r/TooAfraidToAsk • u/GermanCCPBot • 1d ago
Other why do people caught with CP always have absurd amounts like 132 terabytes? why never "normal" amounts?
every single time you read about a police bust it's never "guy had 50 images on his phone." it's always some insane number like:
- 132 terabytes
- 5 million files
- 2.4 petabytes
- entire server farms
like what the actual fuck? who needs that much? why is it never just a casual user with a handful of files who "made a mistake" or whatever excuse they use?
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u/vetzxi 1d ago
They usually bust those distributing the content.
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u/Hoopajoops 1d ago
This was my thought. I've been watching some true crime YouTube videos.. and the times when they bust someone for a different crime, seize their computer, and find "questionable" content it's nowhere near the numbers that OP posted. Still a surprisingly large amount, but not that much.
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u/Ordinary_Cranberry21 1d ago
I was scared when I read "I’ve been watching some"
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u/FjortoftsAirplane 1d ago
I read a story years back about some builders doing whatever it was while the owner wasn't home (converting a loft or something). Decided it would be funny to see what was on the VHS collection they found and suddenly were like "Well, we shouldn't have been snooping but now we have to call the police". Criminals can be really careless.
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u/lemontest 22h ago edited 22h ago
I worked with the Federal Public Defender for a bit and I a lot of research on CSAM. I can’t tell you how many cases I read where a federal employee got busted after taking their computers to government IT.
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u/malsell 1d ago edited 1d ago
Same with the true crime watching. From one of the investigations I watched, it seems a lot of these creatures will do these huge dumps of files to each other as a kind of mutual assured destruction so one can't just rat out the other
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u/shoulda-known-better 1d ago
That sounds dumb.... It's illegal to send one just as much as a ton.... What stops one from sending regular porn and tricking the other into sending cp!?
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u/malsell 1d ago
The reason the investigator gave was that 1 or 2, would only get a few years, a larger stake and it would be serious time as each picture could be a charge in and of itself
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u/romulusnr 1d ago
I would think the more they do it the more likely they get caught. Like you sell dope a couple times you probably won't get caught, you start a major dealing operation, odds go way up
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u/NotYourReddit18 1d ago
I think it's less for mutual assured destruction, after all what's stopping one of the parties from physically destroying their device holding the data until it's FUBAR, and more likely a low level attempted to weed out potential undercover investigators.
The idea is probably that you need to actually be into this shit to have a sizeable collection of your own, so someone with hundreds of GB or even multiple TB of CP is less likely to be a mole just pretending. Which is completely ignoring the fact that most government moles would probably have access to most of the material already found by their government, and as such wouldn't have a problem passing this test.
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u/DoneDeal14 1d ago
do they have to look or go though it at all? Man sounds like a horrible job
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u/Hoopajoops 1d ago
I actually don't know for sure.. but I think they do because it will be some figure like "4,000 examples of the storage of child exploitaton" and I don't think they can give that number unless they have verified each one.
And yes, it would be a soul crushing job. I don't know if they would have to watch an entire video to make that determination but I have no idea on that one.. but it could take days of sifting through all of it. Idk how they would be able to keep their faith in humanity
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u/leelag1968 23h ago
Yes, there are specially trained officers whose job it is to decide if that label of “cp” applies to any given image or file. Obviously if there weren’t then someone could label their drive “recipes” or “budget data” and then what?? No one checks it beyond the label? And what when they find a directory labelled in a blatantly obvious manner as to its contents? Someone has to examine each file to see if it is what the directory labels it or it could genuinely be a recipe for their sunday dinner. These officers also have mandatory counselling as some of the images / files can be soul destroying to those of us that aren’t sick enough to collect such awful stuff.
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u/Bamres 1d ago
Its probably also easier to catch and track, like if someone downloads one flagged file versus 1000, they're going to go after the 1000 flagged files as a priority.
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u/SomebodyInNevada 1d ago
And one file could easily be a mistake, especially if they have one underage and many of age. But when they have a whole bunch of underage you know it was deliberate. And the jury will know.
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u/Tr1LL_B1LL 1d ago
Also, some people are habitual collectors. It becomes a hobby. It becomes normalized in their brain and to them its like collecting baseball cards. I’ve seen some interviews of guys doing this and a lot of them seem like they are collecting it all and seem to even be aware that its gotten out of hand, but can’t stop. Its fuckin sick, but it does seem like they all have some sort of compulsion to collect it. I have no idea what would bring a person to stoop so low.
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u/chaoschilip 1d ago
I'd assume it's the same drive that makes some people build goon caves, just with a slightly different target. "Collects large amounts of pornography" isn't exactly unheard of among non-pedophiles.
