The tired old ‘child porn’ myth debunked…again

You can tell the Hoaxtead gang are running low on material when they start recycling arguments that were roundly debunked a year ago. This time, it’s the old ‘RD is a consumer and/or producer of child sex abuse images’ myth.

The intellectual powerhouse Scott Pattinson, aka ‘SuperEarther’, has resurrected this video, in which he does his best to reproduce an argument he seems not to understand:

We can’t recommend that you watch it, unless you’re fascinated by the apparent failure of our educational system to reach those at the bottom end of the bell curve, but it reminded us of this post from last year, when Charlotte Alton Ward got all frothed at the mouth, and wrote this highly imaginative gem (transcript of one of her obscene videos):

The children allege that their father RD is a child pornographer. RD, they allege, sexually abuses and humiliates them and the other children, along with all the other members of the cult. RD and the others film this and upload it onto the internet; the children claim that their father has shown them some of this material.

So in this video we’re going to offer evidence that seems to substantiate the children’s allegations.

Every internet user is familiar with predictive analysis. Predictive software analyses your behaviour patterns online and works out what kind of a person you are. For example, if you buy lots of shoes on ebay the software will pick up your shopping patterns, analyse them and advertise shoe shops and ebay at you. YouTube uses it to recommend videos based on the other videos you have watched and so on. Ecommerce is now such big business that online retailers have invested millions into developing increasingly accurate predictive software.

Back in March 2015 a fellow researcher – let’s call him John Smith – left a message on our Hampstead Research blog. John stressed that he was not accusing anyone of being guilty but RD seemed to be delting (sic) all traces of himself from the internet.

John drew our attention to one particular website that RD had deleted. The IP address of this website was very important, he said.

Ns2.2heartsdelight.com

We were unable to verify whether 2 hearts delight belonged to RD so we took John’s word for it. John explained that 2hearts delight’s IP address is not a normal IP address, it is a step up from that: 2heartsdelight is a domain name server, or DNS. A DNS is used as a look up table to reference other websites. According to John, if you add a DNS address to your computer you can access websites that other people can’t access, not unless they know the IP addresses of those websites.

So, we wondered, would a DNS give someone who knew what they were doing access to illegal sites, sites that were hidden, sites that contained, say, child pornography? Could a DNS be used to search Deep Net? Is this how paedophiles and other criminals operate online? We don’t know but from what John said, it sounds as if this could be the case.

We followed John’s lead and looked up 2heartsdelight on the Wayback machine. And here we can see that 2hearts provided services and conducted tours with deep connections into the US and Russia.

We have also heard that the symbols of two hearts is sometimes used as a pedophilic reference to sex with young girls. We don’t know if this is fact but if it is then the name 2heartsdelight could signal more than a straightforward dating agency.

Still following John’s lead on 23 March 2015 we accessed this website, which shows us all the websites that are hosted at RD’s IP address.

On the surface it all looks perfectly innocent – a selection of health related sites. But when we checked the predictive analysis software, which can see what’s going on behind the scenes, we were directed to a list of hardcore and child pornography websites.

We decided to look into these websites for the purpose of fact checking. After all, they look and sound like child pornography but are they really? What we found is that most of these links were inactive. One, however, was active. This link was offering pornography of children as young as one year old. In the cause of fact checking, because we did not want to accuse an innocent man, we followed some of the links and found pronographic (sic) images of young girls. We did not want to investigate further but we did this to demonstrate to our viewers that this is fact.

So the predictive software had worked out that was going on behind the scenes on RD’s computer was nothing to do with health and fitness – the predictive software told us that these websites might be a front for child pornography.

Please note that predictive software cannot lie. It cannot be compromised or intimidated into silence. It is automated; designed to analyse online behaviour.

We emailed this website to ask which predictive software they use and how it works but they have not yet received a reply.

The child porn site you were looking at may not have been registered by RD and the material we examined may not originate from him either. It is, however, quite possible that this is the case. The software strongly suggests that he and the other users of his websites have at least accessed this IP address. When we look up who registered littleorgies we find someone at an address in the Ukraine calling themself (sic) V Smirnoff, which may well, of course, be a fake name.

Please note that as RD seems to be removing his websites or moving things around, things will have changed over the past three weeks. When we checked the predictive software on 16 April 2015 the only trace of child pornography we were offered was this: the gay website is probably nothing illegal although dorms may have paedophile connotations.

Tellingly, back in March, when we dug further into the predictive software it revealed that users of this child pornography sites appeared to be accessing a collection of medical sites to do with

diagnosing whether an adult man – or female child – has a sexually transmitted disease. Many of these websites look the same, as if they have been created by the same person.

And now I want you to use your imagination. What if a decent loving parent or relative heard that their child had been abused and that videos of this had been posted online. What if that person was so distressed they felt a need to investigate those claims, search for that pornography and try to identify faces and guilty parties? Would that parent be allowed to do this?

No way. No matter how well meaning they were they would be risking arrest.

Yet these laws do not apply to child pornographers and paedophiles. People like RD are being protected by the UK judiciary, people like Judge Pauffley. And when previous PM Tony Blair was informed that a large number of his fellow politicians and members of the estalishment (sic)  had been caught viewing child pornography online, he issued a D Notice, which prohibited the media from reporting the matter and protected the child pornographers and paedophiles, who were never arrested.

Thank goodness, then, for John Smith’s message and predictive analysis software, which gave us evidence to substantiate the children’s allegations without having to search out or view such material.

We hope that this evidence will be admissable (sic) in court in support of the children’s allegations.

Quite aside from the fact that Charlotte admits several times that she doesn’t actually have any evidence at all (“we took John’s word for it“; “we have heard“; “we don’t know if this is fact“; “now I want you to use your imagination“), both she and ‘John Smith’ are both, well, full of sh*t.

Why it doesn’t work that way

As it happens, we have our own tech specialist here at Hoaxtead Research, and here’s what they said in answer to our questions about Charlotte’s allegations:

1. Would a DNS give someone who knew what they were doing access to illegal sites?

Yes, in a way it would, if by “a DNS” they mean “adding entries to the host’s file”. The porn site was never inaccessible to begin with, but doing it that way is one (very clumsy) way to trick your browser into making the request you need.

2. Could a DNS be used to search Deep Net?

To access certain sites, yes. To search, no. Not unless one of the sites you access is an index of said net. (DNS has no search capabilities at all.)

3. Is this how paedophiles and other criminals operate online?

Maybe. It’s a plausible, if very low-tech, way to sort-of hide a website. They would have to be pretty inept criminals, without much technical expertise.

4. Can you really use predictive analysis software to find out what someone else’s “sites of interest” might be?

Nope. Never, not at all. It will only show you what it thinks your own interests might be, based on where your browser has been recently.

In other words, because Charlotte is fascinated by child sex abuse images and has probably gone looking for similar sites in the past, her predictive analysis software takes her to that kind of site.

Oh, and a brief word about IP addresses:

In addition, when a person sets up a website and puts it on a host server (like Bluehost, GoDaddy, etc.), their site will not get its own unique IP address. It will get an IP address that’s shared by a bunch of other sites, because there’s a finite number of IPs laying about, and web hosting companies will typically place a bunch of domains on one IP.

So…to the Hoaxtead pushers who are hoping to resurrect this old and not very clever myth: sorry, nice try, but no prize.

(p.s. For even more on this subject, this post from last year contains excellent reference material. Not that we expect Scott Pattinson or Charlotte Ward to get any of it.)