Fuck this human
Tldr; Asshole used encrypted everything and Tor to create and spread csam. Government isn’t disclosing how they caught him
If you distribute encrypted materials you also need to distribute a means of decryption. I’m willing to bet a honeypot was used to trick him into distributing his csam right to the government hinself.
True. Or it could have been a backdoor in his phone, or the full running browser in his sim card, or the backdoor into his CPU chips… Maybe they do old fashioned police work for these cases and only use the pegasus spyware for others?
Pretty silly to do anything illegal on a computer when we know how flawed they are, imo
Hey, could I get some info on the
Full running browser in his SIM card
Thing?
I’m quite curious and haven’t been able of finding anything on the internet about it
Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It’s possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don’t need a software back door for that.
Well it probably wasn’t a Vic Mackey-style rubber hose attack, because it sounds like this chump is getting hauled into court.
Tor was created by NSA, half of Tor servers are run by NSA, not that secure
Tor was created by the NRL, which is a part of the US Navy and Marine Corps.
Meh, I heard wrong them sorry
Tor was created by the Naval Research Labs, and was released to the public because it is secure.
The problem is that if it’s only the CIA or DIA using it, it’s easy figure out who is using it and where. Make it global and now there is a lot of noise to separate out.
Yeah, the security of tor relies on the nodes being different, but when most of them are owned by the same person/government body the security go downhill, sadly i2p isn’t that popular, because every person is a node
Please don’t talk about child predators, and use the term “back door” in the same sentence. It ain’t right…
we’re talking about encryption here, not…that. please get your mind out of the gutter
He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.
They got it by running a honeypot exit node like they always do
It’s better they don’t disclose it and catch more people doing the same.
I’m all for transparency but if that means less caught child molesters, I’m ok with a little obfuscation, even from the fucking pigs.
my guess is that a large number of tor exit nodes is run by government agencies.
Certainly some are. How many is an entertaining question.
.onions: am i a joke to you?
This whole thing is horrifying, but the last paragraph is especially disturbing:
Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are “six children living within his fourplex alone” on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.
Even more disturbing is it said he was also producing content.
Where is the police brutality when you need it?!
As satisfying as it may seem we can’t do this. No group no matter how heinous should be abused by the police. Don’t give the pigs an inch.
Let him be convicted then see what gen pop has to say about it.
Does this go to show that authorities needing backdoors to everything in order to do their jobs is actually kind of nonsense?
The article is exaggerating the guy’s setup way too much. Opsec doesn’t end at the application level… The OS (the most popular being in bed with US), ISP, tor nodes, Honeypot VPNs, so on and so on could leave a trail.
Using telegram public groups and obfuscating a calculator as a password protection layer is hillbilly level of security.
And i’m glad these fuckos don’t have the knowledge to go beyond App developers marketing.
Goes beyond the OSI model, too. Someone has to pay for that VPN, and there has to be an entry point to getting BTC, using a 2nd hand laptop where they can prove you bought it off of someone off of Craigslist, etc.
Mullvad let’s you write down an account number on a piece of paper and mail it in with cash and they’ll activate it.
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Yup, every time I read about something like this, I look at what I’m doing and it’s way overkill, and I have nothing to hide. I’m guessing there are plenty of sickos that don’t get caught because they practice half-decent opsec, but there are a ton that don’t.
Yeah, it does. Perfect opsec is impossible even with encryption.
The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily, which is a bit scary. I don’t see anything about a computer.
Although it doesn’t appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.” He also joined “multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups” and frequented dark websites with taglines like “The Only Child Porn Site you need!”
My guess would honestly be Telegram. For starters, they aren’t end-to-end encrypted by default, you have to turn it on. The only end-to-end encryption that Telegram offers is their “secret chats” which are only available between two users. Groups are not encrypted.
So telegram’s delusional propaganda did something good for once?
What propaganda?
That groups aren’t encrypted is documented. If you don’t know that, it’s because you didn’t bother to see how it works.
