Dr. Nicolas Dubin Caught by the FBI

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he said he knew viewing and downloading kiddy porn to be illegal....
he never said he did that....

Those media articles are presented to appear to say what you believed. Not true.

Maybe this is what happens to outspoken aspies and activists. Doesnt surprise me if the feds set him up, not like its the first time for them....

People who photography naked kids and molest them should be arrested, they are criminals...

But "downloaders"? you can find the most insane s**t on the internet, and it's so easy to have access to anything with two clicks. Would you want to be jailed because you clicked on the wrong s**t?
I had a friend who used to collect gorish pictures of freak accidents and car crashes. Man that guy was a weirdo. I, myself, love watching "fail compilation" where tons of stupid people get hurt. Am I a criminal now? I love horror movies too, sue me. It didn't make me want to behead anyone so far though.
Humans are voyeurs, get over it.

And basically for those saying that "we should arrest them for what they would potentially do", then it legimitizes "Thought Crimes".

This wouldn't be the first time the media has lied about someone.

Thread moved from General Autism Discussion to Autism Politics, Activism and Media Representation.

If you look on the Michigan Sex Offender registry you find that Mr. Dubin was registered, for the first time, on 4/13/2013.

It gives no new details - but him having to register is clear enough.

It's a real disappointment because his book on anxiety is very good. However, in light of this development, I found the section entitled "Shadow Dancing", within that book, deeply disturbing. I think I would have been disturbed with it anyway.

Okay, I am convinced - the registration http://www.mipsor.state.mi.us/PSORSearc ... d=20049375 has a mugshot which looks like the same person. I assume that mipsor.state.mi.us is genuine and a registration is hard to fake.

He actually wrote a new book about his personal experience called, “The Autism Spectrum, Sexuality, and the Law”, along with Tony Atwood and Isabelle Henault.

The book came out in 2014, 4 years after this thread was started in response to his being charged with possession of child porn. I can not find out what eventually happened to him legally. I hope the book was not written to justify his own possible pedophilia.

You know, I’ve actually read this book. And in it he talks about how he was arrested, the events from his past that lead up to it, and his experience in the criminal justice system. He also explains that his problem is not that he is a pedophile, but that his sexuality was frozen in time since upper elementary school. I highly recommended this book to everyone on this thread, as well as to everyone else here on WP.

Um, hello? Child porn is wrong because children cannot consent to sexual acts. Also, it exploits these vulnerable individuals for these criminals’ perverted sexual gain and leaves them traumatized. How hard is that for y’all to understand?

Dubin is no angel here. He has a doctorate in Psychology, so he knows that child porn is illegal. And he says that he found most of it by accident, which is NOT possible. He’d have to deliberately search for it to find that much of it.

I call BS on this man.

I hope you're correct that child porn is hard to find NOW.

However, in the not-too-distant past, I recall reading lots of complaints, by a variety of people with a variety of points of view, about how the big popular porn sites like Pornhub weren't being careful enough to keep under-age porn off their sites. Googling "Pornhub child porn" just now has led me to relevant news stories here, here, here, and here.

So Dubin's story about running into a lot of child porn accidentally was indeed plausible at the time his porn-viewing occurred.

Also, while child porn is clearly wrong, what is probably not intuitively obvious to a lot of people (unless they happen to have studied the issue) is the extreme penalties for merely viewing child porn images online. Surely the wrath of the law ought to focus primarily on those who actually make child porn photos/videos and/or display them on a website or otherwise distribute them?

I would favor a law requiring people who encounter child porn images online to report them, but it doesn't seem to me that merely encountering but failing to report such images should result in long prison terms and having to register as a sex offender.

It seems to me very unfair that Pornhub is now being merely sued, rather than its executives arrested and charged with crimes, whereas a lot of people who merely viewed under-age porn on Pornhub and other similar websites have had their computers seized and then got sent to prison for multi-year sentences and required to register as sex offenders.

Also it is generally rather creepy and "1984"-style Big Brother-ish for the police to be spying on individual people's internet connections to try to catch people viewing child porn.

Worse, it is highly likely that cops have sometimes been arresting the wrong people entirely. For example, a lot of cops seem to think I.P. addresses are unique to individual machines, which they are not. (See Network address translation.) So it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of totally innocent people -- not even occasional accidental viewers of child porn -- have had their homes ransacked by cops with no-knock warrants, their computers seized, and then "evidence" planted on their computers by cops who were too embarrassed to admit they were wrong.

Where I disagree with Dubin is his making what happened to him an autism-specific issue. To me it is a much more general government-overreach, privacy rights, and general human rights issue, probably harming lots of NT's too.

For more about this and related issues, see various articles linked in the thread Child porn law (& enforcement) reforms needed?, which I posted in the "Adult Autism Issues" section about a year ago.

The media just needs to run there mouth , no matter the topic..

They've just got better at running it on certain topics

Are you defending Dr. Dubin, or do you just want the Media to remain silent about his crimes?

I read once many of these illegal sites are hosted in someone’s basement and have poor security.

So it’s quite easy for the cops to hack them to get admin details of IP addresses or credit card details used to access them.

Which they do.

About two decades back a huge number of peados we’re caught via their credit card details on one such site including a THE WHO rock band member.

