UKC

Am I missing something, or didn't this sort of behaviour, quite rightly, used to be illegal?

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27872401

Some way down:

'He poses on incest chat rooms as a father offering his children for sex with other adults.'

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I think the police have always been allowed to do more in this kind of area than people realise.

As I understand it, for example... if the police had reason to suspect me of dealing drugs, but wanted more evidence, they could legitimately pose as a customer and ask me for drugs. However, if I refused, they couldn't then hold a gun to my head to force me to complete the transaction or threaten to hurt my family unless I sold them drugs.

Essentially, offering someone an opportunity to commit a crime is legitimate but you can't "induce" them to commit a crime that in ordinary circumstances they wouldn't consider.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment#United_Kingdom

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I'm not sure there was ever anything illegal about employing agents provocateurs per se.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/10/fine-line-undercover-officer

In reply to John2:

OK, maybe entrapment would be a better word? However hideous the offences that they are trying to prevent, I'm not entirely comfortable about throwing out the rule of law to achieve that?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

OK, maybe entrapment would be a better word? However hideous the offences that they are trying to prevent, I'm not entirely comfortable about throwing out the rule of law to achieve that?

From what I can tell, he wasn't actually charged for the offences immediately connected to the actual 'Sting', but for material/evidence subsequently found on his computer.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Read the Wikipedia link I posted, it's about exactly that. Entrapment is the word used in American law where I believe it's defined in some kind of statute. It's more informally defined by precedent in our legal system but as far as I understand, it never precluded the kind of behaviour you're referring to.


I agree with you that the rule of law shouldn't be suspended for any kind of offence but you seem to be assuming there are things in the law that don't actually exist.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment

'In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely to commit'

I don't think he would have been lurking in the paedophile chatroom if he had no intent of committing an offence.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I so thought this was going to be about rude underwear....

In reply to maisie:

Me too.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

At least the item offered in the sting was not some mythic, non existent substance...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4943122.stm

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Abusing children is quite rightly illegal.

I have no problem whatsoever with the police doing what needs to be done to catch abusers.

I don't understand your point of view at all.

In reply to marsbar:




I see your point of view marsbar, however, I also see Rob's, which is to do with creating a crime for someone to commit. Imagine a female Police officer goes out dressed up as a prostitute and by 'advertising' herself attracts a male for business who wasn't otherwise looking for it. It's a fine line in law, which as others have said is called entrapment.

In reply to Hannah S:


And you still clicked into the thread....interesting...

In reply to Baron Weasel:

I see your point of view as well.

But if the punter wasn't otherwise looking for it, he wouldn't go for it...would he?

I've walked past a few obvious ladies of the night. I've not been looking for sex with a prostitute when I've walked past them, but I've not suddenly been overwhelmed with the urge to pay them for sex just because they happened to be there.


For the record, I'm not sure where I stand on the whole entrapment, catching thing. I agree with John2's statement earlier:

"I don't think he would have been lurking in the paedophile chatroom if he had no intent of committing an offence."

In reply to maisie:


I thought it was going to be about a retro bolted route on Bodmin.

In reply to ThunderCat:

I know what you are saying, but for the sake of UKC (aka devils advocate), let's look at it another way...

You are at the super market, you went there to get some bin liners or similar. First you are hit by the smell of fresh baked bread, you resist, but then you pass the pie counter... you can smell the browning flavours of the caramelising pastry tops and then you notice the man at the pie counter discounting his children... you know they are filled with ale and meat, before you know it you are reaching out for one, panting like a dog... you snatch one and before you know it you are thinking of excuses to tell your chums at Weight Watchers.

As I said it is a fine line and advertising and marketing do get people to do things they otherwise wouldn't...

In reply to Baron Weasel:
Listen, it's one of those many things were I'm not at all decided - I wasn't being an argumentative prick (I'm not drunk enough for that...yet)

I just thought the prostitution thing was a bad example.

But on the other hand...lets says a long time ago a friend of mine once saw a car with four masked men in it speeding away from a bank. Pink smoke billowing out the car and piles of £10s and £20s covered in pink dye being chucked out of the window. Followed quite quickly by quite a few police cars.

Absolutely law abiding citizen. Never broken the law in his life.

He stopped and collected as much of the money as possible and handed in all of the badly dyed notes to the bank.

However there were quite undamaged notes....

So...yeah...maybe some people can be tempted if things are dangled in front of them like that....

Interesting question...

In reply to ThunderCat:


I know

What's your tipple?

Mine is beer, because I am a brewer...

In reply to Baron Weasel:
Well I've actually had two bottles of leffe blond tonight, which were rather nice.

One of those nights where you wish you'd bought a couple more.

Am currently on a bottle of "Echo Falls Fruit Fusion Red Wine"...cos that's all that's left in the house and I don't feel like going to bed tonight.

It was Mr's TC's...she was saving it for the weekend I think.

Hahah...I'll be long gone by then.

Rah.....

I like trying lots of new beers and ales that I've not tried before. But I won't pretend that I'm an expert. I like the odd wychwood ale.

In reply to ThunderCat:

There's a cool climbing place near where Leffe is brewed called Freyr.

