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"Accidental" Download Sending 22-Year-Old Man To Prison
An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago, Matthew White searched Limewire for porn. He was looking for 'College Girls Gone Wild,' but ended up downloading some images of child pornography. This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images. A year later, the FBI showed up on his family's doorstep and asked to search the computer. After thorough sleuthing, the FBI found some images 'deep within the hard drive.' According to White, the investigators agreed that he himself could not have accessed the files anymore. Matthew now faces 20 years in jail for possession of child pornography. On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty so that he will 'hopefully' end up with 3.5 years in jail, 10 years probation and a registration as a sex offender. 'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.'"
Absolutely ridiculous
What's a district attorney to do when someone anonymously sends the D.A. an email with kiddie porn attached? Technically, the D.A. downloaded it.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
"Oh HAI, I just downloaded some kiddie pron... by mistake of course you understand"
yeah, I can see that one working out well...
Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence.
In other words, he doesn't have the money to actually fight this.
I just wonder if i should ever buy/use a used HD again ?!?
Sure. And go to prison like this guy. Personally, I'd take my chances and just throw the hard drive away.
DO NOT CALL THE AUTHORITIES
Worst idea ever. If you actually have undeleted CP on your computer you will get 20 years.
The only safe thing to do is destroy the hard drive.
Should always maintain your innocence in these type of cases because the guilty plea will haunt you the rest of your life. 3.5 years is still ridiculous.
If the FBI shows up at your door and asks to search your computer, the correct answer is 'No.'
Sure, now every 4chan user have to give his computer to the authorities and never ever see it again. 'Cos if you see a CP thread, you first downloaded the images ! But maybe 4chan is harder to monitor than a P2P network.
"One day, you're going to get a knock on the door and have your child taken away for many years," he said.
No one sees any problem with letting German existentialists design our laws until things like this start to happen.
Good job Kafka!
Asshole.....
Real child predators are out roaming the streets.
This is complete BULLSHIT! Apparently, this guy is not a danger but our tax dollars will be used to ruin his life.
Typically, neither do people who are innocent.
Never talk to the police (even if you're perfectly innocent).
Spammers on a worksafe imageboard I occasionally visit sometimes upload it to the place. I report it to the board's administrator via IRC....which is logged... and purge private history. It is such an easy thing to have happen. Hell, a google search with safesearch off can do it.
This is 'won't somebody please think of the children' gone way to far.
And the public defender encouraging him to plead guilty? That lawyer should be fired for incompetance. How can someone be guilty of a crime they never had any intention of committing, and took active steps to actually avoid committing it?
I mean... I've bought second-hand HDD's that have been zeroe'd and formatted. Could I be potentially liable if the previous owner had been a kiddie-porn freako? The images might still be buried deep in the disk after all.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately.'
At which point you've just confessed to trafficking in child porn. No, the proper thing to do is have a secure file deletion utility to nuke all evidence on your system.
Child porn has just become way too much of a boogeyman these days. Even if he had downloaded the images to look at - what harm would it have caused? He didn't ruin some girls life by looking at pictures that already exist.
Personally, just to get around stupid cases like this, I'd say that simple POSSESSION of child pornography shouldn't even be illegal. The point is the harm done to the actual children. By that token PRODUCTION should be illegal as that's when the harm is done. BUYING it (through cash or barter) should also be illegal as it finances production of more material. Other than that? Having a picture or video on your hard drive hurts no one, and it isn't going to turn someone into a stark raving mad child molester anymore than playing GTA turns them into a murderer.
If simple possession were not against the law then every one of these borderline gray area cases like this would go away.
Why wouldn't a jury believe you had no intention of downloading kiddie porn when you were the one who reported it to the cops? Calling the cops sends it up the line to who you got it from.
Work Safe Porn
Please someone answer me as honestly as they can: even if that guy happened to willingly watch child porn images, what damage does that do to society? Obviously exploiting children to take those pictures is a bad thing. Yet, we are talking about a random person who never harmed or abused a child. He even downloaded them from a P2P network, which means that he didn't indirectly supported harming children by financing it. How will society improve itself if the justice system throws that man in jail for yeas to come? What is there to be gained? // Posted anonymously to avoid all that social stigma that is promptly associated with those that question society's knee jerk reaction regarding child pornography.
I bet that's what the guy downloaded, given the description of how the FBI just shows up and knows exactly what to look for.
If so, the good luck explaining your way out of that.
My Ass!
Dariks Boot and Nuke+Replace
Doesn't work any more. Sorry.
In my opinion, it's irrelevant whether or not he downloaded the images on purpose. The connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is so tenuous it's absurd. The only way people can justify it is to make up crazy hypotheticals and market demand theories which are used in no other context.
... to fire his attorney and enter a plea of not guilty. If I were him I would fight to the end to avoid the felony conviction. They said he is in his early twenties with no criminal record - why screw that up now? Even if he spent years fighting the charges, and drove himself to bankruptcy in the process, it would still be less of a problem to his future than taking the felony conviction and serving 3.5 years in prison.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Do a fresh install into a VM. Clear your caches/history. Then you snapshot the VM in a pristine state.
Whenever you get a malware nasty or other nonsense, you just restore to your pristine snapshot.
To avoid the possession, you could add some secure erase utility to the management to the snapshot file so there is no remainder of the "dirty" snapshot for the FBI to find on your host filesystem.
This has to be one of the worst examples I've seen of law enforcement over stepping their boundaries. Nobody can argue that child porn is bad stuff BUT taking your computer if you accidentally dl it is almost more outrageous than 20 years in prison for possession. Wouldn't it be better if you were trying to download something of dubious origin to save it on a USB thumb drive? Just bypass the hard drive until you're sure it's safe.
Whatever the (dis)merits of the application of the law are here you Americans really, really need to shorten your prison sentences.
Where I live (Finland), it's hard to actually be imprisoned for 20 years even if you murder someone. Sure, technically killers get lifetime sentences, but they are mostly let out after a decade or so.
And despite us technically having lots of killers and other criminals on the loose, this country is very safe. I believe the science actually says that prisons manufacture and "enhance" criminals.
If you've made it to court and you're sitting behind a jury, you're damn well going to be wishing you had never called the cops. Don't go to government for anything. Let them come to you. At best you're in for a time-consuming hassle, and at worst? I think you know the answer to that.
I was on wikipedia and I accidentally went to the page about the German rock band "Scorpions" and looked at their album "Virgin Killer"
Then, I turned on the TV and what did I see? "Romeo & Juliet" (with 15-yr old Olivia Hussey showing off her boobage)
do I turn myself in now?
Especially when it's just a simple mistake. You download a shite game demo. Deleted. I don't need the cops, even though I live right next to them, to come check my damn work.
Pics or it didn't happen!
If you don't have a warrant, you don't get entry.
If you want to go fishing, go fish yourself somewhere else, not on the taxpayers dime.
Fire the lawyer. No jury will convict. "Deep int he hard drive" - it is to laugh. Must have been a really old hard drive - most of them are pretty shallow nowadays.
The summary states that if you accidentally download kiddie porn you need to call the cops asap. Typically, people who are guilty or trying to hide something don't call the cops on themselves.
Yes but the summary also states that accidentally downloading child porn will get you 22 years in prison.
No thank you, I will not be calling the cops to have myself sent to prison for 22 years for not doing anything wrong.
This is shocking and appalling and must stop. This sort of thing makes it impossible to be able to even look at webpages on the net. What if one accidentily clicks on a link without knowing what it goes to and ends up with these files in their web browser cache? Clicking on a link is not enough to show intent, we cannot go on a wild witch hunt where everyone is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Under the law, it is the act of taking pictures of children in a sexually suggestive way is what should be considered illegal. For some time it has been argued that those who were purchasing such material were helping to contribute to this. However, an accidental download of such a thing does not contribute in any material way to it whatsoever and in most cases, such as we see here, is completely accidental. There are serious problems with this. This is like arresting a person for seeing a blank sheet of paper on a sidewalk, picking it up and noticing that on the other side there was child porn, since they had simply picked it up and held it. The notion is so outrageous and this is exactly what is going on here. This has nothing to do about protecting children and these prosecutions are not protecting children. That is NOT what this dragnet is about. They are NOT protecting children but they are attacking and destroying the lives of completely innocent people. In fact, many childrens lives have already been destroyed because they took a picture of themselves and simply had the picture on their cell phone. This is about thought control and precrime, because by accidentily downloading this, no one anywhere has been harmed, all it is a copy of bits. Really, this massive abuse of the law needs to stop.
ostensibly, they're not wanting to check your work - they're wanting to trace back where you got the child porn, so they can prosecute those people.
