobody in their right mind would want to be associated with any of it. Those people are 10 times worse than neo nazis.
The funny thing is the first guy, everybody could kind of tell he was a creep. But the FBI caught him and he completely cooperated and admitted everything. The second guy, he really seemed like he was going to be the only person in his family who actually turned out to be a decent guy. He was a really sweet kid in a super trashy family. And then all of a sudden everything goes down and everybody is in shock. Then he jumps bail. Last I heard his dad was about to lose his house because he used it as collateral to bail his piece of shit son out of jail.
This open source software needs to include code that reports certain search terms. There are ML algorithms out there that can automatically detect this stuff. Do not search for that kind of content, thinking you're some sort of vigilante. There are ways to deal with this shit without putting yourself in serious legal peril.
I don't think you understand how a research organization works. This isn't three guys in a basement searching for child porn. It's a research institute at Stanford University. They'll have gotten funding to do the work by applying for federal grants, getting approval from multiple Institutional Review Boards who are charged with, among other things, making sure that the people involved in the research are appropriately taken care of. They'll be required to have counselors on board. However "legit" you think such an outfit might possibly be, multiply that by three.
This is their job. It is the same as if they worked for a law enforcement agency. When someone gets arrested for child porn, we don't also charge the police, prosecutors, and judges who might have to look at the material as part of prosecuting a case. I promise you Stanford isn't paying a team of professors and postdocs to just diddle themselves to kiddie porn all day.