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."

Comments

Re:Does it hold up in court?

[kfg]

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

Re:I say the ends don't justify the means.

[Dun Malg]

I don't think the police should be allowed to use illicitly gained information or that they should be allowed to encourage private citizens to commit felonies.

Thing is, 4th Amendment protections only prohibit the government from illegally searching your property. If a burglar breaks into your house and steal a sack of the counterfeit money you're printing then later gets caught and fingers you, the 4th Amendment doesn't apply. They still need a warrant to search your place, but the sack of C-notes with damp ink are easily enough to get one. Now, if the government hires a burglar, that's a 4th Amendment no-no; otherwise, you can press charges for criminal trespass if you like-- from your prison cell. The moral of this story is that if you're a criminal, be careful about protecting your stuff from other criminals, particularly if they "have it in for you". Nothing new there.

Re:I say the ends don't justify the means.

[budgenator]

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.

Re:1069

[TheoMurpse]

1. Why are newsgroups such as this allowed to exist in the first place?

That's like asking why email that carries child pornography exists, or why Freenet has child pornography on it, or why torrents of copyrighted material exist. Someone needs to read up on how Usenet works: one posts a message to one's own Usenet server, and it propagates to many other Usenet servers in the way data from a torrent propagates (namely, like a web). Blacklisting servers whose users post illegal content would be impossible without destroying Usenet altogether.