But yeah - no one does this. Like I want to lose my computer, and a substantial portion of my life, just because someone bundled X with Y.
The law makes no distinction if the child porn you possess was obtained accidentally or intentionally.
Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.. The sniffing dogs smell some dope that got stashed underneath the seat and YOU are the one who gets put in prison.
I'm not a libertarian but even I can see how utterly broke and immoral the system has become to get to such a point.
Calling the cops is a complete gamble. The cops will likely say "you have child porn, I am required to arrest you and charge you with possession, you can explain it to the judge".
Best thing to do is a low-level multi-pass format, or a new HD. But that is if you *know* that you downloaded CP. If you don't know, cops may bust down your door some months later, seize your computer, then charge you once they find a thumbnail in some cache folder that was deleted 4 months ago.
There is NO requirement to "call the authorities". Delete it, preferably with a file shredder that opens up the file, overwrites each block with random bytes, closes the file, flushes the cache, THEN deletes the file. "Nothing to see here." Their "l33t toolz" (which are really just some perl scripts) won't recover it.
Do the math. What's the most popular porn? Girls as close to 18 as possible. Combine that with user submitted porn. Combine that with typical porn viewing habits, i.e. way too much. Now do some stats. Who's leftover that doesn't have something illegal in their cache? No one who looks at lots of porn, that's for sure. Face it. If someone doesn't like you, they can mess your life up financially, politically, emotionally, really anything they fell like if they are malicious.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
The cops are not your friends. If you accidentally downloaded child pornography, then you downloaded child pornography and you are in possession of child pornography. Intention doesn't matter, as can clearly be seen in this story. If you then call the cops, then you're basically confessing. Do not do it.
I don't know about you, but some times I've come across porn that I think of as a little bit marginal. I also don't like the idea of someone digging up deleted files on my hard disk. It seems like a good idea to have a tool that scrambles all the bits on the free space of your hard disk overnight and during idle periods. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
What this speaks -- loudly and clearly -- to me is that the national tapping of any and all communication lines is complete. And, when things are slow and the FBI can't find a terrorist cell or -power group to take down, they troll their logs, and look to hang someone that no one would defend.
I'm sure that both the EFF and the ACLU will jump in here any minute now...
It just makes the case for using cryptography in everything you do online. I don't know how far it goes though. It may be that they finally laid off Zimmerman because they have enough horsepower to break anything that bubbles up to the surface as potentially interesting.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I posted something similar to this in the comments to the article, but I thought I would start the discussion here too. For those of you who are inclined to rip on the public defender for letting this guy take the plea, bear in mind that the PD is probably handling about a thousand other cases (no exaggeration), not to mention that he barely makes a living wage. Public Defenders' offices are criminally underfunded compared to the DAs, who have the full backing of the State.
Matt White's attorney probably had no choice but to take the plea and dispose of the case quickly. The system is designed so that the PDs can't take anything to trial on account of the sheer volume of cases they have to manage; they're forced to plead everything out and pray they get a good deal. (If they took even a small fraction of their cases to trial, their other clients would be waiting for years to have their cases heard, and there's this pesky little piece of paper that guarantees people the right to a speedy trial. (Of course, it also guarantees the right to effective counsel, but the bar for what constitutes "effective" is ridiculously low.)
It's a win-win for the people who matter: the DA gets to scratch another kill mark into his desk, the prison system gets another warm body it can use to justify its budget, the politicians who depend on prisons to keep the headcounts in their districts high get another "constituent" who can't vote, plus they get to claim they're "tough on crime" and are "protecting the children".
The fact that an (arguably) innocent man has his life ruined as a result doesn't even factor into the equation. He and the public defender are pawns. It's not that the $ystem hates them, it's that, to the people who run the show, they truly, truly do not matter.
So the moral of the story is: if you accidentally download CP, pull the plug on the computer, rip out the hard drive, and destroy it immediately. (Okay, maybe you can leave it powered up for the time it takes to back up your documents, &c., but no longer. It's hammer time.)
Surely there must be more to it than that? We had a guy busted for downloading Child Porn at work. He was monitored for months and charged. Seized his home and work computers. After all said and done he only got 14 days (Military)!
I am not an officer only work for them so didn't any of the procedure/court hearings but when I found out I was shaking my head in disbelief.
The arguments against anarchy start to where thin once you realize that the government isn't some savior-organization out to stop evil but is just a really strong rogue faction that does what it pleases. You sleep safe at night, knowing there's a government out there?
What if you computer is or has been part on a botnet that transfered that kind of picture to your hard drive, without you ever be aware of that? What if spammers or botnet hoarders starts to send mails with child porn attached to millons of email addresses? Or worse, what if someone sends to a rival a simple anonymous mail with such picture and then call the cops?
since there is a plethora of software to remove virus from computers, I am wondering if there is software available to the public to find and remove (all traces) of pornography on a computer. In particular the public should have access to the software the FBI uses to find pornography. Consider this scenario you take a job and are assigned a computer ( previously used) later pornography is found on the computer and you are fired or worse.
Hasn't the music industry spent billions of dollars in advertisement and legal fees trying to convince us illegal downloading of music harms the music industry?
If so we should be thanking this man for harming the supporters of child pornography. Even if it was unintentional and immediately deleted.
Now I am going to destroy any credibility I had by quoting Captain Jean-Luc Picard. "I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions. "
This happened to me, after $4,500 spent on a lawyer it went away.
Just another example of the prophecy of 1984. If anyone thinks that this sort of activity will diminish in the future then they are just kidding themselves. It will get worse, much worse. Big Brother wants to know what you are doing, where you are doing it, when you are doing, and even why you are doing it - at all times. As other posters have said - destroy the drive if you ever THINK you might have accidentally downloaded ANYTHING that your respective Government considers illegal. Preferably with acid, although a sledge hammer would do nicely.
Remember when the cops used to lant pot and guns on people?
Maybe now they are planting porn ..
This report still looks like a "yes men" prank.
He will never get employment and maybe he will even get killed by a vigilante who knows the kid is guilty.
And for those of you named Mathew White, you're going to have to deal with it too on some level - people like to jump to conclusions.
This is were the Internet shows its evil side.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Get a Mac or Hackintosh, use "Secure Empty Trash".
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
If the police and prosecutors cared about justice, then this sort of story wouldn't happen. So just the fact that they say you should call the police shows that you're probably screwed if you do. At least if you call police like them.
I don't see censorship of child porn as even being the issue here. This is like someone getting 3 years for walking out of a store with the clerk's pen. The solution isn't to legalize theft, its to try to do something about the corruption of the 'justice' system.
Then Windoze + IE dosnt get to hide crap everwhere
Haven't heard about WTC7.
Yeah, because they didn't have coverage of the WTC7 collapse on TV that day. Oh wait.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
3 years in prison and ten years listed as a sex offender?? ffs. This guy needs a new lawyer. Either that, or I honestly wonder if he actually is guilty of something worse.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
"Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence."
In other words, he doesn't have the money to actually fight this.
... where by "he" you mean the PD himself.
Look, public defenders almost *always* encourage their clients to settle, because their compensation structure incentivizes them that way. PDs barely make ends meet, and they get compensated by the number of cases they take on, with very little marginal compensation for taking a case to trial. So they wind up taking on 50, 100 cases at a time. The faster they can get rid of you, the faster they can take on another case.
Notice that the merits of your case didn't appear in the above reasoning chain.
Of course if the client insists on going to trial, the PD is legally obliged to do so--but how many criminal defendants know enough AND have the cojones to argue with their lawyer when their liberty is at stake?
The PD compensation system is b0rkd, and innocent people are in jail because of it.
Are you required by law to tell law enforcement when you think a crime might have been committed? Normally you don't have to...
If I happen to see my neighbor's kid out driving alone past curfew I don't legally have to call the police
If I hear a friend talking about sharing MP3s with BitTorrent, I don't legally have to call the RIAA, or the FBI, to report their file sharing activity, do I?
They might confiscate your computer, this can hurt you.
Also, how can you be sure they won't charge you with a crime over the "accident" ?
I'm pretty sure there's this thing called the 5th ammendment, that assures you don't have to testify against yourself, you don't have to admit that you committed a crime.
