Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh sure, blame Canada.
MABASPLOOM!
The summary is misleading on multiple fronts... First, according to the 2002 story, the "hacker" spent considerable time writing the trojan used to access the judge's porn stash---he's hardly a "script kiddie," as the summary dubs him. And "anonymous"? The guy was identified by name in both of the TFAs: "Brad Willman, the Canadian hacker, forwarded the information to an anti-pedophile watchdog group, which then sent the information to Irvine police detectives." "Dubbed 'Citizen Tipster' by police, Brad Willman, spent night after night writing a Trojan Horse program that gave him complete control over every computer that downloaded it. "
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.
On /. it used to be that you didn't RTFA, but now I think that it is now time you didn't RTFSummary! Editing and summarising are just crap!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And how the fuck you can convince someone on evidence that got obtained in an illegal way?
And why the script kiddie isn't in jail? Spying and breaking the privacy of many thousands of people (the blurb suggests it was way more than 3000) isn't something to shake a stick at.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The son of a coffee shop owner, Mr. Willman, a.k.a. Omni-Potent,
And he stayed up all night .. night after night ... I wonder what kept him awake ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
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.
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. You can't spy on everyone possible where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy to see if they might be doing something illegal. You need a search warrant when American citizens are involved. So while breaking and entering into the judge's computer and finding data contraband, who knows what personal details of other people's lives, financial data, credit card numbers, etc. that this criminal has gathered while repeatedly breaking and entering into other people's property. I can't trespass into your home to see if you have drugs or child porn or what have you. Even if I find something illegal, I've already broken into your home and searched it top from bottom, without your knowledge, consent, or a search warrant, and I've broken into thousands of other houses and found nothing. This is the same thing; the hacker is a one-man brownshirt, with no respect for the rule of law or due process.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
You scare me ... you know, first this is against kiddie porn, then terrorism, and in a not all-too-far future, it is for the war on tax evasion or for finding that Bittorrent files you have...
There should be limits on what can be done legally. And that script kiddie should be jailed, too.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Then you can be sure there are one hundred doing it for ill.
But similar to what posters earlier have pointed out - How can we solely trust a trojan writer? How do we know that the hacker didn't simply set people up? Once he had taken control of their computers he could have planted the files himself.
Not to mention the fact that he must have broken into a great many innocent people's computers and read their emails. I wonder if they will be so happy of the methods that this superhero used.
If he knew the places pedophiles frequent, why didn't he just forward that info to the authorities, he can't claim that they weren't putting enough effort into fighting child pornography.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
The hacker in question was referred to as a 'script kiddy' solely for the fact that upon hearing of his success in implicating the former judge, he immediately blogged his victory on myspace under the appropriate title of 'PWN3D!'. Ergo, this title is moreso an indicator of maturity than his technical skill level, and furthermore, an indicator that he lives in his parents basement.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
This idiot thought he was doing the authorities a favor by finding evidence of what he saw as wrongdoing.
....... .......
To do this he broke into systems and spied without a warrant, probable cause, or any authority whatsoever. Most of the people he did this to were innocent, but in any case the 'evidence' he found cannot be used to prosecute with. I doubt if he has much concept of the 'chain of evidence' anyway, so it will be inadmissable for all sorts of reasons.
'Never mind', you say, 'he has gained valuable intelligence. The authorities can mount a raid later and do things properly'.
But by his own admission these target machines have been hacked by a person anxious to 'find' kiddyporn distributors and users. Surely this makes ANYTHING on that system suspect thereafter? When accused, all the judge has to do is claim that he has never seen these photos before, and they must have been placed there by the hacker. Indeed, from TFA I think that is a credible possibility.
Not only has this idiot committed a nasty computer crime by hacking into innocent people's machines, he has messed up the possibilities of any future prosecution of people who may or may not have been involved in an actual crime.
{irony}
Of course, the above is only going by the Constitution. Everyone knows that nowadays the rule of law is suspended whenever:
Patriotism is mentioned
Children are mentioned
Global Warming is mentioned
Security is mentioned
Road Safety is mentioned
{end irony}
He's found a judge with child porn on his computer. This judge will hire a competent defense attorney who will argue that Willman put all of the images there. After all, Willman had complete access to the machine, by his own admission. "Willman is a lone wacko who's obsessed by child porn," the attorney will argue.
