Ok forgive me for any ignorance but the first thing that screams at me is why in the heck is Canada investigating all those people from all those different countries? Those countries might have different laws, etc. and as far as I know Canada does not have any business or jurisdiction to be investigating them! The second thing that screamed at me is they do not even know that these images are illegal yet! WTF??

Can they do that? Just hack passwords to see what someone has with no proof a crime has been committed?!

That's like opening up all private accounts to government scrutiny.

Now if they determine - by hacking into accounts with their password software - a person in the US has illegal files and shares that with the justice department is that illegal search and seizure? No warrant to look at online accounts and the case gets thrown out?

Those are all valid questions Ivy - and my first answer is the Justice Dept. seems to get away with just about anything they want to - I have no trust in those are supposed to be upholding the US Constitution anymore - but that of course is just me! lol

BTW - from what we have been hearing lately US citizens have no such thing as private emails accounts or anything

Police software my butt.

They raided my son's house because they said he had 2300+ 'suspect cp'.. and he had only 3.

Another gold star for the cops!

The title of the article is misleading, probably on purpose to attract viewers.

They claim this data center has 1.2 petabytes of data, which is an enormous amount of data. One petabyte is large enough to hold the space needed for 13.3 years of HDTV movies. That is, if you have one petabyte of movies to watch, you could sit in your living room and watch high definition movies for over 13 years.

Down in the article it only says the data center had 1.3 petabytes of data, but they did not say that there was 1.3 petabytes of child porn. The manner in which the article was written will make many people think that all the data is child pornography.

This 1.3 petabytes is four times as much child pornography as the U.S. Library of Congress has. Trust me, there is not that much child pornography in the entire world.

A truer statement---and one that would not mislead people---would be that this data center has 1.3 petabytes of data some of which is child pornography. They even admit that some of it is password protected and they are not sure about the volume of child porn here.

But they want to make it seem that way, so when the government wants to pass a law tightening down the internet---to supposedly protect the children--- and taking away some of our freedom, it will be easier to do so. All the bedwetters and pantywaists will come out in full force yelling "Save the children," "If it saves one child", "the internet is full of pedophiles or predators."

And most people will fall for it. The government will get the new laws passed and more of our freedoms will be taken away.

rewdiazepam

Spot on REW

@Advocate---the reason that Canada is investigating these servers is because they are located in Ontario. No, Canada will not investigate anyone from another country as they have no jurisdiction. But they will hand over all the IP addresses and any evidence they have obtained from an American citizen using this site to law enforcement in the United States. At that point, the authorities here in the states can decide what to do or to investigate further. And you are correct, they do not know how many of these files are illegal, but it is certainly not 1.2 petabytes of data.

@Ivy---I don't think they are hacking people's accounts. There are 1.2 petabytes of data there and much of it is in the form of RAR or ZIP files.

A ZIP or RAR file is one single file which many contain hundreds of compressed files within it. Many are password protected and they won't know what is in those files until they break the password. That is where they are using their password cracking software.

They are only trying to password crack the files---the rar of zip files--- they found on the server in Canada, not on any files a U S citizen might have. These files apparently were just on the drive awaiting to be downloaded by members of this file sharing application and did not belong to any one person or his account.

This sounds as if this might be a large file sharing site such as Rapidshare, Datafile, Hotfile, Megaupload, Keep2Share, etc. These sites allow people to upload movies to their servers and members of these sites can then download some of the movies that were uploaded by others.

I don't think they "hacked" into anyone's account.

rewdiazepam

Rew, thanks for the clarification on the passwords and to what they pertain.

But if this data center is a business I wonder what started the investigation ? Did someone report something?

Can they just go into a business and start poking into data?

My husbands company hosts tons of data for customers and they'd be none too happy to have Feds in there.

One thing scary and unusual about this case is that they want to hold the owners of the data center criminally liable if some child porn is found on their servers, even if they owners were unaware that it was there.

Many of these major file sharing sites do not police all the content and they have no way of knowing a files actual content unless the file is reported to them or law enforcement as being illegal. Then, of course, they will take the file down and it will no longer be available for download.

Wanting to criminally charge the owners of the data center would be like a person owning a 50,000 square foot warehouse and renting space out to others for storage. Law enforcement would want to prosecute the owner of the warehouse if someone put several CDs or DVDs full of child porn in a shoe box and left it there unbeknownst to the owner of the warehouse.

This would not be fair and it is carrying things a little too far, if that is even possible with these three-lettered agencies.

rewdiazepam

Here is a more detailed account of the investigation-----

http://tinyurl.com/pfjjhbc

Apparently they busted someone with child pornography and one of his files was traced back to the data center somehow or maybe someone downloaded an illegal file by mistake and reported it to law enforcement.

No, they cannot just come into a person's business without a warrant and start looking through everything, at least not here in the United States. But remember, these servers were in Canada, and I am not sure how Canada handles search warrants, as they don't have the same Constitution we have.

rewdiazepam

i'm not up on all of this sooooo?

has that happened here in the states? and/or could it? if a file was traced to a certain server or data center?