🚀 go-pugleaf

Here is yet another reason to boycott AOL...
 Slimey Bastards!!!

CrossPosted from comp.dcom.telecom
 Patrick Townsend, Author, moderator

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Today students, we shall examine different government agencies and their
purposes. 

FCC - The Federal Communications Commission has the responsibility of
regulating the airwaves and the phone companies.

FAA - The Federal Aviation Administration has something to do with
airplanes and their flying around in the USA.

Let's see ... what about the United States Customs Service?

Well ... they are in charge of manufacturing and distributing child
pornography on the Internet. They have a pretty large operation for
that in south Florida now. Their objective is to entrap whoever they
can by sending it out through email to see who takes the bait. They
also get involved in 'hot chat' looking for people interested in the
garbage they have for sale. 

Now of course if they were to send it out from a site with an address
ending in .gov or .mil or similar, only someone like your Editor, who
fell off the back of the turnip truck yesterday would be inclined to 
exchange any correspondence with them at all. So they had to find some
other Internet service provider willing to give them a few bogus accounts 
and ficticious names to use.

Wait a minute, I hear you saying ... what sort of service provider would
deliberatly allow child pornography to be pushed out into the net via
their site?  Well, America OnLine would do it. When Steve Case was
approached by the Customs 'service' asking for a few accounts and screen
names to be used specifically for the purpose of sending out child porn
to unsuspecting netters, he agreed. After all, the FBI was already doing
their thing on AOL, so why not let Customs in on it also? 

By their own admission in recent articles in the mainstream press, the
United States Customs Service took over a child pornography operation 
in Florida about two years ago, and has continued to operate it. What
they did not go into detail about however was how they go about finding
people they can set up. And that is what it amounts to; it is a numbers
game to get as many arrests and convictions as possible. Someone has
decided there are zillions and thousands of pedophiles on the net and
they have to all be rounded up -- no matter who gets hurt in the process.

Customs uses screen names such as 'Confused Teen' to hang around on line
in places like the gay chat rooms on AOL, along with Teen Chat and
Romance Connection, two other popular chat areas on that system. They
do it with the full knowledge and blessings of AOL management. Confused
Teen and his 'younger brother' start up conversations with suspected
pedophiles -- users whose names have been supplied to them by AOL --
to see what they can get cooking ... and a couple of 'teenage girls'
(yeah ... you bet!) work the heterosexual side of the house making
the same kind of agressive approaches. 

Soon enough, the conversations get steamy and the guys respond like, 
well, like guys will respond. Pretty soon the .gif files start coming, 
etc. Then comes a little more hardcore stuff and maybe you would like
to order more, eh?  It can be sent direct to your computer from ours,
here in south Florida at the offices of the US Customs Service, d/b/a
Confused Teen. Of course they don't tell you *that*. And if you don't
want to order it today, we will keep sending you a little every few
days until you do decide to order some. 

Some AOL users were just junking it on arrival. Deleting the mail and
ignoring it. Now and then one might send it to TOSAdvisor with a com-
plaint, but not often; you know how it goes. When Customs tried to
arrest a couple people they had *entrapped* into purchasing their stuff,
the people quite correctly managed to get it deleted from the computer
before the federal officers got there which made it hard for the Customs
people to prove the 'pedophiles' were in possession of it.

To fix that little problem, AOL agreed to change the email software so
that users CANNOT delete mail they receive. All email received there
is now stored *in your account, in your storage space* until AOL gets
good and ready to delete it. If the user attempts to delete unwanted
mail, he gets back a system response saying 'We have removed the delete
function from mail since you don't need it any longer. We will delete
it in a few days. In the meantime, we will just save it over here in
another folder for you.'  ... how terribly thoughtful and gracious of
them, don't you think?  It sure makes it a lot easier to be certain 
that someone will be 'in possession' of something nasty when the law
comes a-calling at their door. 

              -------------------------------

That's what happened to a Chicago Police officer here recently. A very
high-ranking officer, a watch commander in his district ('watch commander'
here is the title for the supervising officer of an entire police
district for certain hours of the day) wound up with child pornography
in his email at AOL. By coincidence -- the merest coincidence of course --
federal agents were at his house *the day it arrived* with a search 
warrant. How is that for slick timing?   <grin> ...  

The media in Chicago has withheld his name from publication to protect
his privacy in this early stage of the investigation. He has been
temporarily assigned a job with no public contact pending a complete
investigation. He maintains his complete innocence, and we shall see,
I guess, what we shall see as things move along. 

               --------------------------------

And I bet all this time you thought the pedophile stink over at AOL
consisted of users complaining that other users were bothering them ... 
or kidnapping their children. Its understandable you feel that way,
since that's what AOL would like to have you believe. And yes, there
is a grain of truth in that I suppose, but the reality is some of the
tax dollars you pay are being used to pay the salaries of some slimeballs
whose job is to sit at a keyboard and try to entrap you into accepting
child porn so they can come out and arrest you for being in possession
of it the next day.

One has to wonder if Steve Case really likes having that sort of thing
go on over his network.  Cynics might say that Case has found that federal
judges and federal agents are really good at enforcing the TOS which 
his Guides are rapidly losing control over ... but others suggest that maybe 
the real reason he tolerates the spying on and entrapment of users is
because he has no choice in the matter. Maybe the feds got something
on him and got him to flip also, eh?  Maybe his arm (or something else) is
getting twisted to force his cooperation.

It is getting harder and harder these days to sing 'America the Beautiful'
and really mean it. Ugly things are all around us and show no signs of
going away anytime soon.  

                      -------------------

In other news about the recent AOL busts, the two guys here in Chicago
who were arrested *and charged* -- out of what was it, over a hundred
people hassled? -- have already had their day in court. Yep, that quick. 
Mr. Zucker had his pre-trial hearing on October 5 and he pleaded guilty.  
Mr. Zemke's attorney said to my correspondent that "there won't be any
trial", so I guess we can figure that one out also.


PAT


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Only in America... and any other Quasi-Police state....
Yeesh...
TD