The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily
Android uses data at rest encryption, which isn’t really useful without a lockscreen PIN/password since data gets decrypted after you unlock your screen the first time after each boot
Although it doesn’t appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
Agreed, he probably felt safe enough “hiding” the files. Definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed, which is great because fuck this guy
I honestly don’t think he really had any opsec apart from those few applications, look at what tools he was using, what a joke. Fake calculator app to store files are great to protect from your parents, not the FBI.
He was clearly using Android and I bet he was using the stock rom, kyc sim card, and not even a vpn behind tor.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy and relieved he was caught, but if he had done serious research and did a better opsec, it wouldn’t have been so easy for the authorities to get him
Phones are horseshit for OPSec, always. Every darknet admin and their dog know that.
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It seems irrelevant whether this person is using encrypted channels if they failed to maintain anonymity. If they distributed material and leaked any identifying info (e.g. IP address), then it would be trivial for investigators or CIs to track them down.
Likely, data may have been encrypted but he may have leaked compromising metadata. Even more likely it was bad operation security linking a personal identity to his anonymous persona.
I’m always thankful for incompetent criminals.
In the list of apps he was using I don’t see any mention of a VPN. How much you want to bet he raw dogged it with encrypted apps over the clearnet so it was trivial to leak his real IP address
He posted the AI filth to a “public server”, so I’m willing to bet his plan was just full of holes. I don’t mind pedos getting taken down, buy I do mind encrypted software being owned by the government - any government.
It sounds like he created material, not only AI but actual children then distributed it. The tools to track down the creators of CASM is only getting better.
A single legal image of any of those children posted to social media is going to allow algorithms to make the match and its routine detective work from there.
It only takes one child to talk. No amount of encryption is going to stop that.
i watched some documatnary about hackers, and usually, they catch them because they talk way to mouch about themselves.
This dude wasn’t a hacker by any stretch
But when you do anything illegal like this, you need to act like one.
i believe thats a given…
All this is obvious.
Since nobody pressures Signal and Wire in Europe, it really seems to me that the pressure is mostly applied to those who do have the ability to spy upon their users.
That would be too optimistic about humanity, but maybe not. What if.
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its way more likely that your mom searched for cancer related information on google. and you are connected to your mom, so you get ads as well.
I get the feeling this thing, I mean, the ad targeting is far stronger in the USA (maybe also in europe) than in the rest of the world. My “ad targeting” is idiotic. I once was in brazil (argentinian here!). And got ads in portuguese for a year or so. I was a month planning on buying a computer, with all that that involves (google searchs, looking for prices on internet) and i never got an ad until i actually bought everything, then it was 2 months of ads recommending me to buy the exact same components i already bought.
As today, half of my ads are in german. Jokes on them, i use them to learn.
europe has more complicated laws about privacy and data mining
Man ain’t nobody escaping feds in the fucking fed land if they want to fuck you over legit or not.
But we ain’t got to make it easy for them either, let them do their jobs if they think they got something.
Privacy for me at least is denying the corporate the data. Your story and many other ones like it reinforces the well known fact that they farm us.
But clearly shit works based on ad trash cos valuations. But we still got adult men and women out here who got nothing to hide 🤡
saw a headline the other day about the gov’t tracking people on tor using Google ads
I’m still not entirely convinced that tor is as protected as people think it is.
There’s only something like 6,000 exit nodes. It really wouldn’t be that much money for the government to run thousands of them. If you monitor enough exit nodes and enough relays, you can start to statistically tie connections back together with timing analysis.
I don’t know this to be the case for sure but I can’t imagine the government hasn’t pushed towards breaking the security and identifiability of the tor network
If you read a lot of news, it’s really clear Tor isn’t protecting anyone from the FBI. It’s about as effective as using limewire at this point. Which also, the reporting makes it pretty clear it’s not effective to hide criminal acts in the least. But it’s pretty great abusers think it’s effective so they get caught.
If you read the news it’s really clear people commit opsec mistakes - all it takes is one - and get caught.
Shhh I want an excuse to not protect my privacy, it’s hard
The inciting thought of most criminal acts is ‘‘they’ll never catch me’’. Which if you’re as lucky as me, you’ll know you’ll get caught everytime, and they’ll make an example of you. It’s kept my nose clean a long time.