Accidentally committing a crime and taking the means available to remedy the situation by negating the error (deleting the file, bringing the dead person you shot back to life via alchemy, anonymously returning your neighbor's car you accidentally stole while drunk, etc....) would seem to be one of the more important situations where this ammendment protects the public.
First of all, the CBS13 article is utterly fact free. The only CP "boogeyman" is the one the news manufactures.
Limewire? A year ago? As a fake "College Girls Gone Wild"? Anyone who downloaded that would be getting it from many sources and would have no idea what it was. The FBI simply wouldn't be able to track the download, and over that kind of time, NTFS (I assume) would have completely destroyed any evidence. I've done data recovery, it takes a lot less than a year for deleted files to degrade.
If something could be recovered in an intact enough state to satisfy forensics, I'm convinced this guy intentionally downloaded CP, got caught, and deleted it not too long before the FBI showed up. He's making excuses.
The FBI without a doubt does set up sting sites and baits CP downloaders, but why would they disguise it as fake adult porn? They want to catch people who are actually trying to download CP.
As others have pointed out, this shit shows up on 4chan and the like all the time. Lots of us have probably seen it be accident, has the FBI knocked on your door yet?
Do you really forget accidental child porn on your hdd for a year ? If you do "forget it there", you belong where law says you should be at. Every normal person would delete the file after opening it.
Duh.
This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images.
Not a new low for slashdot, but still depressing that people can't even finish reading a sentence they have begun to read. Even worse, you actually read the FA to get that "forget" part of your post. Maybe you just skip randomly around.
It's bad enough that viewing child porn can throw you in prison for 20 years when most who view aren't interested in making it, which is the real crime. But even the FBI says he couldn't have accssed these pictures easily. For that we trade his tax paying job for a tax paid term in prison which will also make it hard for him to pay as much in taxes afterwards. Then there's the ridiculous cost of this investigation.
Whheeee ... the modern police state, where you can be arrested for anything at any time, regardless of how stupid it is.
Infuriate left and right
I sleep worse at night knowing there are paranoid idiots like you out there. The government isn't likely to snap and go postal with me as an innocent bystander.
You are a fool aren't you?
Why isn't this kind of stuff taught in high school?
No doubt about it. This is a classic case where the users should have been using GNU/Linux. This is because GNU/Linux is designed and created by people who enjoy child pornography just as much as you do. It's the only OS with the security and reliability needed to keep your private collection of "good pics" safe from prying eyes. If you care about freedom, you'll use FOSS. Simple as that. People who use proprietary software are the real pedophiles.
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.
What are the filenames? If he downloaded "girls-gone-wild-ep6654.mpg" than there's no issue, it was an accident. But if he downloaded a filename with kiddie porn in it... well then....
As much as I think child porn is bad (including possession), I think US law, for better or for worse, is built upon giving individual rights to protect themselves from self-incrimination, otherwise the legal system can run amok - as evidenced by this case (if we choose to believe the guy).
So I kinda like the Neal Stephenson approach of having a strong magnetic field in the door frame wipe any drive passing through it. Surely in this day and age of portable electronics it may cause some issues, but not unresolvable ones ;-)
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
The feds often have super-powers when it comes to plea bargaining.
They can make the threat: Plead to three years or face twenty.
When that power is in the wrong hands it can force innocent or very mitigated people to plead guilty.
More importantly--much more importantly--they can use this leverage to FORCE a person to agree to their sentence recommendation. This means that they don't get to plead for mercy from the judge.
This power when used in the right hands, is excellent for hammering bad guys. When used in the wrong hands (for ambition or to avoid embarrassment), it can be downright evil.
We place a lot of trust in our federal prosecutors.
Who runs (most of) the high schools?
Someone that can, upon hearing the facts, charge the prosecutor with abuse of process and dismiss the case.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
was not the claimed questionable possession of kiddy porn. It was using limewire. And the sentence is so hard because MAFIAA and Micro$oft demand it. Fuck them I say.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This reminds me of an old south park episode where all the kids in town reported their parents for child abuse and a few minutes later an army of police show up and haul the parents away.
Sending emails to your enemies with embedded links which secretly download illegal material is really the ultimate way of getting even. Perhaps throw in an anonymous tip to move the process along for good measure.
Its a shame drunk drivers get less time for killing people when someone who does not intend to break any laws gets time and a sicko label tattooed to their forehead for life for accidental downloading of something that was most likely mislabled in the first place.
Unfortunately the more I learn about our legal system the more unscientific, illogical and unfair it appears to be. (ehmm..OJ) Even if you feel like you have nothing to hide and want to start talking or otherwise cooperating its better to just get a lawyer as unless you have law training you would be amazed at how your actions can be twisted and used against you by people with an agenda.
The most corrupt aspect are politicians continually one-uping each other for purely political (votes) reasons adding minimiums to the legal code so that judges are left with no choice but to send someone who deserves no time to jail for years.
I have to assume this guy is not guilty, not because of the presumption of innocence, but rather by the lack of accessible cp on his computer. Pedophiles don't just quit cold turkey, and even if he is a pedophile, quit cold turkey (doesn't happen), hey great, he's fixed his problem on his own. Going with that:
Where does the government keep finding 12 morons to vote guilty in the jury box? I know this particular guy's case isn't going to a jury, but his lawyer seems to think he's screwed if he does. With easy to explain facts like this, both the DA (who wouldn't bring charges that would hurt his win %) and defense thinks there is a high likely hood of conviction? Are you kidding me?
And how many CRAZY guilty verdicts have we read about? Why are juries stacked with idiots too stupid to see that they could just as likely be in the defendant's seat for a multitude of offenses?
Quick side story: *all numbers, except age are fudged to prevent recrimination* I'm 32 (so far so good on my plan to outlive Jesus) and have been on a Jury 1 time. It was a drug charge, which I kinda figured out during jury selection based on the questions I was asked, so I shaped my answers accordingly. It ended up being a trial of a 19 year old kid found with 5 marijuana plants in a "grow box" (nice setup, bought online for like 2k, could of built his own for 800). The prosecution presented their case, the defense only called the defendant, who swore up and down that they were only for personal use (we're not in a medical marijuana state), and the defendant pretty much begged for mercy. I swear at this point one of my co-juror's started to tear up. Final arguments came and went, and then the Judge, the last arbiter of law said (paraphrasing here) that we were only to determine if he possessed the plants, and if so, to find him guilty.
We got back to the jury room and as I'm told we're not supposed to do, but always gets done regardless, we took a vote. 11-1. IANAL but I believed without knowing that if I gave my real reason for not wanting to convict that I'd be replaced (we had 2 alternates). I've never had to choose my wording so carefully, meanwhile the rest of the Jury kept saying things like : "the judge said we had to vote guilty" and "It doesn't matter if I think he did anything wrong, the judge said he did wrong" (that last one, I SWEAR TO GOD, was uttered word for word, i will never forget a syllable). It took 2 hours of carefully worded analogies to sway 1 other to my side, from there we got to 3 in 10 minutes, at 4, the whole room switched. Let me say that again, at 4 ppl, the remaining 8 switched over, not out of a sense of civic duty, but because they were tired and wanted to go home. WITH A MAN'S LIFE IN THE BALANCE.
When we returned our verdict, the judge didn't look at what the foreman wrote (he opened it, looked at its general direction and refolded it), when the foreman not guilty, the Judge damn near fell out of his chair, the DA did a real life triple take, and the defense attorney looked like a deer in headlights. The point is that all 3 professionals INCLUDING the defense attorney, were shocked that the jury failed to rubber stamp guilty on this guy.
After we were relieved 4 of the other jurors came to me and admitted thru conversation that they smoked pot and didn't want to vote guilty at all, but thought they had to because the judge had told them to. As they were talking, all I could think was, "So this is how democracy ends, with sheep"
"you know why? Because we got the bomb, thats why" -Dennis Leary
Look, I'm not saying his defense isn't possible, but why do we immediately assume he's innocent?
Yes, the data was deleted, but do we know for how long? As far as "unable to access" on a filesystem is concerned, deleted 2 minutes ago versus 2 years ago is about the same. Also, if he had deleted it a year ago, you'd think the dirty blocks would have been partially erased, huh? Kinda weird if the FBI could still detect it...and would mean that he has probably deleted it much later than he claims or the FBI knew information about the files beforehand as they were *gasp* FBI BAIT!
So we don't know the whole story here, and yeah, maybe he's right, but we haven't seen all the evidence.
I mean, not that a slashdot summary could -EVER- be wrong or incomplete :P.