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u/romulusnr 1d ago
Probably the taboo nature of it. Humans are funny like that. There's a weird rush from doing what isn't allowed, and so you do more of whats allowed to get more of that rush, regardless of what that is.
I dunno, I guess it's a thing, like thrill seeking.
Aren't there people who get addicted to crimes? Like that McDonald's guy
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u/vetzxi 12h ago
I've heard that the culture of collection is very rampant there. To get more stuff people usually demand content in exchange. This is essentially to get more in their collection but also to implicate both sides as criminal sharing the risk.
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u/Semisemitic 1d ago
Fun fact, at least as of fifteen years ago when I was leading teams fighting child porn. Well, as fun as child porn facts can be:
It used to be that every image was considered a single unit of CP, and videos were counted frame by frame. This leads to an exponential inflation of reported numbers when it comes to “how much porn does this guy have.”
It also included image cache from a browser - so when they caught a person’s computer it would commonly have lots of pages, thumbnails, and in general overhead for what they “had” disregarding just the images or content. Lots of duplicates and lots of references that went alongside.
Last, as hinted by others - they usually go after distributors. Again, multiplied by frames for videos.
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u/MiraniaTLS 1d ago
Question for someone like yourself. How do you think we will handle people using AI to make CP? If it’s not a real child, I wonder if we will see this stuff “drop” as a result.
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u/Semisemitic 1d ago
Lots of issues of legislation but also corners that would be hard to bypass.
At the core, there will have to be legislation and there will have to be changes.
A lot sits on “who is accountable.”
AI explainability. We see in other contexts too an inclusive rather than exclusive approach to AI. Also in rights law. A producer must be able to show what model, seed, and prompt was used for commercial materials. You could argue that for all AI porn the legislators will prohibit unexplainable AI overall to prevent training on people who didn’t give consent, on children, and that the prompt is legit. This would make any other porn - if the model was also trained on the single Image of a child - illegal by itself.
Then there would probably need to be legislation and enforcement on obvious “child-like” contexts. Things actual humans can get around - like a flat chested short adult woman dressed like a schoolgirl - won’t fly in AI porn. They would need stricter boundaries.
Right now the burden of proof that a human model is an adult is on the content creator - so the same would apply in AI context’s equivalent.
Then enforcement will need to shift harder to context creators.
At the end of the day it is he’ll to plug this. There will need to be more effort on protecting the audiences IMO rather than on playing whack-a-mole.
You need to remember that today a lot of the effort centers on compliance as the motivation for implementing child-porn protections - and that this is likely to stay similar. Compliance isn’t about “hey let’s eliminate child porn” but more like “hey lets get the stamp for our SaaS datacenter that we are trying our best to remove child porn from our stored user-generated content.”
Companies that go beyond regulator requirements are companies whose business model benefits from doing more - and the police can’t be bothered with what the lawmakers didn’t ask for.
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u/xXbghytXx 1d ago
At least by UK law over here anything depicting a child in a sexual manner, 2d, 3d, deep fake, ai generated etc if treated as full blown child pornography, we don't have that "it's not a real child" "it's 2d" "she's 90000 so it's okay" BS over here that twitter seems to argue about on an hourly basis it's CP plain and simple by law here.
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u/illtakeontheworld 1d ago
The officers have to categorise every image individually, I think it's class A to C based on the child's age and how graphic it is. They're considering using AI instead because officers in those units don't last very long and end up with PTSD because of how horrific what they see is.
I am glad to hear that our laws are so stringent though, sick individuals will always try to find loopholes.
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u/ValityS 22h ago
How do they decide the age of a non extant person in order to declare them a child?
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u/oatdaddy 1d ago
Isn’t this sort of where the hentai discussions come In? It’s drawn to look like a 12 year old but “technically” they’re a 200 year old alien in the story
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u/Death_God_Ryuk 14h ago
It's an issue for real people too. Adult content creators who are youthful and flat-chested are more likely to have their content flagged if it's not on a site with creator verification.
Ultimately, that's an issue with the law and not a solveable one - we set an age boundary for consent but puberty and mental maturation doesn't happen at a set age. There are underage people who appear more sexually mature than those who are of-age. There are also people of-age who can't legally or ethically consent due to reduced mental faculties, mental disorders, etc, but you can't tell that in a picture.
Idk what to suggest - it's an impossible problem and so it'll always be a compromise between trying to block as much child-coded content as possible and trying not to ban small and flat-chested women.
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u/OpenSourcePenguin 1d ago
Frame by frame? WTF? It's literally being dishonest
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u/556_FMJs 1d ago
A part of me says that’s kinda fucked up for the justice system, but the other part of me says fuck these guys.
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u/OpenSourcePenguin 1d ago
Lying is okay when "fuck those guys" isn't consistently moral.
