Caught In The Kiddie Porn Crusade
from the bungled-investigations dept
A fairly long article at Wired looks at the case of one guy who was arrested last year in the mass online kiddie porn arrests. It’s a typical Wired-style article about bungling federal agents not really understanding how computers work. They certainly paint a sympathetic portrait of the guy profiled. I can certainly see some of the points they make, but it still appears that he (at one time) had a fairly large number of child porn pictures on his computer. Certainly, there could be some explanations for how something like that happened accidentally (say, if he visited a page by accident once and it popped up a bunch of other pages, all with pictures that download to the cache), but nowhere does the article make those arguments – suggesting that this guy at least spent some time knowingly looking at child pornography, making me a lot less sympathetic to his story. The scary part in the article, though, is the fact that they charged him with “obstruction of justice” because he said he didn’t remember signing up for a Yahoo Group about child porn. That seems a bit ridiculous, and a clear attempt to intimidate him into pleading guilty to lesser charges.
Comments on “Caught In The Kiddie Porn Crusade”
childporn
For all of the guys great resume, he was looking at Child Porn. And he was too stupid to delete it afterwards.
The article kind of brushed over this becuase of his Marine/Police background.
I don’t see how somebody could “accidently” looks at lots and lots of child porn.
As far as incompetant Feds, they didn’t seem to come across that way in the article.
Re: childporn
I don’t see how somebody could “accidently” looks at lots and lots of child porn.
It’s real simple.
For example, I run a program called SBNews that goes through newsgroups that I select and downloads all the binary files to my local PC. I do not have it go through anything even remotely related to kiddie porn, no pre-teens, teens, young, etc., yet I would say (rough estimate) that one out of every 200-250 pictures it downloads would be considered an illegal image.
I try to block further images by setting up key words to lock out, as well as marking the poster’s name and posting host as those to be ignored, but the spammers keep creating all new user names and fake posting addresses.
I then use a thumbnail viewing program to go through and immediately delete anything remotely questionable, but I don’t always immediately empty my recycle bin (although I think I’ll start doing that now!). If someone were to sign me up for something like this, the feds could come to my house and find files in my cache or recycle bin, but it doesn’t mean that I ever wanted to see them.
I also receive a lot of porn spam to my inbox. I have never looked at it enough to know if contained anything illegal, but it’s entirely possible that someone could have files in their cache from that, too.
I’m not trying to excuse the activities of a legitimate offender, but I am trying to point out that it’s entirely possible to not be interested and still have files on your PC.
Of course, having a directory of files called “Too Young” is pretty much just begging for trouble…
Re: Re: childporn
I can understand your example of an automatic program, but that is not what the ex-marine/ex-cop claims.
overzealous
The most disturbing aspect of the article was the detailing of the strong-arm tactics used by the feds to get guilty pleas from those accused.
Re: overzealous
“”One click, you’re guilty. A federal offense is that easy.” ? An FBI agent explains that merely viewing a kid porn image on your computer is a felony”
The above quote is what disturbs me. How often has anyone been fooled into clicking a link that leads to the goatse.cx guy on slashdot and elsewhere? How often have I clicked a link that didn’t go where I wanted it to? So now what these idiots are saying is that its that easy to commit a felony…well where’s the intent?
And from the tactics they used, I don’t think they’d be sympathetic to anyone who was fooled.