Hacker Cinema
To Catch a Predator
2004 · TV series · documentary · 60 min episodes · 1 season
An American news exposé series featuring hidden camera investigations by Dateline NBC, devoted to impersonating underage minors and detaining adult men who contacted them over the Internet for sexual liaisons. The men are lured to a sting house to meet with a decoy under the pretence of sexual contact and then confronted by Chris Hansen.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Funny reaction videos to old episodes of To Catch A Predator and Hoarders.
I mostly agree, though I will argue for the other side; child predators don't exactly have a track record for intelligence. Pedophiles still to this day get caught trading CP on Facebook of all places. I think engaging in that kind of activity requires a certain number of brain cells misfiring. Watch some old episodes of To Catch A Predator. Most of those guys were borderline retarded or had obvious personality disorders.
I went into the article expecting it to look like the old To Catch a Predator TV show, which really bordered on entrapment in many cases, trying to make good TV happen, but that isn't the case here at all. They just put up an innocent profile and were immediately bombarded. Good stuff.
Using these chats to train machine learning corpus on child grooming is a great idea too. Social networks could use that data trivially and at very low cost by having parents opt-in to having their childrens' communications automatically monitored and alerting the parents when a conversation trips a threshold.
You've got to figure anyone harassing children on open channels isn't exactly a master criminal and will get caught sooner or later anyway. But harm done is substantial so you want it to be sooner, not later.
This tends to happen to an exceptional degree when news has a strong emotional impact, which is of course what sensationalized headlines try to emphasize (whether out of partisanship or because emotionally charged information is more viral).
People's belief systems about the relative threats of terrorism and pedophiles is thus distorted by the media because the amount of time they spend watching terrorist attacks or episodes of "To Catch A Predator" is massively disproportionate to the actual level of risk posed by those kinds of things, and so especially is the emotional impact of that media.
There was a serious change in the nature of TV after the late 90's.
Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel.
Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news channels, TV mutated into this hideous disease that vomited itself into my living room.
Somewhere amidst the election ads and the telephone ads, the Big Pharma ads came along, with Montel Williams and Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer, and then Realty TV exploded for beyond the already intolerable spectacle of MTV's The Real World. Vapid scummy channels like E! spewed forth with shallow, narcissistic tabloid hopelessness. MTV itself devolved into TRL and Britney Spears and then 9/11 and Iraq blew all the gaskets open.
With every celebrity fearing for their pathetic career, at the very premise of disagreeing with a "Wartime President", that very chilling effect of self censorship attenuated all intelligence on TV.
The internet, meanwhile, was uncensored, unfiltered virgin wilderness to explore. Hard core pornography and gore sites were immediately available, and you didn't have to skulk around the adult section of the video store for Faces Of Death or Debbie Does Dallas. You also didn't have to pay extra to get a glipse of tits or hear some curse words on HBO. TV knows this, and has grown even creepier still, in an attempt to compete with the total lack of boundries found on the internet, to the point where it feels disturbingly questionable that Cialis ads are directly juxtaposed with Honey Boo Boo episodes.
The rationale for Court TV finally died about a decade and a half after the O.J. Simpson case, and by then it had transformed itself into a dumping ground for re-runs of To Catch A Predator and COPS, and then rebranded as TRU TV, and now also includes shows about repo men harassing irresponsible poor people.
At these times scales of ten to fifteen years for a complete life cycle of a trend like the one caused by O.J. Simpson, I shudder to think what TV will be like when the 9/11, Iraq War, Fox News trend cycle wraps up. The current trend feels like it still needs about ten more years to fully play itself out.
> "Uncovering pedophiles on the Internet is impossible without mass surveillance of the Internet"
Didn't realize the TV show "To Catch a Predator" did mass surveillance of the internet, NBC is taking investigative journalism to an extreme.
There is no bright line law here... every state is different. We once had a developer working for us who in 1992 had a server that was unsecure and someone was sending kiddy-porn via it. Of course he is now considered a 'sex offender' and his life is well... over. But what can we do? Everyday you hear a story about a kidnapping and American's are scared, protective, etc...
I do agree that something needs to be done. In fact, I wrote my Thesis on 'The Illegalities of The TV Show To Catch a Predator" I think some of you will enjoy it:
http://stalemelon.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-catch-predator-invasion-of-privacy.html
-P