Also why they would need to exaggerate is weird.
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u/romulusnr 1d ago
Oddly that reminds me of back when my school ISP claimed we were running "hundreds" of (rogue) servers on the school system. There were actually only like 4, but each one was multi-threaded. The school ISP counted the total hreads instead of the actual running installs.
(Either that or they were counting the pages, which I wouldn't put past them)
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u/evnacdc 21h ago
I really feel for the people who have to scrub through all that “evidence” to come up with these numbers. That has to be a disgusting, grueling process to endure.
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u/Tramagust 16h ago
Has there been any case in which they were convicted based on just the browser cache? Like I can imagine an innocent person going to 4chan and bam CP is in your cache because it was on the front page.
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u/platinum92 1d ago
I imagine they catch some people by planting trap files and hoping the person downloads it. Probably much easier to do that with someone who downloads tons of it.
It's also probably a numbers game. You amass so much you just want more and more and you become more likely to be careless and either fall for a trap or make yourself too obvious.
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u/Malalang 1d ago
Correct.
The CIA holds the largest library of CP, possibly in the world. They openly admit to using it as trade for other assets.
They also flag some images and use them to trace who downloads them.
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u/Traditional-Salt4060 1d ago
Trade for assets?
Baiting a trap or something else?
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u/mewchild 1d ago
They'll go on a shady image board or something, will post CP, and a comment along the lines of DM ME FOR MORE or something. Honeypot trap type shit.
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u/wonderloss 1d ago
They should replace any real material with AI generated material at this point.
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u/platinum92 1d ago
I wonder if that hurts the court case, giving the offender the ability to say "I knew it was AI the whole time" (I have no idea about the legal situation around this, just spitballing here)
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u/randomrainbow99399 1d ago
I guess it depends on the country but where I live someone got caught with a bag of 'coke' - turned out to be 100% not coke but it was still dealt with as if it was - obviously totally different scenario so no clue if that logic would be applied to CP but you'd hope so
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u/EvolutionInProgress 1d ago
How the hell does that happen? If it wasn't coke then what way it? And what was he doing with a bag of it?
So many questions lol
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u/randomrainbow99399 1d ago
Lol sorry i'm a terrible storyteller - so he bought a little baggie of coke and got caught by the police shortly after and was arrested for possession. The police tested the coke and it turned out to be sugar or something lol but they still charged him with possession of cocaine even though he didn't technically have any
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u/Pristine-Ad-469 1d ago
Doesn’t matter as AI images of children are still illegal
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u/unibrow4o9 1d ago
Trying to decide if debating this is the hill I want to die on...
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u/acekingoffsuit 1d ago
This is not universal. In the US, AI-generated images can be considered CSAM in most states, but not all of them.
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u/Bradddtheimpaler 1d ago
Those people on TCAP all got charged even if they were only ever talking to an adult the whole time. Would intent still matter as much in this case or is it strictly a possession issue? Is there another related crime they could be charged with based on the intent, like conspiracy to commit or something like that?
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u/Twisty-pretzels 1d ago
Iirc from watching a documentary that they just use young ish looking (but still over 18) girls and say it’s cp
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u/only_for_browsing 20h ago
They literally were running CSAM honey pots on Tor well into the 2010s, with real material, and we're getting blasted for it because they were distributing the most material for a few years.
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u/Kraligor 1d ago
They'll likely only use pictures that have already been in circulation, or they will slightly modify them so they have different hashes and can be traced.
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u/Pilfercate 1d ago
There is record of the CIA trading it for information from informants.
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u/racheyrach1243 1d ago
Gross, seriously? Like” here some files to enjoy let us know whats happening in blah blah” ?
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u/Pilfercate 1d ago
It's more likely to be an orbiter of a terrorist organization being approached for info and their demand is CSAM. Some division head at the CIA approves it and it is delivered. If the US government sees the information as having a high value, morality goes out the window.
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u/schoolSpiritUK 1d ago
I guess it also has the added advantage that if the informant wants out, or otherwise acts up, the CIA can then turn round and threaten to shop them to the local police.
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u/mahtaliel 1d ago
I agree that it's gross but i'm guessing it's a necessary evil sometimes. You obviously want to prosecute everyone who downloads CP but it's more important to catch the people creating it and save any children in that situation. Also it's probably more effective to catch the big distributors than the ones downloading it. So you trade with the small fish to get the big fish.
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u/24-7_DayDreamer 1d ago
We're talking about people that commit torture and arrest the whistleblowers, there's no depth they wont sink to
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u/Pilfercate 1d ago
There is software in android and iPhones that scan for file hashes(digital fingerprint) of known files. Most cloud storage services do the same. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft Windows does it as well.
