[meowface]

To speak of conveniences and "cui bono?" instead of disinterested analysis of the evidence is to be a conspiracy theorist. Of course they conspire all day, because any covert action can be called a conspiracy. It doesn't necessarily lead one to think they're conspiracies in the sense of planting child pornography on a US citizen suspect's computer.

One can't rule anything out when you're dealing with intelligence agencies, but in this case, is there a single known instance of the US government ever doing such a thing? Planting child pornography on a defendant's computer? Imagine dealing with the optics from that fallout; not only seeking out and spreading content of children being raped, but also using it to falsely imprison someone. I suspect nearly all CIA agents are far more comfortable with assassinating foreign adversaries than doing that.

Of course it could happen, but such a claim requires evidence, or at least some attempt at refuting the prosecution's claimed evidence, not just "well, you can't trust the CIA, you know".

[ClumsyPilot]

Is CIA really scared of fallout? This is the same agency that lies to congress, has blown up a plane full civilians (Cubana de Aviación Flight 455) and tortured people that later turned out to be innocent.

Which part of that indicates they respect due process?

[meowface]

Yes, because some fallout is much worse than others, and some breaches of due process are much worse than others. I could list things that I consider just as bad or worse, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will do literally anything and everything imaginable to achieve their objectives, especially when many decades have passed since many of these things.

Also, is torturing any better if the people are guilty? One of the many problems with torture is you can never know if they're innocent or guilty, in addition to the fact that even torturing guilty people is unethical. Unless you're alleging the CIA tortured people who they knew to be innocent, or who they knew were very likely innocent, which is a much more severe allegation. If you had evidence of them doing that within the past decade, my prior for their planting child pornography would increase by a lot, absolutely.

[stephen_g]

I don’t understand your reasoning. It seems like either astonishing naivety or arguing in bad faith...

Do you really believe that a huge organisation that has plenty of people that are fine with illegally assassinating people, kidnapping people and torturing them, lying to Congress, etc. would have any moral issue with planting some images on a suspect’s hard drive?

These are very much “ends justify the means” kinds of people.

There is plenty of precedent too. One of the largest child abuse web sites on the dark web was confiscated by Australian police and then they continued to run it for another year [1]. But not only that, they did indeed post additional content (that they had confiscated elsewhere I assume) to keep the site’s users believing it was running as normal!

I guarantee agencies like the CIA would have no qualms doing the same thing, or using some of those images to “help” get somebody they felt was guilty but didn’t have evidence to convict.

That’s not to say that it’s necessarily happening in this case, but I would be surprised if they hadn’t don’t it multiple times before.

1. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/L8ly4/unicef-clear-viol...

[meowface]

>Do you really believe that a huge organisation that has plenty of people that are fine with illegally assassinating people, kidnapping people and torturing them, lying to Congress, etc. would have any moral issue with planting some images on a suspect’s hard drive?

At an organizational level? Yes, absolutely. I could believe a few people there taking such an action independently, but I believe it's a lot less likely the organization itself would approve it. Possible, but unlikely.

Either way, even if I thought they would have absolutely no qualms about doing it, there are still plenty of reasons not to do it (optics, etc.). And even if that weren't an issue, the onus is still on the accuser to produce at least some evidence.

>There is plenty of precedent too. One of the largest child abuse web sites on the dark web was confiscated by Australian police and then they continued to run it for another year [1]. But not only that, they did indeed post additional content (that they had confiscated elsewhere I assume) to keep the site’s users believing it was running as normal!

This is very questionable, but still a different thing.

[true_religion]

To be fair, the CIA doesn’t need to seek out such content. There is a giant repository of it at FBI headquarters, used to create the hash database that they scan people’s computers with in order to convict them.

This database is decades old.

The government has people clearly capable of torturing actual living children in Guantanamo Bay, so I doubt they will have trouble finding someone capable of planting a picture taken in the 1960s.

[meowface]

>To be fair, the CIA doesn’t need to seek out such content. There is a giant repository of it at FBI headquarters, used to create the hash database that they scan people’s computers with in order to convict them.

Could you show how you know they're still storing the photos, and not just the hashes?

>The government has people clearly capable of torturing actual living children in Guantanamo Bay, so I doubt they will have trouble finding someone capable of planting a picture taken in the 1960s.

Unless you're talking about cases of formally government-sanctioned raping of children by adults, I don't think this analogy works.

I could also say that any organization fine with assassinating people in cold blood would be fine with planting child pornography on someone's computer, and there may be some superficial logic to that, but I think it's completely false. I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.

Of course, with any intelligence agency (and the FBI), one's prior for anything like that happening is much, much higher than average. I definitely believe they could've wanted to do such a thing and could have done it. But even with that prior, it's still a big claim, and it requires at least a little evidence. Ideally big evidence; not no evidence, and especially not nothing to even refute the comprehensive evidence and logs the FBI has laid out over hundreds of publicly released pages, and probably hundreds or thousands of more pages that we're not (yet) privy to.

