Sword and Scale - Episode 84

Episode Date: February 26, 2017

There is a place that humanity has created where the rules of society mean nothing. This place is a void of laws and social norms. The scariest thing, is that there is a doorway to this dark place in every home, in some cases we carry this doorway with us day after day. It's a place called The Dark Net. In this episode we're joined by Jamie Bartlett to discuss this dark and sinister place, along with the human psychology that created it and makes it particularly nefarious. We also touch on the stories of William Francis Melchert-Dinkel who tricked a young girl into committing suicide for his own sick sense of entertainment. Mitchell Henderson, who was a young boy constantly bullied and ended up commiting suicide, but even in death he found no solace as an endless barage of trolls relentlessly mocked him and his grieving parents. We also talk about the extraordinarily disturbing case of Peter Scully, who's business enterprise No Limits Fun created such despicable works such as DAFU Love and Daisy's Destruction. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Anything that the consumer or the member of the group will tell him to do, he will do. To the point of, you point of killing the child. Welcome to season 4 Episode 84 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. So we're easing back into another season here and I know it feels like we just took this long break but it doesn't feel that way to us because there's been so much work behind the scenes. We're working on so many different things.

You guys will find out about them soon enough, don't worry. But it does feel great to be back and to be able to bring you more horrible stories from around the globe. Today we're starting off with one of the worst cases you'll probably ever hear about in your lifetime. Hopefully. And yes, it does involve children. And we get this all the time when people say, oh God, not again, not children again. So why do we cover these cases? Because these are the most innocent and vulnerable members of our society. They look up to adults to take care of them, to nurture them, to give them a voice. But there are no limits to the depravity of man. And when the opportunity to do evil exists,

you can bet someone will be there taking advantage of it. It just goes to show that the worst monsters are real. This is Jamie. I'm Jamie Violet. I'm the author of the book, The Dark Net. Jamie's book is a great starting point to understanding this sometimes in the various plays. I'm Jamie Valleette. I'm the author of the book The Dark Net. Jamie's book is a great starting point to understanding this sometimes in the

various place known as the Dark Net, or Dark Web, or Deep Web. It goes by many names and how it's defined changes depending on who you ask, but it's a world that you can enter from the comfort of your own home, with any desktop or laptop computer. But if you find yourself there, be careful. You may find that you can easily become a victim, or even a criminal, simply by clicking the wrong link. What is the dark nut, Jamie? Well, it's a sort of hidden part of the internet, somewhere that's extremely difficult to censor or control that anyone can go there and set up their own website.

And it's accessed with a special web browser. So you don't get there with the normal browsers like Chrome or Firefox. You need a special browser called the Tor browser that allows you to browse the internet and to get onto this darknet without giving away your IP address, without giving away your location or any information about yourself. So what that means basically is that the darknet has become a sort of very popular place for people with something to hide and distinguishes the idea of this dark net from tour and tour hidden services yeah because I mean the internet itself just the kind of the ability for people to be something different online than they are offline means this incredible explosion of all sorts of different strange, weird and often quite

dark subcultures emerge. And they can be on the normal internet. They don't need to be in hidden corners. And some of the sort of most terrifying behaviour we see is on the bits of the internet that we're all really familiar with. So to me, I kind of wanted to make that distinction to say, you know, the dark net for me is really about all of those cultures and behaviors and practices that people do online when they think others aren't watching.

And so that could be, you know, the encrypted, torn network, the dark net, but it could also be in a secretive Facebook group. And this kind of culture, this anonymity and what it can breed, both good and bad, is something I think that's increasingly important for everybody because so many of us now live our lives online and come into contact with these cultures and these people that we all need to know something more about it. Let's get a little bit technical. This tour browser you mentioned, how does it work? Well, so it's originally a US military project.

That's the US Naval Intelligence Research Project that would obscure your IP address. So when you go on the internet, you are essentially asking a website to send your device data. And it does that by knowing what the IP address, the unique IP address of your device is. That's the way it can get the information back to you. Now the inventors of Tor realized that actually you could root that request to visit a website via lots of other computers based around the world. And if you did that with some level of encryption which meant that people looking in couldn't see where your request originally came from, You could essentially allow people

to browse the web so that the web sites that you are visiting would not know where that request for data had come from. The reason it's called Tor is that it stands for the Onion Router, which is the fact that this browser essentially bounces your request for data via usually three other computers that could be based anywhere in the world and each time unraveling a kind of layer of encryption. It's a really clever and quite sophisticated technique, but it really does work. It's kind of like laundering your internet connection. It is something like that. Yeah. It basically just means that anyone that's trying to watch what you're doing

doesn't really know who you are or where you've come from. And that is such a useful thing for so many people. I mean, the fact it was originally invented by the US Navy tells you, of course, that the authorities themselves see that that's a very valuable thing. Anonymity and privacy that it offers has so many positive benefits to people. When you were a kid, did you ever play that game where you asked, if you have one super power, what would it be? I think I probably did. Usually, the, like, there was always, like, the first answer was always, I want to fly, right?

