A former acting head of cybersecurity for a federal agency was found guilty by a Nebraska jury this week on multiple counts of child pornography charges. Timothy DeFoggi, who was at one time the overseer of the critical information technology programs involving online security for the Department of Health and Human Services now awaits his sentencing for what will surely be hard time. In the hierarchy within the U.S. prison system, there isn't much lower than one can get than being a pedophile or sex pervert. This is the dismal quality of individual that infests our terminally corrupt system in that he was not only a deviate but also incompetent and stupid. One would think that a technically savvy type would be well aware of how easy that it is to have his perverse online activity tracked by law-enforcement officials.
I excerpt the following from Kim Zetter's blog at Wired online in a story entitled "Federal Cybersecurity Director Found Guilty on Child Porn Charges":
As the acting cybersecurity chief of a federal agency, Timothy DeFoggi should have been well versed in the digital footprints users leave behind online when they visit web sites and download images.
But DeFoggi—convicted today in Nebraska on three child porn charges including conspiracy to solicit and distribute child porn—must have believed his use of the Tor anonymizing network shielded him from federal investigators.
He’s the sixth suspect to make this mistake in Operation Torpedo, an FBI operation that targeted three Tor-based child porn sites and that used controversial methods to unmask anonymized users.
The use of TOR (The Onion Router) is no longer a guarantee of online anonymity which a guy like DeFoggi should have understood. The Feds, especially the NSA have had an absolute hard-on to not only bust the encryption but according to a recent story published by the blog Boing Boing, mark any who even research the program for special targeting.
DeFoggi is one sick bastard, according to the Wired story:
Although anyone could use the sites, registered users like DeFoggi—who was known online under the user names “fuckchrist” and “PTasseater”—could set up profile pages with an avatar, often child porn images, and personal information and upload files. The site archived more than 100 videos and more than 17,000 child porn and child erotica images, many of them depicting infants and toddlers being sexually abused by adults.
This guy deserves to be locked up in a cell with several fat, hairy and horny thugs and then the keys should be thrown away. Outside of the disgusting details on this pervert whose activities were subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers a larger point is made on the general quality (or lack thereof) in government authority figures. Michael Krieger of the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog nails it in his recent post “A Man of Many Perversions” – Federal Cybersecurity Head Convicted of Child Porn Charges":
The following story is a warning as to why centralized power is so dangerous. It doesn’t matter whether the power is political or corporate, overly centralized power in all forms must be resisted whenever it appears. The worst of all worlds is when centralized political and corporate power unite in an unholy alliance, which is what has happened to America in recent decades. When this occurs, the combined forces of oligarchy simply begin to rapaciously feast on the citizenry with zero accountability. This is a fair description of the United States in 2014.
The primary problem with centralized power is that sociopaths (for obvious reasons) gravitate toward, and greatly covet, positions of power. Once entrenched in such positions, they are able to act upon their perversions with general immunity, and if they are caught, are often left in positions of power by others who at that point “own them” via blackmail. This of course is nothing new, it is how the game of power, politics and economics has been played since the beginning of time. It is also why decentralization of power is the natural evolution we as a species must embrace in order to build a better world.
The bigger that the U.S. government becomes the more that it is infested by those like DeFoggi (there are likely far worse who just haven't been caught) as it rots from within. The corruption and depravity of entrenched power makes the presence of an unaccountable police state a necessity. The police state exists to act as a fully militarized firewall between it and those who it theoretically is supposed to serve. As Mr. Conservative himself, Barry Goldwater once put it “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have”.
is it really any wonder why public trust of the U.S. government continues to fall?
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