This is UTTER INSANITY! It is not like he was building explosives. I don't know what TFA says but this is UNACCEPTABLE.
The young man is having his life destroyed for a THOUGHT CRIME.
When are you fuckers going to take back your country? Anyone who does nothing and says "one more poor slob" is contributing to the problem.
Used to be mine but I moved OUT. I thought I wanted to move back - and no I am not into child porn - but I absolutely hate the idea of what the U.S.A. has turned into... the LAUGHING STOCK of the WORLD. Looked at your exchange rate lately? More of that coming because the country is run by nannies, bought cops, and hypocrits with money.
Then I would say that my hard drive way *pick any size and model that is different than they one they confiscated* and tell they I tossed that drive when it died. I was in the process of saving my money to get a new hard drive. I'm not lawyer but I'm sure this would cause enough confusion that we could work with. Well ok I know this doesn't have much of a chance of working so why not have a little fun in the court room if you're going to jail anyway.
"Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.."
You can have your local K-9 unit run the dog through any car you buy if you ask nicely. The military will do so too, and when I was in the USAF I
had them do one car I bought as a precaution.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Don't me a moron.
Do not in any way shape or form call the cops.
delete the images
Do multiple wipes on your harddrive,
If you are paranoid, buy a new harddrive and after wiping the whole harddrive multiple times. Destroy it with a hammer drill and then send it to the landfill.
This is what big corporations and insurance companies do as a matter of policy.
And in case you haven't seen it yet, the Fifth amendment is the friend of every citizen. And a necessity in any free society.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
I've provided technical services to public defenders for fifteen years and have worked on a number of cases similar to this one. Every legal case has a huge set of facts surrounding it that the general public isn't privy to. Some of those are exposed to the jury, if there is one. More are exposed to the judge. Still more are available to the DA and/or defense attorney. They all affect the legal strategy. Based on the tip of the iceberg we, the general public, are presented with, it's virtually impossible to say anything meaningful, let alone insightful. Acknowledging that massive limitation, here is my perspective:
From the video, the kid presents well. If his record is clean, I question why his attorney isn't aiming for a plea of "not guilty" and a trial. PDs have a reputation for laziness and incompetence. Some of them deserve it. Others are better than the best attorneys money can buy. So this kid may be getting solid counsel - in which case, there is a good reason for him to avoid going to trial - or he may be stuck with a lousy attorney who doesn't want to work or doesn't know how to handle a case like this and wants to see it go away.
In theory, if he's gonna plead guilty, the kid should enter an Alford plea. This is a variation of the guilty plea that says, "I maintain my innocence, but will plead guilty to get the best outcome." That said, DAs will often reject such a plea. The DA may be making an out-and-out guilty plea a requirement to plea bargain at all. Too, he may be aiming for an Alford plea and the press just isn't reporting it that way.
Being put on the sex offender registry is a big deal. Your rights are significantly curtailed - for life. You'd be better off taking more prison time in lieu of the registry... if the DA is willing to even entertain such a deal.
I would add that the legal system is mind-bogglingly inept when it comes to even mildly technical issues. I am considered an expert in my local legal community and have testified as such on multiple occasions. I consider myself to be competent but by no means expert. Watching / reviewing the testimony of other "experts" is blood curdling. You just wouldn't believe the junk "forensic science" presented (and accepted) as evidence. Attorneys, judges, and local law enforcement are quite clueless and accept what they're told, if it sounds sufficiently complicated or is delivered with adequate certainty. I've not dealt with the FBI before but would assume they are much more competent than that. With them on the prosecution's side, the defense would have a very hard time in court, regardless of the facts. I will say that the law enforcement unit in charge of investigating kiddie porn locally is pretty lame - their understanding of technical issues is superficial and their expertise focused on the usage of particular forensic software (specifically Encase).
I have usenet access via Easynews. After a little while of having the service, I realised I didn't have to use an NNTP client and could access everything from their website. They also provide a global search feature. Here's some email correspondence I had with them after my very first use of it.
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:30:38 +0000
To: abuse@easynews.com
Subject: CP Report
I recently tested out your global search engine and searched for Type:
Image, Keyword: Anything.
The first link clearly looks like CP. I have read your FAQ, which directs me
to report it at this email address.
message-id: [removed because of the junk filter]
---
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:45:15 -0700
Subject: [Ticket #254206] CP Report
From: "Support via RT" [abuse@easynews.com]
Hello,
If you are reporting a violation of our Terms of Service, please send us
a sample message header from the posts in question. We need a full
message header in order to investigate the posts and take the
appropriate action.
http://www.easynews.com/childpolicy.html
Thank you,
Easynews Abuse Department
---
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:59:45 +0000
To: abuse@easynews.com
Subject: Re: [Ticket #254206] CP Report
Hello,
You want me to actively look for this child pornography for you? The link
you have given me, states that I should email you the _message ids_, which
is what I sent you, as well as telling you how I discovered it.
I'm not sure what else you need and I am not going try to find the image
again, for obvious reasons.
Again, the message id is: [removed because of the junk filter]
Thank you.
---
I never received a reply. I don't know if it was ever removed, but I get the impression they weren't too bothered about it. I wonder where I stand?
"The only safe thing to do is destroy the hard drive."
Amen.
Physically and thoroughly, say with a sledge hammer. Then bury the pieces underneath Jimmy Hoffa.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Hi Steve Franklin,
Just a friendly note to remind you that you're a loony.
Have a nice day,
T.L.A.
P.S. Don't forget to take your meds and put on your tinfoil hat.
P.P.S. We're watching you...
Erasing a partition could also easily be done with a linux Live CD: dd if=dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 (should also work with /dev/random)
Repeat multiple times if paranoid, but I think once is enough to make it impossible to extract data without throwing millions at it.
Btw. they probably found a connection log on a PC of the sender, tracker of the limewire, or searched his ISP's logs (arguably, ISP shouldn't log that kind of data). It's even possible that secretly all routing is logged, though this probably causes too much traffic. I wonder how many child pornographers hide behind tools like Tor these days. All this is just redicolous because they probably can't catch more than few % of them.
.
/usr/bin/shred is your friend. Won't always do the job, but usually suffices. Destroying the hard drive is excessive, unless you're running for public office.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
...Imagine someone hating someone else (yes - that happens)
that someone gets an idea based on White's misfortune:
1) Send some kiddie porn images (or just family pictures of naked kids) to someone you hate
2) Do it repeatedly a few times, just to make sure they land on his harddisk
3) Secretly tip the Feds that he downloads child porn or has an interest in naked kids
The feds seizes his harddisk, he says someone anonymous sent it to him, but it doesn't help him - because it could be a child porn ring - which he "perhaps" is a part of, and they found them deleted on his harddisk. He's basically screwed! You just killed a man.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
> The law makes no distinction if the child porn you possess was obtained accidentally or intentionally.
That's not true. Disclaimer, I have been involved as an expert (not defendant, wiseass) in a limewire cp case (for the record, the defendant got a full acquittal). In Wisconsin, conviction for possession of child porn requires proof of intent.
Yup... The SPs/MPs will happily do a free sniff of your recently purchased used car. Can't beat a good training opportunity.
...
Do I need to regularly run some sort of secure wipe of all unused space on the possibility that I, or someone else in my house, has accidentaly downloaded something illegal?
Or would this be evidence that I had and was just covering it up?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Antivirus today is garbage, sub 50% detection on collections of public malware (e.g. crawled from web) over the last year. I imagine the rate on the more unknown malware (targeted/custom/small release) is abysmal to none.
Remember, a bunch of people have to get infected, notice and complain before the whole AV market even noticed. When stuff first comes out, the real malware people test it against the same AV engines with that days signatures (often 40+ at a time) until it is not detected. There are plenty of people in the AV world working on both sides of the fence as well.
Brainless signature detection is dead.
I recently interviewed a Save the Children organization's representative over child pornography. She pointed out that the ample psychological harm caused by kid rape is compounded by the victim's awareness that depictions of the act are being spread and "enjoyed." What's your take on this? She had previously mentioned a gateway theory, ie. that less access to child porn results in fewer child molesters, but I'd have to see the numbers before coming to conclusion.
Okay, so your life has been ruined by "Think of the children" hysteria and a malicious and flawed justice system. That's no exaggeration, and if I found my life in that position I'd probably end it.
