Ex-judge Gets 27 Months on Evidence From Hacked PC

netbsd_fan writes "A former California judge has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for possession of illegal pornography, based entirely on evidence gathered by an anonymous vigilante script kiddie in Canada. At any given time he was monitoring over 3,000 innocent people. The anonymous hacker says, "I would stay up late at night to see what I could drag out of their computers, which turned out to be more than I expected. I could read all of their e-mails without them knowing. As far as they were concerned, they didn't know their e-mails had even been opened. I could see who they were chatting with and read what they were saying as they typed."

Comments

Bust the buster?

[dotslashdot]

Isn't the hacker in legal trouble for downloading the same 3,000 pictures? (How else did he know the content was illegal?) He had to download them to his computer to view them, thereby committing the same crime as the guy he outed.

Re:Bust the buster?

[anagama]

Obviously, the possession laws don't apply to the police. They are considered confiscators, not possessors. For example, cops find a joint on someone, collect the evidence, and arrest the person. They aren't in possession of marijuana in the illegal sense, they are in possession in confiscatory sense.

Re:I'm curious how you people think about this

[quantaman]

Because obviously the hacker is guilty of more crimes than that judge

-> clear violation of privacy of thousands of people
-> use of that information for private gain
-> passing off vigilante-collected information to the police
-> (plus or minus) collecting that same porn

All this obviously without a court order, or even being in the police force.

This is also seriously worse than the riaa has ever done. So what should the punishment for the hacker be ? Clearly he cannot go free, despite having caught this criminal. Ahh but you forget, child pornography was involved, one of Bruce Schneier's four horsemen of the information apocalypse. You can be assured that no right is safe, nor investigative method over the line, when one of the horsemen is involved.

It's a damn trojan ... it makes guesses !

[DrYak]

How did the kid know that the pictures were child-porn? From the names? By just taking a flying guess that they were? Unlikely.

The program is a damn trojan ! Most of the other virus/trojan software that use dat on victims' hard drive to disguise themeselve make wild guess based on file name and file type and pull mostly random MS Word .DOC files to build the text used to spread copies of the virus. Sometimes this algorithm puts out pure random bullshit, but there are enough situations (and gullible idiots) so that strategy is good enough for the virus to spread in the wild. And that are only viruses taking random office files and sending them in the hope the files land into co-worker inbox who might, by chance, be working on the same subject.

Now in this case we're speaking about a very specific situation. You know you're looking for JPEGs. You know those JPEGs may have "kid", "sex", "naked" or similar keywords in their file names (at least 1 file out of the 3000 is bound to have such a name). You know other messages in the same thread read by preps have similar name.
It's just enough that in some case the program will display an image (and given that at least 3000 of the JPEGs are porn, surely a huge percentage of all JPEGs, there's a huge chance that, just by luck, the trojan will find one of them). Even if finally it's a wrong image (some of those funny joke-pictures circulating on the net), there's still a proportion of users who'll think "Hm... It's only one of those jokes. Too bad, I already have one", instead of suspecting something.
Too little users will realise that there's something wrong and too little will alert the other readers of the thread. By then, several people will have executed the trojan. Then if the hacker have posted a lot of different mails using several different identities and on more than a few threads, the number of the victims will be high enough.

If it works with viruses pulling random DOC files (where the chance is little that the two person will work on the sme subject), it's bound to work in this case (huge proportion of the JPEGs are genuine porn, all readers of the thread are potential pronographers).

(It's like writing a trojan that spread it self on the mailing list of linux kernel developpers, and maskarade itself using ".c" or ".diff" files found on victims hard drives. It's bound to work).

Re:Hacker Must be Prosecuted for Committed Felonie

[Kjella]

I'd toss out the conviction of the judge based on an illegal search and seizure, prosecute the hacker through the DCMCA and general wire-tapping laws, and allow the judge to file a civil suit for property invasion.

It doesn't work that way. If a burglar breaks into your house and finds your child porn stash, then reports it to the police they can prosecute you all they like. The laws against illegal search and seizure only applies to law enforcement. The burglar is still guilty of breaking and entering though.

However, if that burglar is told "it's ok, you can keep breaking into people's houses as long as you report any child porn to us" then the burglar has become an agent of law enforcement, and any case after that point should be thrown out. If they refuse to investigate or prosecute cases where they suspect the same burglar has been at work, they're equally much doing so.

In order to make this work he should never have identified himself, never been in contact with law enforcement. He should only have left a package at their doorstep, never allowing any contact that could make him an agent of law enforcement. Those rules are very strict exactly so that you can't have a "pseudo-police" that doesn't need to follow the rules. Anyone who's paid any attention to history would know why that would be a very bad thing.

Re:I'm curious how you people think about this

[CmdrGravy]

By the sounds of it he doesn't have much life to be ruined in the first place.

This mans snooping through the personal lives of 3000 people seems to me a far greater crime than a little kiddy fiddling and the fact that he is stupid enough to go to the Police with the results of his illegal, voyeuristic "investigations" just illustrates the sort of fantasy world he is obviously inhabiting. This man needs to be locked up, for his own good as well as the good of the people he is "investigating".

Re:More vigilantes please

[Dhalka226]

or the fear of being seen as a sympathizer is so great that nobody risks talking about it - not even the die-hard civil libertarians.

That's part of it, but the other side of that same coin is that even if you do speak out against these sort of laws, you're ignored.

The problem is that the argument on issues like this are not rational, they are emotional. Regardless of how many good points one can mention against these sorts of bills, the opposition just goes, "but THE CHILDREN!!" And that's it. You've been completely blown off without ever really being heard; sometimes it's hard to understand why it's worth wasting your breath on especially, as you say, with the additional fear that you could be branded with them and worse than just ignored.

On top of that, it's basically political suicide for the people who actually vote of these issues to vote against them. It's dangerous. Even if your intentions are completely related to opposing a poorly-written law, you might never get the chance to tell your side. All it takes is for one person in the other party to go, "he wants to let child molesters run free!!" and the news to repeat that a few times and there is big trouble.

For the record, the PROTECT Act passed 84-0 in the Senate. After the House agreed and the two voted on the final language, it passed 400-25 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.

Put it all together and it just doesn't seem worth it.

Re:More vigilantes please

[kahei]

Well, I don't see any great risk in talking about it:

"For law enforcement agencies to outsource work under the table to unregulated vigilantes who are free to break the law as long as the authorities in question find them useful is a bad thing."

There.

The trouble is that the above concept takes a bit of thought, it takes thinking about history and following through the likely consequences and abuses of having police-sanctioned vigilantes to do the illegal things the police aren't allowed to. And the time it takes to do that thinking is time you don't spend just furiously repeating yourself until you become convinced you are right, a la this post above. Think of the children! Seriously, THINK of the CHILDREN!!! WHY WILL NOBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN????? AM I THE ONLY ONE SANE???@?!?!?!?!?@#$@#

That's what it comes down to -- everyone's got X amount of time to spend on it, so generally those who use less of that time in thought make most of the noise. I don't think it's necessary to postulate a state of fear or insanity.

Re:Waits for it..

[nuzak]

So what keeps a cop from going rogue, lying, cheating and stealing in order to gather information and then submit said 'dirt' under an anonymous handle?

They do. Usually they don't even do it anonymously, it just gets recorded in the paperwork as an "anonymous tip".

Re:Why Evidence Resulting from Illegal Search OK H

[KDR_11k]

However it should be dismissed since it can't be proven that the hacker didn't tamper with the evidence.