Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
“I’m very, very bitter that the likes of Savile and the rest of them were allowed to continue. I did my bit, I said what I had to. But they didn’t air that.”
> an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live
I listened to a podcast that talked about this encampment years ago. The people living there are quite literally trapped. They aren't allowed to move to another city because of their parole and the city they are in has no other location that isn't within some distance of schools, playgrounds, etc that they're forbidden from being near.
One person interviewed had some petty offense like peeing in public when drunk and talked about the violence and crime that occurred in the camp. Listening to him made me so angry at the injustice that people caught in edge cases are subjected to. He drinks too much, pees on the side of a building, and is now forced to live among rapists and predators.
The OP mentioned high school students in totally normal relationships being criminalized. Another example given in the podcast ep was teens sending nude selfies to their bf/gf that got charged and convicted for distributing csam. This is not how enforcement of these laws should work. I'm glad I grew up before smart phones cause I was really stupid when I was a teen.
The only case of public urination -> sex offender which people can point to is Juan Matamoros. He claims this, but the actual case is too old to verify it, and we should not take his word for it.
Arrested in Massachusetts in 1986, charged with two counts of open and gross lewdness, sentenced to two years.
As of [0] lived in Florida, and was in jail for violating probation on a charge of cocaine possession with the intent to sell.
From the article:
Paul Mishkin, the Boston lawyer who represented Matamoros in 1986, could not recall details of the case this week, but said it was clear the judge considered the incident very serious.
“He [Matamoros] told his side of the story to the judge, but clearly there was evidence that made the judge disagree,” said Mishkin. “A two-year sentence in this incident is a fairly severe sentence. You’d have to think there’s evidence to support that.”
It's a weird grey zone of laws where the beaches are not officially nude beaches, but they are advertised this way. Many are run by the federal park police. Most anti nudity laws are state laws and as a result, there is kind of a loophole with enforcing it.
Of course, the act of being nude in public can make many believe they have been assaulted when it's just nudity.
Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
Back when my wife and I were renting, we only found out our landlord was on the list because his parole officer stopped by and asked if he'd informed us as he was legally required to do.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
Honestly I am surprised more real estate agents don’t already bake this into the workflow. Thinking about Zillow as well. There should absolutely be a way to identify all the folks during your home search (buying or renting) that are on the registry.
Of course everyone is ultimately responsible for what they purchase but with the commission earned on a few % off a 500k+ transaction I would expect them to do it.
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
> I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
When I was in high school, our school police officer once gave our class a talk about how to stay off that list. He strongly warned us against sending nudes, because he claimed 18-year-olds getting nudes from their 17-year-old girlfriends was a common way for 18-year-olds to get on the registry.
So, no it's not a concrete example and it's not as non-sexual as public urination but it's still a thing cops are telling young adults to take seriously.
Right, the registry is public in most places, you can just check. When I open it for some of the places I've lived & surrounding areas it is overwhelmingly very serious crimes, the majority of them against minors, a large percentage minors under 13 which is a different category of offense here.
You sometimes need to get familiar with the local legal jargon to interpret it correctly, for example where I live there is no crime "rape" it is recorded as "sexual battery," things like that. And don't assume something is not serious because it is "second degree" or whatever, look up the statutes or sentencing guidelines. I have to seek pretty hard to find anything that could even plausibly be something like an overcharged public urination.
The first one I found, I looked up the case, and the offense took place at 3:40 pm at a city bus stop two blocks from a high school. Pretty decent odds that guy tells all his friends he got booked for trying to take a piss. He might even say that on reddit and HN.
I think you only see the high level offenders in the stuff you can search.
And you say it occurred in the middle of the afternoon at a city bus stop. Pretty hard to do anything serious there without a million people calling 911.
I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.
Are you talking about the link in your parent comment? It's a judgment that overturns the guy's placement on a public registry. (He does seem to be placed on a different registry not accessible to the public.)
He is appealing his placement on the registry on three grounds:
1. He can't be guilty of a qualifying offense, because he has no prior conviction;
2. The officer who put him on the registry did so solely on the basis that his risk of reoffending was "moderate", when it was also necessary to find that he posed a "moderate" danger to the public;
3. He did not in fact pose a danger to the public.
And the judgment rules against him on argument 1 while ruling for him on arguments 2 and 3, nullifying his registration.
Given that this judgment overturns a judgment below, it is evidence that you can be placed on a public registry for purely spurious reasons. That's what happened originally, and it's what was affirmed in the judgment below.
A peer comment [1] reviewed the guy's history, but the comment ended up auto-flagged because of content. If this guy isn't on the sex offender registry, then it's largely evidence that such a thing is reserved for the absolute worst of the worst.
I see nothing wrong with exhibitionism so long as it's mutually agreed upon. This guy was reported exposing and "playing with" himself on the order of dozens of times with nonconsensual partners, so it's likely that it's happened hundreds of times.
I don't think this is socially acceptable behavior in 'normal' society. And in response to his deciding to visibly 'rub one off' (as I believe this term is what results in auto-flagging) towards his neighbor, his response is that she was a "trigger" for him. So he himself is already claiming that he can't control himself, which is more less the entire point of such registries. Imagine you have daughters, let alone a wife. Would you want to live across the street from such a person?
And again I'd emphasize he actually got removed from the registry. So imagine the sort of behavior required to stay on one. It's damn sure not just urinating in public or whatever.
A peer message quoted the PDF of the things he did, before finally getting put on a registry. It wasn't just being naked in his home to say the least. The message was auto-flagged because of its content.
It's a stupid meme. Public urination, like actually taking a piss in public while no one is around you, is likely going to be a ticket for disorderly conduct if a specific charge for it doesn't exist. You won't get an indecent exposure charge unless you're purposely exposing yourself to others, it requires intent. Sometimes flashers will use the excuse of urinating for their intentional exposure or will lie that their indecent exposure charge was due to public urination and not because they were really masturbating in plain view. There probably have been prosecutors that have tried to slap an indecent exposure charge on an innocent public urinater but like everyone else says, they can't find any proof of it actually sticking.
> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
About 0.3% of the adult population is on registries in the US.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
> But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender.
It’s not a mistake, it’s a convenient assumption to make until it’s proven otherwise, especially when you have basically no other information to go on.
I have no doubt these investigators are intelligent enough to have considered that possibility.
There was an infamous case in the Netherlands were two children were horrifically attacked in a park and it turned out that TWO pedos were at that location at the time. They got the wrong one.
I think what is confusing is likely that the investigators/detectives were probably trying to make sure that the girl was actually in the house where the sex offender was registered or technically living, and not maybe kept somewhere else. A lot of detective work is building the case, but also confirming what you believe is actually true and you need the evidence to also request the warrant on factual grounds. They could have busted in the door of that house and found that there was no such brick to be found anywhere and the girl was sold off to someone else or something like that.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
No, parents do not always "know" about child sexual abuse.
I cited a study about this elsethread[1]. And "Lucy" was young (no older than 12, possibly as young as 7) when the rapes began, which correlates with a reluctance to disclose.
It is possible that the mother knew, but it is far from certain. The article didn't provide that context, because it chronicled detective work that led through a different chain of clues to crack the case. An obsession over maternal guilt has arisen here in the comments that was not present in the article.
No one wants to admit that their child was raped, even if they are open to the possibility — so your assertion reduces down to "there often is a realm where they should have known".
Because the article doesn't give detail, we don't know. The mother could have forcefully spurned explicit disclosures from her daughter. She could even have participated in the abuse.
But there's also a possibility that since the perp was clever enough to hide identifying details while publishing CSAM online that he was clever enough to hide abuse from those close by.
I would condemn participation but forgive ignorance. Other commenters here will never forgive the mother no matter what.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
Bringing the full weight of the legal system down on all parents whose children were harmed by third parties, regardless of whether the parents even knew anything about it, is monstrous cruelty.
Pray tell where did i say that all parents should be responsible whose children were harmed by a third part? I’m specifically talking about this case.
Unpredictable random acts of violence happen. Would be lunacy to punish the parents for that. On the other end of the scale here we are talking about abuse ongoing for years. By someone who the mother brought into the child’s life. Somewhere between those two ends of the scale i run out of sympathy for the excuse of “she didn’t know”. Where exactly the bundary is I don’t know. What i know is that in the scenairo described in the article i strongly believe we are in the “she should have known” territory.
Think it through. Do you think that the kid who was praying for someone to come help her, and for whom the law enforcement officers were sufficiently concerned about that they started learning brick manufacturing, do you think that kid was not at least a little bit off? You know, just enough for their mum’s to become concerned and start looking for an explanation?
You call what i say monstrous cruelty. I tell you what i think is monstrous cruelty: no kid, ever, in the history of humankind has ever had the opportunity to consent to being born. Giving life to a kid is a choice. Especially in this day and age. By choosing to father a kid or give birth to a kid one becomes responsible for the wellbeing of said kid. How far and how deep that responsibility goes can be debated. I strongly believe that the parents (both the mom and the dad) is responsible who they bring into their young kid’s life. They are responsible for knowing what is going on with the kid. (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.) The parents are also responsible to have a relationship with their kids where they would be confided by their kids if something goes terribly wrong. So the kid would go ask them for help, before praying for some help comming from who knows where. These are basics. And these are separate but interlacing failures on the part of the mother. And that is why i think what she did (or didn’t do) is monstrously cruel.
I'm reminded of the Gene Weingarten's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning article, Fatal Distraction, on parents whose children have died from hyperthermia after being left in cars[1].
Similar to this case, some people believe that such parents should be criminally liable, and that there cannot possibly be any extenuating circumstances — despite the correlation between the rise of back-seat children's car-seat laws and the prevalence of such deaths.
> Think it through.
I have. The article provides very little to go on, and it is not hard to imagine that an abuser who is clever enough to publish CSAM material online for years without getting caught is clever enough to keep the abuse hidden from the mother and manipulate a child into keeping their trauma secret.
> (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.)
There are vast numbers of parents who do not find out for years[2]:
73% of child victims do not tell anyone
about the abuse for at least a year.
45% of victims do not tell anyone for
at least 5 years. Some never disclose.
Given how often sexual abuse happens, we're talking about millions of parents. I do not believe that every last one of them is morally culpable because they did not "know the large stuff, like for example are [their children] being sexually abused" and that they should be criminally charged.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
I dunno. The skeeziest people I know would show up squeaky clean on paper, and several of the ones I trust the most have some kind of shit in their past, at least on paper.
I agree that the singling out of the mother for condemnation in this comment section is conspicuous and dismaying — thank you for pointing it out. Nevertheless, I would offer the father the same grace that I think the mother deserves, and I think you will be sympathetic.
We know little of the mother's circumstances, and we know basically none of the father's. He may not even be alive. He could be an "absentee", or even an abuser himself — we have no information. But he might also be active in Lucy's life yet tragically unaware of his daughter's plight.
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
Are you entitled to a jury trial for peeing in the bushes in the USA?
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
95% of cases are settled before reaching jury trial. Usually a plea bargain for criminal cases. Settlement for civil cases. Or dismissal. The other 5% are expensive.
Generally speaking, there are two levels of crime in the US; misdemeanors and felonies. Both will land you with a criminal record, but a misdemeanor-only record will not show up on some standard background checks and does not remove your right to bear arms or vote, for example. Felonies are much more serious, and generally mandate a minimum prison sentence of 1 year unless plead down, while the sentencing for misdemeanors generally caps out at a year and typically just gets reduced to fines and community service, or a short stint (e.g. a couple weeks) in the local jail instead of a prison.
In some states, first offense non-violent felony convictions (e.g. exceeding the speed limit while fleeing police in a vehicle) can be expunged from your record when you turn 21 (if you were convicted and served out your sentence before turning 21). Otherwise felonies generally stay with you for life.
We have civil offenses, the most common example would be minor traffic offense (speeding but not recklessly, etc). These were criminal at one time, but arresting people for minor speeding was deemed inappropriate.
Then we have misdemeanors - everything from reckless driving through basic assault (no injuries, no weapon). Usually/always <1 year in prison as the max punishment. Some financial crimes. Usually don't appear on basic background checks, but might on details checks (like when working for a bank or the government).
Then there are felonies - assault with a weapon, major financial crimes, etc. Typically >1 year prison sentences. As noted, these can impact your rights as a citizen and they will appear on most background checks.
As I mentioned in another comment, district attorneys frequently charge as many individual crimes as possible as a tactic to get cooperation/plea from the accused.
For example, you get pulled over for DUI/drink-driving. You're blotto, and you get out of your car and try to walk away. Police tackle you. The chargeable offenses would be at least...
- whatever initial infraction caused the traffic stop (speeding, swerving, whatever) - that was probably civil.