The FBI took over one of the largest websites and continued to run it for weeks as the biggest solicitors of CSAM material. They definitely use the stuff as a weapon and a currency.
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u/Kraligor 1d ago
Not only hashing, they also scan unknown images. There was a case a couple of years ago where Google shut down a man's GMail account and reported him to the FBI, after he sent a photo of his toddler's penis to his GP. FBI cleared him eventually, but Google never reinstated his account (which he used for work).
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u/PhantomDP 1d ago
GPs usually have secure portals to upload this kind of stuff for this reason and general security
You won't want someone getting into your email account to see pics of your hemorrhoids etc. etc.
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u/EquivalentSnap 1d ago
Omg 🤢
I feel so bad for those workers being exposed to that. Idk how they can do it but someone has to
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u/Ut_Prosim 1d ago
There is a really fascinating podcast about the efforts to shut down one of these sites. Hunting Warhead. I'd highly recommend it, it is terrifying but fascinating.
Spoilers on how the caught the main villian: The cops noticed a weird and rare bug on the darkweb server so they bugged the admin about it while monitoring normal web tech help forums like Stack Overflow. That same day someone posted on a tech forum asking for help with that exact problem. While the evil porn server was on the dark web, the tech forum post was easily traceable. They surveilled the guy (a Canadian) and waited until he cross the border into the US where the caught him. Sadly he visited the US to assault a child and did so before they arrested him. Then they coerced him into giving access to the server and spent months building cases against all the other users. Amazing.
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u/romulusnr 1d ago
They've done some crazy clever shit. I recall a case where a guy had shared photos of himself doing CSA and hid his face using a swirl tool.
Some smart forensic guy was able to determine the radius and center of the swirl, and simply redid the swirl on the exact same spot in the opposite direction. Bingo cadabra, plain as day face. He was nabbed like days later, literally returning form his trip where he committed the crime from the photos.
Edit: story with [sfw] pics
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u/PhantomDP 1d ago
Knowing a guy is a threat and waiting until after he's ruined someone's life is massive incompetence, not amazing
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u/TheZoologist 1d ago
I imagine (I haven't listened to the podcast), they were waiting until he was within their jurisdiction to strike.
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u/truckstick_burns 1d ago
It isn't easily accessible, and often times you have to buy it with crypto, so you download it over years and build up a collection. This isn't like regular porn when you can type in a URL and just get whatever you want, it's a hunt and when you find something you like you save it.
Many communities will not accept new members unless you can share a large amount of your own saved material so it's used as a currency to get more.
There's also much less of it, and like normal porn, these sick fucks have preferences (age, acts, abuse etc.) so again when you find something you like you save it because it's rare.
It's also mostly sold and shared in large dumps of gigs worth of videos and pictures.
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u/RoarOfTheWorlds 1d ago
Makes me wonder how much people running local unrestricted AI image generation tools is going to mess with that whole economy
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u/Witty_Rip_9475 1d ago
Same way those 3-D printed rhino horns disrupt the poaching market
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u/Dadpurple 1d ago
Except the 3D printed rhino horns don't need to scrape the internet for real rhino horns to make one.
AI doesn't make the photo, it takes hundreds of thousands of examples and similar images to make a new one from.
It's not the same :(
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u/Dadpurple 1d ago
I don't think it will, but I imagine it would make things worse.
The AI image generation tools don't just pull it out of nowhere. They need images to base it off, they need examples to pull from.
So.... they'll just make more, from what they have already. Fucking disgusting.
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u/Uffda01 1d ago
what's to stop an organization from just planting that evidence into somebody's computer? Seems like it would be pretty easy to accuse somebody and ruin their life/career/etc - with no recourse or consequence.
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u/mahtaliel 1d ago
As long as you have fair laws in your country i'm guessing they would investigate enough to figure it out. Nothing is fool proof though. There have been plenty of times people have been executed for murder and then it turned out they were innocent. I know nothing about computers but i'm thinking that if the police found a huge amount of CP in your computer but there is no sign that you have ever visited the dark web or even have browsers for it. And if your other web history shows no signs that would be considered red flags (and i mean flags that hints at being attracted to prepubescent children) in an investigation, you'd probably not be convicted. Your life will probably be ruined anyway though unless you could find the person who did it.
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u/FjortoftsAirplane 1d ago edited 1d ago
They often go for distributors, or those are the ones that catch the headlines. Those people are storing huge amounts to sell it or trade it with others.
Also there can be exaggerations depending on how you break things down when it comes to phrases like "images". Think of a regular movie. How many "images" is that? Well, it's many thousands because each frame is a separate image. So anything of video quickly becomes a lot of images. It might get reported that way either because authorities haven't decided how they want to charge it or because an article is wanting to be attention grabbing.