I’ve suspected Tor of being heavily compromised for a while now. It’s already known that many onion sites are government honeypots, with sites being taken over rather frequently, sometimes without triggering the canary. While it’s better than nothing in some situations, I don’t think it can be relied upon for true anonymity anymore.
I2P has more protection against this kind of analysis.
It’s not as protected as people think it is. This has popped up on headlines for years. It helps, but if someone really wants to find you on there, they can. It’s just not as easy.
It would be more effective if you spread the load between the 5+ eyes instead.
Can you share the source
11 years ago
Lots of conjecture in the comments about how he got caught. Too bad nobody read the article.
Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots
…
he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.
All the privacy apps in the world won’t save you if you’re uploading pics to a cloud service.
And…that’s still not how he got caught. He hit a child porn honey pot and they got his IP.
I would have assumed all his AI work was local on his own server.
It is also because of people like him that laws like Going Dark become plausible to the eyes of the politicians and the masses
Prison is too good for anyone who keeps child sex abuse images.
So what do you recommend, Siberia?
That’s a good idea.
Stalin era gulag style please
WHO is downvoting you???
People like me, who are against the death penalty on principle. (or even more “creative” forms of punishment people like to come up with in these cases).
No, prison is where this guy belongs. For as long as necessary.Further to this its not likely to result in less children being abused.
If you have the death penalty for even possessing CSAM as the parent suggests, then there is no incentive to not get into distribution or even actively abusing children and producing CSAM once you posess some. The punishment isnt any worse so why not? Its the same reason for proportionality in other crimes, we dont punish robbing a bank with life in jail as then there would be no reason for anyone who robs a bank to not just murder everyone to leave no witnessess.
And if you propose the death penalty for abusing children, a child abuser has incentive to kill the child afterwards to get rid of the witness.
The punishment can’t get any worse, and it reduces the chance of getting caught.
Death penalty is fine if it didn’t get abused bit it will be abused. We know this. So yes i agree with you.
But also if cop killed him and there is adequate evidence that athat person actually hurt a child. I just see self defense and if I was no a jury, I would not convict and I hate police lol
Society lost this basic function for self cleansing. At some point these people just need to be disposed off.
Also, state will execute for treason. I look at severe child abuse as a higher order, ie social treason. FAFO
Oh, I was thinking something far worst than death. I was thinking something like a torture rack.
So you’re a sadist, but you try to convince yourself it’s okay because you only want to torture people you think deserve it. Of course, no one deserves to be tortured.
That’s what I meant by more creative forms of punishment.
the fool! you can’t use ROT-104 encryption against 4 cores!
It’s all publicly approved backdoors until feds are planting child abuse imagery on your PC because you spoke out against them in the wring venue. No one will believe you when they do. Currently you can’t trust articles like this, maybe the dude was actually hurting kids. Maybe the feds just needed a win. You won’t ever know, and neither will I so long as the same ideology is in control. Now watch them turn every single kid in the pics into a sex offender because the fed believes if you were raped, you WILL rape someone in the future. But by all means keep enjoying their rage bait.
Are you ok?
Are you a dumbass?
Damn, thats weird. Are you mentally ill or st?
Well, this person (according to their post history) has schizophrenia, but this could kinda be real and probably also happned, if not recently, probably sometime in history. Of course the stereotype about rape victims actually exists.
The replies to your comment glow so bright
Dumb people deserve to be in jail.
Counterpoint: Those who produce and collect CP deserve to be in jail
I mean, you are right, but I don’t buy that the solution is mass government surveillance.
That’s the funny thing. This guy got busted through plain old detective work.
Did you read the article? Mass surveillance had nothing to do with this.
Lol, I still don’t know why people like CSAM :v
Milf porn is where it’s at. Speaking of which, I think I’m going to go find a cory chase video
But have you heard about big tittied Asian ladies🫢
Hi, Ted!
Lol, it’s a mental illness.
A lot of it out there and a lot of it was enabled by limp dick society. Looking at you cathlics… Fucking disgusting that you allowed your clergy to do this and even cover up for it. And when people spoke up you ostricized them. Pathetic social behavior.
Imagine when your clown social group is more important than children being raped.