- The DUI - a misdemeanor unless it was excessive or a repeat offense
- "Fleeing and eluding" or equivalent for walking away - misdemeanor, usually.
- Assaulting a law enforcement officer (by forcing the police to tackle you) - automatic felony in many states.
The DA will often accept a guilty plea on everything up to the felony assault, or reduce the assault from "against a LEO" to normal assault (non-felony) to clear their plate.
No idea if this is common in the rest of the anglo-sphere, or anywhere else.
Unfortunately in the US we do in fact go so far as to criminalize urinating in public. It's weird to me that speeding (up to some limit) in a school zone is ranked below pissing in a shrub along the road.
Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.
"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation.
Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group.
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners.
One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically.
I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.
Sure, and so is Stockholm Syndrome - except in that case we know the concept was made up by a criminologist working with the local police to help them come up with a psychological explanation for why the hostages stopped trusting them after they had horribly mishandled the hostage crisis and endangered their lives.
Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing.
You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés.
It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
The tell-tale phrase of a soon-to-be victim in a relationship with an abuser is "he's not like that when we're alone", not "I can fix him".
There's a difference between confidence and dominance. It's difficult to grasp given how much our culture tends to conflate them as desirable traits in men but the main distinction is that one is about resilience and the other is about abuse.
Confidence is attractive. Unless you're deeply insecure (and abusers often are insecure even if they try to mask it in displays of dominance) you're likely attracted to confidence in potential partners - yes, even as a straight guy. Just like an insecure person can use dominance to mask their insecurity, a confident person can also act submissively. This isn't just true in BDSM, it's actually a social dynamic many people engage in completely naturally.
An abuser (or I guess the pop-psych term is usually "narcissist" but let's not open the can of worms on whether that is ever applied "correctly") will often seek out a confident partner they can manipulate into a position of vulnerability they can take advantage of to control them.
The problem with power is that it is nearly inseparable from abuse. Abuse will inevitable arise from any power imbalance because the mere circumstance of being in a position of power can easily lead to absuses of power unless you're extremely diligent about your use of it. A healthy social dynamic always requires a balance of power - even if there may be a local imbalance in any one-on-one dynamic it can be offset by the wider network if it is stable and strong enough. If you look at powerful men in modern society almost none of them are actually confident. The few who are tend to paradoxically stand out for their humility and deference (i.e. taking credit for their losses and sharing credit for their accomplishments). But this is of course much more difficult than starting out from a position of power and fearfully lashing out at any potential rival.
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things.
There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth.
There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.
The second most recent video from the YouTube channel you linked uses a "triggered feminist" meme image from 2016.
The image itself is a still image from a video posted on Alex Jones' YouTube channel covering a protest against Trump supporters. If you actually watch the part of the original video the image was taken from, you quickly realize the woman in question just has the misfortune of having very naturally emotive facial expressions and the still is taken from an argument between her and a Trump supporter about the alleged concern of immigrant sex abusers and that if you consider the fact they have to yell at each other to overcome the noisy environment she doesn't actually appear at all outraged or angry.
I don't explain this to dunk on the channel - it easily does that by itself. I explain this because the fact that the channel you cited a video from uses this meme in 2026 (10 years after it was first taken, i.e. enough time to learn about its origin and move on) is extremely symbolic of the approach you seem to favor for finding explanations to social phenomena. Yes, "it's just a meme", but that's the point: memes are shorthands that carry cultural context (or in this case entire fossil records of cultural history), they're not just funny pictures.
_That_ isn't "what we evolved to like". "Men" aren't "probably worse". Don't sell yourself short. You exist downstream from tens of thousands of years of human history and at least a hundred thousand years of prehistory. We had already developed tool-making and cooking before we even became _Homo sapiens_ so in all likelihood you can expand that prehistory into the millions of years of _Homo erectus_.
Science has moved on well past the mythology of barter economies or "hunter gatherer" societies where the cavewife tending towards the babies with her oldest daughters while cavehusband and the boys were out hunting the mammoth.
We know that the thing that allowed us to survive as a species was not just our big brain but our close-knit society that cared for its injured, elderly and disabled and was at times so welcoming we now know that early Homo sapiens at times even interbred with our closer extinct sibling species. In fact, our big brains had to come downstream from this because it made childbirth dangerous and arduous while also requiring us to spend the first years of our lives unable to defend ourselves and the first months in fact so reliant on others to help us survive that disruption of those early bonds can traumatize us for life or in extreme cases even cause us to die. Even as adults "touch starvation" has serious mental health implications.
If you think "what we evolved to like" is not "appropriate", chances are the problem isn't what we evolved to like - e.g. ripe fruits - but what systems the modern social order has put in place to make exploitation of those preferences useful for those in positions of power (or extreme wealth, but I repeat myself) even when doing so will harm you - e.g. abundant high fructose corn syrup in every part of your diet so you think food is tasty and crave more of it although it doesn't satiate you.
There's a reason why "nice guy"
is a stereotype. The people who describe themselves like this aren't nice or timid, but insecure, angry and judgmental. They tell stories like "women like assholes" to avoid coming to terms with the idea that they're unlikable.
Both the "nice guy" and the "asshole" are insecure. The latter is just better at masking their insecurities in such a way that others mistake it for confidence.
This is especially true when eveyone involved is young enough not to have a wide enough frame of reference to gauge what's an indication of actual confidence versus abuse and has a brain undergoing massive hormonal shifts that intensify emotions, encourage risk taking and make them seek out novelty. Let's remember that most of the "nice guy" stories people like to tell are about early adulthood or more often than not their late teens.
The non-wifebeating, non-drug-abusing, non-raping men and boring and unlikeable. It's actually their fault that women fall for the motorcycle riding drug dealers. Got it.
Anyone who thinks like this is absolutely the kind of awful, toxic person who has to make up stories to avoid coming to terms that they are the problem.
Both statements can be true. Although the first is better phrased as drawn to traits that correlate with toxic abusers.
You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.
Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.
I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.
Edit: I found one of the studies -
> Key takeaways
> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.
> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.
> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.
> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.
> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.
Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context?
Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying".
> Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al.
(2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu-
dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler
et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked
from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether
they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim-
ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very
broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the
effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica-
tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater
than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges
according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the
original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait
characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan-
guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable
body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified
as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05.
---
Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier.
> The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified.
So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused.
Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
I met a guy who was the creepiest dude I ever met in my life. Who intentionally was making me uncomfortable with personal questions (and admitted it when pressed! With a grin!). His job? Spending all day with mentally disabled children...
That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.
I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".
I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who?
Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media.
Uhh. No. No, we're generally not drawn to abusers. It's the other way around, abusers are drawn to those at risk of abuse. Maybe don't pose ideas formed through confirmation bias as truth?
If you look at the dating history of typical abusive males, they have a long list of women who they've been involved with. In comparison, if you take the median male, their dating history involves a few chance encounters, one or two actual relationships, and a lot of struggle with loneliness. As a matter of statistics, women are very much attracted to abusive men, and not attracted to normal men who are not abusive. There is some level of personal accountability with that.
source? Even if said statistics are true, there are plenty of other explanations. For example, the abusive relationships may not last as long, the abuser might have multiple partners at the same time, the abuser might be more confident, or the abuser realises it's much easier to force or pressure a vulnerable woman into a relationship
> and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children
Huh. It, uh, sure is a choice to declare you deliberately only date women with underage children and then blame those women for being too stupid to recognize when they're dating dangerous men. The added bit about men getting away with abuse because women let them is also something.
Abusive men deliberately find vulnerable targets, exploit them, and then blame them.
> the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.
Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.
The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).
The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.
There are a lot of women out there drawn to criminals of every kind. The primary demographic of true crime shows are women for a reason, not to mention the letters murderers and such receive. I would be curious to know why this is, and if it happens in other cultures too.
Relatively speaking there aren't plenty of women in prison for violent crimes. It's about a 9:1 ratio. Men obsessively sexualise everything in our patriarchal society.
You've been downvoted into grey-blivion because that claim is wrong. It is an example of the underlying supposition that the behaviour of men and women is identical. This runs counter to the findings of psychology and sociology.
You could still run the sofa customers list against a list of known offenders but is there a federal list? Maybe the number of states where the sofa was sold was to large and getting the full list not feasible?
Sorry, but the wording isn't confusing, I think you just didn't read it properly. All they knew was a girl, somewhere, was being abused. They didn't know who her mother was or, obviously, who was taking the pictures.
I mean, from the sound of it you start out with literally a picture, so hindsight is obvious, but they didn't know who was living in that house until really close to the end.
There's also a lot of "WHY AREN'T YOU FOCUSING ON THE MOTHER?" whataboutism in the comments, which I find appalling. The article was about something else, and who knows what her circumstances were.
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
The investigators will be able to calculate how many rounds of abuse the victim suffered. The more it happened, the less likely it is the mother was unaware. And if course, the victim can tell us directly whether the mother knew. If so, she deserves a decade of her life in prison as well.
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
> But it was estimated that from 30% to even 80% of victims do not purposefully disclose their misuse before adulthood.
[...]
> Arata found an inverse relationship between the disclosure and severity of abuse. Subjects reporting contact sexual abuse were significantly less likely to disclose it than those reporting non-contact sexual abuse.
> The duration of sexual abuse has a significant impact on its disclosure – the longer children are abused, the more hesitant they may be to disclose their abuse.
However damaged someone is they have a duty of care to their children. There's someone else with a blame in the story but to excuse this is very wrong.
Completely agree. It shouldn't be treated as an excuse but it's silly to ignore this as a HUGE risk factor. Probably should be considered when making policies etc.
I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.
It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.
These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).
Moderation feels like the one of the most ethical uses of AI. Being able to prevent a lot of the worst content from being posted and preventing people from being exposed to it.
> Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.
On one hand I agree with you. Any automatic filter implemented can later be expanded to cover more and more things, such as messages from political adversaries for example. It's a slippery slope as we all know.
On the other hand I don't think it applies in this context very much. If we're talking about content published by a corporation or such (say a newspaper for example) they already filter all their gathered news themselves and have no obligation to publish things they don't feel like.
Similarly if we're talking about user uploaded content on social media I don't think they have any obligation to publish everything and anything that their users decide to upload either, and it's not the expectations of the users that anything can be hosted there for them. Users already know that youtube/facebook/tiktok/what-have-you have seemingly arbitrary rules regarding what content they're willing to host and not.
Now if for example DNS providers or ISPs decide to implement these sort of filters on the web at large that's a different matter I think. In which case I agree with you.
I don't think the issue here is related to AI. Without AI, moderators would still have to look at these same videos. The difference is they would hit the public first before being flagged and sent to moderators. Now with AI they can be prevented from ever going public.
The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.
The agencies already have massive collections of csam from every arrest and site seizure. They already have systems that can identify existing csam by fingerprint or computer vision, so very little needs to be seen by humans, only newly produced material.
Outsourcing everything. Even PTSD from training AI to India so privileged law enforcement officers and social media moderators don't have to. This system is so hypocritical and broken.
Another comment mentioned ICE as well, so I've been looking into it, and imagine my surprise to learn that ICE (yes that one) has been working in this space since since the Obama admin. Huh.
HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.
It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.
Yeah, I looked into it, and ICE actually has two distinct components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Pretty much everyone things ICE == ERO, so you've got stuff like Canadians agitating to close the HSI collaboration offices in Canada.
Well and unfortunately until recent times ERO was mostly dedicated to criminals first and other folks second but my understand was there was a backlog of criminals to find, capture and remove that person he other parts were less of a concern.
Coyotes are frequently part of criminal organizations. They take advantage of people in any and every way that they can. Slavery, sexual and otherwise, is not at all an uncommon result of being brought into the country under the radar, so to speak.
This administration pulled people off catching child predators to go after some Juan at home depot. in light of the epstein coverup, its hardly surprising.
AI for helping mitigate PTSD, or helping with the investigations?
Because the latter basically entails helping create a surveillance state. Which in theory could be an acceptable trade-off, but it seems disingenuous to say "AI companies have no financial incentives here" when the big issue is that AI companies would actually be helping to establish powerful dragnet surveillance capabilities. There would need to be a strong democratic process around this.
So do I read it correctly that good old detective work did the job, and that breaking e2e encryption and client side scanning wasn’t needed? Politicians tell me a different story.
It's not a big secret to journalists that such stories are just another kind of entertainment that never fails to attract the public. Certain people constantly work in that genre.
Readers want to be assured that something is excluded. I visit the good sunny side of the internet, and horrors are on some “darknet”. I live in the better part of the town, and horrors happen in bad districts. Me and my friends are “normal people”, never “victims”. Wars are far away. I am not responsible for anything.