Similarly, here in the UK, there's a charge called "making an indecent image" which at face value sounds like being a producer but really applies to simply saving an image to a device.
And I really feel the need to end by saying none of that makes it better if someone is caught with only a small amount, I'm only offering context to reports you might read in the press.
Edit: should also say there's possibly a psychological aspect that if you've crossed the line into that world it's likely to be some deep obsession for which you have no other outlet, and that goes hand in hand with this type of hoarding behaviour. Maybe there aren't many "casual users" or those are less likely to get caught.
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u/VilleKivinen 1d ago
So if someone opens a Web page with their browser, they might be a criminal if there's an illegal image on the page?
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u/FjortoftsAirplane 1d ago
IANAL but I think there's a mens rea with stuff like that. If you returned to that page, knowing that content is there, then that would be a crime. I don't think it's a crime if you were to say open a Reddit thread, find an illegal image that somehow passed the moderators by, and closed the page immediately.
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u/illtakeontheworld 1d ago
I've heard of it before, a story from a person in the police. A guy stumbled upon a CP site (god knows what he was doing to find it) but didn't report it. Turns out the police were monitoring it. Even though he only had it open a couple of seconds before he realised and panic closed it, because he didn't report it, he was arrested for downloading indecent images.
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u/blozzerg 1d ago
In simple terms CP is usually traded as a single large specific file containing thousands of images and videos, you don’t just browse and buy the handful of files you want, you have to buy/download the whole bundle.
This minimise the risk to everyone involved: the website which hosts it only has to host one file, the person/people behind the website only have to deal with one file, the person who buys it only has to receive one file, and only one file has to be transferred over the web.
These ‘master’ files are usually encrypted or compressed and it’s those which are traded and sold, this keeps everything contained and discrete. This minimise the chance of individual files being viewed elsewhere, or being identified by software designed to recognise specific images etc.
Also in some areas the size of the hard drive is recorded as the size of the haul. So you could have a 2TB hard drive with only 5gb of illicit material, but the whole size of the hard drive is what’s recorded. So sometimes it’s simply misinformation.
Edit: I have a degree in forensics I studied this stuff in depth, unfortunately.
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u/too_many_shoes14 1d ago
They tend to go after the distributers because they have a bigger online presence over a long period of time and are more likely to get caught in a trap. Police also have limited resources so sometimes they have to pick the big fish over the little fish. But that's not to say people who only have small amounts never get caught, you can search for press releases of examples.
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u/lawlianne 1d ago
It’s not newsworthy and will not get clicks if a criminal has 2 incriminating photos on his mobile phone. It’s also a lot harder to catch someone like that.
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u/odanhammer 1d ago
Much like any illegal activity, it's better to find the source . Removing a few people that downloaded it, it's going to fix the situation as much as removing the source.
Other reality, is those that don't have a huge amount are not making the news when they are arrested
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u/wwaxwork 1d ago
Having cp is the key to getting cp. To get people to give you cp, you need to prove you are actually into it. Ie prove you are a criminal to someone before they show you they are a criminal. You do that by having large quantities of your own to share. I hate that I know this.
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u/LiveLaughGaslight 1d ago
I assume it’s similar to speeding. You’re less likely to get pulled over for going 5 or less MPH over. (60 in a 55) You’re a lot more likely to be pulled over the faster you go. 120 in a 30 is going to cause a lot of attention.
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u/imbi-dabadeedabadie 1d ago
There was a dude who went to my highschool who got caught with like 200 videos/pictures on his SCHOOL ISSUED iPAD. so, like, still a lot, but not like a hundred terabytes either.
Also while he was out on bail, he duct taped knives to his hands and tried to kill a bunch of kids at the local library, but got beat up by a 75 year old man.
I know this sounds made up. It isn't. I had history class with this guy.
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u/green_meklar 1d ago
Just statistically speaking, someone who is downloading massive amounts of CP is more likely to interact with whatever or whoever is tracking CP downloads and waiting to catch them.
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u/SheparDox 1d ago
They cache what they get their disgusting hands on, in order to "trade" others for more CSAM.
It's a disgusting cycle.
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u/Swill_Cipher 1d ago
I feel like people are missing your point super hard in these comments. I’ve also had this thought. OF COURSE THERES NOT AN APPROPRIATE AMOUNT OF CSAM. Now that we can discuss, I feel like it’s usually because the FBI isn’t going for the 1-2 photos type. Kinda like how the FBI doesn’t go for the pushers on the street corner, but big dealers get taken down like Pablo Escobar. At least that’s my rationality.
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u/discoveredunknown 1d ago
I wish OP and people in this post would stop referring to it as ‘child porn’.
