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The hacktivists are back, targeting the users of forums and sites where illegal images of underage children are posted and shared.


In a YouTube video posted on 8 July, a voice-to-speech program reads out a statement claiming that Anonymous "aims to diminish if not eradicate this plague from the internet".

Calling it #OpPedoChat, the video explains: "Recently it has come to our attention that there has been a surge of websites dedicated to paedophiles for chat and picture sharing. These paedophiles openly advocate concepts like "man-boy love", stating that 8-year-old boys enjoy it and prey on their attention. This is not limited to boys, boards for little girls exist and operate with impunity. Child pornography is frequently traded and even innocent pictures of random children (at the beach, on a playground, in their homes) are publicly fantasised about."

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It continues: "Anonymous aim to diminish if not eradicate this plague from the internet. For the good of our followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment we shall expel from the internet and systematically destroy any such boards that continue to operate. Anonymous recognises this as a serious undertaking and do not expect it to be completed in a short period of time. Factions of Anonymous from all over the globe are participating in sub-operations. Information on paedophiles is being gathered and released."

Information has already been posted by the group which, they claim, links the IP addresses of forum users with their email addresses. You can view the text files here, here, here and here.


Curiously, the video -- released through the official Anonymous YouTube channel -- misspells Anonymous as "Anonyomous" at the beginning. The information about #OpPedoChat was also published on PasteBin, which is strange as previously the organisation had claimed that PasteBin censored users' material. They even went to the trouble of creating an alternative called AnonPaste.

It could indicate that this is the project of one subsection of Anonymous, which would explain the slightly different tone to the information release. This isn't the first anti-paedophile project from the group, either -- in October 2011 members of Anonymous took credit for taking down around 40 sites associated with images of underage children in #OpDarkNet, and publishing the names of 1,500 site members.

#OpPedChat appears to be have an even broader, longer-lasting mission than #OpDarkNet.


As criminal as these sites may be, publicly naming and shaming paedophiles does have the potential to ruin innocent lives. It's what happened with Operation Ore, which to date is still the largest investigation of paedophile websites by British police.

After being tipped off by the FBI, the police arrested 3,744 different people whose credit cards had been used to access a known paedophile site -- except nothing was done to check if those cards had been stolen first.

In many cases (including that of Massive Attack member Robert del Naja and The Who bassist Pete Townshend) there was nothing beyond a stolen credit card to link them to images of underage children, but that didn't stop the tabloid press publishing leaked lists of names. 35 of the men who had been accused ended up killing themselves when they might well have been the victims of identity theft. Anonymous should be careful they don't make similar errors of judgement.