I'm drinking a single hop brown honey ale I brewed. Generously hopped with NZ Green Bullets and going down a treat

In reply to Baron Weasel:

<scratches chin and wonders if Baron Weael lives near Manchester...>

In reply to ThunderCat:

No, more T'North..

In reply to Baron Weasel:
How t'north? we've got our coast to coast ride in August - we cut across hexham / northumbria . We'd love someone to be there on the A69 with a refreshment beer stand..

In reply to ThunderCat:

<Green Bullets are a hop variety from New Zealand and they are to hops as Super Skunk is to grass. Good shit basically >

Back to trapping pedo's...

In reply to Baron Weasel:

I also see Rob's, which is to do with creating a crime for someone to commit.

I personally don't think he was essentially charged with those particular crimes. I think it was a ruse to ascertain how 'hardcore' he was within his particular community and once they'd established his true involvement, investigated him further and therefore found the evidence on his computer.
They probably did similar to any number of people. Most didn't warrant further investigation, he did.

In reply to ThunderCat:

Staveley, soon to be Sedbergh...

Did coast to coast in a day 2 years ago. Eyes on the prize, goal was... Fish and Chips fried in dripping. Mmmm yeah

In reply to Baron Weasel:

Maybe its not as obvious to others as it is to me. Nobody can be charged with abusing imaginary children. Real children have already been abused by the perpetrator in question. This is what the police are trying to find out about.

The crime has already happened.

In reply to marsbar:


I don't think anybody's particularly concerned about this individual's conviction. There's a whole other conversation about protecting the rights of people whom most citizens don't particularly like: where is the line between detecting a pattern of behaviour based on ongoing experience and tempting people into an action which they would otherwise avoid?

Equally, do we see paedophiles as essentially ill and unable to make rational decisions with respect for other people, or are they just scumbags who need to be weeded out and never allowed access to the rest of society?

Martin

In reply to Baron Weasel:

"... then you notice the man at the pie counter discounting his children"

Well, when they are discounted who can resist?

In reply to Baron Weasel:






Well done you be just used the old argument of "she was wearing a short skirt, she was asking to be raped"

This thread was answered by the person who very early on gave definitions of the words "entrapment" and "induce"

Off topic but...I love the caption Investigators have repaired mobile phone chips to analyse the images they hold under a photo of someone wielding a soldering iron. Yeah, that's how you "repair mobile phone chips" - devices with features sizes in the nanometre range, using a tool measured in the millimetre range ie six orders of magnitude difference!

In reply to Martin W:

I think your comment is very much on topic, it's the sort of thing that concerns me ... as Chris Morris demonstrated, all you have to do is whisper 'paedophile' and common sense, rationality and respect for the rule of law go flying out of the window.

I don't know how big a problem paedophilia is. I wouldn't necessarily trust the police to tell me though, nor would I trust organisations whose existence depends upon it. Some of the stats that these people quote are just risible.

It's a horrible, horrible crime, and of course one case is one case too many. But sometimes it feels like it's the flip side of terrorism - this week, we're in fear of terrorists and have to take our belts off to get on a plane; next week it's paedophilia week, we can't take mobile phones in a swimming pool in case 'paedos get hold of pictures of children' and presumably it drives them mad with lust; then the next week schools are overwhelmed by Jihadists... then child porn sites are getting '500 hits per second' or whatever...

In reply to Scarab9:

well done with your straw man..

In reply to marsbar:



I get the impression he's concerned that the same method could be used to catch people doing other things, which they may not set out to do if the police hadn't organised events to catch them?

Which is a fair enough point (unspeakably cruel as child abuse is), charges against some green protesters were dropped after it emerged that an undercover policeman had helped events along, though the details escape me.

That's a bit different to the police posing as fathers offering their children out for sex so they can (hopefully) find material of child abuse on people's computers etc, which leads them to be able to catch the people producing it.

In reply to Martin W:

It actually looks like a surface mount hot air/desoldring station, which is fair enough. If the board's damaged they might want to get it off the board to analyse it.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

That strikes me as a bit of a snap judgement, to call their statistics risible. Based on what knowledge is it risible? I'm sure the same applies to you, when I say I can't imagine them being disappointed if the reason for their organisation existing stopped happening.

Coincidentally I've just stumbled across this....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28359143

In reply to Timmd:

Which contains this:

'All stressed that the latest technology - which is able to spot known images of child abuse and flag authorities immediately - was deployed across the sites.'

What DOES that mean, exactly? If it is spotting 'known images of child abuse' - i.e. images they know about, that have not been edited, then technically that's no big deal. If they are claiming (actually, I suspect they are deliberately inferring) that they can discriminate between, say, family images of kids playing on a beach, and hard core porn then they are talking nonsense.

The risible stat I was referring to was the one where they claimed that 500 searches per second were being recorded ... I don't believe it.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:



It means that the same images are circulated between different people, and that the people who's job it is to monitor this notice when a new image, ie evidence of somebody else being abused to create an image to put online, appears within circulation. Since there may be (or will be) a supply and demand element to this, it is important even if it's just a known image being viewed by somebody new. Which means that, technically, it is a big deal.


Can you say why, how do you know it's not something which can be recorded electronically?

It almost seems like you don't want to believe that it 'could' be true, you've simple decided it's risible instead.

I (genuinely) have course work to do, and have just had a thinking break, so if I don't reply that's the reason.