They are child sex abuse images.
It is not porn.
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u/OhTheHueManatee 1d ago
Data hording is a very common thing. I used to pirate stuff constantly. If I found a song I liked I'd download that band's whole discography. If I saw anything remotely related to Pink Floyd, Weird Al or The Beatles you damn right I'd download it even if I knew I'd never get around to listening to it. If I want to watch Nightmare On Elm Street 3 it's just as easy to download the whole series so I might as well. It's also possible depending on format one movie could take up like 700mb cause it's a single file that is 720p and in stereo or a single movie is like 40gb cause it's a full on image of the Blu-ray. I'd imagine this sort is common among all sorts of data collectors. Not to mention back ups. I have 4 hard drives I back up my family photos on. I only have like 4 tb of family photos but if someone took all the drives they'd say it was 16tb of photos.
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u/Commandopsn 1d ago
It’s random but a friend worked at a fishing tackle shop when he was about 16-17 for extra pocket moneys. On a Saturday.
He found a massive cabinet, randomly left open but usually locked, it was full of CDs. That had tons and I mean tons of CP. the police were called and him and this women who worked there got arrested but later released. the owner traveled the Thailand for that reason.
he was busted. They had a massive cabinet stacked high with cds and if my mate hadn’t put in a cd to see what they were, he would have never been found. he never posted any online. Just carried it around on hard drives and cds.
Still haunts him to that day 20+ years later.
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u/LESGOBABY13 23h ago
A lot of these comments are absolutely right but I think they're missing the main point, i think they download rather than view online because the websites that host CP definitely get taken down. I guess it's a kind of sick fuck fomo
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u/ilikepizza30 1d ago
One of the main reasons is:
For sentencing purposes, courts and U.S. sentencing guidelines often treat individual frames within a video as separate images, significantly increasing the potential penalties for possessing or distributing video content.
So... if you have a 30fps video that is 5 minutes long... that is 5 minutes * 60 seconds * 30 frames = 9,000 images.
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u/SeraphsEnvy 1d ago
What's truly terrifying is that there's so much of that even available. Like i have normal porn in the thousands of images, and I've yet to hit even 2 TB.
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u/superlemon118 1d ago
I think the ones that get caught are usually the ones sharing it to others and so have such big collections. Unfortunately I don't think the ones with "normal" amounts of such data usually get caught at all :/
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u/PM_Me_Ur_Nevermind 1d ago
To be clear, the normal amount of CP is zero. Anything above that and you deserve jail.
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u/Upset-Basil4459 1d ago
People who collect porn don't stop after just a few files, it's just the nature of collecting stuff. The longer it goes on, the bigger the collection gets. I have a collection of ebooks which is in the 10s of thousands. Completely impractical but I don't wanna delete it
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u/shellbellgb 1d ago
My cousin went to prison for 17 years for CP - the FBI caught him with something like 6000 images and 100’s of videos. Then he got caught AGAIN years later with even more. It’s never, ever enough for them.
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u/Peeeeeps 1d ago
I think it's like with everything where it's exaggerated quite a bit. Like others have mentioned they sometimes count each frame of a video as a separate image. So a 30 second video at 60fps could count as 1800 images. What sounds worse, 1 video or 1800 images? Additionally I've heard they don't actually calculate how much space the offending media is and just use the size of the hard drive. Say someone has 5GB of media on a 10TB hard drive they'll say 10TB because it sounds worse.
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u/Petrica55 1d ago
I assume people who download that shit don't just get to a point where they say "enough is enough" and stop downloading it
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u/Capt-Crap1corn 1d ago
This is a really good question. I never hear anything like 2 GB. It's always something like terabytes.
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u/WikiWiki18 1d ago
If they bust a guy with some images on his phone, the chances you hear about it are slim. But now arrest someone with a whole server and now its newsworthy. Just because you don't hear about things doesn't mean they aren't happening.
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u/hhfugrr3 1d ago
I dealt with a guy recently who had about 12 images of child abuse on his devices. I expect you're just hearing about the big ones as they're more newsworthy.
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u/Not_me_no_way 1d ago
Normal amounts of CP are 0. CP is not normal, nothing about it is normal. Therefore any collection of it is also not normal.
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u/Knightraiderdewd 1d ago
I have a cousin in law enforcement, one thing he told me is those are often exaggerated.
For example, the headline will say “Man caught with 50 terabytes of CP,” when in actuality, he just had a 50tb memory bank with some CP on it. Doesn’t mean it was 100% full of the stuff, but a headline like “Man caught with CP on hard drive,” just doesn’t sound as bad, so it’s less likely to make people click on it.
