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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."
Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today
Will these forced acronyms never end?
It sounds like when they investigated him the act was not in force yet and they had to actually get a judge to agree to the tap; that makes this not a particularly interesting or scary story -- judges have had the ability to approve taps to compromise our privacy for a long, long time now.
It looks like PROTECT might make this at the discretion of the prosecutor which is, obviously a Very Bad Thing[tm], but it's not all that relevant in this case, it seems.
This issue doesn't seem to be a big deal, for the privacy issue - the authorities did have to go to a judge and get a warrant first, just like they would for a phone tap or for an in house search.
you still need a judge to ok something like this, and who *really* wants to bother supporting child porno slime.
These guys followed the letter of the law, and im glad they caught the guy. Case closed.
What's more surprising is that they haven't been able to do this before. drop a LOG line in iptables and you can have a complete log of every packet, live.
Except where's the machine with the huge hard-drive that's intercepting all the packets and logging them? You can't run iptables on the cable modem.
The interesting part is just that they've got some kind of device to sniff cable or DSL modems and send them somewhere to be analysed. Then you'd have to put everything back together again into meaningfull data (including intercepting binary transmissions). It's _far_ more complicated than a simple tap of a voice line.
AccountKiller
It's not far fetched to assume an overly zealous agent might consider planting evidence on a computer either. They already do this in a variety of other cases. Sometimes they are caught at it, a lot of times they aren't, and you can't tell. And there's a lot of prior cases to prove the point, the miami cops busted planting guns on suspects, trying to clear themselves of murder. the texas prosecutiors and cops who "flaked" (that's the cop slang term for it, it's so common, taken originally from gold mining and planting gold flakes I think to make a mine look better)) hundreds of people in this small town with drugs that weren't drugs, getting convictions, sending people to jail.
There's just something spooky about it. Child porn is a real problem, but we can't deny government lying isn't a problem as well. It's a serious major problem, ongoing, chronic. Just now on drudge headlines they are investigating a secret service guy for falsifying evidence/perjury in the martha stewart case. And remember the FBI "crime lab" tests scandals of a couple of years ago.
The bad guys commit crimes, but we have a much harder time exposing the "good guys" who really aren't. Look at all the controversy about iraq now, the weird circumstances around 9-11, prisoner abuse, etc.
I'm glad to see that the Feds are pursuing predators online by using methods that will stand up in court, rather than the questionable tactics used by the vigilantes of Perverted Justice
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Do the feds ever actually bust the guys making the porn in the first place i.e. doing the real explotation. Or do they always just bust some sorry shlub who tried to download some old .jpeg and never touched a kid in his life?
Yes - due process is due process, no matter what a person is accused of.
People involved in creating kiddie porn are scum, but that's no reason to treat them differently, especially before their guilt has been proved. In fact, if anything given the general attitude towards crimes of this type, even more care should be taken.
A few years ago here in the UK, there was general outcry after a little girl was abused and murdered; it sparked off a number of demonstrations by people demanding that the public be made aware of the locations of known sex offenders. During this time, a paediatrician was hounded out of her home and forced to move because people incorrectly associated her job title with paedophilia.
It's a highly emotive issue, and so you have to be very careful. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person "because it's kiddie porn" may well get innocent people killed.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
One of the advantages (assuming they use it this way) is a real-time wiretap lets them confirm who is actually *at* the computer when something's happening. A log, unless combined with large amounts of surveillance, can not necessarily be correlated back to an individual. But now, they can see illegal activity and go look at who's doing it while it's happening.
(Hopefully they are, and aren't just assuming the owner of a computer is the one breaking the law..)
In the Macarthy (sp) era you only had to point someone and scream "red", "pinko", "commie" and that individual's life was done for. Down the drain for good...
What tell us that in the near future someone won't cry "pedophile" "child abuser" "terrorist" and your life goes down the drain. And nowadays evidence is soooooo easy to fake, and juries tend to be so damned illitare...
This is not the whole thing, though, with worms and virus and spywares doing the gods know what to your computer, using your storage for the gods know what purposes, who can assure us that we won't wake up some day to the sound of the police storming our door and the press cameras getting us labeled as "worse than scum" for the rest of our life...
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
Child pornography probably doesn't encourage people to go out and molest people, just like watching an action movie probably doesn't make a majority of people go out and start killing people.
The problem though is that child pornography may increase child abuse since it can encourage *the creators* to make more of it if they are paid for it. On the other hand it might also discourage child abuse as pedophiles relieve their sexual energy on the smut instead of on real children.
To further muddy the water there is also drawings, which no real person is being harmed, that tried to be outlawed in America but the Supreme Court struck it down. Examples are Shota and Lolicon.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
That article is very disturbing. It admits that the old system worked while glorifying the newfound ability of police to wiretap anyone they feel like. It's hard for me to understand how the reporters, Stanton and Walsh, were able to twist their brains into missing the big picture.
How on Earth can this case be seen a triumph of ghastly new police powers? This creep was caught despite the inconvenience of judicial oversite and due process. The issue is a simply put in the US Bill of Rights, amendment 4 to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That is, your house will not be violated unless reasonable evidence presented and sworn too in a public court of law.
"Terrorism" and kiddie porn are declared serious enough to remove this protection but the removal for some crimes eliminates the protection for everyone. Without that public record and oversight, anyone can be tapped as a "suspect". The potential for abuse is enormous. PROTECT is a perverse name indeed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Stopping the junkie does nothing to stop the creation of childporn. Why does it matter if we stop the spread of child porn vs the creation?
Stopping the creation of childporn is very obvious, we know why we must do this, children are being hurt by this. Childporn thats already created and being spread around Kazaa by millions or thousands of people, what do you gain by arresting each person?
Same goes with nuclear weapons, we have no right to tell other people they cannot create them if we have them. This also goes for the internet, when we start with censorship and start invading privacy in the end we lose our ability to tell China they are backwards if we are trying to outlaw P2P to stop kiddie porn.
Kiddie porn is bad, but its not like the whole internet is flooded with kiddie porn, I don't see the point in creating new laws and suddenly cracking down on a problem which has always existed. What is the goal? If its to stop children from being hurt then we need to go after the producers and this has little to nothing to do with Kazaa. If the goal is to stop the spread of childporn, we can use the filter systems built into these P2P programs and perhaps make them more advanced.
I don't see however the point in chasing every single person who has a copy of file X in their shared folder. It's a slippery slope.
I'm all for stopping the production of kiddie porn, I'm against censorship. If censorship is the only way to stop the distrubition then its not worth it. The distribution is not whats doing the harm, those are the pawns of the producers.
This would be like arresting everyone who is infected by the worm instead of the creator.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.