Disclaimer: This is a six hands article. Even though it is now being published on this page, this writing is the result of a common work between Carolina Christofoletti, from the academia side, and Hericson dos Santos and Jorge André Domingues Barreto, from the Brazilian Civilian Police to deal with CSAM crimes.

One interesting point that has been long observed in Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) forums mechanics is that, not rarely, discussion boards are inflated with Law Enforcement Operations news. Already from the beginning, this comes to be an odd thing if you consider that, most of the time, criminals tend to have aversion to the act of having to scroll down to find the messages they want because “people talk too much there”.

The fact is, but, that Law Enforcement Authorities (LEA) operation news is not only a non-accidental exception to this rule, appearing very commonly on those dashboards, but that they serve (or are expected to serve) as a warning to all criminals being part of that illegal meeting: “Warning, to whoever this information applies to”.

A warning, after all, that serves for securitizing the illegal forum as a whole. If anyone is caught, the entire forum is vulnerable, and especially if one is managing it at the time police comes to knock on criminal’s doors. Brazil tends to have those weird cases, and who knows if it does not come, exactly, from a negligence in reading those warnings or perceiving them as a real threat?

Even though criminals usually make “as if” they did not know one another, this very particular information makes us question if there is not indeed, at some point, a sharing of information that is more than accidental. In clear words, if administrators or whoever posts those LEA news are not, instead, aware where the applicable case is, and this is (maybe) the reason why Lithuania News does not appear in Brazilian CSAM forums.

While this is something to further investigate, we ask you to light up your matches now, because we are starting the journey on the Dark.

But CSAM forums share not only LEA news. Jurisprudence, pieces of legislation and other “topics of concern” also appear. Keep going.

The LEA Operation news is on the CSAM club dashboard. What now? Now the panic begins. At this time, the situation had escalated to a labyrinth with no way back. As Brazilians say with a chasing dictate: If you stay, they catch you. If you run, they catch you too.

And the turning point here might be, exactly, if one stops to observe, for a while and with sharp eyes, what is actually going on before and after that. Non-trivial silence! The panic has just begun.

And silence, weird silence not overall, but at specific points may indicate a rational fear that police, very probably, is just next door or coming. Post metrics are not trivial. They show how fear is perceived.

Set the net and let them cast the bait.

Think about it.