This cannot be emphasized enough. Normal humans can’t imagine the depravity to which child predators descend. I’ve heard stories from the teams who review content uploaded to YouTube to remove this filth and people who were just looking for a paying job end up alcoholic, suicidal and psychologically messed up for life after Only a few weeks of encountering this this stuff as part of the flagged content review process for places like YouTube and Facebook. I can only imagine the counseling required for law enforcement agents working these crimes is intense... as well as the temptation to shoot all suspects they arrest merely out of disgust.
That said: banning encryption is not the answer to this.
Yup, my guess is that child predators, by and large, are basically criminal psychopaths. I wonder how many of them only prey on kids because they're such a convenient, vulnerable target.
From what I remember the research suggests this isn't the case. But that was research for predators in general, not the ones spreading abuse images, and thus the findings in the larger group may not apply to the smaller.
It's interesting to note that this abuser was caught precisely because people looked at the images of the abuse and figured out that they had to be from the Netherlands. I suspect that this describes a non-trivial portion of successful prosecutions - especially of those responsible for a lot of abuse, as with this case.
Yes, typically it is a bunch of coincidences that allows these cases to be solved. It's incredible the scale at which they operated and how long they got away with it.
The problem is that perpetrators are not as stereotypical as people assume-- it's not the registered offender down the street, it's not the creepy guy in aviators living out of the panel van. "To Catch A Predator" really fucked up the public's perception of abuse perpetrators.
It's almost always the victim's parent/caretaker or other close relation-- but they always "seem totally normal" so nobody wants to believe it's happening and will excuse or look past all sorts of shitty behavior that, if it were performed by some random, would elicit disgust and antipathy and cause them to be run out of town.
I'm currently dealing with an abuse case. The family is uncooperative because they don't believe the evidence presented, and the victim has been coached into protecting the perpetrator. So the abuse will continue.
That said: banning encryption is not the answer to this.