Certain people's careers are made in such pandering.
So they tell a thrilling detective story, and at the same time publicly shame Facebook to make people think that more control over “important services” and more backdoors are needed. Only for serious cases, of course. You wouldn't want to support those people, would you? Good. Now show us you licence number for internet usage.
Not that I agree with either of those things but I think the implicit argument is that breaking encryption would lead to faster arrest and fewer years of abuse for the victims.
They don't even arrest pedophiles when they have them on video tape and a client list when the president is on them. This has all become one big joke, justice I mean. There is no justice.
You’d think so, but the police already have tons of methods they don’t use. The bottleneck is always staffing, not crazy shit they wouldn’t even be allowed to use.
periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
Don't region lock yourself - abuse investigations in Europe or Australia may be from abuse in a different jurisdiction. Alternatively, a gift given from an Australian family member to a European could be a bit of information that helps an investigation rule out or close in on a potential abuser.
Tbf the brick industry helped indirectly and it just happened to be super helpful. They didn’t perform a mass mining of user data across the whole country or a large region. They had very little data to go off other than someone’s past memory of the material. I’m Facebook would have helped in that way too if it was able to.
However, this is exactly how I’d have hoped Facebook would have responded without some sort of court order for data, they shouldn’t be mining everything at the mere request for help by a law enforcement agency. I get this topic is one where you’d wish there was an exception but exceptions are slippery slopes.
It helps that the brick industry is already set up to offer this - "brick matching" from photographs is a valuable service for architects, builders, and home improvement firms.
This is awesome - but they shouldn't have revealed the secret on how they caught them.. like 1000's of other offenders could land up making similar mistakes. It just makes sense to keep your mouth shut and keep on hunting.
I thought so too, but it actually wasn't the couch, brick or whatever. It was overconfidence and mistakes that were exploited and there is no patch for that
>Flaming Alamos were not visible on the outside of any of the homes, because the properties were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to assess - by looking at their style and exterior - if these properties were likely to have been built during a period when Flaming Alamos had been on sale. "We would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say 'would this house have these bricks inside?'" says Squire.
Zillow and tax assessors will list the age\year built of any property.
There is only one location shown in the images, in the past there were several and much clearer, I cannot image how difficult it must be to find it if the europol cannot find it in 2026.
So, I had a friend. Had because he's dead. He did this work for a decade and a half and then couldn't deal with it anymore. In that time he put countless assholes behind bars. At some point he stopped responding to my emails so I called the unit and they were absolutely devastated, this guy was the backbone of their operation, the one with by far the most computer experience of all of them. RIP Ronald.
It is very hard to imagine what the life of someone on the frontline is like, the ones that are really battling online scum. So take that 'think of the children' thing and realize that there are people who really do think of the children and it is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
Quote from TFA:
"The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
So, privacy matters to FB when it is to protect the abusers of children. How low can you go...
That last bit is not really how it works. I've been in a small company that law enforcement would routinely reach out to for help with solving crimes because they thought we'd have relevant data.
99% of requests are wild goose chases based on nothing. Like literally dumb requests that are not only irrelevant, the request wouldn't even get past that cops boss, much less a judge. But a cop can just ask whatever they want regardless of merit or relevance and it's up to you to say yes or no.
In those years we received two requests with warrants that made more sense but when I see "company denied to help" I understand why. Most cases it's a random cop fishing for private info that has nothing to do with anything. And when it's true, just get a warrant then.
Otherwise you're more likely to be jeopardizing innocent people's data than actually helping anyone.
FB is more than large enough to have dedicated liasons to make sure that there is a difference between 'dumb requests that are irrelevant' get separated out from the ones that matter.
I don't think you understood, we weren't understaffed, that's besides the point as it's not hard to reply to an email. The main aspect is you should demand a warrant because you as someone that works for a private company shouldn't be the arbitrar of if a cop has enough or not (plus the cop will obviously not give you any details besides ongoing investigation in most cases). There's a job for that which is a judge. In my opinion even internal lawyers should not judge that outside of the legality of the request. In many jurisdictions you can get in trouble for doing that.
I've in FBs position and I'm happy to report that we had a very well oiled process to deal with pederasts and assisted LE in putting a couple of them - also in the US and Canada - behind bars. That's one of the reason I knew that officer that I mentioned above. These people need all the help they can get, their departments are overworked and understaffed. Investigations are often a bit more time sensitive than you seem to believe. But hey, it's just a couple of kids.
FB has armies of lawyers to stall each and every legitimate request for data and there is ample proof that they have done this many times over the years. This is just one of many cases where they - you - and their tech could have made a difference, but chose to withhold aid.
As for LE sharing proof to convince you that things are a bit time critical: I have never found that to be a problem, assuming you have the stomach for it. What you seem to miss is that warrants have to be more specific than is useful in many cases and FB is well aware of this. In this case the LEO went with that request because he knew that a warrant with that specific set of conditionals would be unlikely, even if it would have helped to solve the case that much quicker.
But given that they're a terrible company with an absolutely horrible person at the helm I should probably not be surprised. See, if the likes of FB would actually take a stand on this subject that would take the wind out of the sails of a lot of these efforts to really harm privacy. But they're happy to sell you down the river when it benefits them and to use the privacy argument when that benefits them too.
A few years ago I came across a company that was wholesale sharing the worst of the worst and the CEO of that company was making all kinds of silly arguments about how they were 'just a dumb pipe'. They refused to take any counter measures and it took me proving to them and their - future - investors beyond a shadow of doubt that they must be aware of what and how much is going on but willfully turning a blind eye. Privacy was - of course - their stated reason for upholding their values. Because it suited them commercially, not because they actually gave two bits about actual privacy.
FB is a massive conduit for child pornography. You know it. FB management knows it. They have their internal processes to deal with flagged content. But they could do a lot better and they don't simply because it is just a cost to them. So they do the minimum and hide behind the privacy cloak when it suits them, even if they know full well what is going on.
Mate I never worked at Facebook what are you on about. Sure if you're looking at evidence of a crime you don't need to wait for a warrant you can proactively reach out. That is not what I was talking about.
So why wouldn't the investigators follow the appropriate legal process?
Now, I'm sure that everything present in this article is true. But I'm worried that the reason we get this article now (apparently the things the article describes happened 10-15 years ago) is because it's part of someone's job to build support for warrantless driftnet surveillance, mandatory real-ID systems etc.
So I think it's fair to ask: why was it so hard to give Facebook the warrant they asked for?
Note how they didn't say that the legal process wasn't followed just that they didn't want to use their fancy face recognition for a good cause in one very particular instance.
Let's see them stand tall then, now that the department of HS is going to make the request, no doubt through the appropriately bought and paid for channels.
They probably didn't want a news article drawing attention how creepy and pervasive their facial recognition system is, even if it was actually used for a good cause for once.
That's exactly my take. I've had a similar thing where a car of mine got stolen and I petitioned the police to use their ANPR capability to give an idea of where it went and they said they couldn't even though I already knew that they could. It was a funny conversation. It hinged on 'couldn't' because of 'reasons' vs 'technical ability'.
Or, it could be that they didn't get a warrant, and don't want to get into the habit of giving the government things without a warrant (or, given that it's a big US internet corporation, something political in return would probably also work).
I'm not saying they're nice, they're not. But it's probably for the best that they don't (or didn't, again, it was 10+ years ago) give government everything they ask for without a warrant.
I repeat the question: why would it be so hard to get a warrant?
Because they were at an early stage of the investigation doing speculative lead following, which didn't reach the legal standard of suspicion for a court order?
The authorities simply needed to start an ad campaign with facebook targeting child abusers. Then FB would have that data packaged up and ready to sell in an instant.
As someone who hasn't done this line of work, the only words of power I could imagine which would help me get though it day-in-and-day-out is: "but it matters to this starfish."
It must be so demoralizing seeing such wicked behavior day-in-and-day-out and thinking it's only a drop in the ocean.
It is, but it is not one of those jobs that you don't take home with you. EMT also has my respect, I could not do their work either but this is a level of nasty that makes you lose any kind of hope for humanity.
> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.
Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
> The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
You don't need to imply they didn't read that part, because it doesn't really affect the point of the comment, that Facebook doesn't actually care about privacy. Even if they're not sharing things willy-nilly, they're still aggressively tracking everyone they can.
The two views aren't necessarily in conflict. I don't appreciate Facebook's use of facial recognition technology, but they built it. I'm extremely disappointed they proceeded to use this technology to influence elections while fighting against making the data available to law enforcement. I understand this may not have been intentional on their part, but the result is the same, and I was not at all surprised by it.
There's another option "I will but only if ..." which is what Facebook rightfully went with. Come back with a warrant is _always_ the correct answer when dealing with LE.
A fourth option is "I can and I will, but only after certain prerequisites are met - go away and meet them first", which looks to me what they were saying.
> From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
Yes, and if Facebook didn't exist, presumably these images connecting the abuser to the victim wouldn't have been available anywhere for the investigators to find.
If Facebook didn’t exist, they would’ve found the photos on MySpace. Come on.
All Facebook likely did here that was any different than any other social media platform would have done, was gather Sandberg, Zuck and a cadre of snotty, sniveling engineers in a conference room and debate whether this was good engagement for the platform.
Facial recognition is very powerful these days. My friend took a photo of his kid at the top of Twin Peaks in SF, with the city in the background. Unfortunately, due to the angle, you could barely see the eyes and a portion of the nose of the kid. Android was still able to tag the kid.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Google photos has the advantage of a limited search space. Any photo you take is overwhelmingly likely to be one of the few faces already in the library. Not to say facebook couldn't solve the problem. But the ability of Google to do facial recognition with such poor inputs is that it's searching on 40~ faces rather than x billion faces.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This story was from more than a decade ago.
Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.
Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]
Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.
> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.
Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made
I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.
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While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.
Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.
When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.
There’s a pretty big difference between surveillance logging your every move your and scanning photos voluntarily uploaded to Facebook.
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
The grim meathook future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming regardless. At the very least we could get some proper crime solving out of it along the way.
The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.
Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.
[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
The only explanation for this comment is you never used reverse image search by Google or yandex before it was nerfed or you'd know this is super plausible to find direct hits without many false positives.
It seems to me that the BBC is including those passages at the beginning and end of their story as propaganda so the public begs (demands, even) for more surveillance, and the sale of private data to the government. I mean, think of the children, like Lucy! Seems to be having that effect in this thread, in any case.
It’s absolutely propaganda and a perfect example of how the public gets manipulated on a daily basis. Let’s break down the facts:
- Pushes for facial recognition
- Pushes for more state run surveillance
- Pushes for AI based surveillance
- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining
- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.
The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.
Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.
The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.
This wouldn't have helped here but there is a related field of research called hotel recognition. Many of these videos are filmed in hotels so being able to recognize if it was a Mariott or even better a non chain local hotel can be very helpful to investigators. They basically train CNNs that learn to pick up on the bathroom fixtures or kind of bedding used by different hotels. One researcher in particular has done a tone of work on this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mNoB9SgAAAAJ&hl=en
I wonder if you could get the interior of every house from Zillow/realtor websites and then do something like this for every house in the country... Clearview for bedrooms?
On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other.
On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."
None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.
What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?
Nothing wrong was done by the police here -- it's all good old-fashioned detective work. But they wanted to have Facebook use facial recognition to find the victim among all the photographs on Facebook. And that actually would have gotten them results faster, because finding the identity of the victim was enough to break the case, in the end. But it also would have been a very bad precedent in terms of surveillance.
I found it quite depressing to read. This guy spent so much time to put just one offender behind bars but the are likely hundreds of thousands out there. So sad
Same. In a world where police agents are committing atrocities, a world where ICE agents are running amok, it's nice to hear about some actual good that comes from the police force
In the sense that Facebook tries to keep everyone inside Facebook? I haven't kept up with it, but isn't Facebook well known for trying to prevent orders from browsing out?
I'm impressed by the people doing this job. How do you turn off at the end of the shift and go home to sleep, when you know an hour more of work could make a more immediate difference? How does work/life balance work in this profession?
Maybe it's just me, and I wouldn't have thought this a few years back, but my immediate reaction as I started reading this was "Oh look, somehow they got the fucking _BBC_ to run a DHS whitewashing feel good story. I wonder what's about to hit the media that they'd like buried?"
I can't understand how anyone can do such a job for any length of time. I worked at a PC repair shop back in the 90s, fixed some dude's PC, and I saw a bunch of CSAM stuff (a lot, like thousands of pics, all children). I reported it to the local cops, then the FBI got involved, and that's the last I heard of it. My point is that the memory of those pics haunt me to this day. And I only saw a handful of pics, over, maybe, a period of about 2 minutes. To do that all day, everyday - how could one not become an alcoholic?