I think that's to do with Superman, isn't it? I mean, because I was about to say flying, and I think Superman is just left that imprint on us. We all want to be able to fly. Or be invisible. But the second one was always, it was always, I want to be invisible, right? Yeah. There's something to that, because when you're invisible you can do anything

especially things that aren't really considered Entirely moral or legal and the Tor browser appears to let people do that online, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean the internet generally does it a little bit because Already you could go on to any Platform any social media platform and create a fake account and a fake name and a fake photograph, pretend to be someone else and live out your fantasies. So I mean the internet itself with the fact that you can connect to people without the knowing who you are already gives you a bit of that, it makes you allow you to people without the knowing who you are, already gives you a bit of

that, it makes you allow you to be a little bit invisible. But I suppose the tour network is the kind of most extreme end of that. Because if you're messing around on a normal website under a pseudonym, it's possible to get found out relatively easily. You know, the internet never forgets that everyone can say, no, what they're doing can find out where you are. But with Tor, that kind of fantasy of being invisible is actually realized. And I guess what you're seeing when people are on this network

is all those strange places that can take people. All the strange fantasies and weird behaviors and criminal or otherwise that people want to do you're suddenly able to see it suddenly able to do it and the first one you mentioned in your book is a website that you stumbled across that you said you couldn't believe existed it's a place where you can actually have someone killed? Well, purportedly, allegedly, yes, it's an assassination marketplace. I don't know whether in the end that was just a sort of a fraudulent website or a joke or a spoo for whatever, but it can be spoke to the unbelievable possibilities of what anonymity online can do. It was a website. There was actually first imagined, but the technology wasn't ready then,

in the mid-90s. And the idea was that people could anonymously bet, if you like, on when a certain famous person would die. And when they bet they could also put money into a pot next to that individual, an individual's name. And if they could correctly guess the exact time of their passing, they would be able to receive the money through a sort of clever system of encryption whereby nobody knew who donated money and nobody knew who received the money and the idea was that it would incentivize someone to assassinate a political leader that makes a prediction, kill them themselves and then receive all the money. So it's like a crowd-funded assassination site. And actually, I recently, you might want to check it out, but I recently heard that someone

done it again. They've just recently set one up for Donald Trump and there's currently $80,000. I'm disappointed, just $80,000. That's not what. Just $80,000. So probably not enough yet for anyone to take that sort of risk. He would probably be insulted by that. I mean, there's always the thing with this. To me, it was, it's obviously a terrible way of using this technology, but actually a really clever idea. I don't think it's out terrible to say that, but this idea of anonymously crowd-sourcing or incentivizing certain types of behavior. I don't know, could potentially have lots of other interesting applications that don't involve trying to get someone killed. What is it about anonymity that gives people the bravado to do something as brazen as order hit on another human being? Well, it's different from different people, but of course for some people it's just to believe

that you're not going to get caught. Unfortunately, some people want to do bad things. They don't do them because they think they'll get caught. And everything that we know about behavior suggests that that is part of the motivation. But for other people, and I think this is a much too little discussed motivation for behavior, is that people are bored. People are bored. They like to product boundaries, they like to test boundaries, they like to try things, they like to experiment.

And so part of the sort of, the stuff that you sometimes see, particularly internet trolling for example, it's actually just because people aboard and they kind of want something to happen, people are curious and I'm afraid to say as well, there are a lot of bad people out there. And I think what the internet does and particularly under the guise of anonymities, it just makes that a bit more visible. I mean, let me give you an example. Back when I was younger and the television was on and there'd be a celebrity on the screen that we all disliked in our family house, we'd all be shouting at the opportunities at them. Nobody outside that room ever knew we were doing that. But nowadays people put that on Twitter.

So you've got like every living room with all the abuse in the screening and the shouting and the swearing is now publicly available to everybody else to see as well. So it kind of looks like we're all much worse than we've ever were before, but I wonder whether actually it's just all a bit more visible. Yeah, and it's also, I mean, I think it's also what happens in terms of anonymity. When you create a world without consequences

that all of these bad things can occur. The human nature can evolve out of that. Yeah, that's right. And you know, when the barriers to entry, and you think about it this way as well, when the barriers to entry of doing something good or bad lowers, more people are going to do it. Right. And I think that's part of the thing, you know, it's easier for me now to insult someone.

Yeah, for my computer, I could have felt 10,000 people a day. 20 years ago, I couldn't have done more than about 100, and I'd probably got beaten up for it. So they're the dynamics now. You know, and it's very different. I mean, it really shows how we're just animals when you think about it. You know, if a place like this, the Stark net,

can summon all the demons within us to do all these horrible things. It does, but you only need to turn on the news, really, and look at all the things that are happening everywhere around the world every day offline, and you probably won't be quite as surprised. I hear people talking about the terrible things that are doing online, but I also then remember all the terrible things are're doing online, but I also then remember all the terrible things we're doing offline. I kind of think, well, yeah, we're not always the nicest species, are we?

And the internet is part of that story. And I think with that additional bit of anonymity as well, it's just kind of turbocharged, some of our darker instincts. Where there's murder, there's usually drugs. So tell me about the silk road. Yes, so probably the most infamous use of this dark net is the silk road and other websites just like it, which are essentially like Amazon or eBay, but for mainly illicit drugs. So back in 2009, Russell Brick,

who I think then was maybe in his late 20s, realized that this kind of dark net site, excuse me, was not two dozen one, it's 2011. And so this dark net work could possibly be the place to set up a completely anonymous online market for anything. He realized that if you had the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, you had anonymity using the special tool browser

and the website itself couldn't be shut down by the authorities. You could have a perfect plaque market online. And that's what he did. And over the course of a couple of years, hundreds of thousands of drug deals were done on the Silk Road. And it works just like Amazon or eBay. So we are talking about hundreds of vendors competing for thousands and thousands of customers. And they did that by having glossy pictures of the drugs they were selling with product descriptions, crucially, with user reviews.

