I didn't click through the links described (or even have time to install Tor), but it occurs to me that one may be able to find these guys via statistical analysis of writing style.
Spider the web and then correlate less-anonymous writings with the stuff the ringleaders are saying on the Darknet.
Oh, you could catch them much more directly than that. There are technical means through which you can very easily track them down, if they make certain mistakes in their setup. On a non-technical side, it's often quite easy to social engineer people into giving you just enough information to track them (a kind of social equivalent to privilege escalation).
As part of another gig I worked on ways to track people, or more commonly to work out if two distinct users were actually the same human, and I'm almost salivating at the thought of all the potential ways authorities could bring some of these people to justice.
A while ago Anonymous hacked one of those forums and published the usernames and hashes. Apparently a lot of them where using the same usernames and passwords in another porn-related forums in the "lit" web.
Don't know if it resulted in someone being caught by the police or not, but definitely subtler methods such as statistical analysis of writing style are not the only way to get a lead from those forums.
I urge caution against amateur investigations, but it'd be interesting to see what software tools could be written to help law enforcement do a better job.
Just be careful, if you get too god at this it might be used for things you don't agree with. This is an area that I would steer completely clear of, the same way I'd never help develop chemical or biological weapons.
Are you saying that working with a very skilled person is worth sacrificing your ethical integrity? I would not hesitate for a second to deny working on things I consider against my personal beliefs even if there was both money and fame at stake.
To use the good old reductio ad absurdum, would you be willing to kill a random stranger if it meant you would get to work with Albert Einstein?
You can to a certain degree, yeah. There was a project in the UK that looked at using NLP to determine what age/gender child groomers are (to see if they were adults impersonating children in order to befriend children online). It was pretty successful (the Isis project - see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pedophile-p... for an overview). The problem is that doing this sort of thing "live" is ethically dubious - not only for the privacy of the child but also for the privacy of the potential offender (because being labelled paedophile is probably one of the worst things you can be labelled - imagine if you are falsely accused).
So yeah, you'd need a huge amount of certainty that this was "the guy", and, frankly, storing enough data about individual writing styles for comparison means it's highly unlikely (right now) that this would be possible to do from a technical perspective, and potentially ethically dubious even if the technology were there - what constitutes "public data" on the internet from a privacy and data protection perspective?
Perhaps that would work, but taking that idea one step further: I doubt that there's anything you could do to them legally, because the evidence of a similar writing style most likely wouldn't hold up in court. IANAL but I think the least you need to prosecute someone for their actions on the internet is an IP and a statement from the ISP that the IP was assigned to this users account at that very moment.
And then again I am unsure if simply visiting and contributing to such a forum could get you in any trouble, legally.
Interesting idea. Do you have any link of methods to identify people by writing style? Google didn't give me anything. To be honest I am a bit skeptical that it's possible but I'd appreciate to be proven wrong.
Spider the web and then correlate less-anonymous writings with the stuff the ringleaders are saying on the Darknet.