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The Story of the Pedophile-catching Hacker
missing30 writes "A Turkish hacker seeding usenet groups with trojan horses has made it a habit to hunt down pedophiles trolling the groups. The cases go back to 2000, with the mysterious good samaritan responsible for several arrests. The man now has tacit approval from the FBI for his actions." From the article: "At the urging of Montgomery Police Capt. Kevin Murphy, '1069' eventually turned over more and more information that led back to a computer owned by Bradley Joseph Steiger, who had worked as an emergency room physician in Alabama. The hacker's finds included information from Steiger's AT&T WorldNet account, records from his checking account, and a list of directories on his computer's hard drive where sexually explicit photographs were stored."
The real question is, will this evidence hold up in court?
The legitimate law enforcement agencies use illegally gained information on a regular basis.
How do they get away with it? They don't present that particular information in court. They leverage that information into admissible evidence by converting it into probable cause for a legitimate search. This is the very problem with widespread, illegal monitoring of the public and why the public might be inclined to support the practice, at least until they become the target.
KFG
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You know, pedophilia is defined as mental illness in the ICD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD .
And pedophilia can be treaten in non-medical and medical therapies.
I don't see a reason to disclose the Name of the pedophile. But I guess that's what infotainment is all about, right?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Last time I was in the Jury pool, the presecuter went to very long lengths to explain the difference between "preponderance of evidence", "reasonbable doubt" and "any Doubt" blurring the differences tends to get you excused from jury duty. The truth is once the FBI gets interested in this guy and supeneas ISP logs, they can start looking at what he's actually downloading, when the pics are downloaded, when the 'puter was accessed through the subseven backdoor and what the timestamps on the illegal material is; the guy going to be toast anyways. I'm sure his logins quickly got transfered to the "special server" that does a more meticulous job of logging than the "normal servers" do. Imagine the task faced durring discovery when the prosecution sends over 5 or 6 DVD's of server logs of everything that came out or went into your clients computer. The Gov can throw a lot of resources into a prosecution and even an ER doctor is going to get bled dry by expert witnesses at $300.00/hr to counter the governments experts.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The FBI may have used 1069's information for what is known as "lead purposes only". That is, they were tipped off by 1069 and started their own investigation into these individuals. The information they obtained from this subsequent investigation is what they may have used in court to convict the folks.
This technuque is used when intelligence angencies uncover illegal activity that is not of intelligence interest but they can't just turn a blind eye to. Also the intelligence agency / operatives do not want to have to testify in court. So, they turn the information over to the appropriate law enforcement agency "for lead purposes only". The law enforcement agency then begins a law enforcement investigation from that point forward using the proper warrants, evidence techniques, etc. None of the information obtained by the intelligence agency is ever used in court, only new information developed by law enforcement is brought into court.
Lets say you are doing some "urban astronomy" and see neighbor is packaging illegal drugs for sale. You decide to anonymously alert law enforcement about possible drug sales. The cops are probably not going to get a warrant on an anonmous tip. But it is a slow day in the narcotics unit so they decide to follow this tip. They legally setup surveillance on the suspect house and see what looks like drug sales. Now they have probable cause and ask a judge for a warrant to tap the phones. The phone tap reveals what sounds like drug sales. They send an undercover officer or informant in who successfully buys drugs. Now they have a good case that will stand up in court so they make the arrest. They do have to say they received an anonlous tip but all the evidence was legally developed by the cops. If the anonmous tip was bogus, then the subsequent investigation would not have revealed any drug sales.
FBI agents make points for getting convictions not losing cases in court on bad evidence. The prosecutor is no fool either and does not like losing cases which waste his or her time. He or she will review all the evidence to make sure it was legally obtained and will stand up to defense challenges and/or judicial scrutiny. It looks like the FBI agents did things right and the prosecutor made a good choice since these challenges have so far been unsuccessful.
HR 666, (see link) http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=104_cong_bills&docid=f:h666rfs.txt.pdf already makes this behaviour from the gov legal. On a side note, for those that didn't read the story, the judge overturned an appeal, and sentence has already been given.... Hacked PC was not accepted as a defense.
Heck, they could even surf child porn sites from your machine and use your credit card and identity to purchase access to such sites. Who is to say that the hacker isn't the pedophile?
The people the FBI had arrested were molesting children who the pedophiles could "access" nearly at will. Surely an investigation would show that fact. RTFA kthx.
Seriously, read the article. These people were actively molesting children and taking pictures of themselves while doing it. The pictures were turned over to the authorities.
Ever seen the movie The Boondock Saints? It's about two Irish brothers who got sick of so much crime in Manhattan and decided to do something about it. They took out mob leaders, gang leaders, big time drug dealers, killers, rapists, etc. because the Police wouldn't do it. The moral is: Standing by and letting something happen is just as bad as or worse than actually doing it.
This Turkish guy is acting as the Irish brothers. He's using his knowledge to find these sick bastards who rape and photograph underage girls who are helpless against these rapists and child pornographers. I'm all for this Turkish guy. He's catching pedophiles who pretty much willingly download his trojan. They may not know they are downloading it, but hey, what's a trojan when you've got kiddie porn, right? I say take these sick fuckers off of the Internet no matter what it takes. I'm not afraid of someone looking through My Documents, I've got nothing to hide. Personal letters? It's a text file. Some guy from the middle of the US isn't gonna know who Johnny and Suzy are if he looks at love letters.
It's about damn time someone stepped up instead of pussyfooting around laws which are constantly being changed.
"My heart agrees with you: pedophiles are scum, and as a parent, their mass death wouldn't bother me one bit."
Well it would have to be a mass murder, because there are a lot of us and we aren't going anywhere. You may put a few hundred paedophiles in prison on child porn charges and some of the 10% of child sex abuses which are committed by paedophiles might result in prison sentences (and rightly so if it's sex abuse), however if you think you're going to have the 33% of people who have at least some attraction to children, or the 5-25% who are technically paedophiles killed, you're fooling yourself. It's not illegal to be a paedophile, because it is not illegal to exist, however it is illegal to abuse children and download child porn.
For the record, the huge majority of us spend time with children, without needing sexual relationships. I spend time with my younger brother's friend and I'm going to become a teacher. I don't need sex with young boys, even though I find them sexually attractive; spending time with them is enough.
People won't be able to fight paeds so hard in the future, because we're fighting back. See AN if you want an example.
And, if you're really so terrified of us, maybe you should learn more
~ BLue
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four