So just like Amazon or eBay, once you've got your product, you would give it a score out of five. And this all made the market incredibly competitive. And so what happened was people were starting to produce better and better products for cheap and cheap prices, just like any competitive market does and so by two thousand thirteen two thousand fourteen the silk road was a place where people could get any drug they could possibly imagine usually a far higher quality and cheaper cost and far easier and in a far more consumer friendly way

than they ever would have been able to do offline and that's why it became so incredibly popular i was just say that's why it became so incredibly popular. I was just going to say that's the interesting part of that because, I mean, let's say you do use drugs rather than go to some back alley and deal with a shady drug dealer in a bad part of town, you just get them in your mailbox or, you know, a PO box you set up or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So there is a redeeming social quality to it, to some degree.

Well, there's a potentially very big redeeming social quality, which is that the drugs are better, but that doesn't just mean they're nicer, it means they're safer. Because they're less likely to be cut with all sorts of substances, people can predict the dose they're likely to get, so they're likely to overdose. You don't have people hanging around on street corners. There's a lot of possible social benefits of a competitive marketplace. And it's not just a Silk Road. I mean, there's about two dozen markets now, just like the Silk Road.

There's still an operation, and the Silk Road was shut down in 2013. But behind it, like a hydra has had this now many more. Yet, if never quite as simple as that with a dark net, because yes, there are those redeeming features and possible harm reduction, but of course, what it also does is make more drugs more available to more people, and that includes really young people. So, if you're 14, 15 years old and you can suddenly get hold of any drug in the world without even leaving your house, there's going to be some people that are going

to try to do that. And that could be really, really dangerous. And it's not just drugs that were being sold there. Yeah, the drugs were the most well-known, the most popular, but stolen data, counterfeit money, fake passport, and on some sites, firearms as well. Once you create these unregulated marketplaces, yeah, there are lots of benefits to certain people, but there's definitely some serious risks that come with it.

Let's go back a second to the murder site, the murder for higher site, because I just asked you a question about redeeming social quality, and you kind of argue that there's a redeeming social quality to a site like this in your book in terms of giving power to the masses, not letting an elected official do harm intentionally to those over here. Well, I mean, I didn't say that was a redeeming feature of it. These persons who came up with it, Jim Bell in an essay, which is called a Faffination Politics, a radical libertarian, said, if we create these assassination markets, no public official would ever dare step our line,

because they'll just get assassinated by a crowd-funded murderer. So he thought that this was the tool for a radical libertarian revolution. He basically said in his essay about this, no public official would ever dare stand for office because they'd be too terrified of the people. So for the libertarians, maybe there was a redeeming feature, but I'm afraid, personally, that is for me anyway, significantly outweighed by the possibility of getting people murdered. Right. There's a lot of libertarian ideas in a lot of this, especially in the method you use to pay for drugs or

murder or whatever else it might be, which is Bitcoin. Can you explain a little bit about Bitcoin and how it works? Yeah, well, I mean, the whole of the intimate, people don't realize it, but the whole of the internet really is a libertarian fantasy. It makes censorship really difficult. It makes governments far less powerful, these are the people. The silk road itself, a kind of unsensurable,

uncontrollable black market, is partly for the people that were behind it, a libertarian political project to sort of defang the governments of the world. So there's a lot of libertarian thinking and you're right. Chief among them is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which invented in 2009 is a sort of form of digital cash. It's a way you can send, I mean, a Bitcoin is just a string of numbers that you can send to other people who downloaded a wallet onto their computer and nobody is really in control or in charge

of it. The way that it works is that there is a public ledger of every transaction that's made between people that have the Bitcoin wallet, which is all publicly recorded, but it's all pseudonymous, so we don't know anybody's names or details, we just know money has been moved, and that public ledger makes sure that the system knows how much every person on the network has at any one time. So it's kind of difficult to fraud or it's practically impossible to fraud. But nobody really is in control of that ledger because it's distributed across hundreds of different computers that each retain their own identical copy of that database.

own identical copy of that database. Now I know that might sound like a slightly complicated thing but it works brilliantly well. Computers check all transactions that are taking place every few minutes once they verify that they're all correct. Everybody else is database is automatically updated and that is the reason it's so beloved of libertarians because no one's in control of it everyone kind of is, no governments can control it because it's distributed over thousands of different computers and it's a currency that is quite difficult to track and trace even though there is a public database recording all the Bitcoin transactions, because it's all pseudonymous and isn't tied necessarily to real world people, you can't really see who's doing what on it.

But it's still pseudonymous, not anonymous, so there's still a bit of a way to get to the person that may own the bitcoins by tracking that ledger. Exactly. So let's say I have a wallet on my laptop and the wallet has a number one and you have a wallet which is number two. I don't know who you are, you don't know who I am and the government doesn't know who either of us are, but they know that wallet one has sent wallet to a Bitcoin, and that might give them something, that might help them piece together some kind of puzzle that they're trying to work out, because that piece of information is available. But it's just a pain in the ass for them,

because they've got to try to figure out who to in that transaction. And you've got to remember that one of the great benefits of this as well, of course, is speed and efficiency. Have you ever tried sending money overseas? Right. Yeah, guy, it's slowly. There's big charges attached. And with Bitcoin, it takes a fraction of a second to send Bitcoin to anyone in the world

and it doesn't cost you anything. I mean, that's an amazing thing. And so a lot of business people, the huge potential in Bitcoin, that's an amazing thing and so a lot of business people see huge potential in Bitcoin as becoming a really valuable assistant of currency. So we've talked about murder and drugs. What's missing? Almost depressing and then even this. Yes, sex, of course. And porn. And you know, a lot of the porn is created here in the United States