But for the next person, if they ask:
1. Do not talk to the cops
2. Do not talk to the cops
3. Do not use limewire for porn
4. TrueCrypt
5. If you're ever unsure, peform a full secure disk wipe of your hard drive
6. If you don't know how to do this, or are still unsure, open the hard drive up and physically destroy the platters
7. Do not talk to the cops
So what happens when hundreds of people stumble across a CP attack on a forum or website before the admins have the chance to clean it up?
Innocent people are more likely to be flustered, etc., when confronted with allegations of a crime.
They'll act guilty, whereas the true crook will look you right in the eye and lie. He or she has nothing to lose by lying.
The old story of "liars can't look you straight in the eye" is a lie. Crooks do it all the time. An honest person would be ashamed tha people would even *think* that they did something wrong, which is why they act in ways that pop psychology says "they're acting guilty."
"No warrant, no entry. I have nothing to hide, but I do value my privacy, and you should be spending your time catching crooks, not trying to weasel around the law like a crook. Have a nice day."
I just downloaded: Eraser. I'm running the erase free space on all my drives now. Let them come for me. If they say I am destroying evidence I will counter with innocent until proven guilty. I am enhancing my privacy in case totalitarian-ist thought comes and tries to railroad me into something I am not guilty of.
Shh.
Really? How is that "War on Drugs" working out for you? I hear USA has the highest percentage per capita of jailed individuals in the world, many in for-profit private prisons and most for drug-related offences. I assume drugs are therefore next to impossible to obtain there, no?
This is precisely such moronic "logic" as you have presented, main purpose of which is diversion of money and power to the "holy crusaders", elimination of civil liberties to enable the witch-hunters to operate "efficiently" ... and creation of ever-more-profitable and violent black market, which is used to justify this spiral of insanity.
I was going to bring this up myself.
Yes, THEY can murder thousands of people both here and abroad, but YOU cannot accidentally fart in public without them wanting to lock you up for the rest of your life.
Ok...
What just blew me away last night watching a video from PilotsFor911Truth...
Annnnd we dive directly into wacko-land. Thanks for including that paragraph, now I know I can completely dismiss the entire post, you paranoid looney.
Comment of the year
Sorry, request denied per the protection granted by the 4th amendment of our constitution.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
From the article "'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative."
So, if I have an old computer I want to be rid of, I first make sure there is no child porn on it, then call the FBI and claim I downloaded child porn by mistake - FBI takes away the computer, and I regain some lost floor/shelf space! Unless, of course, they return the computer after finding nothing on it...
Ken
>>but they are mostly let out after a decade or so.
:-)
I have 5 neighbors I hate. So you're saying it would take me 50 years to kill them all one at a time, but then I'd be a free man?
Might be worth it.
Until FBI agents are rounded up and killed, and/or Washington D.C. is purged with thermonuclear fire, here are some tips on how best to deal with and prevent accidental child porn downloads:
Use tools like Heidi Eraser and DBAN to wipe the files and/or drive in question. Erase all free space on the drive. USDoD 5220.22-M 7-pass should suffice.
Use Firefox, and encrypt your profile and the browser cache with either Windows EFS or by putting your profile folder in a Truecrypt volume. On top of that, use the Private Browsing mode when browsing for porn. If you're on Windows Vista or later, enter 'fsutil behavior set encryptpagingfile 1' into an elevated Command Prompt window to encrypt the pagefile. If you so desire, you can use Truecrypt to encrypt your entire hard drive.
P2P networks like LimeWire are full of shit and spam. Don't use them. Use BitTorrent tracker sites like PureTnA and Cheggit instead; they have strict policies against any content that might be of persons under 18.
In case you have pictures that you want to keep, say, of naked 16-year-old girls being sluts and whores, use Truecrypt to store them in encrypted volumes, and wipe the originals. There are probably open-source programs out there that can take files and hide them in the least significant bits of other, larger files. This is called steganography.
Last, but not least, DON'T CALL THE COPS! Their job isn't to help you, it's to put you in jail. If they come to you, don't talk to them. Don't let them into your home or apartment. Let them come back with a warrant. If they come back with a warrant, refuse to provide keys and/or combinations to safes and lock-boxes; let the Pigs break them open. Refuse to provide passwords to computers and encrypted files. Call a lawyer. If you're prosecuted for something they found, get a real lawyer. A man who defends himself has a fool for a client, and a man with a public defender faces two prosecutors.
Yup... The SPs/MPs will happily do a free sniff of your recently purchased used car. Can't beat a good training opportunity.
And if their free sniff finds some hidden drugs, what then? Will the congratulate you on your honest, or arrest you for possession of illegal drugs? Hopefully the former, but do you want to bet the next N years of your life on that?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Everyone is crying that this guy is being railroaded but no one is questioning the story? The guy downloaded "some" child porn images and a year later the FBI shows up? The FBI says to call authorities if you accidentally download child porn? I don't believe people plead guilty when they are innocent. I think there's a huge chunk of this article missing and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this guy was involved in some child porn ring.
So if you accidentally get kiddie porn on your machine, you should call them and confess to downloading it? After they nailed this guy, stealing 20 years of his life (or only 3.5 if he pleads out), and destroying the remainder: "Hi, my name's Dave. I'm a registered sex offender, and I just moved in next door." "Hi, I'd like to apply for the job. I'm a registered sex offender." "Hello beautiful. Can I buy you a drink? I'm a registered sex offender." They proved that there effectively was no porn on his machine! What do you think they'd do to you when you called up and they had the computer with the porn on it? Your claim of "accident" is no better than his.
The correct thing to do is run shred on the drive for a few days and then restore from back up (I love Time Machine). And if the feds show up, admit nothing and posit that it could easily have been a wardriver on your WiFi.
As for the kid in the story about to get fucked by the system, he needs to get a better lawyer (as others have pointed out), and have his lawyer focus on the prosecution's complete lack of proof of criminal intent (mens rea as the lawyers call it). Although the concept has been ignored recently (especially in federal courts), it is still on the books as a requirement of the prosecution. He needs to show the jury (made up hopefully of mostly men, and nobody with small children), that he's just a regular horny college kid, just like they were. And then point out very clearly to the jury that, according to the law, if they do not feel he intended to download child pornography, beyond a reasonable doubt, then they must acquit him.
Someone else already posted this, but it bears reposting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Reason #1 to never talk to the police: there's no way it can help. As he says, that really ought to be good enough, but he gives seven more reasons, just in case.
...always get your porn from a reliable source.
If you have some way of sending someone within the US an email with child pornography, his/her life is ruined forever! WHY KILL SOMEONE WHEN YOU CAN GIVE HIM ETERNAL DAMNATION?
Look! This is a actually balance of power. Corporates have to hire lawyers to ruin your life. Cults likes CoS have to get a bunch of fanatical believers. You? It's just an email. One email to send one person to eternal damnation. You can ruin the lives of everyone you hate this way. Let everyone you hate live their lives in eternal pain and agony - death is too good for them. Start acting now.
If you don't own the car yet, nor possess the car, but require the previous owner to bring the car down and have it sniffed before you buy it, then if there are drugs the previous owner gets busted.
So clearly that is the way to do it.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Anyone care to comment on the possibility of this:
1. BadPerson puts up a web page, and put an iframe on there. A very tiny invisible one. That iframe links to some random 3rd-party childpornsite.com.
2. GoodPerson goes to BadPerson's web page, and unknowingly downloads stuff from childpornsite.com in the invisible iframe, which is dutifully cached.
As a variant, BadPerson could only include the iframe when requests are from the guy he is trying to frame. To everyone else, the web page would appear normal.
I'm not sure if BadPerson's URL will show up as a referring URL to the childpornsite.com, though.
I too was convicted with child porn because of a accidental download via eMule. I'm now a lovely sex offender with 10yrs probation, the part that is killing me is the fucking fees and the 'status'! I'm not into that type of thing, I have a lovely godmother and her family who knows I'm not a predator or into children and even their grandkids (ages 6months to 23) could tell you that. I too had a lame public defender who told me to take the plea, in feeling that I'd get hung on the stand. I really should of went to trial, I rather be in prison then be outcasted in society. Hopefully the American sheep will wake up and fight against some of this law. Yes production and selling/buying needs to be illegal (30+ to life), but mere possession means shit. That's like trying to outlaw thinking, what they going to do, implant mind readers in our skulls next?
Wake up Americans! YOU ARE BEING RAPED BY THE GOVERNMENT YOU LOVE!
