Of course it's not a crime to think about something. But that's not what happened here. The alleged perps propositioned a child for sexual acts. That it happened not to have been an actual, breathing child in the specific instance involving Sweetie is incidental; I'll bet you real money it was every other time...
EDIT: Or do you somehow actually think that for all 1000 people found via this "honeypot", it was the first time they ever thought, "I know what I'll do today! I'll pay a naked 8-year-old to touch herself over the internet!" and that they were just "lucky" enough to get a fake kid their first time out?
Meta: What's with the tendency on HN to downvote people saying demonstrably true things? Do you somehow think that your downvote will alter the parts of reality you don't like or something?
Yes,but based on that one act,not on the "assumption" that you do it regularly and have done it a thousand times before,as the previous commenter was suggesting.
You seem to think we're advocating arresting and prosecuting people based solely on their interactions with Sweetie. That's patently untrue, and (in my case, at least) easily refuted by my reply to you else-thread, where I said:
If you ask me, however, Bob's propositioning Sweetie creates sufficient Probable Cause to obtain a warrant to search his computer for evidence of other, similar, interactions, with actual children. Then he can be prosecuted for the cases where there was a victim.
That he interacts with a virtual child in an inappropriate way is strongly suggestive that has engaged in that behavior at other times, with other, real children. The issues that cause people to act on their pedophilia tend not to result in isolated incidents, and this has been repeatedly demonstrated by years and years of study of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals.
If the police find no evidence that he's done this before — whether because he actually hasn't (vanishingly unlikely), or because he's too good at hiding his aberrance — then we may or may not be able to prosecute him, depending on the jurisdiction.
But, for my money, Sweetie isn't per se about prosecution. It's about helping surface individuals that warrant further scrutiny, subject to due process, and then quite possibly prosecution.
I think it turns on the fact that Sweetie was being run by an NGO; I would not expect prosecutions solely on the basis of their evidence. If "she" were being run by the police directly, on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the people they caught were prosecuted solely on the basis of this one act.
Of course it's not a crime to think about something. But that's not what happened here. The alleged perps propositioned a child for sexual acts. That it happened not to have been an actual, breathing child in the specific instance involving Sweetie is incidental; I'll bet you real money it was every other time...
EDIT: Or do you somehow actually think that for all 1000 people found via this "honeypot", it was the first time they ever thought, "I know what I'll do today! I'll pay a naked 8-year-old to touch herself over the internet!" and that they were just "lucky" enough to get a fake kid their first time out?