in states like California and Florida. And those states have been tightening their regulations against the porn industry. I imagine as more and more of these states strengthen their laws against what you can do and what you can't do, more of it ends up in the dark web. Naturally, yes. I mean, it's a sort of place where anything that is illegal on the normal internet or in the real world can often find a home. But bear in mind, the internet more generally, of course, is a place where you put regulations out in the real world

and it sort of pushes that behavior into the online one. And of course, we're talking about some of the more insidious types of pornography, like child porn. Yep. Yep. I was surprised to learn from your book that there was a time when child porn was actually not illegal. Yeah, so it's actually quite funny to, when you look at the subject historically, there's

some pretty shocking things that I don't think people realize how recent it's become a matter of interest for the authorities. I mean, the age of consent in the UK in the 19th century was 12 years old, you know, and this was not considered to be a major problem in the night for some countries. In the 1970s, in Scandinavian countries, all forms of pornography was legal. So you could go and buy a child pornography in a shop over the counter. But the difference was back in those days, of course it's quite different now in most countries, is that the supply of this material was relatively limited.

In the very early 90s, the FBI said that they basically cracked the problem because they knew the supply networks. They knew the number of magazines and images that were in circulation, which was in the hundreds or the thousands, and they felt like they were on top of the problem, but the introduction of digital technology completely changed the problem, because it made it possible for people to create, share and collect thousands and hundreds of thousands, and then sometimes even millions of images very quickly and very easily. And so, suddenly, what seems to be a manageable problem is now something that I'm afraid to say is almost completely uncontrollable. And it's interesting in terms of how easy it is to stumble into this sort of a crime if you're playing around on the dark web or the dark net.

Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. Yeah, the websites that have links to another than to another and that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a logic of a lot of internet behavior is that you You see it on Google as well on YouTube, you know that you You sort of get stuck in this rut where you start clicking links which take you to another link which take you to another link and you almost don't really compute where you're going and it's a similar thing with

With illegal pornography in the dark now. I mean, you can very quickly and very easily find yourself in some pretty dark places. And you might not have gone there intentionally looking for it, but through a combination of morbid curiosity and whatever else, you end up there. And so that is one of the big problems with this issue now. That I think probably 20 years ago, people that were interested in viewing illegal pornography had to make some kind of concerted effort to go about getting it, which limited the number of people that did it.

Now it's rather more easy, it's simpler, you can do it almost accidentally, which means that more and more people are doing exactly that. And even though it is a massive problem on the dark net, partly because websites there are almost impossible to censor, and so what happens is these places, these illegal pornography sites become a little bit like warehouses where images are posted. People then download the images onto their own hard drives and then when those websites are removed that sometimes they are you've got thousands of people with copies around the world that can re-upload them again and so it kind of decentralizes the supply of this material, but it's not just the dark net. I mean, I think an equally big, if not bigger problem, is young people who are

taking pictures of themselves and sharing them, whether they're sharing them on their social media profiles or to their boyfriends or girlfriend without really thinking about it. And those images often find their way onto a legal pornography site. And these young kids don't realise the kind of consequences of what they're actually doing. And when you're a 13, 14 year old with a smartphone, I'm so glad I'm not growing up at that age with a smartphone because I've had done stupid things with it too. And you've got to realize when you're that age,

you're not thinking in the same way. And so I get, I really worry that we spend a lot of time worrying about dark, dark, stuff, and illegal pornography. And then, you know, 13, 14-year-old kids are just sharing millions of these images all the time without realizing how serious it could be. So I don't know. I get asked what the answer is, and it's quite an easy try, one, just to say, oh, more

education, because that doesn't always work. You know, I mean, it just doesn't. So it's just a very, very serious problem that we, that I don't think has a very obvious or simple solution. This brings us to the darkest of the dark web. And what is known on the dark web as a red room, oftentimes a chat room, much like what is known on the regular web as a cam room, but instead of paying a cam model to perform sexually explicit acts, what you order in these red rooms is instead torture. One of the most famous red rooms goes by the acronym, Alicia. It features just audio, and much of it is hard to make out.

But listening leaves you with quite an eerie feeling. You're not sure exactly what you just heard. 2011. the Philippines. An Australian-born man known as Peter Gerard Scully flees to this tropical paradise after fleasing dozens of property investors back home for a total of approximately $2.7 million. He leaves behind his wife and two kids, but he's an entrepreneur, and he has a new business idea. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, 52-year-old Peter Scully is a man with no moral fiber. And what he's about to do is so outrageous that even to this day, it's the stuff of internet lore.

In fact, the crimes he will commit are so egregious that the country is now reconsidering reinstituting their death penalty, specifically for this case. In the Philippines, Scully disappears from sight. The 20 investors he defrauded are eager to find him, but he is gone. A warrant is issued for his arrest, and Australian airports are instructed to nab him when he returns, but he will not be returning. He befriends a teenage Malaysian prostitute named Lynn and together they embark on one of the darkest and most impregnant ventures in modern history. The company's name is no limits fun. They will find young children and charge customers in a dark web chatroom of fee paid in Bitcoin to perform actions on these children. Actions of sexual abuse, torture, and murder.

Using children as a commodity, Scully and his young partner will abuse more than a dozen children over three years, moving frequently from one rented house to another, and employing at least four foreigners and half a dozen Filipino workers in their highly lucrative pay-per-view child pornography business. Two of the most famous videos, or infamous videos, they produced, are called Daisy's Destruction and Dafu Love. These videos are, to this day, still available on distant corners of the dark web. And make no mistake what we're talking about here isn't just child pornography. It's murder.