This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.
They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.
Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.
This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
The BBC spent 5 years making a documentary and just finished. They had no idea that the US would in its current state when they started. That doesn't free them from criticism of the content, but the timing is a coincidence.
I haven't watched the video (linked from the article) and I certainly hope the current events caused them to reflect on whether pushing for DHS to have more power is wise, but the last line in the article doesn't give me much optimism.
Although the past couple of years have been an even more stark descent into incompetence and malice, there has not been a moment in DHS's 24-year history at which it was worth defending, let alone with this pattern of propaganda.
It is perfectly possible to investigate and prevent child abuse without this particular configuration.
I'd argue the DHS is incidental and the real story is "law enforcement deserves open access to social media feeds." In this light, the BBC's angle becomes much clearer.
A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.
DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.
Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.
And also to drege up "think of the children" rage that makes some people demand expansion of surveillance and free exchange of serveillance data with governments. Manufacturing consent.
Submitter is Canadian and re: America, posted "I read recently that Patrimonialism is a good way of describing the current regime" about 10 months ago.
Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.
Any reason to think it is?
EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:
> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF
Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)
Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE."
This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
Are you suggesting that the BBC, the world service arm of a British public broadcaster (that is editorially independent from the state and even the wider BBC), began spending five years filming a documentary across the US, Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, just so that they could secretly support a US government agency half a decade before it became embroiled in controversy?
The claim is that an article was submitted intentionally to manipulate public perception of DHS.
We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
You are wrong, this same story was not reported more than ten years ago. The article is not a report of a man being arrested, tried, and sentenced (doubtless the extent of reporting in local news when it happened). This article is about the wider background of one story, of many, from a behind-the-scenes documentary that has been filmed over the last five years and just released.
Did Britain's public broadcaster decide, half a decade ago, to begin making this documentary so that they could secretly and nefariously support a US government agency long before it was embroiled in its current controversies?
Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.
- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly
That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.
Good thing the perp wasn't part of the Epstein class, otherwise they would have done all that work for nothing.
On a more serious note, there is a subreddit where police can post redacted pics of CSAM and they crowd source info on the background. I can't remember the name of it though.
They post godbolt style questions like "where is this beach/playground/parking lot", or ask what brand an object is. I don't know how much success they have had but it's a worthy cause and the more people who try, the higher their chances.
Just got done the doc they made. Long, disgusting, but informative/interesting from a tech/problem solving prospective. Not an easy watch tho. https://youtu.be/mNUku0jd4FA
Yet at the same time the status of Terabytes of abuse material seized from Epstein's properties is unknown because the abusers are rich guys protected by the president who is probably one of them. And law enforcement is actively helping to obstruct justice for the thousands of victims.
There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.
No, but note that my comment didn't mention pedophiles. Someone being a convicted sex offender should already be a big enough red flag that any parent with a working brain shouldn't ever let that person anywhere near their kids.
Web search for the person's name and city turning up mugshots and a criminal record that included SA, among other violent crimes, after getting a weird vibe / uncomfortable gut feeling from them at a social gathering with a mutual friend.
>From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
> Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit which attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
Note: the "agent" the title refers to has nothing to do with an AI/LLM agent. Originally I thought this had something to do with an AI agent, as if someone put an AI agent in charge of identifying dark web pictures for clues. It's a good story nevertheless and I'm glad the victim was rescued, but nothing to do with AI/LLMs.
I'm wondering why they didn't cross reference the addresses they had from the furniture stores with those of registered sex offenders, as this abuser turned out to be? And further intersect that with "Flaming Alamo" brick houses??
From TFA: "Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades."
First of all, sorry to hear about the poor girl’s ordeal, and I’m glad she was rescued. But after reading about all that complicated digital sleuthing, it basically comes down to this:
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
Or, you know, if they knew who she was they would just go and rescue her?
How are people struggling so much with basic logic on this one? This is quite strange. Are some of you just unable to imagine having limited knowledge and not being able to just look everything up?
Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
Louis Theroux did a very interesting but quiet sad documentary on this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040qrxw
There's no BBC doc on how they (BBC) covered for Jimmy Savile for decades, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/24/john-lydon-say...
“I’m very, very bitter that the likes of Savile and the rest of them were allowed to continue. I did my bit, I said what I had to. But they didn’t air that.”
> an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live
I listened to a podcast that talked about this encampment years ago. The people living there are quite literally trapped. They aren't allowed to move to another city because of their parole and the city they are in has no other location that isn't within some distance of schools, playgrounds, etc that they're forbidden from being near.
One person interviewed had some petty offense like peeing in public when drunk and talked about the violence and crime that occurred in the camp. Listening to him made me so angry at the injustice that people caught in edge cases are subjected to. He drinks too much, pees on the side of a building, and is now forced to live among rapists and predators.
The OP mentioned high school students in totally normal relationships being criminalized. Another example given in the podcast ep was teens sending nude selfies to their bf/gf that got charged and convicted for distributing csam. This is not how enforcement of these laws should work. I'm glad I grew up before smart phones cause I was really stupid when I was a teen.
Meanwhile, if you're a rich old white guy…
The only case of public urination -> sex offender which people can point to is Juan Matamoros. He claims this, but the actual case is too old to verify it, and we should not take his word for it.
Arrested in Massachusetts in 1986, charged with two counts of open and gross lewdness, sentenced to two years.
As of [0] lived in Florida, and was in jail for violating probation on a charge of cocaine possession with the intent to sell.
From the article: Paul Mishkin, the Boston lawyer who represented Matamoros in 1986, could not recall details of the case this week, but said it was clear the judge considered the incident very serious.
“He [Matamoros] told his side of the story to the judge, but clearly there was evidence that made the judge disagree,” said Mishkin. “A two-year sentence in this incident is a fairly severe sentence. You’d have to think there’s evidence to support that.”
[0] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2007/03/21/long-ago-charge-t...
How can visiting a nude beach get be a trigger?
America?
Come on, that's a very lazy answer. I'm in CA and have never heard that visiting a nude beach can get you on that registry.
It's a weird grey zone of laws where the beaches are not officially nude beaches, but they are advertised this way. Many are run by the federal park police. Most anti nudity laws are state laws and as a result, there is kind of a loophole with enforcing it.
Of course, the act of being nude in public can make many believe they have been assaulted when it's just nudity.
Not all "nude" beaches are officially sanctioned.
Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
Back when my wife and I were renting, we only found out our landlord was on the list because his parole officer stopped by and asked if he'd informed us as he was legally required to do.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
Honestly I am surprised more real estate agents don’t already bake this into the workflow. Thinking about Zillow as well. There should absolutely be a way to identify all the folks during your home search (buying or renting) that are on the registry.
I found that realtors can't even do basic searches to determine which ISPs serve the house.
To expect them to be aware of multiple GIS layers is likely way out of their normal scope. Maybe it shouldn't be? But thats how things are now.
You, the client, should also do your own data collection from public and semi-public sources for things that are strictly outside MLS data capture.
Of course everyone is ultimately responsible for what they purchase but with the commission earned on a few % off a 500k+ transaction I would expect them to do it.
The salient point was that the person was in a relationship to the child’s mother.
They didn't know who the child was, yet alone the mother. All they had were photos of an unnamed girl being abused.
I didn’t understand that part. The child has a mother, why wasn’t she reported missing?
A child does not need to be missing to be abused. Most abuse happens by people the child knows.
There's also a long dark road down "just because they birthed you doesn't mean they want to parent you."
Indeed, he may not have even been on the lease or title of the residence.
I hav heard this many times, but never found a single example - and I’ve looked. Everyone I’ve researched on the registry richly deserved it.
I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
> I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
When I was in high school, our school police officer once gave our class a talk about how to stay off that list. He strongly warned us against sending nudes, because he claimed 18-year-olds getting nudes from their 17-year-old girlfriends was a common way for 18-year-olds to get on the registry.
So, no it's not a concrete example and it's not as non-sexual as public urination but it's still a thing cops are telling young adults to take seriously.
Right, the registry is public in most places, you can just check. When I open it for some of the places I've lived & surrounding areas it is overwhelmingly very serious crimes, the majority of them against minors, a large percentage minors under 13 which is a different category of offense here.
You sometimes need to get familiar with the local legal jargon to interpret it correctly, for example where I live there is no crime "rape" it is recorded as "sexual battery," things like that. And don't assume something is not serious because it is "second degree" or whatever, look up the statutes or sentencing guidelines. I have to seek pretty hard to find anything that could even plausibly be something like an overcharged public urination.
The first one I found, I looked up the case, and the offense took place at 3:40 pm at a city bus stop two blocks from a high school. Pretty decent odds that guy tells all his friends he got booked for trying to take a piss. He might even say that on reddit and HN.
I think you only see the high level offenders in the stuff you can search.
And you say it occurred in the middle of the afternoon at a city bus stop. Pretty hard to do anything serious there without a million people calling 911.
https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/201...
I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.
Are you talking about the link in your parent comment? It's a judgment that overturns the guy's placement on a public registry. (He does seem to be placed on a different registry not accessible to the public.)
He is appealing his placement on the registry on three grounds:
1. He can't be guilty of a qualifying offense, because he has no prior conviction;
2. The officer who put him on the registry did so solely on the basis that his risk of reoffending was "moderate", when it was also necessary to find that he posed a "moderate" danger to the public;
3. He did not in fact pose a danger to the public.
And the judgment rules against him on argument 1 while ruling for him on arguments 2 and 3, nullifying his registration.
Given that this judgment overturns a judgment below, it is evidence that you can be placed on a public registry for purely spurious reasons. That's what happened originally, and it's what was affirmed in the judgment below.
A peer comment [1] reviewed the guy's history, but the comment ended up auto-flagged because of content. If this guy isn't on the sex offender registry, then it's largely evidence that such a thing is reserved for the absolute worst of the worst.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048094
You're crazy. Read that history for yourself. There is a reason he was found to pose no danger to the public.
The guy is not even alleged to have done anything other than exposing his genitals at any point.
I see nothing wrong with exhibitionism so long as it's mutually agreed upon. This guy was reported exposing and "playing with" himself on the order of dozens of times with nonconsensual partners, so it's likely that it's happened hundreds of times.
I don't think this is socially acceptable behavior in 'normal' society. And in response to his deciding to visibly 'rub one off' (as I believe this term is what results in auto-flagging) towards his neighbor, his response is that she was a "trigger" for him. So he himself is already claiming that he can't control himself, which is more less the entire point of such registries. Imagine you have daughters, let alone a wife. Would you want to live across the street from such a person?
And again I'd emphasize he actually got removed from the registry. So imagine the sort of behavior required to stay on one. It's damn sure not just urinating in public or whatever.
> he was convicted in 2015 of two counts of open and gross lewdness for displaying his genitals to a neighbor through the window of his home
So he was naked in his own home?
#Land of the free
It's all about levels here.
First level? Open and gross lewdness for the home owner.
Third level? Voyeurism for the person outside.
The disgusting, gross lewdness of a naked body. Thank God someone did something.
A peer message quoted the PDF of the things he did, before finally getting put on a registry. It wasn't just being naked in his home to say the least. The message was auto-flagged because of its content.
[dead]
It's a stupid meme. Public urination, like actually taking a piss in public while no one is around you, is likely going to be a ticket for disorderly conduct if a specific charge for it doesn't exist. You won't get an indecent exposure charge unless you're purposely exposing yourself to others, it requires intent. Sometimes flashers will use the excuse of urinating for their intentional exposure or will lie that their indecent exposure charge was due to public urination and not because they were really masturbating in plain view. There probably have been prosecutors that have tried to slap an indecent exposure charge on an innocent public urinater but like everyone else says, they can't find any proof of it actually sticking.
> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
Have you ever looked at one of the registries?
The ones I've seen have had details about the offense(s).
We don't have public ones here in Australia, so no I've never looked at one.
Having details would make it harder to play down the offenses. But only if someone bothers to check.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
you've never looked at any of them but you have an opinion on how they should and shouldn't be?
How many of these sex offenders bought this couch and live close to this brick factory in homes built in that time period?
About 0.3% of the adult population is on registries in the US.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
> But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender.
It’s not a mistake, it’s a convenient assumption to make until it’s proven otherwise, especially when you have basically no other information to go on.
I have no doubt these investigators are intelligent enough to have considered that possibility.
So ~1m people are registered sex offenders? As in, 1m people who were arrested and found guilty of sex offences?
That’s insane.
It's more like 800,000
But I used number of adults, not total population. Because most children aren't registered sex offenders, or buying expensive furniture.
Just look up how many folks local to your area are on the list. It’s quite shocking.
