Comment on lemm.ee plans for mitigating image upload abuse

• TWeaK@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This isn’t something the FBI have much involvement with. The FBI deal with matters across states.

  This isn’t America, where you have a bunch of separate states unified under one American government. People haven’t been posting porn to lemm.ee. People have been posting porn to other instances, which has seeped through to lemm.ee.

  Getting the Estonian law enforcement involved is like trying to get the Californian government involved in dealing with a problem from Texas. Estonian law enforcement have no jurisdiction over lemmy.world or any other instance, and giving them an opportunity is only going to lead to locking down lawful association and communication in favour of some vague “think of the children” rhetoric. And, like I say, it won’t do anything to curtail the production of CSAM as the purpose of this attack has little to do with the promotion of CSAM.

  Frankly, it could easily be more like:

  lemm.ee: We’ve got a problem with illegal content

  Estonian law enforcement: Woah that’s illegal.

  Estonian law enforcement: You’ve admitted to hosting illegal content. We’re going to confiscate all your stuff.

  lemm.ee is shut down pending investigation.

  Meanwhile, if lemm.ee continues its current course of action, yet someone notifies law enforcement:

  Estonian law enforcement: Woah, we’ve got a report of something dodgy, that’s illegal.

  lemm.ee: People tried to post illegal content elsewhere that could have come to our site, we blocked and deleted it to the best of our ability.

  Estonian law enforcement: Fair enough, we’ll see what we can figure out.

  It really matters how and when the problem is presented to law enforcement. If you report yourself, they’re much more likely to take action against yourself than if someone else reports you. It doesn’t do yourself any favours to present your transgressions to them, not unless you’re absolutely certain you’re squeeky clean.

  At this stage and in these circumstances, corrective action is more important than reporting.

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  • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You’re assuming that no American user saw any of the content. I think the FBI could absolutely get involved if the content was seen by anyone in the US, let alone by people in more than 1 state. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on child abuse or cyber crimes but the FBI devotes massive resources to investigation of crimes against children and could potentially at least help other agencies investigate where this attack originated from. And if the FBI were able to determine that the attack originated from the US, I assure you the DOJ is far less kind to people who possess, commit or distribute that type of horrible child abuse than they are to rich old white men who commit a coup. You’re kind of acting like this is just another DDOS attack rather than the deliberate distribution of horrific images of child abuse to a platform that in no way encourages distribution of child abuse material.

    Anywhooooo the problem was much worse on lemmy.world since they were the main target of the attack. Does anyone know if they reported it?

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    • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Local authorities will be the contact point of the admins (or authorities of where the servers are hosted). They’ll investigate what they can and then ring up euro/inter/whatever pol as necessary to have other forces handle stuff in their respective jurisdictions.

      As to the current case the ball is clearly in the field of lemmy.world admins and their local authorities (Germany? Hetzner, I think, as so many) as they’re the ones with the IP logs. Even if the FBI gets a tip-off because an American saw anything they’re not exactly in a position to do anything but go via Interpol and ask the BKA if they’d like to share those IP logs.

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