At least one of the children used in these videos was killed by scully and buried under one of his rented house's floorboards. Because the simple act of even clicking a link to view these videos is in and of itself a very serious crime. View will admit to having seen them. There are dozens of forums where the morbid curiosity of the masses compels people to ask what occurs in these videos, or even be stupid enough to request a link. Because of the nature of these videos, I cannot verify exactly what their content is, but there is one man on YouTube that claims to know. Some retitors call him a liar and a fraud, but his videos describing the content of Dafu love has generated over 380,000 views.

So, judge for yourself. In this video, they actually have five people who murder five children in cold blood under the age of one year old. The person who created the video is actually the same person that created Daisy's destruction, Peter Scully, of no limits fun.

Now we're going to talk about how this video takes place, it takes place, and you guys excuse me if I keep pausing, this is really fucking me up. I asked a lot of people what exactly was it, what it is, and so forth on the deep web, on a question of and answer saying, and I've gotten pretty much the same response from everybody. So, it's let me know that people who have seen this, the story is pretty much corroborated and they're true.

It was all, the video takes place in an empty house where five adults are standing around. Three men, one of them being Peter Scully and two of his girlfriends. One of the people that were listed there on the video is actually a man by the name of Jose Luis Hernandez Escobar, Spanish National. And of course, Peter Scully himself and an unknown man participated along with the

her Scully's two girlfriends and a horrible act that took place probably about December or just a little bit before then and an empty house. The video starts when if the cameras turned on you can see two of the men sitting at the table drinking beer. They begin to talk for a couple of minutes and that's when the cameraman has to go out of the house and hearing it. They start hearing on a child that is outside who is wearing some kind of duct tape over her mouth with the dog leash and she has handcuffs on her ankles and her arms. She looked to be around nine years old. Once he finishes, it shows two women arriving with the mask on,

both of them being sculley's girlfriends. Each of them had two bags. They proceeded to open the bags that contained babies who will be the victims of the Surin Disact. They then proceeded to place the bags that contained babies, who will be the victims of the Surrender's Act. They then proceeded to place the children on the floor. Afterwards they put some newspaper under them. While the two women do this, Scully proceeds to go and grab a toolbox from the trunk of

a blue car. The box was very large and looked very heavy. The cameraman walks around filming the house, the two women finishing up placing the babies on the floor. They have them all sitting on top of the newspapers. At that point, everyone comes into the room. One of the women takes the chair that you use basically to feed babies like high chairs and stuff and starts putting the babies one by one in there. And then she starts kissing them and filling them up pretty much in a sexual nature. The cameraman shows the tour box as always opening it up. He takes a chisel and a hammer

out. One of the women is seeing slapping the baby, then kissing where she slapped his sexualis. They all gather around the babies and then start to rape them. This went on for some time, around 45 minutes to an hour until everyone claimed to be done. At that point, one of the women then takes out a chisel and a hammer and gives it to Scully. Scully places it on top of the head of the first child. Scully then ferociously hits the child with the chisel on the baby's head. What comes next is a piercing cry of the baby. He does it over and over for around a minute until the baby finally stops crying and the body stops moving. As the baby was laying there lifeless, Scully was heard saying, wow, that little bitch had a lot of fighting hurt. As they record a stream of blood coming out of her head and her ears, the

next baby is taken and smacked violently to the ground. The other two men that were there with Scully, proceeded to take a chainsaw and they grabbed a baby. They start laughing as the baby is screaming. They then take the baby and tie her feet and just basically just start cutting her up. The babies did in seconds. The remains of the baby are shown to be taken and thrown out of the house into the backyard where there was a dog city. The next thing that happens is even worse. Next to two women came on stage and everyone takes a drink and they began to whip the

remaining babies into walls. They then take the baby's feet and start fighting them as if they were having a pillow fight. During that time one of the women started getting angry and yelled louder for everyone at the table to keep drinking and drink more Once you seen they had Her and the other girl started fighting with the babies back and forth And they kept smacking the faces together and they had together until the skulls opened up and eventually the babies died The two dead babies were then thrown to the ground Much like children with them

wanted to us. They then take the last baby that is alive, lays him down. They then put scissors in his stomach and are stuck in and out over and over again until an opening is made. They then put their hands in and start to pull out the intestines of the baby. Skully tells the woman he is not satisfied, but he is not impressed. So one of the women put scissors into the eyes of the baby. The baby collapses and dies about 30 seconds after that. This is where the video ends.

On February 20, 2015, after a four-year global manhunt, Peter Scully was arrested in his rented house in Mandalay Belay City and charged with numerous crimes, including child molestation, the torture and sexual abuse of at least eight girls, including an 18-month-old infant, and the murder of an 11-year-old Filipina girl. It is reported that Scully would make the children dig their own graves before abusing them. In a jailhouse interview with Australia's 60 minutes, Peter Scully exhibits no remorse and appears almost defiant in the face of a possible death sentence. So when you were on the run, how great was the urge?

To find young girls. How did they ever head a urge? It's not like hungry dog that's got a feed every three hours or four hours. It's not like that. And it's really not. It's almost not a note. Oh, I did. Yeah, good question. Yeah. Why do you rape young children? The answer is, I don't know. I don't know the real answer. Well, why don't we hazard a guess? No, I don't hazard a guess. Is it because you're deprived?