There was an infamous case in the Netherlands were two children were horrifically attacked in a park and it turned out that TWO pedos were at that location at the time. They got the wrong one.
Serendipity and all that.
I think what is confusing is likely that the investigators/detectives were probably trying to make sure that the girl was actually in the house where the sex offender was registered or technically living, and not maybe kept somewhere else. A lot of detective work is building the case, but also confirming what you believe is actually true and you need the evidence to also request the warrant on factual grounds. They could have busted in the door of that house and found that there was no such brick to be found anywhere and the girl was sold off to someone else or something like that.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
> Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
They always know.
My mother worked in mental healthcare and she's always told me that "the sisterhood" doesn't exist.
No, parents do not always "know" about child sexual abuse.
I cited a study about this elsethread[1]. And "Lucy" was young (no older than 12, possibly as young as 7) when the rapes began, which correlates with a reluctance to disclose.
It is possible that the mother knew, but it is far from certain. The article didn't provide that context, because it chronicled detective work that led through a different chain of clues to crack the case. An obsession over maternal guilt has arisen here in the comments that was not present in the article.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042396#47049735
There often is a realm where they should have known but didn't want to admit it to themselves.
No one wants to admit that their child was raped, even if they are open to the possibility — so your assertion reduces down to "there often is a realm where they should have known".
Because the article doesn't give detail, we don't know. The mother could have forcefully spurned explicit disclosures from her daughter. She could even have participated in the abuse.
But there's also a possibility that since the perp was clever enough to hide identifying details while publishing CSAM online that he was clever enough to hide abuse from those close by.
I would condemn participation but forgive ignorance. Other commenters here will never forgive the mother no matter what.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
Bringing the full weight of the legal system down on all parents whose children were harmed by third parties, regardless of whether the parents even knew anything about it, is monstrous cruelty.
Pray tell where did i say that all parents should be responsible whose children were harmed by a third part? I’m specifically talking about this case.
Unpredictable random acts of violence happen. Would be lunacy to punish the parents for that. On the other end of the scale here we are talking about abuse ongoing for years. By someone who the mother brought into the child’s life. Somewhere between those two ends of the scale i run out of sympathy for the excuse of “she didn’t know”. Where exactly the bundary is I don’t know. What i know is that in the scenairo described in the article i strongly believe we are in the “she should have known” territory.
Think it through. Do you think that the kid who was praying for someone to come help her, and for whom the law enforcement officers were sufficiently concerned about that they started learning brick manufacturing, do you think that kid was not at least a little bit off? You know, just enough for their mum’s to become concerned and start looking for an explanation?
You call what i say monstrous cruelty. I tell you what i think is monstrous cruelty: no kid, ever, in the history of humankind has ever had the opportunity to consent to being born. Giving life to a kid is a choice. Especially in this day and age. By choosing to father a kid or give birth to a kid one becomes responsible for the wellbeing of said kid. How far and how deep that responsibility goes can be debated. I strongly believe that the parents (both the mom and the dad) is responsible who they bring into their young kid’s life. They are responsible for knowing what is going on with the kid. (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.) The parents are also responsible to have a relationship with their kids where they would be confided by their kids if something goes terribly wrong. So the kid would go ask them for help, before praying for some help comming from who knows where. These are basics. And these are separate but interlacing failures on the part of the mother. And that is why i think what she did (or didn’t do) is monstrously cruel.
I'm reminded of the Gene Weingarten's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning article, Fatal Distraction, on parents whose children have died from hyperthermia after being left in cars[1].
Similar to this case, some people believe that such parents should be criminally liable, and that there cannot possibly be any extenuating circumstances — despite the correlation between the rise of back-seat children's car-seat laws and the prevalence of such deaths.
> Think it through.
I have. The article provides very little to go on, and it is not hard to imagine that an abuser who is clever enough to publish CSAM material online for years without getting caught is clever enough to keep the abuse hidden from the mother and manipulate a child into keeping their trauma secret.
> (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.)
There are vast numbers of parents who do not find out for years[2]:
Given how often sexual abuse happens, we're talking about millions of parents. I do not believe that every last one of them is morally culpable because they did not "know the large stuff, like for example are [their children] being sexually abused" and that they should be criminally charged.[1] https://mitchellhamline.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2012/...
[2] https://cachouston.org/prevention/child-sexual-abuse-facts/
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
I dunno. The skeeziest people I know would show up squeaky clean on paper, and several of the ones I trust the most have some kind of shit in their past, at least on paper.
> There are laws against child endangerment for a reason
What do you think the reason is? The deterrence value is zero.
Why just the mother? What about her absentee father?
I agree that the singling out of the mother for condemnation in this comment section is conspicuous and dismaying — thank you for pointing it out. Nevertheless, I would offer the father the same grace that I think the mother deserves, and I think you will be sympathetic.
We know little of the mother's circumstances, and we know basically none of the father's. He may not even be alive. He could be an "absentee", or even an abuser himself — we have no information. But he might also be active in Lucy's life yet tragically unaware of his daughter's plight.
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
Are you entitled to a jury trial for peeing in the bushes in the USA?
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
You are constitutionally entitled to a jury trial for any criminal charge in the US under the Sixth Amendment.
Thanks.
I’d imagine it would be cost prohibitive to take a peeing in the bushes charge to jury trial though?
Sounds like the sort of thing one would only do if they were aiming to set a precedent for some reason?
95% of cases are settled before reaching jury trial. Usually a plea bargain for criminal cases. Settlement for civil cases. Or dismissal. The other 5% are expensive.
Would peeing in a bush be a criminal charge? I'm not American but I thought there was a difference between misdemeanors and "actual" crimes.
Generally speaking, there are two levels of crime in the US; misdemeanors and felonies. Both will land you with a criminal record, but a misdemeanor-only record will not show up on some standard background checks and does not remove your right to bear arms or vote, for example. Felonies are much more serious, and generally mandate a minimum prison sentence of 1 year unless plead down, while the sentencing for misdemeanors generally caps out at a year and typically just gets reduced to fines and community service, or a short stint (e.g. a couple weeks) in the local jail instead of a prison.
In some states, first offense non-violent felony convictions (e.g. exceeding the speed limit while fleeing police in a vehicle) can be expunged from your record when you turn 21 (if you were convicted and served out your sentence before turning 21). Otherwise felonies generally stay with you for life.
The other comments cover it.
We have civil offenses, the most common example would be minor traffic offense (speeding but not recklessly, etc). These were criminal at one time, but arresting people for minor speeding was deemed inappropriate.
Then we have misdemeanors - everything from reckless driving through basic assault (no injuries, no weapon). Usually/always <1 year in prison as the max punishment. Some financial crimes. Usually don't appear on basic background checks, but might on details checks (like when working for a bank or the government).
Then there are felonies - assault with a weapon, major financial crimes, etc. Typically >1 year prison sentences. As noted, these can impact your rights as a citizen and they will appear on most background checks.
As I mentioned in another comment, district attorneys frequently charge as many individual crimes as possible as a tactic to get cooperation/plea from the accused.
For example, you get pulled over for DUI/drink-driving. You're blotto, and you get out of your car and try to walk away. Police tackle you. The chargeable offenses would be at least... - whatever initial infraction caused the traffic stop (speeding, swerving, whatever) - that was probably civil. - The DUI - a misdemeanor unless it was excessive or a repeat offense - "Fleeing and eluding" or equivalent for walking away - misdemeanor, usually. - Assaulting a law enforcement officer (by forcing the police to tackle you) - automatic felony in many states.
The DA will often accept a guilty plea on everything up to the felony assault, or reduce the assault from "against a LEO" to normal assault (non-felony) to clear their plate.
No idea if this is common in the rest of the anglo-sphere, or anywhere else.
Unfortunately in the US we do in fact go so far as to criminalize urinating in public. It's weird to me that speeding (up to some limit) in a school zone is ranked below pissing in a shrub along the road.
It's not the urinating part. It's the part where you expose the bit that does the urinating. And most places are bonkers about that.
Misdemeanors are actual crimes, yes.
The US judicial system LOVES to overcharge as a means to forcing a plea (and avoiding the cost/time of full trial).
There was also that Chicago Sunroof incident.
Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.
"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation. Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group.
Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
Some people are often drawn to toxic abusers.
It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners.
One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically.
I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.
It’s called “Hybristophilia” and it’s a well-known phenomenon.
Yes, but it's the overgeneralization to "women have hybristophilia" that is the problem.
Sure, and so is Stockholm Syndrome - except in that case we know the concept was made up by a criminologist working with the local police to help them come up with a psychological explanation for why the hostages stopped trusting them after they had horribly mishandled the hostage crisis and endangered their lives.
Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing.
You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés.
It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
A different explanation that rings true to my experience is that people are drawn to confidence rather than a desire to be abused.
Toxic abusers and high school garbage are good at signalling strength despite their poor character and choices.
Confidence and power.
And all too often they don't recognize until too late that that power will be turned on them.
The tell-tale phrase of a soon-to-be victim in a relationship with an abuser is "he's not like that when we're alone", not "I can fix him".
There's a difference between confidence and dominance. It's difficult to grasp given how much our culture tends to conflate them as desirable traits in men but the main distinction is that one is about resilience and the other is about abuse.
Confidence is attractive. Unless you're deeply insecure (and abusers often are insecure even if they try to mask it in displays of dominance) you're likely attracted to confidence in potential partners - yes, even as a straight guy. Just like an insecure person can use dominance to mask their insecurity, a confident person can also act submissively. This isn't just true in BDSM, it's actually a social dynamic many people engage in completely naturally.
An abuser (or I guess the pop-psych term is usually "narcissist" but let's not open the can of worms on whether that is ever applied "correctly") will often seek out a confident partner they can manipulate into a position of vulnerability they can take advantage of to control them.
The problem with power is that it is nearly inseparable from abuse. Abuse will inevitable arise from any power imbalance because the mere circumstance of being in a position of power can easily lead to absuses of power unless you're extremely diligent about your use of it. A healthy social dynamic always requires a balance of power - even if there may be a local imbalance in any one-on-one dynamic it can be offset by the wider network if it is stable and strong enough. If you look at powerful men in modern society almost none of them are actually confident. The few who are tend to paradoxically stand out for their humility and deference (i.e. taking credit for their losses and sharing credit for their accomplishments). But this is of course much more difficult than starting out from a position of power and fearfully lashing out at any potential rival.
Sure, that also must be a factor.
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things. There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth. There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
"[ Indirectly ] drawn to X [ due to trait Y ]" is not the same as "directly desires X". You are strawmanning the other party.
The OnlyFans example can be twisted in a similar manner.
It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
Please don't treat half of the people on this planet as if they were some alien species. Treat people like people.
People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.
Or -- and hear me out -- you're just wrong.
Which is likelier -- that
(1) the behavior of four billion people can be described by a sentence or two
or
(2) you have an extremely small and shallow reference pool and not enough experience and/or capability to understand and escape it?
Bro science isn't real
The second most recent video from the YouTube channel you linked uses a "triggered feminist" meme image from 2016.
The image itself is a still image from a video posted on Alex Jones' YouTube channel covering a protest against Trump supporters. If you actually watch the part of the original video the image was taken from, you quickly realize the woman in question just has the misfortune of having very naturally emotive facial expressions and the still is taken from an argument between her and a Trump supporter about the alleged concern of immigrant sex abusers and that if you consider the fact they have to yell at each other to overcome the noisy environment she doesn't actually appear at all outraged or angry.
I don't explain this to dunk on the channel - it easily does that by itself. I explain this because the fact that the channel you cited a video from uses this meme in 2026 (10 years after it was first taken, i.e. enough time to learn about its origin and move on) is extremely symbolic of the approach you seem to favor for finding explanations to social phenomena. Yes, "it's just a meme", but that's the point: memes are shorthands that carry cultural context (or in this case entire fossil records of cultural history), they're not just funny pictures.
_That_ isn't "what we evolved to like". "Men" aren't "probably worse". Don't sell yourself short. You exist downstream from tens of thousands of years of human history and at least a hundred thousand years of prehistory. We had already developed tool-making and cooking before we even became _Homo sapiens_ so in all likelihood you can expand that prehistory into the millions of years of _Homo erectus_.
Science has moved on well past the mythology of barter economies or "hunter gatherer" societies where the cavewife tending towards the babies with her oldest daughters while cavehusband and the boys were out hunting the mammoth.
We know that the thing that allowed us to survive as a species was not just our big brain but our close-knit society that cared for its injured, elderly and disabled and was at times so welcoming we now know that early Homo sapiens at times even interbred with our closer extinct sibling species. In fact, our big brains had to come downstream from this because it made childbirth dangerous and arduous while also requiring us to spend the first years of our lives unable to defend ourselves and the first months in fact so reliant on others to help us survive that disruption of those early bonds can traumatize us for life or in extreme cases even cause us to die. Even as adults "touch starvation" has serious mental health implications.
