US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps

Fuck this human

Tldr; Asshole used encrypted everything and Tor to create and spread csam. Government isn't disclosing how they caught him

This whole thing is horrifying, but the last paragraph is especially disturbing:

Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are "six children living within his fourplex alone" on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.

Even more disturbing is it said he was also producing content.

Does this go to show that authorities needing backdoors to everything in order to do their jobs is actually kind of nonsense?

The Ars article seems to suggest that they were able to crack his phones pretty easily, which is a bit scary. I don't see anything about a computer.

Although it doesn't appear he was actually using any encryption apps to store material; rather, he used a fake calculator app as password protection. Obviously not the brightest bulb in the drawer.

It seems irrelevant whether this person is using encrypted channels if they failed to maintain anonymity. If they distributed material and leaked any identifying info (e.g. IP address), then it would be trivial for investigators or CIs to track them down.

When my mother got breast cancer, my Facebook page suddenly filled up with ads for laetrile and quack clinics across the border in Mexico. Even though I know better, I might have grasped at straws had it come to that. Thankfully it didn't, but I love my mother and Facebook was happy to sell that vulnerability to advertisers.

And the thing is, I had never posted about it. My two sisters had used the chat feature to discuss it, and FB made the connection.

That was the moment that privacy and encryption became important to me. Most encryption services have probably been infiltrated by the feds to some degree, and I can live with that. It's the corporations I want to hide from.

saw a headline the other day about the gov't tracking people on tor using Google ads

Lots of conjecture in the comments about how he got caught. Too bad nobody read the article.

Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots

...

he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids.

All the privacy apps in the world won't save you if you're uploading pics to a cloud service.

It is also because of people like him that laws like Going Dark become plausible to the eyes of the politicians and the masses

Prison is too good for anyone who keeps child sex abuse images.

the fool! you can't use ROT-104 encryption against 4 cores!

a heavy vehicle driver for the US military

That's an odd way to describe a soldier. It's not really surprising when violent people do violent things.

It's all publicly approved backdoors until feds are planting child abuse imagery on your PC because you spoke out against them in the wring venue. No one will believe you when they do. Currently you can't trust articles like this, maybe the dude was actually hurting kids. Maybe the feds just needed a win. You won't ever know, and neither will I so long as the same ideology is in control. Now watch them turn every single kid in the pics into a sex offender because the fed believes if you were raped, you WILL rape someone in the future. But by all means keep enjoying their rage bait.

Lol, I still don't know why people like CSAM :v

Dumb people deserve to be in jail.