Priced. The right ear. The ear, at me, you do it. What I'm looking for is the real reason why I took that road. And what drove me to it. Because in Australia I wasn't like that, in the first six, six, 12 months here I wasn't like that. So what drove me that way? That's what I wanted to know, and that's what I wanted to tell everyone. That is, I'm writing that every day I've been here since April 2011, and what has happened,

what influenced me, What influenced me? What made me take that road and set this road? All the way until the present? Would you consider that a confession? Yeah. Why would you abuse an 18-month-old child? Well, for a start I didn't. And...

Well, that's not true, is it? It is true. No, I'm sorry, you're wrong. Oh, I'm sorry. How old was she? How old was she, Peter? You are confusing... I don't want to get into the rest. How old was she? How old was she Peter? You are confusing, I don't want to get into dress. How old was she? How old was she?

I don't want to get into any of that yet. Okay, whether that child was 18 months, two years, three years, or perhaps we're mixing it up with a nine-year-old child, or an 11-year-old girl, 12-year-old girl, you've done it to all of them, haven't you? All right, I will go back to this now. No comment. So, Cal's way out, haven't you? All right, I will go back to this now. No comment. So, Cal is way out, isn't it?

It's a realistic way out. So, what was the reaction when you were arrested? Did you feel as pathetic as you looked? Thank you. I didn't think about that. You told me earlier that you were a pedophile in Australia. Is that true? No victims in Australia.

Of course not. What about your own children? No, no way. Oh, that shocks you, does it? It shocks me. It shocks me that you asked her. We believe that there is still one girl missing. Where is she? For now on my answer, everything will be in the journal. You can keep asking questions, but that will be my answer will be everything will be in the journal. You can keep asking questions but that will be my answer.

Is she alive? Everything will be in the journal. Anyway, are we almost done? Because we're going round into circles. I'm not finished yet. What we're interested in is whether you have any remorse, whether you admit to what you've done, which is sexual abuse, and of course murder.

Hmm, of course every mouse. Why, of course. I think people don't have very mouse. No, I'm asking you, as somebody who is a repeater fender here, who went on the run, who's only here because you've been caught, not because you've turned yourself in. At what point do you actually feel sorry for what you've done? Is it at the point where you're captured?

Oh, that's a good question, actually. That's a good question, not on. That's a very good question. At what point do you feel remorse? I think there's different degrees of remorse all the way through. But I think your greatest remorse can, when you finally realize the extent of what you've done. And at what point was that?

At what point was that? I can't enter that honestly yet. Why isn't it the point where you're actually raping somebody, violently torturing them? Why isn't it at the point when you kill a child? Why isn't it then? Why don't you realize the extent of what you've done at that point? Maybe you should ask a psychiatrist. I'm asking the name, you did it. Yeah.

What is it about you, Peter, that hates children and women so much? I might have dressed up in the journal. It just got crazier and crazier for you and sicker and sicker. And you'd already committed murder. Where was it going to end? Like, where, what was the next level for you and sicker and sicker and you'd already committed murder. Where was it going to end? Like, where, what was the next level for you? There was the next level. And as a parent, how can you reconcile what you've done to children?

Next question, please. Do you accept that you were ruining their lives as soon as you came in touch with them? And a journal. except that you were ruining their lives as soon as you came in touch with him. And a journal. So you really have most info for these people, for these kids. That is definitely a journal. I think we are finished. I think we are.

Ah, I think we are. It seems like based on the history of child pornography that the authorities eventually stopped going after the source of the material and just gave up and started going after the consumers of the material. And because of that nowadays, clicking a single link, clicking the wrong link can be a very serious crime. Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of people there's a strange disinhibition effect online where I think people somehow, subconsciously, don't feel like

clicking on a link is a serious crime because all you're doing is pushing a button on your mouse. Right. And so people don't seem to realize that just by sitting at your computer, you're actually capable of committing an incredibly serious crime indeed. But it doesn't feel like it is that because it's a very simple physical act. So I think that's one of the things that people need to try to learn, that people need to realize. But I'm afraid we're never going to be able to get rid of this problem entirely in the political government say. I just don't think it's possible. As we were working on this episode, a story broke

which has an avalanche of political and legal ramifications related to the way authorities prosecute crimes such as child pornography. I'm sure that as a citizen of a Western country that touts justice and liberty, you wouldn't want to think that your own government is doing harm to its own citizens, and more specifically to children. But that's exactly what happened. The over-zealousness of authorities to catch the bad guy combined with the lazy method of going after consumers instead of producers of such material had the effect of instead making authorities themselves the bad guy in early 2015 the federal bureau of investigation the FBI seized a dark website called playpen that featured sexually explicit

pictures of children, but instead of shutting it down immediately they obtained a search warrant from a federal judge in Virginia that allowed them to keep the site operating for 30 days on a government-controlled server in order to catch more people downloading the images. Approximately 22,000 images, videos and links to child pornography that more than 100,000 people accessed were kept on that government- controlled server. They used it to hack into the computers that accessed the material and obtain their identities. With this information, they filed charges against people such as 39-year-old Darryl Glenn Pollack, who was indicted in 2014, as well as 180 other people nationwide.

It was called Operation Pacifier, and some legal experts think it went too far. Since doing this, made the FBI themselves guilty of exploiting children. The US government was essentially conducting a cost-benefit analysis, weighing damage to children against catching people who downloaded child porn. Douglas Anderson, chair of the University of North Texas Philosophy and Religion Department, said this in an interview with USA Today, quote, it's a moral conundrum for anyone who takes the view that we are committed to protecting them in all ways.