If you think "what we evolved to like" is not "appropriate", chances are the problem isn't what we evolved to like - e.g. ripe fruits - but what systems the modern social order has put in place to make exploitation of those preferences useful for those in positions of power (or extreme wealth, but I repeat myself) even when doing so will harm you - e.g. abundant high fructose corn syrup in every part of your diet so you think food is tasty and crave more of it although it doesn't satiate you.
No one said there were.
> nice, timid guys were friendzoned
There's a reason why "nice guy" is a stereotype. The people who describe themselves like this aren't nice or timid, but insecure, angry and judgmental. They tell stories like "women like assholes" to avoid coming to terms with the idea that they're unlikable.
Note that "insecure" is not incompatible with "nice" and "timid". Doesn't make them unlikable.
And it's not that women like assholes. Rather, people (not just women) like the traits that let an asshole get away with being an asshole.
Both the "nice guy" and the "asshole" are insecure. The latter is just better at masking their insecurities in such a way that others mistake it for confidence.
This is especially true when eveyone involved is young enough not to have a wide enough frame of reference to gauge what's an indication of actual confidence versus abuse and has a brain undergoing massive hormonal shifts that intensify emotions, encourage risk taking and make them seek out novelty. Let's remember that most of the "nice guy" stories people like to tell are about early adulthood or more often than not their late teens.
1,000,000% this
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The non-wifebeating, non-drug-abusing, non-raping men and boring and unlikeable. It's actually their fault that women fall for the motorcycle riding drug dealers. Got it.
Anyone who thinks like this is absolutely the kind of awful, toxic person who has to make up stories to avoid coming to terms that they are the problem.
Just take off those glasses and everyone will realize you're secretly hot
Oh this is not a spiteful view of the world, I've been quite lucky with my love life, thanks.
I think it was a quip on movie tropes
“Woman are drawn to toxic abusers”
That’s not true. Abusers are very capable at identifying and targeting vulnerable people. Abusers are drawn to vulnerable people.
Both statements can be true. Although the first is better phrased as drawn to traits that correlate with toxic abusers.
You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.
Perfect illustration. It's not a women thing, it's a people thing.
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.
Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.
I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.
Edit: I found one of the studies -
> Key takeaways
> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.
> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.
> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.
> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.
> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.
https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...
Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context?
Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying".
> Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al. (2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu- dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim- ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica- tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan- guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05.
---
Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier.
> The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified.
https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson...
So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused.
Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
I met a guy who was the creepiest dude I ever met in my life. Who intentionally was making me uncomfortable with personal questions (and admitted it when pressed! With a grin!). His job? Spending all day with mentally disabled children...
That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.
I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".
I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who?
Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
You've always dated single mothers?
After your late 20s, that's like 90% of your pool.
Where, in Utah ?
Case in point
A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media.
https://www.is.fi/viihde/art-2000011776913.html
Imagine you or I sending a DM to some cuban dancer abroad. The probability of that leading up to engagement is basically zero.
Indeed. Plus getting ourselves banned from the platform for harassment
To be fair, women really aren't in a habit of getting a divorce from normal/slightly fucked up man they had kid with.
Si I'd imagine only dating single mothers had a huge influence on a your statistics.
Uhh. No. No, we're generally not drawn to abusers. It's the other way around, abusers are drawn to those at risk of abuse. Maybe don't pose ideas formed through confirmation bias as truth?
If you look at the dating history of typical abusive males, they have a long list of women who they've been involved with. In comparison, if you take the median male, their dating history involves a few chance encounters, one or two actual relationships, and a lot of struggle with loneliness. As a matter of statistics, women are very much attracted to abusive men, and not attracted to normal men who are not abusive. There is some level of personal accountability with that.
source? Even if said statistics are true, there are plenty of other explanations. For example, the abusive relationships may not last as long, the abuser might have multiple partners at the same time, the abuser might be more confident, or the abuser realises it's much easier to force or pressure a vulnerable woman into a relationship
> and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children
Huh. It, uh, sure is a choice to declare you deliberately only date women with underage children and then blame those women for being too stupid to recognize when they're dating dangerous men. The added bit about men getting away with abuse because women let them is also something.
Abusive men deliberately find vulnerable targets, exploit them, and then blame them.
Sure. But the prerequisite to make this possible is that wonen in general are very much attracted to dangerous men.
That is absolutely not what I said lol, try again.
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> the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
> While many see that as blaming the mother
Yes, that's how I see it.
> it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
"Sanctions"? This is an article about successful digital sleuthing, but your takeaway is that we need to punish the mother?
Not to mention we're talking about rape not beatings. Beatings wouldn't put DHS on the case.
A lot of evils cannot be eradicated with just more education. Sunshine I we as a society have to put our foot down.
There's been several cases of mothers being put in jail for child negligence in such situations in my country.
> an abused girl his team had named Lucy
> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.
Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.
The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).
The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.
There are a lot of women out there drawn to criminals of every kind. The primary demographic of true crime shows are women for a reason, not to mention the letters murderers and such receive. I would be curious to know why this is, and if it happens in other cultures too.
If there were as many women in prison as men you can be sure there would be as many or more men interested in them.
Can I be sure? How? There are plenty of women in prison as-is, although high profile cases are rarer.
Relatively speaking there aren't plenty of women in prison for violent crimes. It's about a 9:1 ratio. Men obsessively sexualise everything in our patriarchal society.
Sure... There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to begin.
Well, that's how I felt about your initial comment so we're even.
You've been downvoted into grey-blivion because that claim is wrong. It is an example of the underlying supposition that the behaviour of men and women is identical. This runs counter to the findings of psychology and sociology.
> It is an example of the underlying supposition that the behaviour of men and women is identical.
No, it isn't. You've read something into it that wasn't there. You've also missed the point I made about speaking within the context of a patriarchy.
> This runs counter to the findings of psychology and sociology.
Let's both note that neither psychologists nor sociologists can work with non-socialised people who won't reflect back society's norms.
> You've been downvoted into grey-blivion because that claim is wrong.
For the record, I received one downvote.
What a deflection, we had a good laugh. You're still wrong with comment '784.
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Shoo. Peddle your incel garbage elsewhere.
Oh, so shaming people for number of sexual partners they have is back in fashion? Or it's just ok when we do it to men? Lol, hypocrites.
They couldn't ID the child initially.
I think the order went finding the house first and only then were they able to identify the victim (and consequently the offender)
That would make sense. Thank you.
You could still run the sofa customers list against a list of known offenders but is there a federal list? Maybe the number of states where the sofa was sold was to large and getting the full list not feasible?
Exactly, it sounds like they didn't know who the girl was from photos alone; "Lucy" was just a name they gave the victim.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the article because they want public support to end privacy
Yeah this whole story reads like propaganda to me.
Sorry, but the wording isn't confusing, I think you just didn't read it properly. All they knew was a girl, somewhere, was being abused. They didn't know who her mother was or, obviously, who was taking the pictures.
I mean, from the sound of it you start out with literally a picture, so hindsight is obvious, but they didn't know who was living in that house until really close to the end.
There's also a lot of "WHY AREN'T YOU FOCUSING ON THE MOTHER?" whataboutism in the comments, which I find appalling. The article was about something else, and who knows what her circumstances were.
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
The investigators will be able to calculate how many rounds of abuse the victim suffered. The more it happened, the less likely it is the mother was unaware. And if course, the victim can tell us directly whether the mother knew. If so, she deserves a decade of her life in prison as well.
Something like 60-70% of violent crime involves victims and offenders that know each other, and with murder and sexual assault it's 70-80%.
Which isn't really relevant as most violent crime is criminal on criminal. Know each other doesn't mean they're friends. Many times it's rivals.
You are right, the article is about:
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
My heart breaks for parents who learn that their children found themselves unable to confide in them about rape.
I doubt the mother didn't know.
From Maternal Perceptions Of And Responses To Child Sexual Abuse https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4845772/ :
> But it was estimated that from 30% to even 80% of victims do not purposefully disclose their misuse before adulthood.
[...]
> Arata found an inverse relationship between the disclosure and severity of abuse. Subjects reporting contact sexual abuse were significantly less likely to disclose it than those reporting non-contact sexual abuse.
> The duration of sexual abuse has a significant impact on its disclosure – the longer children are abused, the more hesitant they may be to disclose their abuse.
True. Damaged parents are often the kinds of people who are taken advantage of by sex offenders. I think it requires a social fix of some kind.
However damaged someone is they have a duty of care to their children. There's someone else with a blame in the story but to excuse this is very wrong.
Completely agree. It shouldn't be treated as an excuse but it's silly to ignore this as a HUGE risk factor. Probably should be considered when making policies etc.
Equal rights also means equal accountability. It's very unlikely she was unaware of the abuse taking place for 6 years.
absolute ~cinema~ surveillance
I’ve spent just a teeny bit of time helping international ICE investigators (not that one; internet child exploitation) postpone PTSD with technology. It seems like after two years of their job, they’re going to have a mental break. So postponing is all you can really do.
It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.
These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).
Moderation feels like the one of the most ethical uses of AI. Being able to prevent a lot of the worst content from being posted and preventing people from being exposed to it.
Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.
In the UK once website blocking powers were established, their scope was extended repeatedly by courts for IP protection purposes.
> Putting that kind of filter in the way of speech seems ripe for abuse.
On one hand I agree with you. Any automatic filter implemented can later be expanded to cover more and more things, such as messages from political adversaries for example. It's a slippery slope as we all know.
On the other hand I don't think it applies in this context very much. If we're talking about content published by a corporation or such (say a newspaper for example) they already filter all their gathered news themselves and have no obligation to publish things they don't feel like.
Similarly if we're talking about user uploaded content on social media I don't think they have any obligation to publish everything and anything that their users decide to upload either, and it's not the expectations of the users that anything can be hosted there for them. Users already know that youtube/facebook/tiktok/what-have-you have seemingly arbitrary rules regarding what content they're willing to host and not.
Now if for example DNS providers or ISPs decide to implement these sort of filters on the web at large that's a different matter I think. In which case I agree with you.
The slope isn't slippery, it's vertical. It's always misused. Thus it needs to be completely prohibited, lest the camel get it's nose in.
Sure... so now we end up with people watching abuse 9 to 5 to train AI. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/05/i...
I don't think the issue here is related to AI. Without AI, moderators would still have to look at these same videos. The difference is they would hit the public first before being flagged and sent to moderators. Now with AI they can be prevented from ever going public.
The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.
The agencies already have massive collections of csam from every arrest and site seizure. They already have systems that can identify existing csam by fingerprint or computer vision, so very little needs to be seen by humans, only newly produced material.
Outsourcing everything. Even PTSD from training AI to India so privileged law enforcement officers and social media moderators don't have to. This system is so hypocritical and broken.
I always thought these were the perfect jobs for psychopaths, putting that lack of empathy/stress to some good use e.g. in similar police work.
Another comment mentioned ICE as well, so I've been looking into it, and imagine my surprise to learn that ICE (yes that one) has been working in this space since since the Obama admin. Huh.
https://www.ice.gov/careers/hero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_for_Victims_of_Traffic...
HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.
It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.
Yeah, I looked into it, and ICE actually has two distinct components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Pretty much everyone things ICE == ERO, so you've got stuff like Canadians agitating to close the HSI collaboration offices in Canada.
Well and unfortunately until recent times ERO was mostly dedicated to criminals first and other folks second but my understand was there was a backlog of criminals to find, capture and remove that person he other parts were less of a concern.
Coyotes are frequently part of criminal organizations. They take advantage of people in any and every way that they can. Slavery, sexual and otherwise, is not at all an uncommon result of being brought into the country under the radar, so to speak.
This administration pulled people off catching child predators to go after some Juan at home depot. in light of the epstein coverup, its hardly surprising.
AI for helping mitigate PTSD, or helping with the investigations?
Because the latter basically entails helping create a surveillance state. Which in theory could be an acceptable trade-off, but it seems disingenuous to say "AI companies have no financial incentives here" when the big issue is that AI companies would actually be helping to establish powerful dragnet surveillance capabilities. There would need to be a strong democratic process around this.
So do I read it correctly that good old detective work did the job, and that breaking e2e encryption and client side scanning wasn’t needed? Politicians tell me a different story.
This is actually both.
It's not a big secret to journalists that such stories are just another kind of entertainment that never fails to attract the public. Certain people constantly work in that genre.
