I've trawled around the dark web (.onion) before for quite a while and have never landed on any CP. I did see a link once to something that looked like it could have been CP but of course didn't follow it. Point is that even in onion-land it seems that one can't easily find CP unless one is actively attempting to search it out. It's not something you are likely to be ambushed by.
I explored on Tor about 15 years ago, by just finding indexers and what not from the regular net. I couldn't avoid links to CP everywhere. For every "innocent" link I saw, there must have been multiple links (claiming) to be of CP stashes. I'd say the only thing comparable was the number of "hitman; Pay half first, half after" links.
My experience was the same and I quickly gave up on Tor for that reason. I occasionally toyed with it as a clearnet proxy but hidden services made me really pessimistic about its mission.
Fortunately it does seem like a lot of that has been expunged. I recently revisited hidden services, as well as the Hidden Wiki (which I'm almost certain had CP links a long time ago but my memory is cloudy), and it seems like that filth isn't tolerated anymore on most indexes I found.
I think it's safe to assume that they were fed honeypots.
And you know something, I don't know if I'm even opposed to that.
The idea that the government must have a ton of CP stashed somewhere for such purposes feels about as disgusting as disgusting gets, but I'm not sure how many of those monsters you can catch without placing bait.
1. Honeypots are controversial and practically invite an entrapment defense. Better to have police infiltrate forums, identify people, and give prosecutors unambiguous evidence.
2. Calling people who view these images "monsters" contributes to a stigma that makes people hesitant to seek help before their urges lead them to abuse children.
2.5. If they are "monsters" and someone you know and love is not a "monster," what do you do when you discover that your loved one is one of those people? We go around asking why people look the other way; the way we reflexively dehumanize pedophiles is one of the reasons. We need to recognize pedophiles as human beings who have serious and potentially dangerous mental health problems, and instead of calling them "monsters" we need to reoriented ourselves to say "let's get this person help before they do something monstrous." Obviously a person who is actively abusing children needs to be arrested, but let's not forget that we are talking about people who actively consume imagery of children being abused, many of whom are not necessarily abusing children (yet).
I have no idea why you’d be opposed to the idea, yet I’m fairly certain they are not honeypots. I’m not even sure if that would be legal. Besides, if these sites had the ability to identify their users, we’d hear about the prosecutions. Or, if they were run by actual criminals, we’d hear of shakedowns of users of these sites?
> Or, if they were run by actual criminals, we’d hear of shakedowns of users of these sites?
Why? If someone is using those sites, they are extremely unlikely to tell anyone they're being shaken down because doing so requires admitting that they have used those sites. I would imagine that that group of people is a lot more likely to stay quiet and pay up than many other people.
That aside, I'm not entirely sure how people using those Tor sites would even be shaken down given Tor's anonymity. Unless, of course, they paid with a CC and not a form of digital currency.
We do hear about prosecutions, and the sites are run by criminals (as operating such sites is a criminal act). The police are better resourced and better able to identify users than almost all the forum operators, and in any case I doubt the majority of forum operators are interested in shaking down their users.
No idea, I kept away from them as best I could, but I did see comments (on the indexers that, I guess, were there for "rating" the links) lauding most of them as such.
Honestly, it reminded me a lot of the early 90s www - that is that anything and everything just couldn't be trusted unless you knew the source outside of the web, too. (Like you know the author's personally, or you have confirmation it is a university site, etc.) and that put me off quite a lot. I really didn't fancy the idea of even accidentally opening the wrong link and seeing these images so I basically stopped using Tor altogether and haven't been back since.
I could not tell what was real there. I'd find a wiki that had links but it's like is this a honeypot or is it real kind of thing. I don't know what I was looking for some like hidden secret, something cool.