Meantime in UK: "A 66-year-old church elder convicted of indecently assaulting a child will not be sent to jail because his obesity means his health is "precarious".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8393463.stm
So basically what you are saying is that if I hacked Time Warner Cable and disseminated child porn on it, the local authorities would be required by law to arrest everyone with a TiVO?
Absurd, and I don't really believe this is true. I believe that case law requires intent to possess. I.e., if someone else had put the child porn on his computer, without his knowledge, and he could prove this to be true, there'd be no case.
C//
What is your problem with Pilots for 911 Truth? The fact that they are pilots or the fact that they want the truth?
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Last jury I was on was a drug case. The state had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he had it under his possession and control, he knew he had it under his possession and control, he knew what it was, and he intended to sell it. I could see why the case made it to trial, that wasn't easy. We voted to convict him and every time I revisit it the gut check comes back the same: we got it right.
Trusting any one-sided description of events strikes me as risky, but going on what's in the article I'd think it'd be hard to prove any sane sense of the word "possession", let alone conscious possession.
So there's at least one of three things going on here: the public defender's recommendation to plead guilty is incompetent, the public defender knows something about the case that we don't, or the law is insane.
Kinda hard to tell what's going here.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
It's called Argumentum ad Hominem. It has no more relation to the argument than the fact that you have an unnatural erotic attraction toward goats, Gerald. Perhaps you can take some time out from your busy day at the ranch to tell us just exactly what your problem is with actually interviewing the witnesses before coming to a conclusion about what happened. Forget the damned goat, Gerald, answer the bloody question.
Any of you other geniuses out there want to chime in on this, go right ahead. Just don't bother to tell me what you channeled from the spirit of Hani Hanjour. The position of Village Idiot has already been filled by the Anonymous Nitwit.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
dd if=dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 is slow as fuck, you need to use bs=1M, and it *WILL NOT* work with /dev/random. /dev/random will just get exhausted and block reads. /dev/urandom will work, but is slower and doesn't provide any more protection.
Look, they can cut you a deal, and you'll only be in jail for 3.5 years! Nice!
By the way, rule number one is: don't talk to the cops
Why were the FBI wanting to search his computer in the first place? The fact that they had to ask meant they didn't have a warrant. American law allows you to confront your accuser. That means a person or persons who told the FBI he had CP on his computer. Unless the FBI did an illegal search with some kind of stealth program to access his computer with out his knowledge or someone turned him in they wouldn't have been there in the first place. It is never a good idea to let the authorities search any place or possession (like a car) when they ask. I don't care is I get pulled over for speeding or not having my seatbelt on I would never allow a search request. You give up a lot of rights by allowing it. Just the fact you can be arrested for doing what is right shows you can't expect fair an honest treatment form any law-enforcement agency. It's a fact you can download anything with any name and it not be what you thought or expected to get. It's a fact that should you get something of that nature it's hard to get rid of without leaving a trace. It's a fact that you can not count on any government agency to do what is right. It's a fact that a PD doesn't have the same motivation a paid for lawyer has in getting you cleared of what ever you are charged with. It is also a fact that there are those in the system who will do whats right. You just can't take the chance all of those people will be the ones working on your case. And of course there is those twelve jurors who, for the most part haven't got a clue, being manipulated by the court. If you believe you are innocent of what ever charges hove been brought against you, pleading guilty can seal your fate. Should new evidence show up at a later date your "confession" could torpedo any chances of your getting out even if proved innocent. My point is that neither he nor any other person is doing him/her self a favor by accepting a plea bargain. It's not much of a bargain for you. Just them.
Do you want to make a difference in this?
Start Twittering http://bit.ly/jurynull with the hashtag #jury-nullification.
To HELL with the law, bring justice back to the hands of the people.
[End Of Line]
He claims he didn't do it... oh wow. A person on trial who claims he didn't do it. Now that is a shocker.
He claims it was done by accident, that the files magically got buried deep within the system. Yeah, because that stuff happens. Not.
I would have thought that on Slashdot, people would question computer related claims a little bit more thoroughly before swallowing some guys story.
The linked story claims that at first investigators could not find anything (in /users/Documents/Pictures) but later found something buried deep inside the harddrive (/winnt/tmp/mycp/pictures). Oh I got no idea about this, but on /. people are always so ready to assume that the police know nothing about computers, so why are you now so ready to assume that these files were magically hidden deep inside... inside what? What part of windows buries files deeply? How buried? Attached as parts to other files or simply a few directories deep?
I smell an excuse. "oh it wasn't me, it was scary computers that did it". Yeah, like people who claimed that computer games made them kill people.
Smell the bullshit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The laws against child porn are strict liability: You're guilty even if its an accident, you're even guilty if someone actually planted it on you (and you can prove it). This is what strict liability means.
He is guilty. He admitted his guilt to the police. There is nothing reasonable to do except plead guilty at this point. Oh, and learn your fking lesson and DON'T TALK TO THE POLICE.
So, how does it then get burried deep inside the hard drive where a first inspection does not find it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When is the FBI going to get their heads out of their asses and realize this could happen to anyone, including them. Just another example of how our poorly thought out justice system ruins plenty of innocent citizens lives. Talk about taking a life and throwing it neatly in the waste receptacle
Many people that posted in this thread seem to miss a simple thing. Which proves one more time that when the whole world is considering the Americans being stupid, then the whole world has a point. Look what people in other countries do. Hint: look at the poor countries. People in poor countries consider the poverty a bad thing, a thing that makes their life worse than they think they deserve. So they just GTFO from those countries. Patriotism is a great thing, but the respect between a country and its citizens must be mutual. If a country has such dumb laws that screw you so badly, screw that country. Find another one. You will be happier, you will be free, and you won't be hated because some rich greedy morons that happen to share the same citizenship with you provoked yet another war and are killing innocent people on the other side of the Earth, in the name of *cough* Democracy.
Why do you bother to argue with these idiots? They can't help it. They grew up staring at a TV screen. Their brains are rotted. They believe whatever Katie Crock tells them.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Usenet is a case in point for this story.
Go to any legitimate (i.e. non-child) erotica group in Usenet and look at the last 1-2 days worth of images. Some of them will be illegal, just about guaranteed, and you won't know until the bits hit your drive. Now you've incriminated yourself without intent, and according to cases like TFA, you're potentially jail-bound and marked for life.
If enforcement was anything like even-handed, Usenet would be kept clean through reports like yours, and posters of kiddie pix would be shut down by law enforcement. In reality, a small number of viewers get a maximum penalty, all viewers are put in legal jeopardy, and meanwhile actual perpetrators apparently just go scott free.
Note, I'm talking about the US, where it is *legal* to view non-child erotica, and millions of people do it every day.
So I'm wondering what their policy is on twinks. Personally twinks do not float my boat but I have seen some images of young boys who look like they could be 10 years old but, according to the disclaimer on the site, are 18 years old at least. :/
And there's plenty of women in straight porn who look 12 but aren't, right?
If you don't know, cops may bust down your door some months later, seize your computer, then charge you once they find a thumbnail in some cache folder that was deleted 4 months ago.
That works for Calgary Police Service for any law.
The fact that they already have the truth, and are in denial.
Comment of the year
Just get a new HD. Why risk _everything_ when you can be in the free and clear for a very well spent $100 and a few hours re-install. You think that guy wouldn't pay $10,000 now to make all his troubles disappear??
It's the unforgivable crime. If that stuff winds up on your drive, smash it, then toss it, and get a new one. Tell whoever that the HD died and you need a new one. Even if you have to put it on a charge card or borrow the money. Don't even mess around with shredders or wipe programs. Why take any chance at all??
I think it's very rare to hind behind Tor for downloading child porn, it's very slow and unreliable for large transfers. If you're doing something illegal you might as well rent some russian VPN or something already.
c++;
More than likely they caught him on bait links, or someone turned him in - both of which undermine his defense that it was just an accident.
He could have someone who hates him, and he could also just be a dumbass who spends all day searching for porn and clicking on every link he finds, but the child porn on his hard drive was the -last- piece of evidence, not the first.
Also, this case had to go through a grand jury first - if this was all the evidence the FBI had then it would not have made it through. Even if it did manage to get past the grand jury phase, if what White says is true this would be an easy win, you'd hardly have to do anything - simply show that this is the only child porn on your hard drive, and the plethora of normal porn (this guy was apparently an avid porn surfer, and not shy about it) on the hard drive, combined with the fact that the child porn was, in fact inaccessible (making it very likely he didn't want it on his computer at all), and the FBI will have a really hard time proving he intended to possess child pornography.