Readers want to be assured that something is excluded. I visit the good sunny side of the internet, and horrors are on some “darknet”. I live in the better part of the town, and horrors happen in bad districts. Me and my friends are “normal people”, never “victims”. Wars are far away. I am not responsible for anything.
Certain people's careers are made in such pandering.
So they tell a thrilling detective story, and at the same time publicly shame Facebook to make people think that more control over “important services” and more backdoors are needed. Only for serious cases, of course. You wouldn't want to support those people, would you? Good. Now show us you licence number for internet usage.
Lies upon lies upon lies.
Not that I agree with either of those things but I think the implicit argument is that breaking encryption would lead to faster arrest and fewer years of abuse for the victims.
They don't even arrest pedophiles when they have them on video tape and a client list when the president is on them. This has all become one big joke, justice I mean. There is no justice.
You’d think so, but the police already have tons of methods they don’t use. The bottleneck is always staffing, not crazy shit they wouldn’t even be allowed to use.
Except people wouldnt post such material to TOR if they knew the crypto is backdoored. They'd post it to an alternative that ignores the law
periodically the various forces tackling CSAM release images which are ENTIRELY SFW, and are purely of a jersey, a backpack, a location, a tea setting, and ask people to tell them things: Was this available in Belgium? Did you ever see this in a second hand shop? Do you recognise the logo on this bag?
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
Sounds a bit more productive than Wordle. How can we get involved?
https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
For any Australians here, there is also https://www.accce.gov.au/what-we-do/trace-an-object - I hope there are similar sites for other regions too.
Don't region lock yourself - abuse investigations in Europe or Australia may be from abuse in a different jurisdiction. Alternatively, a gift given from an Australian family member to a European could be a bit of information that helps an investigation rule out or close in on a potential abuser.
This seems like the perfect job/challenge for those GeoGuesser pros
I tried helping with that once, but after looking at a few images, I really felt like throwing up.
I'm not built for this.
This speaks volumes of the moral values of Facebook vs the brick industry.
Tbf the brick industry helped indirectly and it just happened to be super helpful. They didn’t perform a mass mining of user data across the whole country or a large region. They had very little data to go off other than someone’s past memory of the material. I’m Facebook would have helped in that way too if it was able to.
However, this is exactly how I’d have hoped Facebook would have responded without some sort of court order for data, they shouldn’t be mining everything at the mere request for help by a law enforcement agency. I get this topic is one where you’d wish there was an exception but exceptions are slippery slopes.
> "He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"
Move slow, build things.
It helps that the brick industry is already set up to offer this - "brick matching" from photographs is a valuable service for architects, builders, and home improvement firms.
> "And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"
That is an epic sentence!
This is awesome - but they shouldn't have revealed the secret on how they caught them.. like 1000's of other offenders could land up making similar mistakes. It just makes sense to keep your mouth shut and keep on hunting.
I thought so too, but it actually wasn't the couch, brick or whatever. It was overconfidence and mistakes that were exploited and there is no patch for that
This is a common dilemma in intelligence. One of the most famous examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_telegram
>Flaming Alamos were not visible on the outside of any of the homes, because the properties were clad in other materials. But the team asked Harp to assess - by looking at their style and exterior - if these properties were likely to have been built during a period when Flaming Alamos had been on sale. "We would basically take a screenshot of that house or residence and shoot it over to John and say 'would this house have these bricks inside?'" says Squire.
Zillow and tax assessors will list the age\year built of any property.
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You can do the same yourself here: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
I feel like I'm gonna puke, just knowing these are all cut out from images where a child is being sexually abused makes them feel so cursed.
There is only one location shown in the images, in the past there were several and much clearer, I cannot image how difficult it must be to find it if the europol cannot find it in 2026.
Old thread for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469681
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So, I had a friend. Had because he's dead. He did this work for a decade and a half and then couldn't deal with it anymore. In that time he put countless assholes behind bars. At some point he stopped responding to my emails so I called the unit and they were absolutely devastated, this guy was the backbone of their operation, the one with by far the most computer experience of all of them. RIP Ronald.
It is very hard to imagine what the life of someone on the frontline is like, the ones that are really battling online scum. So take that 'think of the children' thing and realize that there are people who really do think of the children and it is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
Quote from TFA:
"The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
So, privacy matters to FB when it is to protect the abusers of children. How low can you go...
That last bit is not really how it works. I've been in a small company that law enforcement would routinely reach out to for help with solving crimes because they thought we'd have relevant data.
99% of requests are wild goose chases based on nothing. Like literally dumb requests that are not only irrelevant, the request wouldn't even get past that cops boss, much less a judge. But a cop can just ask whatever they want regardless of merit or relevance and it's up to you to say yes or no.
In those years we received two requests with warrants that made more sense but when I see "company denied to help" I understand why. Most cases it's a random cop fishing for private info that has nothing to do with anything. And when it's true, just get a warrant then.
Otherwise you're more likely to be jeopardizing innocent people's data than actually helping anyone.
FB is more than large enough to have dedicated liasons to make sure that there is a difference between 'dumb requests that are irrelevant' get separated out from the ones that matter.
I don't think you understood, we weren't understaffed, that's besides the point as it's not hard to reply to an email. The main aspect is you should demand a warrant because you as someone that works for a private company shouldn't be the arbitrar of if a cop has enough or not (plus the cop will obviously not give you any details besides ongoing investigation in most cases). There's a job for that which is a judge. In my opinion even internal lawyers should not judge that outside of the legality of the request. In many jurisdictions you can get in trouble for doing that.
> we
Ah ok, never mind me then.
I've in FBs position and I'm happy to report that we had a very well oiled process to deal with pederasts and assisted LE in putting a couple of them - also in the US and Canada - behind bars. That's one of the reason I knew that officer that I mentioned above. These people need all the help they can get, their departments are overworked and understaffed. Investigations are often a bit more time sensitive than you seem to believe. But hey, it's just a couple of kids.
FB has armies of lawyers to stall each and every legitimate request for data and there is ample proof that they have done this many times over the years. This is just one of many cases where they - you - and their tech could have made a difference, but chose to withhold aid.
As for LE sharing proof to convince you that things are a bit time critical: I have never found that to be a problem, assuming you have the stomach for it. What you seem to miss is that warrants have to be more specific than is useful in many cases and FB is well aware of this. In this case the LEO went with that request because he knew that a warrant with that specific set of conditionals would be unlikely, even if it would have helped to solve the case that much quicker.
But given that they're a terrible company with an absolutely horrible person at the helm I should probably not be surprised. See, if the likes of FB would actually take a stand on this subject that would take the wind out of the sails of a lot of these efforts to really harm privacy. But they're happy to sell you down the river when it benefits them and to use the privacy argument when that benefits them too.
A few years ago I came across a company that was wholesale sharing the worst of the worst and the CEO of that company was making all kinds of silly arguments about how they were 'just a dumb pipe'. They refused to take any counter measures and it took me proving to them and their - future - investors beyond a shadow of doubt that they must be aware of what and how much is going on but willfully turning a blind eye. Privacy was - of course - their stated reason for upholding their values. Because it suited them commercially, not because they actually gave two bits about actual privacy.
FB is a massive conduit for child pornography. You know it. FB management knows it. They have their internal processes to deal with flagged content. But they could do a lot better and they don't simply because it is just a cost to them. So they do the minimum and hide behind the privacy cloak when it suits them, even if they know full well what is going on.
Mate I never worked at Facebook what are you on about. Sure if you're looking at evidence of a crime you don't need to wait for a warrant you can proactively reach out. That is not what I was talking about.
"I don't think you understood, we weren't understaffed,"
Who is 'we' then in that context if not FB?
> I've been in a small company that law enforcement would routinely reach out to
Obviously "we" in this context is the small company in question.
> a small company that law enforcement would routinely reach out to for help
RTFC?
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So why wouldn't the investigators follow the appropriate legal process?
Now, I'm sure that everything present in this article is true. But I'm worried that the reason we get this article now (apparently the things the article describes happened 10-15 years ago) is because it's part of someone's job to build support for warrantless driftnet surveillance, mandatory real-ID systems etc.
So I think it's fair to ask: why was it so hard to give Facebook the warrant they asked for?
Note how they didn't say that the legal process wasn't followed just that they didn't want to use their fancy face recognition for a good cause in one very particular instance.
> https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1r6wluq/departmen...
Let's see them stand tall then, now that the department of HS is going to make the request, no doubt through the appropriately bought and paid for channels.
They probably didn't want a news article drawing attention how creepy and pervasive their facial recognition system is, even if it was actually used for a good cause for once.
That's exactly my take. I've had a similar thing where a car of mine got stolen and I petitioned the police to use their ANPR capability to give an idea of where it went and they said they couldn't even though I already knew that they could. It was a funny conversation. It hinged on 'couldn't' because of 'reasons' vs 'technical ability'.
Or, it could be that they didn't get a warrant, and don't want to get into the habit of giving the government things without a warrant (or, given that it's a big US internet corporation, something political in return would probably also work).
I'm not saying they're nice, they're not. But it's probably for the best that they don't (or didn't, again, it was 10+ years ago) give government everything they ask for without a warrant.
I repeat the question: why would it be so hard to get a warrant?
Because they were at an early stage of the investigation doing speculative lead following, which didn't reach the legal standard of suspicion for a court order?
Because this was a fishing expedition. Do you let the police have a warrant to examine everyone in a large group?
The authorities simply needed to start an ad campaign with facebook targeting child abusers. Then FB would have that data packaged up and ready to sell in an instant.
As someone who hasn't done this line of work, the only words of power I could imagine which would help me get though it day-in-and-day-out is: "but it matters to this starfish."
It must be so demoralizing seeing such wicked behavior day-in-and-day-out and thinking it's only a drop in the ocean.
Yeah this kind of work is really important but man I just don't think I could do it.
It is, but it is not one of those jobs that you don't take home with you. EMT also has my respect, I could not do their work either but this is a level of nasty that makes you lose any kind of hope for humanity.
A article this long just to blame facebook to not give away private data to a three letter organization.
Human agents, for once, not AI agents.
> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.
Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
The fine article actually ends with this text:
You don't need to imply they didn't read that part, because it doesn't really affect the point of the comment, that Facebook doesn't actually care about privacy. Even if they're not sharing things willy-nilly, they're still aggressively tracking everyone they can.
just remember even the patriot act started with good intentions, to get justice.
At the time that act was passed, many people pointed out that it would be abused.
Facebook shut down their facial recognition program in 2021 and deleted the data in response to public frustrations.
It’s really sad now to see people getting angry at Facebook not having facial recognition technology.
The two views aren't necessarily in conflict. I don't appreciate Facebook's use of facial recognition technology, but they built it. I'm extremely disappointed they proceeded to use this technology to influence elections while fighting against making the data available to law enforcement. I understand this may not have been intentional on their part, but the result is the same, and I was not at all surprised by it.
I can't help but notice the exact wording of FB's response - or rather what they didn't say.
If someone asks me to do them a favor, I have basically three options for a reply:
• I can and I will;
• I can but I won't; or
• I am not able to.
FB's answer was not option 3.
I think a more plausible explanation is that FB did not want to set a precedent of being the facial recog avenue of choice for the Fed.
There's another option "I will but only if ..." which is what Facebook rightfully went with. Come back with a warrant is _always_ the correct answer when dealing with LE.
A fourth option is "I can and I will, but only after certain prerequisites are met - go away and meet them first", which looks to me what they were saying.
> From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
Yes, and if Facebook didn't exist, presumably these images connecting the abuser to the victim wouldn't have been available anywhere for the investigators to find.
If Facebook didn’t exist, they would’ve found the photos on MySpace. Come on.
All Facebook likely did here that was any different than any other social media platform would have done, was gather Sandberg, Zuck and a cadre of snotty, sniveling engineers in a conference room and debate whether this was good engagement for the platform.
Facial recognition is very powerful these days. My friend took a photo of his kid at the top of Twin Peaks in SF, with the city in the background. Unfortunately, due to the angle, you could barely see the eyes and a portion of the nose of the kid. Android was still able to tag the kid.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Google photos has the advantage of a limited search space. Any photo you take is overwhelmingly likely to be one of the few faces already in the library. Not to say facebook couldn't solve the problem. But the ability of Google to do facial recognition with such poor inputs is that it's searching on 40~ faces rather than x billion faces.
Can confirm, have seen Google photos misidentify strangers. I'm sure better technology exists, but Google's system has weaknesses.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This story was from more than a decade ago.
Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
> Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
People decide who they think are the good guys and who they think are the bad guys first, then view subsequent events through that lens.
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here
This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.
Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]
Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.
> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.
Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made
I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.
---
While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.
---
[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-eye-documentary-t...
[1] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...
[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...
[3] - https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vgg_face/
Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.
When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.
