Friday 20 September 2013

"Cyber-blackmailers abusing millions of UK taxpayers"

From the BBC:

British taxpayers are being blackmailed into funding the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), a quango which has threatened them with wildly exaggerated stories about children performing sex acts online.

It is almost impossible to prove that their urban myth about abusers posing online as children and talking victims into sexual acts or sharing of images, then threatening to send pictures to the child's family and friends, is a wild exaggeration at best and a outright fabrication at worst.

Ceop claimed that in 12 cases over two years, 424 children had been blackmailed in this way - 184 of them in the UK. Even if those figures are correct, that equates to about 0.001% of UK children who use the internet.

The only bit of hard evidence they have is the suicide of a 17-year-old in the UK, which might well have been internet-related. The other six suicides they refer to clearly happened outside the UK.

The quango then scraped the barrel by claiming that another seven seriously self-harmed, of whom six were from the UK.

With a complete lack of respect for his or his family's dignity, the quango is claiming that Daniel Perry, from Dunfermline, Fife, took his own life in the summer after blackmailers demanded thousands of pounds having tricked him into thinking he was chatting with a US girl.

3 comments:

Tim Almond said...

Ceop said a third of its operations had seen abusers operate on the so-called “Darknet” – an encrypted sub-layer of the world wide web that is supposed to ensure anonymity – but officials said people were arrested in every “sting”. They declined to say how suspects were identified.

And this is here is what those of us who know about the WWW or internet refer to as "bullshit". There is no "darknet", no encrypted sub-layer to it hidden away. An encrypted SSL message still has an IP address identifying the sender (because without the IP address of the sender, it can't route a response).

Bayard said...

No, No, the Darknet is what the Illuminati use to control the world from their base on the far side of the Moon.

Rational Anarchist said...

I'm not sure if that's something like the first rule of Fight Club, but there are definitely networks that can serve as something akin to Darknets - just look at TOR and it's hidden services.

It's not secure if enough of the nodes are controlled by one person(/government?) as they can then analyse your traffic - although you can minimise the risks by changing routes fairly often.

That said, I suspect most people arrested are identified by information that they give or by trying to arrange meetings.