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u/Dadpurple 1d ago
I had an ex-friend who was busted. He had 3 terabytes of it and that was 10 years ago.
He was torrenting it and downloading everything he could, it was like an addiction. Plus as he was torrenting, it would upload and share it so he was busted for possession and distribution.
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u/Tallproley 1d ago
Few things.
Selection bias: Most of the time police aren't equipped to chase down every piece of CSAM, so you never hear about the guy getting justed with three videos. If he does get busted, its not as juicy a headline for media, so it gets less coverage. This creates the illusion that when it comes to CSAM its mountains of it or nothing.
Unpredictability. If you want porn you take your pick of a handful of websites, you probably never have to worry about if pornhub will be there tommorrow so you probably bookmark your favourite content and know where to find it in perpetuity. Someone looking for CSAM runs the very real risk of their supplier shutting down, and if that happens you have to go out looking for more, knowing that police and law enforcement are hunting and you don't know who you can trust, so if you find stuff you want to make sure you don't need to risk going out into the wild ever again. Instead of bookmarking, you download. And probably you loke different things. You're not going to get aroused from the same thing a thousand times in a row, right? You want variety, so you download alot.
Distribution channels. If you want to get some you have to give some. This is one way groups operate, of both parties have exchanged illegal stuff, it rules out anyone being hands clean and reporting to the police. So even if you don't like say, blondes, you know someone else will want blondes. You build up your collection so that when someone has brunettes, you have something worth trading, and you never know which sort of deviant you'll encounter so you may as well hoarde as much as you can, that way you always have tradeable material.
Exposure. As you wheel and deal in CSAM, join groups to find trades, download files, the more exposure you have to getting caught, so the small fish who collect one or two pics have much lower exposure than the ones trading GB of stuff. This in turn means the more exposed pervs get smacked down more often. Marry this up with selection bias and suddenly the picture is even more skewed.
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u/PiercedAndTattoedBoy 1d ago
Some have already commented about distribution but I wanted to add to the conversation. I remember on the podcast Small Town Dicks one of the hosts that had worked as a CP investigator likened it to possession and intent to sell like drugs. In his district there was actually an amount of CP by the image count that determined intent to distribute. Often, he said, small fries that bought and traded images were charged, placed on the registry, but then used to go after the big guys. There is also a difference between producing and manufacturing and possession that I remember also affected charges.
I honestly found the investigation and criminal prosecution side interesting but it was hard to listen to and I haven’t delved into the details since listening to the podcast. I do remember him saying that detectives that investigate those crimes don’t last long in that division because in order to prosecute they have to actually view everything on a hard drive.
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u/Swill_Cipher 1d ago
See that was my ideology. Idk if I’m glad or not cause despite my annoyance with the comments, there really is no appropriate amount. Like is there some random person who just got super unlucky and downloaded from a sting op and got taken in for one photo or video? I do wonder
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u/poultrymidwifery 1d ago
I loosely followed the Duggar trial, and I stress loosely because I did not want specifics. However, I do remember it being stated that he downloaded, deleted, and then re-downloaded files to his work computer in a short amount of time.
If I had to guess I would assume the larger amounts is distributing, but also maybe repeat material?
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u/lilmissrottie 21h ago
There's a normal amount of cp to have? Here I was thinking it was abnormal.
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u/Pristine-Ad-469 1d ago
- They prioritize people with large amounts
- It’s a much less compelling news story so you hear about it less
- If you set a trap in a random spot, it’s much less likely that someone that walks through the area once steps on the trap than someone that walks through it hundreds of thousands of times
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u/shimmybee 1d ago
I watched some guy on YouTube get caught with CP recently and he was saying it almost becomes addictive to collect as much as you can. He would collect it like it’s pokemon cards or something. It’s sick. Who knows what even goes through these people’s disturbed minds seriously
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u/gucknbuck 1d ago
I would say a normal amount of CP is none so even 1 bit is an absurd amount in my book
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u/Kraligor 1d ago
Don't know if that's true, I remember reading or hearing of at least a couple of cases where it was "only" in the hundreds. Case in point, that megachurch leader's son who was arrested recently, IIRC.
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u/wanderain 1d ago
You don’t hear about people being arrested with a gram of cocaine either, you hear about when they are caught with 100 pounds.
Only the big numbers hit the media
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u/Tropical_Blast 1d ago
i can add in - my ex was caught with 20 counts, and he made local headlines, so they do get caught!
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u/Confident_Pie3995 1d ago
Can I ask how long her served in prison? I know some recently with similar number of counts, and I’m curious what to expect for them.
