A kind of confederation of hackers whose specialty was hitting and bringing down child porn Web sites is reportedly giving up hacking.
Kent Browne and others from New York and Australia had created Condemned in early December and broadcast their plan to take down child pornographers any way they could - including hacking. But Wired says Browne's changed his tack after talking to Parry Aftab, an attorney who runs the biggest and best-known anti-child porn group, Cyber Angels.
"She said that the one problem we would have would be law enforcement," Browne tells Wired. "If they knew we were doing illegal stuff, they wouldn't touch us with a ten-foot pole. Quite frankly, I'm an older guy. I've got two kids. And I don't want to take any chances."
He says Condemned loosely-organized members now use what the magazine calls specially designed software and "good old-fashioned Internet search engines" hunt down the child porn sites and tip off the authorities.
They're only the best-known of the anti-child porn hackers. Natasha Grigori tells Wired her antichildporn.org has also decided to hang up their hack and roll shoes. Her former Anti Child Porn Militia "started out very angry" and militant, but Wired says her recent trip to Def Con in Las Vegas turned her around.
She, too, reached out to law enforcement, being told they backed her cause if not her means. "You can't stop a felony with a felony," she tells Wired - but when she decided to go legal, she lost most of her volunteer hackers.
"Less than a dozen out of 250 stuck with us," she tells the magazine. "They didn't like the idea. They just thought we could rip and tear."