There’s a pretty big difference between surveillance logging your every move your and scanning photos voluntarily uploaded to Facebook.
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
The grim meathook future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming regardless. At the very least we could get some proper crime solving out of it along the way.
That's probably the worst attitude one could have about this topic in the whole space of possible opinions there is.
The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.
Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.
[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
The only explanation for this comment is you never used reverse image search by Google or yandex before it was nerfed or you'd know this is super plausible to find direct hits without many false positives.
Facebook carried a ball?
I'm willing to bet said ball was kicked into the jungle five seconds after registering the domain.
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It seems to me that the BBC is including those passages at the beginning and end of their story as propaganda so the public begs (demands, even) for more surveillance, and the sale of private data to the government. I mean, think of the children, like Lucy! Seems to be having that effect in this thread, in any case.
It’s absolutely propaganda and a perfect example of how the public gets manipulated on a daily basis. Let’s break down the facts:
- Pushes for facial recognition
- Pushes for more state run surveillance
- Pushes for AI based surveillance
- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining
- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.
The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.
Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.
The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.
This wouldn't have helped here but there is a related field of research called hotel recognition. Many of these videos are filmed in hotels so being able to recognize if it was a Mariott or even better a non chain local hotel can be very helpful to investigators. They basically train CNNs that learn to pick up on the bathroom fixtures or kind of bedding used by different hotels. One researcher in particular has done a tone of work on this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mNoB9SgAAAAJ&hl=en
I wonder if you could get the interior of every house from Zillow/realtor websites and then do something like this for every house in the country... Clearview for bedrooms?
On the one hand, this is a beautiful (but depressing) story about humans standing up for each other.
On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."
None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.
What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?
Nothing wrong was done by the police here -- it's all good old-fashioned detective work. But they wanted to have Facebook use facial recognition to find the victim among all the photographs on Facebook. And that actually would have gotten them results faster, because finding the identity of the victim was enough to break the case, in the end. But it also would have been a very bad precedent in terms of surveillance.
That is fair, I’m out of line.
I found it quite depressing to read. This guy spent so much time to put just one offender behind bars but the are likely hundreds of thousands out there. So sad
I have literally no idea how you've ended up at that conclusion from the article!
Same. In a world where police agents are committing atrocities, a world where ICE agents are running amok, it's nice to hear about some actual good that comes from the police force
Plus a chance to dunk on their biggest competitor for ad revenue and clicks (Facebook)
In what sense are Facebook and the BBC competitors?
In the sense that Facebook tries to keep everyone inside Facebook? I haven't kept up with it, but isn't Facebook well known for trying to prevent orders from browsing out?
I'm impressed by the people doing this job. How do you turn off at the end of the shift and go home to sleep, when you know an hour more of work could make a more immediate difference? How does work/life balance work in this profession?
Micki Pistorius (yes, Oscar Pistorius' aunt) talks about this in her auto-biography - Catch Me a Killer (2000)
[also made as a TV series of the same name in 2024]
To paraphrase "How can I sleep when I am the key to finding these murderers."
She was involved in more than thirty serial killer cases while at South African Police Service (SAPS) working as a Criminal Profiler.
It took a great toll on her life but she was ultimately able to overcome the stress of it.
This is amazing ingenuity and collaboration.
I wonder if Rainbolt (or other GeoGuessrs) gets regular requests for consultation, or maybe he should if he is not already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Rainbolt
Maybe it's just me, and I wouldn't have thought this a few years back, but my immediate reaction as I started reading this was "Oh look, somehow they got the fucking _BBC_ to run a DHS whitewashing feel good story. I wonder what's about to hit the media that they'd like buried?"
Not sure how we can help such heros !! These are the people that make the world a better place !!
I can't understand how anyone can do such a job for any length of time. I worked at a PC repair shop back in the 90s, fixed some dude's PC, and I saw a bunch of CSAM stuff (a lot, like thousands of pics, all children). I reported it to the local cops, then the FBI got involved, and that's the last I heard of it. My point is that the memory of those pics haunt me to this day. And I only saw a handful of pics, over, maybe, a period of about 2 minutes. To do that all day, everyday - how could one not become an alcoholic?
yeah and from the article, it sounds like they chat with the perps and befriend them to build trust.
This is an old story about an old investigation. It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE. It is propaganda resurrected to make DHS look useful.
They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.
Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.
This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
The BBC spent 5 years making a documentary and just finished. They had no idea that the US would in its current state when they started. That doesn't free them from criticism of the content, but the timing is a coincidence.
I haven't watched the video (linked from the article) and I certainly hope the current events caused them to reflect on whether pushing for DHS to have more power is wise, but the last line in the article doesn't give me much optimism.
Although the past couple of years have been an even more stark descent into incompetence and malice, there has not been a moment in DHS's 24-year history at which it was worth defending, let alone with this pattern of propaganda.
It is perfectly possible to investigate and prevent child abuse without this particular configuration.
Propaganda made by the BBC to make DHS look good? You are awfully cynical.
I'd argue the DHS is incidental and the real story is "law enforcement deserves open access to social media feeds." In this light, the BBC's angle becomes much clearer.
>You are awfully cynical.
A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.
DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.
Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.
> the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago
Not so.
> Last summer Greg met Lucy, now in her 20s, for the first time. > Lucy (left), now an adult...
You are correct. Thank you.
It’s a story taken from a documentary airing tonight. Unless it’s entirely AI slop, it probably predates the current DHS mess.
Edit: seven years in the making, so entirely coincidental
What better way to bolster your reputation than to get your buddies to prop you up with fluff pieces? Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Are the Europeans suddenly willing to kiss the ring? They don’t otherwise seem to be buddies right now.
And also to drege up "think of the children" rage that makes some people demand expansion of surveillance and free exchange of serveillance data with governments. Manufacturing consent.
That's exactly right. Meanwhile these are the kinds of things that DHS is being pulled off of so they can spend more time harassing latinos.
Submitter is Canadian and re: America, posted "I read recently that Patrimonialism is a good way of describing the current regime" about 10 months ago.
Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.
Any reason to think it is?
EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:
> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF
Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)
Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE." This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
From the fine article itself:
>Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years.
Are you suggesting that the BBC, the world service arm of a British public broadcaster (that is editorially independent from the state and even the wider BBC), began spending five years filming a documentary across the US, Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, just so that they could secretly support a US government agency half a decade before it became embroiled in controversy?
The claim is that an article was submitted intentionally to manipulate public perception of DHS.
We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
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You are wrong, this same story was not reported more than ten years ago. The article is not a report of a man being arrested, tried, and sentenced (doubtless the extent of reporting in local news when it happened). This article is about the wider background of one story, of many, from a behind-the-scenes documentary that has been filmed over the last five years and just released.
Did Britain's public broadcaster decide, half a decade ago, to begin making this documentary so that they could secretly and nefariously support a US government agency long before it was embroiled in its current controversies?
Strange to think that right now, the people doing that work are not getting paid for it.
DHS? There are a lot of different orgs doing this type of work, but I'm pretty sure (nearly?) all of them are getting paid to do it.
Horrific job though.
Probably a reference to the shutdown.
Ah! Got it. "Right now" narrowly defined. Thank you :)
I wonder if the GeoGuesser guy has ever been reached out to by LE.
Very interesting account, but this article is also sounding like it’s for eliminating the thin layer of privacy that we have remaining.
Great article. On HN though “dark web agent” sounds like some AI bot did the work. It was far more interesting the way they did it.
So "agent" only means "AI agent" now?
In the current zeitgeist, more and more so
So HN commenters only are trolls now?
That's what I was expecting, too. Quite an interesting story regardless.
Is there a way to volunteer for such investigations?
https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
Related: A researcher for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, warned executives at the tech giant that there may be upward of 500,000 cases of sexual exploitation of minors per day on the social media platforms.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned...
Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government?
Edit: downvotes? Lol
That headline seems like a stretch after reading the article (Fox after all)
> sexually inappropriate messages were sent to "~500k victims per DAY in English markets only."
This sounds like a total count of unsolicited sexual messages sent to all users every day.
I always need to contextualize these numbers:
- there are 2.4B under 18 globally
- which means 500k is 0.02% of all children
- or around 1 in 5000 children globally, per day
- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly
That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.
Anyway, disturbing.
See also: the 17-strike policy for sex trafficking.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/11/22/meta-strike-po...
Unbelievable. I mean, believable.. but WTF?
TBF these easily could be cases of Meta protecting the US government rather than vice versa.
Another example of tiny details being used to catch sex offenders is this story about marks on people's hands: https://www.wired.com/story/sue-black-forensics-hand-marking... / https://archive.is/89vOJ
It turns out that, even if all you can see is the assailant's hands, that may be enough to identify them.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
Erm... Are they that clueless they didn't start from there?
To know who the mother was they’d have to first know the identity of the child.
Good thing the perp wasn't part of the Epstein class, otherwise they would have done all that work for nothing.
On a more serious note, there is a subreddit where police can post redacted pics of CSAM and they crowd source info on the background. I can't remember the name of it though.
They post godbolt style questions like "where is this beach/playground/parking lot", or ask what brand an object is. I don't know how much success they have had but it's a worthy cause and the more people who try, the higher their chances.
first part of the article reads: Darkweb a encrypted part of the internet. Isn't darkweb just the part where bots don't index? is it realy encrypted?
I thought that was the deep web. The dark web I always understood as referring to the Tor network.
I think that that's the Deep Web.
It's all encrypted.
Just got done the doc they made. Long, disgusting, but informative/interesting from a tech/problem solving prospective. Not an easy watch tho. https://youtu.be/mNUku0jd4FA
Non-paywalled copy:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dark-agent-spotted-bedro...
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Fricken love this story ...
And now I'm thinking who *wouldn't* want to volunteer to go all in on this kind of stuff once their main work winds down? (Facebook apparently).
... starts looking for dark web vigilante groups
Yet at the same time the status of Terabytes of abuse material seized from Epstein's properties is unknown because the abusers are rich guys protected by the president who is probably one of them. And law enforcement is actively helping to obstruct justice for the thousands of victims.
There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.
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Have you ever dealt with a pedophile? I ask that incidentally, neutrally, in the sense of, have you ever dealt with a flat tire or mold in the attic.
No, but note that my comment didn't mention pedophiles. Someone being a convicted sex offender should already be a big enough red flag that any parent with a working brain shouldn't ever let that person anywhere near their kids.
Then have you ever dealt with a convicted sex offender, same question.
Yes. I immediately broke off all contact with them as soon as I learned about it.
How did you learn about it?
Web search for the person's name and city turning up mugshots and a criminal record that included SA, among other violent crimes, after getting a weird vibe / uncomfortable gut feeling from them at a social gathering with a mutual friend.
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What about cases where we get the wrong guy? The system messes up sometimes, people can get framed, etc.
Doing eye for an eye here, say putting a broom somewhere cough for 6 years, only to find out he's innocent would be pretty bad.
>From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.
>They worked out the woman's address
And yet they didn't bother to knock on the door.
Children and lost dogs are sadly the fist excuse to justify the serveillance state.
this is a circular reasoning fallacy
Was this guy law enforcement? How did he get the addresses of everyone who had bought that model of couch?
From the article: "Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit ..."
FTA:
> Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit which attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
Note: the "agent" the title refers to has nothing to do with an AI/LLM agent. Originally I thought this had something to do with an AI agent, as if someone put an AI agent in charge of identifying dark web pictures for clues. It's a good story nevertheless and I'm glad the victim was rescued, but nothing to do with AI/LLMs.
The term "agent" with regards to law enforcement substantially predates "agent" in the context of AI.
> The term "agent" with regards to law enforcement substantially predates "agent" in the context of AI.
The GP's account was created in 2019, so being born yesterday is not an excuse available to them.
To be fair, I initially had the same thought, and the HN item just two below this as I write also has agent (but the LLM kind) in its title.
True, but with every other article on HN being about AI nowadays I assumed there was something to it.
I'm wondering why they didn't cross reference the addresses they had from the furniture stores with those of registered sex offenders, as this abuser turned out to be? And further intersect that with "Flaming Alamo" brick houses??
From TFA: "Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades."
First of all, sorry to hear about the poor girl’s ordeal, and I’m glad she was rescued. But after reading about all that complicated digital sleuthing, it basically comes down to this:
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
It sounds like they had the abuse images but not her name or identity - hence asking Facebook to identify her via facial recognition search.
I don't think they knew who Lucy was. Otherwise the search would have been much narrower and faster than 'everyone who bought this sofa'.
Or, you know, if they knew who she was they would just go and rescue her?
How are people struggling so much with basic logic on this one? This is quite strange. Are some of you just unable to imagine having limited knowledge and not being able to just look everything up?