Z Praise China XI zi ping ID: 694345 July 25, 2022, 4:50 p.m. No.16811371   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, has a child sex abuse problem — and little is being done to stop it

 

[Wickr? Wicca, wicked?]

 

Court records show that Wickr Me has become part of a toolkit used by people who exploit children. Law enforcement and child abuse experts say it's not taking basic safety measures.

 

June 10, 2022, 10:03 AM EDT

 

Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists.

 

It’s not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem,experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet.

 

NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines. Nearly every prosecution reviewed has resulted in a conviction aside from those still being adjudicated. Almost none of the criminal complaints reviewed note cooperation from Wickr itself at the time of filing, aside from limited instances where Wickr was legally compelled to provide information via a search warrant. Over 25 percent of the prosecutions stemmed from undercover operations conducted by law enforcement on Wickr and other tech platforms.

 

These court cases only represent a small fraction of the problem, according to two law enforcement officers involved in investigating child exploitation cases, two experts studying child exploitation and two people who have seen firsthand how individuals frequently use Wickr and other platforms for criminal transactions on the dark web. They point to direct knowledge of child exploitation investigations and sting operations, interviews with victims and perpetrators of abuse, and interactions with individuals soliciting child sexual abuse material as evidence that Wickr is being used by many people who exploit children…

 

Wickr’s origins

 

Wickr was founded in 2012 by a security-minded group of entrepreneurs includingNico Sell,an organizer of the hacker convention Defcon. The app applied encryption typically used by defense officials to personal messaging, stripping messages of any identifiable metadata, and giving users the option to sign up anonymously and have their messages self-delete.

 

By 2015, the company had raised $39 million in funding, seizing on a public just beginning to gain interest in data privacy. Sell, who did not respond to a request for comment, sold the company as staunchly pro-privacy, claiming early on that she had refused to give the FBI a backdoor into the platform. That same year, news reports started to trickle in about how the app was being used to commit crimes.

 

The first report from Australia’s Herald Sun said thatCraiglist drug dealerswere instructing interested parties to contact them on Wickr. Numerous outlets also reported in 2015 that theIslamic State terrorist group was using Wickr to recruit fighters.

 

moar (long artice) @ https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/wickr-amazon-aws-child-messaging-app-sex-abuse-problem-rcna20674