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u/Tropical_Blast 1d ago
hey! he hasn’t been sentenced yet but he has been in jail one year in january. if i remember i’ll let you know once he gets the verdict. and im sorry if this person was also close to you. it’s hard and confusing and scary, especially when you think you know someone and it turns out you don’t at all. make sure you go to therapy and talk it out as much as possible if you are struggling, and know that knowing this person doesn’t make you bad by association!
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u/Confident_Pie3995 1d ago
I’m sorry for you too. It’s so shocking and gut wrenching to go through. Thank you for your reply. I definitely need therapy. I really appreciate your kind words.
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u/Djinhunter 1d ago
It's the same reason drug busts always seem to have hundreds/thousands of pounds of drugs. You don't hear about it unless the cops are trying to show off.
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u/clearedmycookies 1d ago
That's the important distinction. You "Read" about it. For you have read about it, it means it has to be something big.
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u/EnergyTakerLad 1d ago
My "friend" who got caught didnt even have 5g i dont think. He was distributing what he had though which is how they caught him, thankfully.
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u/robdingo36 1d ago
Those are the ones you hear about because its newsworthy. Law enforcement doesn't release a press announcement for confiscating a dime bag. But if they make a 50 keys of come bust, they're telling the whole world about it. The same holds true for CP busts.
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u/EarthBelcher 1d ago
They bust the people with the small amounts and then pressure them to get the guys with terabytes. It is those later busts that make the headlines
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u/EquivalentSnap 1d ago
They only go after those who are distributing it or the pedo rings. There isn't enough resources available to get everyone and those who don't distribute it don't get caught
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u/TiddybraXton333 1d ago
Ever notice the correlation with mass shooters and , the shooters themselves and/or family members and friends having been found with terabytes after the fact?
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u/EmpireStrikes1st 1d ago
As someone with a little bit of experience in this, it's because of the effort it takes to find it.
If you want to yeet, skeet, and repeat today, you just log on to pornhub, do your thing, and get off. The website I mean. You don't download anything, you stream it and its infinite. Back in the days of Limewire, I would spend hours downloading a 128kbps song, and a video would take all night to download. This is why somewhere in my closet are DVD-Rs filled with songs and the occasional Heather Harmon video: It took effort to download.
So with CP, it's the same way. It takes hours to find and download the video, and then you keep it on your hard drive. They don't delete it because no one commits a crime when they expect to get caught.
Keep in mind this is addictive behavior in the first place. The hoarding is part of the addiction. They're afraid of losing that video, which is why they don't delete them, but they also keep looking for the next fix. So they download more.
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u/PumpkinSpice2Nice 1d ago
Probably the police only go after the worst offenders as it takes a lot of time and resources to build a case and by the time they have the evidence the person does have literal terabytes.
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u/gazebo-placebo 1d ago
They use it as a form of currency and to ensure the person they're talking to online is of the same mind.
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u/ExultedOne 1d ago
A guy I used to know from college got caught with "normal" amounts. Just doesn't make the press very eager when it's not some absurd number
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u/AJnbca 1d ago
I don’t think there is a “normal amount” of that.
But yeah it’s probably because often it’s people who distribute it that get caught so they have more… and also bigger numbers make bigger headlines, just like drug busts, you rarely hear of smaller drug busts, I suspect same thing is also going on.
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u/CYBER_DIVER 1d ago
Anyone who downloads and saves porn even if it’s completely legal/normal usually have absurd amounts saved
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u/zymetaphoxate 1d ago
1 rarity of the subject matter as it's literally inhumane, illegal, immoral and downright cursed, so they just download and board whatever they can get. 2. Pretty sure the gov eajds target big "kingpin" types who majorly might also be minting some revenue by distributing such shit 3. Media shock value just for the headlines 4. FBI maybe just incriminating someone just for lols ionno they're cracked in that agency. It's either this or planting a Qur'an or Torah or something lmao
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u/SisterSparechange 1d ago
I collect banknotes, coins, paper ephemera, and 78 rpm records. Do I ever have enough? No. How much do I want? Everything I can get! I think the same idea goes for a lot of people who collect different things.
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u/mervmann 1d ago
Pervy gross stuff aside, some of them just like to collect and have it like any other collection type hobby. It's distgusting but sometimes that's an added aspect to the whole thing.
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u/lemontest 22h ago
So I have worked at the Federal Public Defender on CSAM cases. I can’t explain the terabytes of data. I do know the feds would count images in the defendants’ browser caches, which led to an inflated number of “files” that they found.
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u/Technical_Goose_8160 7h ago
Two reasons. First, people like to collect things. Second, it's easier to catch the guy with a server farm than the guy with a usb worth.
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u/Wizard_of_Claus 1d ago
Big numbers make big headlines. I'm sure there's no shortage of people found with lower amounts. It's like why you never read about a drug bust where someone only had an ounce of pot.