The Dutch minister of justice wants to block credit cards which were used to buy child porn (link in dutch). And he wants to do this as soon as the police notices that a particular credit card was used to buy child porn, without involving the courts. It sounds though and decisive, everything a minister in a bit of trouble (due to the Gregorius Nekschot case) needs to bolster his image. Very likely nothing will come of this of course, due to all those nastly little practical details that always derail bright ideas like this. Like, if the police knows somebody has used a credit card to buy child porn, why don’t they arrest them for it, rather than just blocking that credit card? How will the police get this transaction data anyway, and how will the credit card companies be sure it’s the police telling them to block a card and not J. Random Person with a grudge against the person whose card is blocked?
But most importantly, how will the police determine that said card hadn’t had its details stolen for use in some internet scam or other? You might think this a theoretical danger, were it not for what happened in the UK back when their police went fishing for child porn buyers, in Operation Ore. The Yorkshire Ranter has the details:
The killer fact? Many of the credit cards presented for payment don’t correspond to the server log – to put it more brutally, a mysteriously large number of people were paying up in advance but not taking delivery of their smut. In fact, quite a lot of the websites that used Landslide contained no porn, nor anything else, existing purely for fraudulent purposes. The M.O. was to get hold of a list of cards – a black market exists – set up an account, and then run a script that would charge small amounts (say £25) to each, hoping that the payments would go unnoticed.
This is why we have courts, because even when the police is correctly representing the facts as they know them they may very well be wrong about what’s going on. If you go through the courts, you have the chance to test if the police is right in their assumptions; if you don’t, you run a much greater risk of harming innocents, branding people as pedophiles because their stolen credit card data got used for dodgy data. Instajustice sounds great in a soundbyte, but in reality it doesn’t work.
Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.