Pornhub is one of the world’s most popular adult porn websites I believe it’s up there with Twitter and Facebook as the top ten global most popular sites and it has a strict anti illegal content policy despite some rare things falling through their net.

For these reasons it’s unlikely the cops would hang out there even if there was an illegal link that was reported to them. It would be very difficult to prove intent in a court of law since the defendant could claim with a lot of plausibility that he visited pornhub to view adult porn and must have just inadvertently clicked on something that he misunderstood to be legal or poorly worded.

Many of those convicted are found to have thousands of images on their computer and no real excuse.

Assuming he was found guilty he’s probably just another dirty old peado that thought he would get away with it.

Not so rare, apparently, at least until just last year. As reported in the news stories linked in my previous post, Pornhub did not, until just last year, have any reasonably reliable means of enforcing its policy, however strict the wording of its policy might have been.

IMO Pornhub took an inexcusably long time to get around to requiring uploads to be from verified users only.

Also, as detailed in various older news stories I linked to in this thread, there were a lot of complaints by people who had great difficulty getting Pornhub and other big porn sites to delete images of their own younger selves. This too is inexcusable IMO.


Even thousands of privately viewed images are not, in terms of direct harm to the children, equal to the actual making or displaying/distributing of even just one pornographic image of even just one child.

IMO there should be a small penalty for having these images and failing to report them -- the harm being the failure to report. But the penalties we how have are way too draconian -- and typically are not even justified in terms of the one actual harm (failure to report) of passively viewing or downloading these images.

I would also say, IMO, that any law requiring people to snitch on other people is a potentially very dangerous step toward totalitarianism. In some cases, e.g. where the well-being of a child is at stake, snitch laws may be a necessary evil. So I would say that we do need to have some snitch laws, yet the intrinsic dangers of snitch laws in general should be recognized -- and can mitigated by not having extremely harsh penalties for failure to snitch.

The kinds of penalties we now have for mere "possession" of child porn were enacted during a time before the Internet became ubiquitous. The justification back then was that anyone who had child porn at all had to go out of their way to obtain it, either by making it themselves or by paying for it and thereby enabling the making of child porn.

But then, by the early 2000's or so, I'm under the impression (I don't know firsthand) that consumption of child porn became typically a much more passive activity than it was before the Internet era. If I'm not mistaken, Internet child porn is -- or at least was until very recently -- commonly shared noncommercially and available to anyone who clicks on enough relevant links.

These days, the usual justification for today's extreme penalties for "possession" of child porn is not that the person possessing it is somehow an accessory to the person making it. Rather the usual justification is, to use your words, that the person possessing it is "just another dirty old peado" -- even if they have never actually, personally molested any child. In other words, thought crime.

IMO the idea of thought crime, as a justification for any law, should be categorically rejected. What goes on between someone's ears, no matter how repugnant, should not be deemed a crime until and unless the person acts on it in a way that actually harms another person.

Another justification I've seen for the extremely harsh penalties for mere "possession" of child porn is that it's very difficult to catch actual child molesters, because the children are often intimidated into not reporting it and/or are often disbelieved when they do report it. Therefore, it is argued, the only effective way to punish child molesters it to punish them harshly for a different crime that they are also highly likely to commit, and for which they can more easily be caught, namely possession of child porn.

I would say that if someone who is accused of actually molesting children is also found to have a large collection of child porn, then said collection could justifiably be used as evidence of a greater-than-average likelihood that the person is guilty of actually molesting children too.

Nevertheless, there probably do exist lots of people who have had large collections of child porn but have never actually molested a child. Nick Dubin is probably an example of such a person, given that, as far as I am aware, no one has ever stepped forward and claimed to have been molested by him, even after he was caught with the child porn.

These days there probably exist, also, at least some people who have large collections of child porn that they didn't even personally download, but were downloaded by malware.

Its not quite the wild west where anyone can be caught with this kind of thing, the cops have a lot of tools to separate the guilty from the innocent

1. The human interpretation of delete means to destroy, the computer interpretation is to write over. So every time someone deletes something on their computer its not really deleted, rather its written over again and again. Provided the hard drive has not been replaced the cops can simply peel off the various layers of written over files all the way to the moment the computer was taken out the box & switched on for the first time. They can see what was downloaded, searched for & from which website and can distinguish between pop ups & viruses from deliberate searches.

2. IP addresses change if they are dynamic but there`s more to an IP address than what`s allocated by your ISP. Your network card is unique in the world and has its own IP address that is burned into the chip & doesnt change, this is added onto your ISP provided IP address that goes to the website & is left as a calling card. So if there is more than one device in a home that share the same ISP the website goes to your device only when you click on it. So if someone like a neighbour on your street is piggybacking on your internet doing something illegal, the cops can check the network card on the device to see if it matches that left on the downloaded site`s admin file.

One of the dirtiest words on the political right that they hate is harm reduction.

I believe there should be a safe place for over 18`s to go to view adult porn that is not contaminated with illegal material i.e children, rape, criminals & viruses. Many of the tube sites like pornhub probably fulfill this role despite the rare incidents that got through in the past.

I understand there is a feminist view that see`s adult porn as exploitation of women, but i think that is rather outdated these days since many women view adult porn themselves. The recent book & movie 50 shades of grey kind of lifted the lid on this unnoticed trend.