The Null Device

It has emerged that children in Britain are posing as paedophiles online to intimidate each other.

Officers have warned parents and children to be vigilant after as many as nine youngsters in Padstow, Cornwall, were targeted through the networking sites Bebo and MSN. Police initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children by befriending them online and arranging to meet them. But a member of the public has come forward and told them that youngsters are trying to settle playground disputes by posing as a paedophile to frighten their rivals.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police said: "Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile. The investigations are continuing and at this moment we are looking into every line of inquiry and are not ruling out any possibility. However, the language used on the social networking sites such as Bebo and MSN is at times childish. It could be youngsters playing a sick game to try and intimidate friends they have fallen out with. This will be treated seriously and we will be contacting the families of the children involved and we will try and help them by involving social services."

(via Boing Boing) ¶ bullying children hoaxes irony moral panics online paedoterrorists society uk [no comments]

In today's paranoid age, controlling parents have ever-increasing options for monitoring everything their children do:

The SnoopStick looks like a memory stick. You plug it into your teenager's computer when they are not around, and it installs stealth software on to the machine. Then you plug it into your own computer and can sit back at your leisure and observe, in real time, exactly what your child is doing online - what websites they are visiting, the full conversations they are having on the instant messenger (IM) service, and who they are sending emails to. It is as if you are sitting and invisibly spying over their shoulder.

Significantly, the £37.50 device comes with the warning that, if you use it to monitor an employee's computer without notifying them, you may well be in breach of employment laws. But install it secretively on the computer of your teenager, who has absolutely no rights at all, and no one can touch you. The moral argument doesn't come into it.

The following devices, please note, are not just being marketed to private detectives to catch errant spouses; they are being targeted at parents of teenagers. You can get clothes with tracking devices fitted into them. You can fit such devices covertly into mobile phones. For $149 you can purchase a mobile spy data extractor, which reads deleted text messages from a SIM card. For $79 you can buy a semen detection kit, to test your teenage daughter's clothing. And for $99, if you really want to ape the mad ex-Marine father in American Beauty, you can buy a drug identification kit which can detect up to 12 different illegal drugs.

The SnoopStick symbolises the modern obsession with control. The American psychologist Robert Epstein, who wrote the controversial book The Case Against Adolescence, estimates that young Americans are now ten times more restricted than adults, and twice as restricted as convicted criminals. He says teenagers are infantilised and deprived of human rights. As well as the obvious legal bar to prevent them smoking, drinking, marrying, voting and gambling, teenagers have no privacy rights, no property rights, no right to sign contracts or make decisions regarding their own medical or psychiatric treatment.

¶ civil liberties fear paedoterrorists paranoia parenting rights society surveillance [no comments]

The practice of street photography, taking spontaneous photographs in public places, is under threat, as photographers find themselves lumped in with the shadowy paedoterrorist hordes who are out to kill us all and molest our children:

In the past year, the photography blogs have buzzed with tales of harassment, even violence. There's the war photographer who dodged bullets abroad only to be beaten up in his own South London backyard by a paranoid parent who (wrongly) thought his child was being photographed. There's the amateur photographer punched prostrate in the London Tube after refusing to give up his film to a stranger; the case of the man in Hull, swooped on by police after taking photographs in a shopping centre. “Any person who appears to be taking photos in a covert manner should expect to be stopped and spoken to by police ...” ran the Humberside force's statement.

Sophie Howarth is a curator specialising in street photography. She says she's noticed - despite the difficulties - a boom for the art, enabled by technology, and with London at the centre. “In France, traditionally one of the great centres of street photography, the law now says you own the rights to your own image, so street photography's become a dead art. In London there's a growing community of photographers, using digi- tal technology, not just cameras, but blogs, too, to document the city and give each other instant feedback.”

“I'm not going to belittle the issue of terrorism, but this is paranoia. And unfortunately, since Lady Di and now this link with terrorists, photography's seen by many people as something that's a little ... cheap.”

(via meimaimaggio) ¶ copyfight paedoterrorists paranoia photography society the long siege uk [no comments]

As we dig in for the long siege and see potential terrorists in every shadow, the war on terror is, according to Bruce Schneier, turning into a war on the unexpected, with untrained civilians encouraged to report anything out of the ordinary, and the authorities escalating such reports to full-blown incidents:

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.

