Comments on: Giganews Resorts to DMCA to Quieten FBI Allegations

By: The Month In Internet Law: September 2014

The Month In Internet Law: September 2014 — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 03:34:22 +0000

[…] When the news hit, Giganews adamantly denied the accusations and brandished the old logic bomb: “it’s impossible to prove a negative.” But just in case that doesn’t work, the company has gone on a DMCA takedown rampage. […]

By: zbeast

zbeast — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:29:00 +0000

Giginews is not the FBI.. but they have done work for the FBI…
Where this was by choice or coercion I don’t know. This is the same type of stuff that happens to internet companies.. But a number of years ago someone from the FBI via Giginews tried to run some type of sting on me. I was notified by someone I know in the local phone exchange this was happening and appropriate counter actions were taken by me. Needless to say I was not amused. My internet connection was being servailed as well as a local agent set up surveillance on my home. No tin foil hat here. it’s all true… but i’m not going to provide more details.

By: Streaky

Streaky — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 15:25:00 +0000

Giganews have a serious issue here with their customer base. Proving negatives etc is a bit of a nonense – it might not be ethical to provide these services as a US company and claim privacy. As a Brit I’d also say it might not be ethical to provide them as a UK company either.

The whole fed operation/non fed operation argument is a diversion – all companies with US operations are US government operations when you have wholesale wire-tapping and secret courts and companies being ordered not to say what is actually going on. I find it very hard to believe Giganews is immune to all this, and it’s almost impossible to believe given the services they provide.

Even if it isn’t run by the FBI you can be damned sure DHS/FBI/et al will have no issue turning up with a secret court order telling them to remove this/log that/give us the details of the user on this IP at this date/time. We get them constantly and we don’t even provide services that are generally associated with illegality in the way usenet is.

By: tetridae

tetridae — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 07:08:00 +0000

Yes encryption is good, but with the exposed weaknesses in software literally everywhere, in SSL, in SSH, flawed random number generation, even vulnerabilities in such basic things as Bash… I am quite pessimistic about how possible it is to really protect your privacy these days…

By: tetridae

tetridae — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Yes, at least if they don’t know what they’re doing, bitcoin is not very anonymous. There are more and less secure ways to use bitcoin. To get it really secure you must be very careful and very systematic. Most people don’t have the energy to bother with that. The average halfwit pedo sure doesn’t. Probably doesn’t even know to use a VPN or data encryption. But I suspect the more organized ones are quite clever, or they’d get caught more often than they do.

By: You Fail Again

You Fail Again — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 05:53:00 +0000

The “open Internet” is much, much less of a problem.
Google manages to find most of the real stuff before anyone even has a chance to stumble upon it.

On the darknet, the exchange of money is the biggest security flaw in the CP trade.

No matter how well they configure Tor and all the other measures they may have taken to hide themselves, bitcoin (which is what they use) is what eventually leads to them being caught.

Bitcoin is not as anonymous as people want to believe.
See here:
https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know
And here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity
And a little better insight here:
http://www.coindesk.com/how-anonymous-is-bitcoin/

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create a totally anonymous transaction using bitcoin. The best that can be hoped for is pseudo-anonymity.

When people say, “Follow the money,” it works just as well chasing down a bitcoin transaction as it works for real currency transactions over the Internet.

By: tetridae

tetridae — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 05:03:00 +0000

If there is a black-market for CP, censorship on the open internet would help protecting the people trading in it too. Less risk for them to get caught if no one stumbles on the content. Biggest chance to catch someone doing stuff like that would probably be if some random person stumbled on it and recognized either a kid or perpetrator or maybe the surroundings of the scene.

By: allahu.snackbar

allahu.snackbar — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:29:00 +0000

Another reason you don’t use services based in the United States.

By: You Fail Again

You Fail Again — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:30:00 +0000

I agree with that.

By: You Fail Again

You Fail Again — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 00:29:00 +0000

I don’t know anything about cases in Sweden, so I can’t comment on that.

Preventive measures (at least here in the U.S.) come after the fact. Some pedophiles are kept in prisons even after their original sentence have run out.

It’s called Civil Incarceration.

It’s allowed because they know they aren’t cured and never will be.

The other route (seldom followed) is by chemical castration — but it has to be requested and agreed to by the offender.

That option has seldom worked either. One offender (that i know of) even committed violent sexual assaults by other means in spite of his chemical castration.

If anyone here doesn’t know what that is — please use Google.