How are illegal / immoral websites allowed to exist?

**Kula** · 05-22-2005 10:04 PM

Why is that illegal websites, for example child porn and bestiality websites are allowed to exist? Do the makers of these sites have some way of covering themselves? Why can't these sites simply be shut down? Surely the government and computer experts have the technology and expertise to shut these sites down?

Am i simply being naive here? It's something i've always wondered, and if anyone can shed light on this, i'd appreciate it.

**Yume** · 05-23-2005 06:07 AM

No one government does not and never will completely controls the internet. In some countries child porn is actually legal.

If a site goes up it could be weeks or months before someone finds it. No one person controls every server. A site doesn't come up and an internet controller gets rid of it. It has to be reported and investigated. There is no way to stop something from getting on the internet if you cannot get control of a server that holds the information. I could put child porn on the internet and transfer it through a network to a private server. Someone would have to hack into a server and take it down. Usually what people do is they trace the server to the location and arrest the owners and shut down the server.

There are also many laws such as if the information or media is legal in one country another country has no right to get rid of it without consent from the country that the server is in. If you own a server you have basically free reign to put whatever you please.

**Alric** · 05-23-2005 07:29 AM

Its not just from country to country but also state to state. Which laws do you apply to which sites?

**Fetish** · 05-23-2005 11:41 AM

Originally posted by Yume
No one government does not and never will completely controls the internet. In some countries child porn is actually legal.

im thinking that most of them are asian -_-; i get alot of " Hot Asian Girls For You " e-mail

**Kaniaz** · 05-23-2005 04:32 PM

Alot of pornography sites and other illegal goodies are hosted and managed by shady characters who are not as easy to catch as in "real life". You can't chase after them with cars and you can't just shoot them with a sniper. For all you know, they could be the other side of the world. They could be twelve. They could be Ali Baba and his flying carpets. Or whatever that dude was.

You get many types hosting sites (some impersonating banks, for example - pishing) and the (insert your favourite law enforcing agency here) can't just click a button and have the identity of the person, then arrest them five minutes later. Apart from the tangle of laws and red tape that have to be waded through, there's alsorts of weird and wonderful ways that they (the hosters) manage to conceal themselves by. The internet is pretty unreliable when it comes to providing definite evidence.

Then as Yume said, if the police do find the real identity of the culprit (who for all they know could be involved w/ the mafia or some equally dodgy group) they have to hope that they live in America, or whoever is trying to prosecute them, which is also rather unlikely, then you have to go and beat up their server. Because despite what you do, that server isn't stopping for anything. One of the beauties of computers is they don't care about the goverment. There is no backdoor or anything to just shut a site down. You have to either hack it, or smash it. And that's also if they haven't caught wind of what you're doing and are busy throwing said server off a cliff.

Then, if you manage to do all that, you have to lawsuit them, which could swing either way depending on how much evidence you got, realiability, all the usual stuff.

You have to take into account the vastness of the internet. There are just so many sites, and it's so easy to set up your very own illegal site, the resources of the FBI or whatever are just better spent elsewhere. By the time a site was brought down, another wise shot could of copied the entire site and hosted it somewhere else.

I don't think the internet will ever be enforced properly. The way it all works, with no real center to just regulate things, there isn't a way you could enforce proper law. It's like all of these countries, states and parts of the world, put into this mixing pot with a dash of anoymity that comes as a result of it, and it just becomes a pig to regulate in any real way.

Obviously it's not impossible, though. If the FBI really want something down, it will happen. Probably. But it means that huge amounts of sites are just not worth bothering with. Like in real life, where crime is never going to be utterly extingushed.

That said I don't think the internet should be enforced (much). While it's kind of futile on a large scale unless the goverment are going to try some George Orwellesque things with little bugs in everything teling people what's being uploaded, etc, I like to think of the internet as another world which is the general publics world, and not what some goverment dude thinks it should be. Everything I just said could probably do with a grain of salt, or perhaps a few truckloads, because I'm no expert on law.