(via Schneier) ¶ paedoterrorists paranoia security terrorism the long siege [no comments]

Legal fictions are a powerful thing; firstly unlicensed reproduction of copyrighted materials was equated with violent robbery at sea by being termed "piracy", and soon, at least in Sweden, it may be categorised as a form of paedophilia. Well, it had to be either that or terrorism...

(via /.) ¶ copyfight paedoterrorists sweden [no comments]

In Britain, the police are arresting people for accessing open wireless access points without permission:

The man arrested at the weekend was cautioned for dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment.

"Gaining unauthorised access to someone else's network is an offence and people have to take responsibility for their actions. Some people might argue that taking a joy-ride in someone else's car is not an offence either," he said.

"There have been incidences where paedophiles deliberately leave their wireless networks open so that, if caught, they can say that is wasn't them that used the network for illegal purposes," said NetSurity's Mr Cracknell.

Such a defence would hold little water as the person installing the network, be they a home user or a business, has ultimate responsibility for any criminal activity that takes place on that network, whether it be launching a hack attack or downloading illegal pornography.

The BBC article provides the following helpful advice to anyone with a wireless access point wishing to avoid ending up on the Sex Offenders' Register:

There are many different types of security options available - but the most basic is to give the network a Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) key.

While not totally secure, WEP keys do at least provide a modicum of security to thwart all but the most technically-literate hackers.

¶ crime law paedoterrorists surveillance uk wifi [no comments]

A US television station blows the lid off "leetspeak", and the paedophilic menace lurking behind its innocent-sounding acronyms:

"LOL" for "laughing out loud" and "TTYL" for "talk to ya later" sound innocent enough, but if you look behind some other acronyms, there could be something sinister.

• "KPC" means "keeping parents clueless."
• "POS" means "parent over the shoulder"
• "GYPO" means "get your pants off."
• "TDTM" means "talk dirty to me"

The article also includes links to helpful websites with names like "Teen Angels" and "Parents' Edge", which specialise in listing the telltale signs your children may be being preyed on by satanists paedophiles via Dungeons & Dragons online chatrooms.

(via substitute) ¶ fear leetspeak paedoterrorists sensationalism [no comments]

BBC Newsnight's Adam Livingstone sets the record straight on paedophiles, terrorists and file sharing:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I'd be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting "Pictures from Sky Sport" in the top left corner of the screen. And I'm not. So it isn't. So you can stop telling us if you like. We hear you.

The rest of the article goes on about ISPs blocking BitTorrent, other clients using encryption to bypass the blocks, and the resulting increase in encrypted content on the net allowing suspicious encrypted paedoterrorist communications, which would have otherwise drawn the security services' attention, to sink into the encryption soup unnoticed.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ bbc copyfight encryption paedoterrorists security [no comments]

The latest salvos in the War on Intellectual Property Terrorism: Paypal have unilaterally suspended donations to Freenet, an underground crimeware project allowing data to be distributed anonymously with no provision for law enforcement monitoring, thus providing a safe haven for paedophiles, terrorists and dissidents living under oppressive regimes. Freenet is not technically illegal (except perhaps in Japan), though appears to be being de facto outlawed and driven further underground through third-party sanctions. You can still contribute to Freenet by using E-Gold, an alternative online currency favoured by heavily armed anarchist militia whackos and the tinfoil hat crowd.

¶ freenet p2p paedoterrorists paranoia [no comments]

Microsoft announces that they're shutting down all unsupervised chat rooms because of paedophiles. A few days later, Senator Alston, the Savonarola of Canberra, issues a statement praising the action, and saying how this will force other operators to shut down their chat rooms as well. You can almost see the glee in his beady little eyes as he contemplates the golden age of shame-based morality and self-righteous busybodyism this will usher in, in which everybody is their brother's keeper and private moral lapses (from morality as defined by our spiritual leaders) have serious public consequences.

¶ australia censorship paedoterrorists wowsers [2 comments]

The US Department of Defense recently investigated ways of redesigning the Internet to eliminate that pesky anonymity that allows terrorists, paedophiles, drug traffickers, Green Party activists and evil, evil people to go about their dastardly deeds undetected. After attempting to fudge a politically expedient result (or at least one likely to get money thrown in its direction, in the name of "national security"), they concluded that it was impractical and scrapped the idea.

I wonder how long until the MPAA/RIAA revive the idea and start pushing hard for Internet protocols to be rewritten to stamp out this un-American "file sharing" idea and protect their business models, late capitalism and the American Way.

¶ anonymity internet paedoterrorists surveillance the long siege [no comments]