They're weighing it against these kids' lives. You'd have to have something pretty overwhelming to offset damaging more people. It would have to be awfully extreme to allow even one child to be harmed. One of the other problems I think in the years ahead is going to be as more developing world countries get better access online, including to the dark net, where there may be isn't quite as strong a police presence or quite so skilled a police presence at digital policing and in some cases bar higher poverty and in some places

different cultural attitudes towards the age of consent. We might see more things like this, not necessarily the case that you've given, but more instances of child abuse of various types taking place online. So it's not a rosy picture, is it? I mean, there are big problems ahead. There was a long history, though, leading up to the emergence of tour and the dark net. And it seems like the creation of such a place was inevitable. In your book, you describe what happens to a cam model when she wanders into the wrong use net group. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, there've been people sometimes forget that in a sense we we kind of been here before. And in the early 90s when internet culture, early internet culture was just starting to take off in youths, net groups or in bulletin board systems, all of these things were already taking place. You already had people web-coming, performing live sex shows in various different types of rooms. You had huge amounts of internet trolling, which had become a very, very important subculture.

Illegal pornographers were going on to early internet showrooms, to share it in the show. Terrorists were, I mean, it was all of the same problems that we see now. We saw in the early 90s. It's just they've become a little bit more mainstream now. Jamie Bartlett describes the sinister nature of some of these internet places such as 4chan, where a collection of geeks and outcasts can bully, harass, or even destroy someone's life all from the comfort of their own homes, sitting behind a computer keyboard. Yeah, what happened with this one girl was that she was doing that

like so many others before her, but she kind of was doing it in the wrong chat room. She was doing it in a kind of no-holds-barred chat room. And people were asking her to take her clothes off and she was doing it, and they were putting in requests since she was doing it, and everyone was enjoying requests and she was doing it and everyone was enjoying it and then she accidentally or were they asked for her first name to write it across her body which she did. And then they asked whether she was on any medication and could she show them the bottle

of medication which she did and that just suddenly changed everything because then they decided the people that were watching this that with that bit of information her first name and the address of her doctor, which was on the label of the bottle that she shared They could probably work out who she was in real life because she was doing all this on the assumption that she was completely anonymous and It took him about 10 minutes because there was lots of them working together

to find out where she lived, what her full name was, what university she went to, what her address was, what her phone number was, and they found her Facebook page, and they found her Twitter account, and they even,

and this was kind of all happening and all this information was being shared in the same room that she was in so she was watching this happen but she was completely powerless to stop it. They put together a kind of montage of all the different photos that she'd been sharing on that page and then sent it to all of her Facebook friends. So that includes her parents and then sent it to all of her Facebook friends. So, and that includes her parents, her parents' friends, one of her school teachers. And she just made that one little mistake.

And you know what was funnily enough about that story? That was kind of a story that got me to want to write this book, because I was in Fawcchan, like a lot of people scrolling around F around Fort Chan because there's always weird and interesting things happen in there and then suddenly saw this happen and I saw it happen live and I was just thinking I can't believe this is I can't believe what I'm seeing here and I thought I need to be able to warn people that this sort of thing takes place because of let's be honest young for the gonna make mistakes and they're gonna go to websites and places

that maybe they shouldn't but i would rather they were a little bit sort of ready for what it was like if they do what is it about trolling that people find so appealing. It goes back a little bit to what I said before about why anonymity brings out the worst in some people. Because you've got different types of internet trolls. You have people that consider it to be an enjoyable, creative pastime. And they'll spend hours trying to work out artistically how to really push someone's buttons and get them upset. And the thing that's been enjoyable and creative exercise and some of

the trolling that you see is actually really quite funny and really quite skillfully done. And then for other people, it's just poking up boundaries and pissing people off just for the sake of it, which frankly, well, have you ever played knockdown ginger when you were a kid? No, what is that? Notking on a door. Maybe that's an English expression.

Notking on a front door and then running away. Oh, yeah. We call that something different in the US. What do you call that? I don't think I can say that on the show. Right, right. I'll tell you afterwards. Okay, yeah, I live over to that. So why did you do that? Why did why did because it was enjoyable to upset someone else for a laugh. So there's a little bit of that going on as well. And then there's just, there's some people that are just bullies and they're angry bullies and they like going on there to upset people, but some of the people that

do this consider it to be something of a political gesture. You know, we, free speeches under a tack, people can't say what they really think. Being an internet troll and saying crude and rude and offensive things is a vital way in which we keep the boundaries of free speech alive. Someone's got to say offensive stuff to make sure that we, the rest of us, understand that it's okay to be rude and offensive. Anonymously? And I have spoken anonymously. The sometimes would their real name, but usually anonymously. And I've met plenty of internet trolls who consider what they're doing to be something

of a sort of a political gesture, that all the rest of us benefit from. So this is a thing. When you hear about internet trolls, the image that you get is of an angry person who's a bully, who's screaming hate. And yes, there are some people doing that, but there are plenty of other people that are doing it for slightly different reasons too. Of course, trolling can also have dramatic consequences. That can be deadly serious. Tell me about Mitchell Henderson. So the young man, I think he's a teenager who killed himself.

And how I'm not sure that members of Bore Chan had found the story about him. And he found some note that he'd left. I think he was reported in the news that had mentioned an iPhone or an iPod that he was upset about and they'd had somehow concocted this story that this man had killed himself because he'd lost his iPod or he'd had his iPod stolen. And they started creating all of these memes, these images and texts about Mitchell and his lost diapod and that's why he killed himself. And they started, you know, it became hilarious for the people involved, they thought, but they

were able to find the details of his address and his parents and started phoning his parents and sending images to his parents and I think one person even turned up to his parents house and tried to give an iPod to his father. I mean, and this is where trolling which some people just thought was funny and humorous even if very dark can be so devastating for the people that are on the receiving end of it. But I don't think the people doing it always realize that. And Fort Chan has a kind of culture of being as offensive, as rude, as nasty, as possible, and they will almost compete sometimes to do that.