And every single child pornographer he's uncovered will do the same. Many of them will get away with it, and precedent will be set.
There's a reason why we have search laws. Willman has now tainted the evidence in thousands of child porn cases, by his own admission. That's pretty much the definition of "well meaning idiot."
... if someone hacks your network to 'gain evidence' the counter-claim should be that the hacking was done to PLANT evidence. Force an end to the assault on your freedom and your character before the struggle itself becomes your downfall.
Reasonable doubt then has a good chance to keeping you free. If evidence is not properly gathered from the very beginning, how can proof beyond a reasonable doubt ever be presented?
This guy copped a plea, though, so much of the background is moot at this point. But I have seen many other cases (typically surrounding divorce where the woman would like to secure custody of children and such) where people's lives had been ruined on the basis of an accusation that could not be defended easily enough. As the article shows, this guy's whole life fell apart during all of this and while the resources of the prosecution are unlimited, the resources of the accused deteriorated and suffocated while he defended against the charges.
We, the public, will never know the full truth of this. A confession after all the strife he faced is nothing short of coerced and tainted.
Not only that, but he could also view any email correspondence by that judge, which could have included sensitive court material.
Show me a judge who handles sensitive court correspondence by e-mail and I'll show you a judge I dearly want to smack in the face really, really hard.
he should be punished for his deeds and then be enlisted by some the Canadian police and do it legally
I wouldn't find it at all more comforting that the guy who has the job (self-appointed or not) trolling through private e-mails has a badge. Wouldn't that make him *more* dangerous to the average privacy-loving John Q. Whatever?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
The judge kept a detailed diary of his actions.
Not only has the judge admitted the diary was genuine BUT ALSO a former victim came forward and spoke AND the police found the diary to seem real enough.
At no moment did the judge contest the fact and pretend to have been victim of some spyware/virus.
Therefore the ex-judge can be judged, even if the hacker will also be :
- Told (once more) to stop breaching into people's computers because it's illegal.
- Told to get an actual job at the police to be able to do it legally.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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
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).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Welcome to the Land Of The Free, where you can be locked up for two years for looking at pictures.
Yeah, mod me flamebait because I didn't think of the chiiiiildren. It's still a fact that we yell and cry about the horrors of tyranny if people are forbidden from reading any book they like, but in our own culture people don't have the freedom to look at any pictures they like. And there are cases where people have been sentenced for child porn that was created digitially, with no actual childs harmed.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I know it's hard for the thinofthechildren masses to comprehend it, but there is a reason there are limitations to what the police can do, and they are not "those commies hate kids!"
Great Intellect...
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What I find most disturbing is that this isn't discussed anywhere except Slashdot (which seems to be split about 50/50 on the issue of whether there should be one set of laws and standards for KP and one set of laws for "everything else"). Consider the outrage and public debate that the Patriot act sparked in the US - everybody had an opinion, it was debated to death (although it did pass), and will undoubtedly be one of the primary focii of the 2008 election. What about the PROTECT act that had been successfully used to prosecute posession of drawings? No debate. No discussion. No concern. Anywhere.
This means that either the 50% of /. that finds this line of reasoning irrational is completely insane or (more likely) the fear of being seen as a sympathizer is so great that nobody risks talking about it - not even the die-hard civil libertarians.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Sex with children is yet another sickening fact of life that goes back for
thousands of yearsand will still be around long after the internet is gone.
Sadly child molestation is not even by far the worst thing to happen
to a child. War and starvation are what KILL hundreds of thousands
of children each year(!), and do speak to that little african girl
who had her right leg blown away if she'd rather stripped and danced
naked in front of dirty old men than step on that Made in U.S.A
land mine. Talk of old men abusing children, that little girl had
a virtual sit on Donald Rumsfeld's abusive lap instead.
That's as far as the hubris here is concerned, now how about the
civil liberties angle. Here we have the "Uuuuh, uuuh it's for the
children"angle yet again but what is next? Does our sociophobic
sour drop gobbling citizen vigilante get to break into our homes
next and search them forillegal substances? Does he get the right to
assault me on a street and go through my pockets??