The fact that he is pleading guilty leads me to believe there is a hell of a lot more evidence against this guy, and he's just saying "oh they found some old picture I deleted a long time ago and are railroading me for it". Seriously, how did the FBI know to come to his house in the first place if all he did was accidently download - and delete - some child porn.
Innocent until guilty and all that, but it sounds to me like he is trying to mitigate the damage of his actions (by pleading guilty and looking for sympathy) while trying to make himself look like the victim. His story does not ring true to me.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
There is also a risk to this.
Sniffer dogs are not perfect, especially when they're still in training. What if the sniffer dog does a shitty job and misses something?
Now there's proof that there wasn't any drugs in the car when you bought it so any drugs found must be yours, right?
That they think there are 911 truths. Clearly, there are only 42.
What's the matter with you? Don't you like getting tased?
Requiem for the American Dream
The mindless "kiddy porn" hysteria is out of control, and it's a canary in the coal-mine for further suppression of free speech, because all tyrannies wean themselves on suppressing the most unpopular freedoms first. Any dissident can now have doubleplusungood.png or crimethink.avi uploaded to his computer and deprived of his liberty for the rest of his life! (Being released from prison under the current "former sex offender" programs isn't much better than still being in prison!)
In most cases "kiddy porn" doesn't even depict an actual crime (the "market" is over-saturated with millions, someday an accumulation of billions of high school idiots posting pictures of themselves, as I once did), but even if it does - viewing an image of a crime is not same as committing it! In a rational world, the alleged victim and/or her parents / guardians should decide whether rape has taken place, with "bad parents" being subject to social ostracism and the child's Natural Right to sue for emancipation (jury-granted full sovereignty or transfer of custody). When government force is put in charge of regulating family life, the former grows beyond all bounds and the latter collapses! All those victimless restrictions on human sexuality only encourage violent rape, or the psychological projection of violence into other aspects of one's life!
No possible combination of 1's and 0's should EVER be illegal!
...Do multiple wipes on your harddrive ....
Apple's OS X includes a feature called secure erase. How much more secure is that, then the normal delete? Does Windows 7 have something similar? If so what do they call it.
All theory is gray
"I was going to bring this up myself. "Yes, THEY can murder thousands of people both here and abroad, but YOU cannot accidentally fart in public without them wanting to lock you up for the rest of your life. "What just blew me away last night watching a video from PilotsFor911Truth was that the NTSB simulation agrees with the interviews done by the guys at NationalSecurityAlert, that the plane at the Pentagon followed a northerly flight path that could not possibly have knocked over the light poles. The only folks who were out of step on this were the 911 Commission. Add to this the failure to reset the altitude gauge in the simulation upon descent and you have the plane at 400+ feet, flying OVER the Pentagon and not into it." Moderators are idiots.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
It's starting to sound like the Dept. of Homeland Security: too much money chasing too few leads. Thus, they go after small potatoes and iffy situations. Local gov'ts started slapping the label "Homeland Security" on arbitrary departments and projects to get DHS money.
Table-ized A.I.
The 5th Amendment states in part that "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
What this means is that the prosecution cannot force you to take the stand, police cannot force you to talk, etc. However, if you freely admit things to the police, they may use that information against you, and if you take the stand in your own defense, your statements may be used by the prosecutor.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
To see another discussion based on this comment, go: here.
Shh.
While ripping out the HDD and destroying it in the event of something like this, a better solution would be to not let yourself get into these types of situations in the first place. I'm not saying its impossible to accidentally download child pornography or anything else that may get you into some kind of trouble. However, at the same time if you had full disk encryption and the FBI showed up to your house asking to search your machine, well, good luck to them is all I have to say. The chances of them finding anything on a fully encrypted hard drive are zero. Combine that with a multipass delete over the potentially incriminating file and you should be safe.
God damn. Why has no one mentioned encryption? It's a matter of privacy. I use OpenBSD softraid encryption on all my boxes. Fuck the police or anyone else who wants to see my hard drives. I have a right to fucking remain silent. I have no child porn. Only college girls mud wrestling naked while they grab each others boobs. They are over 18... the way I like 'em.
"The connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is so tenuous it's absurd."
Oh really? Tell that to the face of the child in the image he downloaded.
That's like, your opinion, man. Most 24-year-olds don't have the maturity level to understand the repercussions of the activity. May I suggest remedial ontology?
Big Brother is watching you!
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
police cannot force you to talk
However, we know that not to be true. Police commonly question people, and threaten them with obstruction of justice charges, if they do not fully cooperate, answer all questions, and do everything they ask, even in ways that incriminate them.
What's true de jure, may be false in actual fact. So...
The real question is is it really a legal requirement to call be police?. It would seem to work against you in all possible ways...
Of course, if you have a dead/dying body on your dining room floor, it's probably in your best interest to call the 911.
Your neigbors, their family/etc, might get suspicious about you digging a big hole in your back yard to bury the friend who choked on a dinner roll.
And the police may even manage to find crime where none existed; the friend was dating one of your old acquaintenances of the opposite sex, or something such as that...
What a victory for the tax payer. First we have the thrill of supporting some lard assed FBI personnel. Then we have the joy of paying for a trial as well as the prosecutor's time. And then for the next wonderful thrill we get to pay a huge sum to put this poor guy in prison! And then we get the absolute joy have having him on a sex offenders' list so that he will not be employable or able to get housing for the rest of his life which will trigger welfare and public support until the poor schmuck is dead.
So the guy gets his entire life trashed and the public gets a whopping expense. With a logic stream such as this one the people behind this kind of law should have been in charge of the war in Vietnam. Entire new definitions of victory abound!
The old story of "liars can't look you straight in the eye" is a lie.
It's hard to assess the truth of this claim you make when you keep avoiding eye contact.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
OMG, they're congregrating! Someone - quick - call in the Hardly Boys!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
They wouldn't have asked. Asking first is stupid because it could tip off the suspect that they were under investigation and they'd then have time to destroy evidence and such.
So that they asked means they either realized they had insufficient evidence to get a warrant, or they'd already tried to get one and the judge said "No, you are fishing and I'm not signing off on it."
The police do things like this, try to go search when they lack the evidence to get a warrant. Many people are cooperative so it works well. Happened to a friend of mine. His roommate at the time was a problem many ways, and ended up getting himself arrested. However the police thought my friend might be involved as well. So they came back and said they wanted to search the house. My friend told them to get lost, which annoyed them, but there was nothing they could do. They didn't have any probable cause that he was doing anything illegal, they'd never get a warrant, but they could ask and if he said yes they were free to go.
It is amazing how often tricks like that work. A county attorney I know says he loves lineups. Reason? Because he asks the question "Would the guy who did it please raise his hand?" and people do! He's gotten the same person with that on more than one occasion. If crooks are willing to make it easy for the police to get them, well expect the police to take advantage.
So if you've done nothing wrong and the police come and ask to search your house, your answer should be "No, come back with a warrant." That'll most likely be the last you see of them, they wouldn't have asked if they had probable cause for a warrant. Remember: The 4th amendment is made for protecting innocent people. If we could rely on the police to be a perfectly noble and just group who would only ever search criminals, well then we'd not need a 4th amendment. It isn't there to protect criminals. However we can't thus we have one to protect innocent people from being harassed and inconvenienced.
Remember this organization? No need for public defender.
New Economic Perspectives
Keep in mind that you can't trust the FBI (or any other law enforcement agency) to give you an opinion on what the law actually says (and you can't trust TFAorS either). Just because they tell you that accidentally having child pornography is illegal, doesn't make it illegal. They are not giving you legal advice, they are making their own jobs easier. If you want to know whether something is illegal or not, read the statutes for yourself, and/or consult your lawyer.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Talking to the police is a great way to get yourself considered non-innocent.
...destroy your HD and throw it in the lake. That's the lesson here, I guess.
If only because it's so easy to 'plant' nearly anything, whether it's the police doing the planting, someone who does not like you, a trojan/malware, or accident...possession laws are basically "you are guilty because you are".
I meant: countries like the UK, of course.
My brother worked at a local mom & pop computer store here in Canada. He was asked to repair a PC for a family acquaintance. The "gentleman's" computer was acting up because he had tried installing a freeware (or malware) utility to create hidden partitions. My brother found all kinds of kiddie porn, all young males, some even the same age of his own son (who was 8 years old) and younger. He reported to the police, they confiscated the computer, and charged him to the fullest extent of Canada's child pornography law at the time (around 1999).
