Child Porn Probe Uses Live Internet Wiretap

rrkap writes "The Sacramento Bee is reporting that Jason Heath Morgan, a suspect in a child porn case was subject to the first 'live internet wiretap.' According to the story, 'Technology used in the surveillance is very similar to a phone tap. Agents attached a monitoring device to Morgan's phone line, then tracked his Internet activity from remote computers.' This packet sniffing was authorized by the PROTECT Act - officially Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act, which authorizes such tapping of internet connections."

Comments

Before You People Start Ranting

[Pave Low]

From the article:
When Sacramento agents made their request in August 2003, the wiretap provision had not yet been used, and authorities had to convince a federal judge to grant the authority.

The court order was granted, with a requirement that two groups of agents be involved in monitoring Morgan. The first scrutinized his computer use and culled out everything not related to the investigation. The rest was turned over to the second team.

Everything was by the book here. Now, it's just that computer users aren't invulnerable to using the Internet to commit crimes, the Feds have caught up.

Child porn, a history

[Anonymous Coward]

The child pornography "problem" was invented by the Meese Commission back in the Reagan years, as a way around the Constitutional limitations on censoring pornography generally. If you actually read the 1985 Meese Commission report, they're quite clear about their intent. (There's quite a bit of material on line about the Meese Commission report, most of it critical, but the report itself is hard to find.)

So the next step was to criminalize pure possession of child pornography. (Molesting children was already illegal, but having pictures of it wasn't until the Reagan years.) This made it much easier for law enforcement to make arrests, and, significantly, provided much broader reasons for search and seizure.

Then came the child porno entrapment industry. Law enforcement started sending out child pornography and seeing who'd bite. This is far less work than finding real child abusers, but generates cases.

As with most forms of self-generating police activity, there's a tendency to lose touch with reality in such operations. In the complaint-driven end of law enforcement, performance is measureable - how many murders were solved, how many stolen cars were recovered. There are "customers" (people who report crimes) to be satisfied.

Self-generated law enforcement activity (drugs, porno, "red hunting" in the 1930s and 1950s, and today "terrorism") doesn't have "customers", so there's a strong tendency for it to get out of control.

The worst abuses come when self-generated law enforcement activity becomes self-financing through seizures. So far, child pornography and terrorism enforcement haven't reached that level. The "war on drugs" reached that level about fifteen years ago. For some law enforcement organizations, it's a profit center.