It's beautiful, isn't it? The masses are doing very little to protect children from that sort of filth, and they're patting themselves on the backs for it. Contrary to the popular belief that "getting tough" is going to solve the problem is the massive body of evidence that it won't.
Making a thing illegal and getting tough on it has never solved the problem any more than drilling holes in peoples' heads cured mental illness. The way to deal with this and the majority of problems is from a logical, measured, and scientific approach. Here's a couple of things to consider:
1. What aspects of our current social arrangement allow these problems (exploitation of other humans in the numerous forms it takes)?
2. Would we be better off to actually spend resources to study the problem?
3. How do people become that way?
4. If/how can we stop that from happening and/or detect them early on and/or fix them?
When subjects like this come up we're faced with this overwhelming emotional response that we choose to cloud or judgment rather than face the reality. We explain this away as all-too-human and bask in it. Just read comments online or talk to people about cases involving crimes of passion or the various incidents of parents (generally fathers) murdering molesters and abusers. The majority of reactions are "I'd do that too."
While I can understand that reaction and the comments that support it, they fail to engage the brain and understand the implications of such things. Which brings me back to the initial point, which is that the attitude the majority of the world holds towards crime is ultimately counterproductive and self-destructive. We owe it to the past victims and to the children and to ourselves to actually solve the problem rather than merely seeking vengeance.
When someone is abused it may as well be us or those that are dear to us. We should be less concerned with adding equal or greater suffering to the life that caused the pain as finding a way to understand why that pain was caused and constructing a world where less pain is possible. It's the old 'do you not destroy your enemy if you make him your friend?' situation where by eradicating a mental disorder that allows for abuse and exploitation we effectively destroy all child predators and their ilk.
I'm sick to death of "think of the children" assholes that are so damned blind with their emotions to recognize they're not solving a goddamned thing and that more kids will be harmed because they're too fucking slow on the uptake to actually set things right.
Sorry, I know this got a little bit repetitive.
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.
And you're even more stupid if you're relying on posting as an AC to protect your identity. So, watch out for this virus, if I ever do make it. I might call it "Ashcroft"
Which will be shortly after they subpoena Slashdot and track you down via your IP... assuming Slashdot would want to protect the identity of someone who wrote such a virus anyway. destroying an otherwise harmless old man's life just because he had some fricking images on his HD. Uh, no. From one of the articles: "After reading the judge's electronic diary, he concluded it showed an apparent plot to sexually exploit young boys at a private health club.".
You *might* just about have been able to put forward a plausible argument regarding the level of damage caused by someone who solely looks at photos. And that only stands up in the absence of *any* any form of payment- or even other forms of encouragement- to others who *create* such material. But neither applies to the "harmless old man" you describe. I don't know how Americans can keep a straight face when we say we favour free speech on one hand, but on the other we can talk about "illegal pornography" (Disclaimer: I am not an American). Are you talking about hardcore pornography between consenting adults (which I have nothing against) or child pornography? If the latter, are you claiming that "free speech" should extend towards material whose consumption supports the molestation of children? Seriously? It's the pure fucking principle. No, it's pure fucking stupidity.
(*1) Yeah, I know it's out-of-date and improbable. But I couldn't resist, sorry
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
A pedophile is caught and goes to jail? Good. A hacker violates the privacy of thousands of people, spies on them, and gets away as a hero? Bad. Compromising our rights to authority-supervised investigation and due process? Very bad. Getting dirty in the name of justice destroys the very freedoms you were trying to protect. I'm sorry, but 1 pedophile in jail is not worth waiving my right to privacy. There's no grey there, it's crystal clear. I don't accept your attempt to take the moral high ground.
If you Google "Ronald Kline" you will find a court decision on the matter. Because the hacker was not acting as an agent of the Government, the exclusionary rule on illegally obtained evidence didn't apply.
Seems like a dangerous little loophole that's just asking to be exploited.
Judges should be brighter than that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
However it should be dismissed since it can't be proven that the hacker didn't tamper with the evidence.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.