UN peacekeepers 'paid 13-year-olds for sex', FBI hacked into 'dark web' to bust up largest ever child abuse network

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reportedly interrupted and shut down a massive online child abuse network after hacking into the so-called dark web in an operation that may lead to 1,500 prosecutions."

UN peacekeepers 'paid 13-year-olds for sex'
Four peacekeepers allegedly paid young girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex
Kevin Sieff Tuesday 12 January 2016

The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently called them "a cancer in our system."

Now, officials have learned about what appears to be a fresh scandal. Investigators discovered this month that at least four UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid young girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The case is the latest to plague the UN mission in the Central African Republic, whose employees have been accused of 22 other incidents of alleged sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in the past 14 months. The most recent accusations come in the wake of Ban’s efforts to implement a "zero tolerance" policy for such offenses....

The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital. The site, known as M’Poko camp, is home to 20,000 people, mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.

The United Nations has not publicly released the nationalities of the acccused troops, or provided details of the alleged abuse. But in interviews, UN officials said the peacekeepers were from Gabon, Morocco, Burundi and France. The prostitution ring they allegedly used was run by boys and young men who offered up girls "for anywhere from 50 cents to three dollars," according to one official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation....

Human Rights Watch documented nine cases of sexual violence between September and December in and around the displacement camp. In several instances, Christian women were raped by members of the mostly Christian "anti-balaka" militia after being accused of interacting with Muslims. Across Bangui, the conflict has fallen largely along religious lines.

"M'Poko is a lawless zone run by anti-balaka thugs a few hundred meters away from the international airport. The camp is not being protected, and women are being raped," said Lewis Mudge, Human Rights Watch's Central Africa Republic researcher....
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/un-peacekeepers-paid-13-year-olds-for-sex-a6806961.html


FBI hacked into 'dark web' to bust up largest ever child abuse network
The FBI used an unprecedented technique to hack into the protected bulletin board
Andrew Buncombe New York Friday 8 January 2016

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reportedly interrupted and shut down a massive online child abuse network after hacking into the so-called dark web in an operation that may lead to 1,500 prosecutions.

Vice Motherboard reported that federal investigators used an unprecedented approach to hack into the dark web bulletin board site named Playpen. The bulletin board was launched in August 2014 and within one year had 215,000 accounts with 11,000 unique visitors each week.

The report said that the FBI seized the North Carolina-based server running the board in February 2015 but did not shut it down immediately. Rather, the investigators ran the site via its own servers and deployed a hacking tool known, or network investigative technique (NIT), to identify the IP addresses of those visitors to the site.

The dark web is a section of the internet not discoverable by conventional means, such as through a server search or by directly entering a website URL.

Playpen was apparently the largest child abuse site discovered to date. It enabled users to sign up and then upload any images they liked. According to court documents, the website’s primary purpose was to advertise and distribute child pornography....
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-hacked-into-dark-web-to-bust-up-largest-ever-child-abuse-network-a6802886.html