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throwaway89209834 ago

Recently, through my own investigations of the Hampstead case, I was alerted to a United Arab Emirates satellite broadcasting company Yahlive . The Hampstead angle is another chapter of this book, so I won’t go into that here. Yahlive is a very important broadcasting company for the Arab world. Saudi TV channels use this company exclusively.

Several years ago I performed data recovery for a US based satellite TV company owned by a middle eastern man (clearly an arabic name and accent). This recovery was on an 8TB RAID array. Most cases someone removed a wrong disk or did something to crash the array and it just needs to be reassembled, mounted and fsck it. So the first part of recovery is examining the system logs for different things like disk/power/filesystem events. Well this system had a slew of file system errors all which showed there were video files with names that all had ages in them like "8 yo" all the way to "16 yo" and some with pornographic titles. I was able to recover the RAID part with the data on it and I checked the folder these files were in and there were thousands of these videos. I checked the folder size and it was obviously the purpose of this storage device since it over 80% of the storage space being used.

I was told I would likely find CP after enough time doing DR, so I documented what I did, per our SOP, reported it to my director and he reported it to the FBI.

I had this feeling at the time that the whole satellite thing was being used as a front to distribute CP but I just told myself it was being handed off to better people and that was all I could do to help. I'm dumbfounded the guy just acted so casual about it and didn't think anyone would notice what the dataset consisted of. I don't poke around in people's data, but couldn't justify to not do anything in this case.

I don't recall the company name but I do remember it was on the east coast since I had to coordinate between timezone differences.

I'm still in shock at the emergence of the "streaming" industry. Look at twitch, all it does is host people streaming games and it sold for a billion dollars. The hardware and internet bandwidth needed to host streaming services is readily available to the public, anyone can go rent a server these days, and you can even purchase "anonymous hosting" with bitcoin through TOR. Hell you can even rent a server hosted in a raid proof bomb bunker. For the handling of the video, there is open source software for encoding/streaming/encryption. The whole streaming thing seems to of started with "camgirls" and this idea has been around for a while now.

cantsleepawink ago

Thank you for your insights. Greatly appreciated.