[akiselev]

> I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.

Why?

I think if there are millions of people who can justify assassination for their country/ideology, they'll be able to justify planting child pornography too. They'll just look away from the pictures themselves, just like they've looked away from every single other atrocity committed in their name. It's not like they have to pull a trigger: they have to print out some paper, stick it an envelope without looking while repeating to themselves "I wasn't the one who took the pictures" (if they even get that far in their thought process), and go about their business framing someone. It's even easier if they work in tech because they probably don't even have to open the file. Just grab ten thousand binary blobs from the database and thats it. One will be enough! Then they'll go home to their children, look them in the eyes, and forget all about it.

Perhaps I'm just too cynical.

[meowface]

It's certainly possible, but I just disagree that assassinations are as psychologically weighty, personally. Killing someone who's killed other people or contributed to their deaths vs. rigging the justice system and planting child pornography on someone who leaked some of your secrets are really different things.

[harikb]

I fail to see how planting evidence crosses a higher moral barrier than killing someone.

By the way, in both cases, the person who makes the decision genuinely believes, probably on wrong information, that the person they are entrapping is evil and they just lack the right evidence

So I don’t buy the argument that they would lose they sleep over what they did.

[meowface]

Because there are different kinds of "evil". Killing an individual who they believe is responsible for the deaths of many people is different from framing a US citizen and going around the justice system by planting child pornography evidence, because they leaked secrets. These are not apples-to-apples situations.

[kelnos]

> I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.

Even supposing what you say is true, why does it become unlikely that there's a disjoint set of people (sizeable enough to assume that some work for some law enforcement agency) who wouldn't blink an eye at doing the latter thing, if they truly believed it was for the good and safety of their country? I think there are absolutely people like that, and suggesting that there aren't feels incredibly naive.

[meowface]

I'm sure there are some people who would be doing that. I'm just saying that there are a lot of people who are okay with the former but not the latter, so I disagree with the suggestion that most or all of the CIA or FBIA would be okay with it. That leads me to think the probability of this happening at an organizational level (i.e. the director orders it) is low.

The probability of a few people acting independently is a lot higher, but I think still low. And whether it's low or high, you still need evidence. Any evidence. For example, evidence that they may have doctored chat logs.

[alasdair_]

The same people are content to have a drone blow up a house full of children to kill a single target.

[meowface]

From an objective morality standpoint, you're probably right that that is worse. But subjectively and psychologically, I think most of them put them in different boxes.

[scarejunba]

You know you have the bad guy. He knows he's bad. But the system is going to let him get away. He's not a child pornographer but you and I both know we don't put other people away the way we did Al Capone. He knows he's the bad guy and he laughs in my face just because some lawyer will get him off. I'm the good guy, man. If I let this guy off who knows how many lives he'll ruin.

Society is peaceful because rough men stand ready to do violence in the night in its name. They can judge me, but I did the right thing.

Plant the drive, Dave.

[magduf]

>I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.

I think Nazi Germany should have been enough proof that humans are perfectly happy to do anything to support their side. Planting CP to target political prisoners is nothing compared to what the Nazis and various other regimes have done. What makes you think the humans in this place are any different?

[meowface]

Because I haven't yet seen the CIA be as bad as the Nazis, as bad as they might be.

[craftinator]

> One can't rule anything out when you're dealing with intelligence agencies, but in this case, is there a single known instance of the US government ever doing such a thing? Planting child pornography on a defendant's computer? Imagine dealing with the optics from that fallout; not only seeking out and spreading content of children being raped, but also using it to falsely imprison someone. I suspect nearly all CIA agents are far more comfortable with assassinating foreign adversaries than doing that.

Imagine dealing with the optics of the other major illegal activities, such as Operation Mockingbird, or trafficking drugs for Contra, or more recently, trying to smuggle 1300 lbs. of cocaine across the boarder. There are bad people working in the CIA (there are bad people working in most major organizations; it is logically sound to think the power and rule-bending offered by the CIA attract more of these types than other organizations). They had ample access, they have huge collections of child porn in evidence, and they had strong motive. Is it more believable that this guy circumvented their security, wiped his hard drive, but forgot about the life-sentence inducing child porn on his other hard drives? Or that is was planted by people who didn't like him, needed a scapegoat, needed a conviction, and had an easy way to do it.

> Of course it could happen, but such a claim requires evidence, or at least some attempt at refuting the prosecution's claimed evidence, not just "well, you can't trust the CIA, you know".

The US Intelligence Community has had some really massive screwups and straight up illegal operations become exposed over the last couple of decades (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, COINTELPRO, PRISM, the list goes on...). They have lost the legitimacy required for blind trust in them.

