[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.