And unfortunately, that one upmanship has led to some pretty terrible incidents like this. And also, a case where members of the fortune had managed to find in a police file, the image of a car crash that involved a young woman that was killed, which they managed to then send via email and via social media to that girl's parents. So, there's been some unbelievably dark things that have happened as a result of internet trolling. And so this is the problem with it. It's a bit of a spectrum.

And sometimes it's, you know, offensiveness that's useful and valuable in political conversation. And it goes all the way up to essentially bullying grieving parents and worse. And worse, there's the case of William Francis Meltchert-Dinkel, who basically was trying to get some troubled people, including a girl named Nadia, to try to kill herself on cam.

Yeah, I wouldn't even know whether I'd call that trolling, I mean, because it's so horrific, but this is another kind of weird, quite dark, well, very dark, subculture online, which isn't on the dark, next on the normal internet, which is suicide forums. And there are lots of suicide forums where people go, usually anonymously, and talk about their fantasies for committing suicide. They talk about methods to commit suicide. And sometimes they even get involved in a pact where they agree with somebody else to commit suicide at the same time. And one individual on these forums

had been talking to people in these forums, pretending that he was a young nurse who could help people who wanted to commit suicide, do it in a fairly safe way. And he convinced some other people that he was planning to commit suicide too. He wasn't a young nurse, he was a man in the 50s and we know I think of at least two cases including the woman Nadia and there's also a British man who was in his mid-twenties

who thinking that they were committing suicide in a pact with a friend, a friendly young woman that they'd met online and doing it live on camera, were actually being completely tricked by this guy who was not committing suicide, who was just getting a kick out of making other people do it. I mean, and that really was one of the darkest things I saw anywhere, and that was on the normal internet. And that's a terrible thing and these suicide forums, like many of these darker places, can be really quite dangerous and people can get misled and they can be abused and they can end up doing all sorts of terrible things but there was the other side of these

suicide forums was that some people found them really helpful? Some people said they had their lives saved as a result of going onto these forums, because they're able to find people to talk to, people who understood them. So there's always another side to the story. This is the last question. Do you think the nature of the dark web says something about the future of humanity? Nice easy one to finish with, though.

It's a big question, of course. I've talked almost nonstop here about all the terrible things that we're doing, but I did, I haven't talked about all the brilliant things that people are doing with these tools. All of the amazing journalism, the whistle blowing, the activism, the people that are using anonymity and enhancing or privacy and enhancing tools for great good infaciity. And that's part of the story too. And all of us, especially as more and more of our personal

information gets hacked or gets stolen or we're worried about surveillance from private companies or from government. We suddenly will come to realise that we all do need some degree of privacy online. And we will come to use many of the tools and techniques that these people are using in our everyday lives. And so I think it says something very important about the future of humanity, which is I think

more and more people are going to use all of these tools and techniques that we will all come to see privacy as far more valuable than we do today. The dark net and other things like it will go mainstream, which will have huge benefits than any other, but it's also going to mean, unfortunately, all the problems that I've talked about, I can really only see getting worse. So we're going to have a kind of more turbulent future, where many of us will benefit greatly from the freedom that the Internet offers us, but many more people will also abuse that privacy for criminal or nefarious purposes.

Jamie Bartlett, thank you so much for joining us. No thanks for having me. Jamie Bartlett's book is called The Dark Net, Inside the Digital Underworld. You can also check out his TED Talk, which at present has just under 2 million views. If you like the show, please tell your friends about it. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And don't forget about our Patreon. Patreon is a website that allows our listeners to donate just a few bucks a month to help keep the show going. In return, we give you perks throughout the year, including merchandise and bonus content such as Sword and Scale Plus, a condensed version of this program available only to supporters at the $5 level or higher.

If you like something, help support it. Go to patreon.com slash sword and scale for more details. That'll do it for this episode, episode 84 of sword and scale. Thank you for joining us and until next time. Stay off the dark net and stay safe. Hey man, my name is Andrew, calling from Eastern Washington. I just got down with the two-parter Luca Magnata series. I'm a couple years behind. That's one of the reasons why I like your show. It's It's condensed that it's not topical in a time frame. I guess for the lack of a better word You can listen to it anywhere Murders of old and new are still fresh to this day. That was very disturbing. I remember the story

but I can't figure out what's more disturbing. I've been out of the loopless art of the internet for the last 10 years. One of the last things I saw was through growing one cup and the reaction of most me and everybody. I was highly disturbed with people who go and seek this murder out when you posted it on Facebook. I don't know, I'm torn. Is it any different from me wanting to listen to your podcast, you know, seeking something out, putting an edge to your day? I guess that's why 4chan and all those things are out there and people want to go find them. They're there. I just found the reactions disturbing.

They're all in their teens, early 20s. Obviously they don't have kids. Maybe that's what I find disturbing about it out kids. Um, yeah. Good podcast, man. I've listen to about 30 different podcasts. Give you a lot of mood monthly, daily, you're a couple of times a month and keep up the good work. By the way, your show is very well produced. Maybe a little bit less bad music. That's okay, interstit interestingly. It sets the mood. You gotta get chill, man. Keep up to get work. ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿� you