[meowface]

>Is it more believable that this guy circumvented their security, wiped his hard drive, but forgot about the life-sentence inducing child porn on his other hard drives? Or that is was planted by people who didn't like him, needed a scapegoat, needed a conviction, and had an easy way to do it.

Neither, because they're both contrived strawman scenarios.

>The US Intelligence Community has had some really massive screwups and straight up illegal operations become exposed over the last couple of decades (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, COINTELPRO, PRISM, the list goes on...).

I mentioned COINTELPRO in another comment, but I don't consider any of the other things you listed as ranking as highly as planting child pornography, and even COINTELPRO never went that far.

>They have lost the legitimacy required for blind trust in them.

Another weakman argument. Obviously I don't trust any government, let alone any government's intelligence agencies. Few people do. Most people, in all countries around the world, are well-aware that they're some of the least trustworthy entities to ever exist.

I still think evidence is required when accusing an intelligence agency of heinous offenses, even when they have been guilty of many offenses in the past. I would even say the same of far more authoritarian and ruthless governments' intelligence agencies, like China's, even in spite of the fact that I think China's system and police state is a serious threat to humanity.

It would not shock me much if the CIA did this. It would shock me if everyone out-of-hand believed it was more likely than not that they did this despite not a shred of evidence, or in the vast majority of cases didn't even look for any evidence, or cared about there being evidence, or even read anything related to the situation beyond a condensed title or a comment from someone who also read nothing but the title. It's intellectual laziness. Not that prosecuting a leaker is a high-stakes social issue, but future issues may arise where such a poor approach to epistemology could pose a great threat to our country or world. This thread so far is only a hair's width better than an InfoWars comment section.

[kelnos]

>> Is it more believable that this guy circumvented their security, wiped his hard drive, but forgot about the life-sentence inducing child porn on his other hard drives? Or that is was planted by people who didn't like him, needed a scapegoat, needed a conviction, and had an easy way to do it.

> Neither, because they're both contrived strawman scenarios

Except that the first scenario isn't a strawman, or even contrived: it's exactly what the CIA/FBI/prosecution is telling us to believe.

While the second scenario certainly smacks of "conspiracy theory", it's trivially doable by the agencies in question, who have motive to do so, and incredibly difficult for the defense to even allege, let alone gather evidence to support. I absolutely agree with and am sympathetic to the idea that this is just conspiracy theory nonsense, but... would anyone really be surprised if it were true? I certainly wouldn't be.

[meowface]

>Except that the first scenario isn't a strawman, or even contrived: it's exactly what the CIA/FBI/prosecution is telling us to believe.

No, it isn't. It is if you were to quickly skim the NYT article, perhaps, but that's not the actual story. The real story is in the court documents.

[SkyBelow]

There are known cases of the FBI running such sites and sharing such images. In general, people have not been outraged by the FBI's actions and the FBI agents themselves are fine doing so, even though by the very logic that makes the material illegal they are harming the children in doing so. This is part of a trend I've noticed where some portion of the population is far more interested in catching and punishing the bad guy than protecting the innocent and when it comes to having to choose one or the other, willingly sacrifice the innocent to punish the bad guy.

Not the CIA, but should be close enough.

[sjg007]

There will be no fallout. Even if it is true the records would be destroyed if they ever existed. If the FBI or location police uncovered said operation there would be no action taken. Why? Because all operations today are joint operations.

[meowface]

If this is true, then how can one dispute any conspiracy theory? If one believes that all of law enforcement and intelligence is in on every conspiracy, will never leak, and that all evidence of every conspiracy is destroyed before it can ever be discovered, then you can justify any belief.

I think if the FBI or police covered up a conspiracy theory of planted child pornography evidence, and this were found out, it would be a massive scandal that would dominate the news for months or years.

[monadic2]

Is “cui bono” at odds with a disinterested analysis of the evidence?

[meowface]

Not at all, but for situations like these, it seems like a very high percentage of the time, it stops at "cui bono" and skips the analysis part.

[mindslight]

Actually, stopping at "cui bono" would be a great thing. The common pathology is that people start with the legitimate idea of who has benefited, get hung up on unsupported specifics, and end up creating straw men that then get used to discourage talking about the obvious incentives.

[meowface]

No, the common pathology is that they stop at cui bono and come to conclusions about facts based only on incentives instead of empirical data and evidence.

[dkersten]

> is there a single known instance of the US government ever doing such a thing?

Not that I’m aware of, but they’ve done a lot worse in the past (arming opposition to democratically elected governments, then turning against them later; drugging people without their consent or knowledge; etc) so its not particularly crazy to think that they’re willing or capable to do such things.

[meowface]

I completely agree. I just think the other repliers aren't assigning the probabilities correctly. Also, separately from the incentive and capability issue, there's the fact that people seem comfortable casting suspicion without any evidence or other empirical basis, while lazily including misinformation like "convenient that this happens so often, huh" despite not mentioning a single other case of it happening (leaker charged with possessing child pornography).