Posted on 04/25/2019 3:28:06 PM PDT by SMGFan
The Department of Justice has been dismissing child pornography cases in order to not reveal information about the software programs used as the basis for the charges.
An array of cases suggest serious problems with the tech tools used by federal authorities. But the private entities who developed these tools won't submit them for independent inspection or hand over hardly any information about how they work, their error rates, or other critical information. As a result, potentially innocent people are being smeared as pedophiles and prosecuted as child porn collectors, while potentially guilty people are going free so these companies can protect "trade secrets."
The situation suggests some of the many problems that can arise around public-private partnerships in catching criminals and the secretive digital surveillance software that it entails (software that's being employed for far more than catching child predators).
With the child pornography cases, "the defendants are hardly the most sympathetic," notes Tim Cushing at Techdirt. Yet that's all the more reason why the government's antics here are disturbing. Either the feds initially brought bad cases against people whom they just didn't think would fight back, or they're willing to let bad behavior go rather than face some public scrutiny.
An extensive investigation by ProPublica "found more than a dozen cases since 2011 that were dismissed either because of challenges to the software's findings, or the refusal by the government or the maker to share the computer programs with defense attorneys, or both," writes Jack Gillum. Many more cases raised issues with the software as a defense.
"Defense attorneys have long complained that the government's secrecy claims may hamstring suspects seeking to prove that the software wrongly identified them," notes Gillum. "But the growing success of their counterattack is also raising concerns that, by questioning the software used by investigators, some who trade in child pornography can avoid punishment."
Courts have sought to overcome concerns that scrutiny would diminish the effectiveness of the software for law enforcement or infringe on intellectual property rights by ordering only secret and monitored third-party review proces
CHANGE THE DAMN LAW.
Protect the methods
To
PROTECT THE CHILDREN
Why do we protect the press sources in such a holy matter? It’s in our effing CONSTITUTION. We should do the same with surveillance methods that catch people who RAPE BABIES and destroy children’s lives!!!!!!!!!!
Um, you have just proposed a recipe for witch hunts.
Nope, not on my watch.
Can’t imagine more of a horror than being accused of being a pedophile and charged with it because of a “glitch”
And there is a fallacy behind this that “child abuse is a forever unrecoverable condition.”
Now it’s a heinous, heinous thing to do. It should meet with social scorn even where the government cannot technically punish (and there are ample reasons not to allow unlimited punishing powers). The victims should meet with much social pity and succor. But in a more spiritual age, those who were victims of chide abuse (such as the young woman who was to become Mother Teresa, and the young man who was to become St. Francis) learned from copious sources to turn to God, who would characteristically flip these lives into bastions of kindness against cruelty, in the “more than conqueror” promise of Christian faith.
It’s in spiritually apostate ages that these become piteous waste cases. But really, the common person — abused or not — in these ages is a piteous waste case.
I didn’t know any of that.
Exactly how many times have you read the Bible? :)
You could teach a course.
Um, we have the sprout of excuse for “Witch hunts.”
If you’re a pervert and into kids
A you’re gonna have trouble hiding it
B. For BS.
The pedos who hide it best are the men you would least expect. Don’t ask me how I know this. Ok, you can ask. There were pages of letters to the newspaper in a big city protesting against my abuser finally being arrested on 8 counts of child moleststion. They were heartfelt about what a wonderful man he was, dedicated to children, a man of great morals and service to others, and how he could NEVER. I was almost convinced myself... if it weren’t for some very distinct and personal memories.
Not just charged with it, but also denied access to tools of basic facts and truth in challenging it. We Have To Believe The Output Of Some Hackers.
I do not approve of witch hunts. Clearly there needs some legal adjustment. I’m just biased against child abuse. I believe it is close to murder in many cases in its heinousness.
I am so sorry to learn that it happened to you.
And yet your own personal life isn’t the center and director of the world. If our own personal lives were, we would end up damning great swaths of mixed things. God is up to larger things, which by no means need to exclude your participation at all.
The greatest weapon against cruelty, ironic as it may seem to the worldly, is kindness. It’s illustrated in both Old and New Testament of the bible.
And God, in His sharing way, allows those who exercise kindness to get kindness too. Don’t gnash your teeth — if the offender will not repent, he will go down to shame. As bad as things can get in this mortal coil, consider the dimensions of forever.
You’re quite alive now.
Your right to face your accuser is also enshrined in the constitution. The algorithm is the accuser. A change in the constitution would be needed for the protections you seek.
God is Himself the ultimate Teacher. I hope I’ve been a good student in some areas. I lag in other areas, I know.
Oh look Mueller just found Trump’s computer full of child porn then.
*smacks you over the head*
Idiot!
And here’s an odd thing — a life that is covered with a flood of kindness received as a result of a campaign of kindness begins to worry less about the fate of the cruel and trust God more to get it right. This isn’t like our modern “liberals” who are very snappish and illiberal.
I know you’re Jewish, and not (or not yet) Christian, and I don’t know all the ins and outs here of the Torah tradition that is kept by moderns. It would utterly daunt me to try to master it all. I’m Christian. However the idea of going to hell isn’t one that Christians first came up with. It’s spoken of in the book of Daniel as one possible fate of those raised from the dead. Death isn’t the excuse-all card, it will turn out.
God considers much, much grief in a life preferable to ending up in hell. At the worst, grief is the goad that pushes a soul towards God when otherwise the soul might just go on its merry way of itself in a fatal ignorance.
What of the man who was the abuser of your childhood? He might or might not be in a position to make direct amends to you, but he can certainly offer himself to God to be a force against evil in the world.
All of our stories are mixed. We’ve all done evil things, some of which never got past the scene, some of which have had great knock-on effects. And what determines that? A thing which we don’t have control over, called circumstance.
Don’t let your suffering before the cruel be the end of your story. Let it be a reason for erecting a monument to kindness.
I believe the case here is that the methods don’t produce reliable evidence, which is almost certainly the reason they don’t want to open those methods for inspection.
By hiding the method they can make any person they want to point to guilty, just by having the program say so. Or saying the program said so.
or to incriminate Pedo Joe.
“Guessing one of the reasons is they’d have to reveal that governments are by far the largest distributors of CP, trafficking millions of pics to catch people with maybe a folder full of anime.”
Bingo.
I guess you missed the part about innocent people getting hemmed up in child porn nets. I suppose that's OK as long as it's some other innocent person and not you.
And that's what makes being wrongly accused of being a child abuser just as abhorrent.
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