The result?
Despite the judge ruling that he could no longer possess any computers in his home, he actually studied computer science in jail, paid for by the Canadian taxpayer. My brother was harassed by some people in our small community who did not realize what kind of depraved photos and videos he found - and he was not allowed to tell anyone by police order. He claims that he would not report such finds again to the authorities.
And the pervert?
Out of jail after just a year (long enough to get his training finished) and has moved out West, making big bucks in IT. Now he has the knowledge to hide his child porn himself thanks to the Canadian penal system!
Secondly, if this is their typical method of going after people, it assures that they will ONLY catch the casual browser and never catch the actual distributes or even producers of this stuff. Anyone who is a habitual cyber criminal is going to know better than to keep stuff like that on an unsecure hard-drive for any period of time. They'll likely securely delete and wipe their drives regularly. These idiots were so completely out of it that they thought it was a good idea to suddenly consider it urgent to go after someone who once did something two years ago and has apparently not done so since?
Because this poor sap is one of the best examples of "low hanging fruit." They're going after him because it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to trace the original source of the images and nail the bastards who truly harmed the kids in the first place. They rack up another CP conviction, moralists are satisfied that another pedo has been nailed, and the general public cheers that the good guys are thinking of the children and fighting the scourge. Makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy (except, alas, the poor dude now serving hard time with "Rollo, the Amateur Proctologist" for a cellmate) and pure and smug in spite of the fact that the conviction does nothing -- repeat, NOTHING -- to actually put even the smallest dent in the problem of kiddie porn. He's just like those tens of thousands of small-time casual drug users doing jail time while the big cartels go merrily on.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
For a paedophile, it is probably a lot safer to actually go molest some kids nowadays rather than look for pictures on the internet. They should use all these resources to hunt down real criminals (bankers) instead.
Lets stand up to the government! What could they do if we organized and stopped paying taxes until we fix the problems that are making this beautiful land a shi**y place to live. The government has far too much power. If I were him I'd demand to be deported to a country that doesn't suck republican nuts... When are we gonna have another civil war? I say we start a country wide militia and tell the federal government to shape up or get knocked down. That is IF they haven't already put something in the water to keep us submissive.
on that note... I'm sleepy.
Phone the FBI and tell them that you definitely haven’t downloaded anything
This last step is completely unnecessary. Just type your message into Notepad and we'll get it.
-Your Friendly Neighborhood Agent
so you are saying that 1) people generally dont know what guilt looks like and 2) the current interpretation of "acting guilty" is designed to incriminate the innocent?
Balderdash!
No, the guy is 22. He's getting 20 years.
I am impressed that you seem to have gone beyond the usual "I don't RTFA", and even the recent rash of "I don't RTFS", and moved straight into "I don't RTFC".
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
*while I personally cringe any time someone "plays the race card", I do think it's weird that Congress (or some State legislature) hasn't applied the same technique to squash the "meth epidemic" and wonder if that is because there seem to be meth heads in all skin tones.
If the amount of meth production in my ~95% white hometown is any indication, either there are meth heads in a number of skin tones, or people are afraid of applying such profiling to white people. Honestly, neither would surprise me.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Typically, people who are guilty or trying to hide something don't call the cops on themselves.
What makes you think the cops care? It is not the job of the police, the FBI, or any other law-enforcement body, to give legal advice, to do justice, or even, really, to protect the innocent. Their job is to get convictions. That's all it comes down to: if there's a crime, they will desperately want to pin it on someone. They want a conviction.
That is their only job. You do not want to make yourself an eligible target. The bad ones don't care if they get the wrong person, so long as they get a conviction. But even the good ones, when it comes to child porn, will start swinging pretty wildly; if you're close by, you'll get hit. Don't be close by.
"Directory Opus" is a kick ass Windows explorer replacement and it has a secure wipe option when deleting a file and you can configure how you want it to erase and how many passes. http://www.gpsoft.com.au/ If in doubt I would be going for DBAN on the whole drive though if I accidentally downloaded some. If you view/download a lot of mainstream pron in the form of short clips, I think there is a good chance eventually there is going to be some questionable content (from other countries which have different age limits) which makes its way into Google circulation. If you are a mainstream pron junkie which I bet a lot of /. readers are, how careful do you need to be?
I'm not saying it - Eddie Greenspan, an experienced trial lawyer, says it in his book, where he deals with cops and other witnesses who lie under oath.
And its' everyone's experience. Even if you did nothing wrong, you don't want to be stopped and questioned. Even if you haven't even got a "borrowed" hotel towel in your baggage, customs makes you nervous. The crook? They're already pathological, so it's no wonder they exploit weaknesses in human responses.
Anyone know if there's some way we can donate to his legal defense fund? Or is there someway we can get ACLU or some other interest group involved?
It offends peoples morals. And as a democratic society, we reserve the right to legislate our own morality to as great an extent as we please. Thus, any transgression, no matter how minor can be made into a capital offence by the simple will of the people.
Child pornography laws and penalties are history's greatest example of the raw, uncensored will of the people acting in a democracy. More so than any other development, the current trends regarding child pornography have convinced me that unrestricted democracy is every bit as bad as unrestricted dictatorship.
May the Maths Be with you!
Best thing to do is a low-level multi-pass format...
Even that isn't a guarantee. If they are aware at all about what happened they have logs of the transfer and can still charge you with receipt. This, incidentally, carries heavier penalties (5 year minimum jail time) than plain possession (no minimum). The anti-CP laws are truly fucked up. Largely because it isn't politically feasible for any moderate legislator to stand up against the harsh punishment when some zealot (in this case Thurmond and Helms) introduces whacked out bills "for the children".
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Why was Donald Trump's Miss USA (America?) organization not charged for possession of child pornography. The organization said they had possession of a "sex tape" with Miss California. Miss California said she was 17 at the time. Presto. Miss USA (America?) company just admitted to possession of child pornography. Why isn't the government prosecuting them?
ostensibly, they're not wanting to check your work - they're wanting to trace back where you got the child porn, so they can prosecute those people.
And that’s a load of crap. Limewire keeps no logs, afaik, to tell what IPs it got such-and-such a file from. If they want to track down CP sharers on Limewire, they’re going to have to (wait for it...)
fire up Limewire and try to download some themselves. I guess that’s too difficult, though.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
that's going to make negotiating the price a little tricky, since you've now accused the guy of being a druggie
Even if that works on files you drag into the Trash, what about your browsing history and cache? Are those securely deleted when you clear them in Safari?
TFA is based on a one-sided argument. that in itself makes me suspicious. would the FBI really take the time to prosecute a first time offender for one, deleted picture that was downloaded years ago? yes it's possible but it's also not likely. i'd like to hear the other side of the case first.
why did he plead guilty when facing 3.5 years of hard time? based on the evidence just about any jury would let the guy off for a one-time accidental download that was deleted immediately.
i've downloaded an awful lot of p0rn, and i've never accidentally downloaded child pornography that i am aware of anyway.
I did read his comment, which was full of outright lies. Lies like claiming that crack cocaine was eliminated due to introduction of ever more draconian laws, which is utterly laughable to anyone with even passing knowledge of the US drug scene. "Recreational drug" consumption has been steadily growing all throughout the "War on Drugs" and shows no signs of slowing down, although some morons have mis-interpreted decline in use of older types of drugs which were being replaced by newer, more potent or more fashionable ones as a "victory" resulting from their brain-dead "demand reduction" campaigns.
If I go out right now and download some CP on Limewire, what are the chances of my being caught?
I ask this because we see this or similar stories every couple of months. Is this reflective of the conviction rate, or are droves of people being arrested for similar offenses that we never hear of?
I find it hard to believe that everyone looking at 17 year olds on Limewire is convicted, but then again what would be the point of having a reverse lottery? Is it a fear thing?
Imaginary circumstances you made up on the spot "undermine his defense"?
Grand juries reject any but actually farcical allegations?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Instead of feeling sorry for this 22 year old, why can't you nerds THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!
The term for this is "Low Quality Legal System", LQLS
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Delete it, preferably with a file shredder that opens up the file, overwrites each block with random bytes, closes the file, flushes the cache, THEN deletes the file.
I don't think that's going to work that well with a journalling or versioning file system; it'll store the new version of the file (the random-contents blocks) in a set of blocks disjoint from those storing the child porn. Fine, you flush those to disk, then unlink. The CP is still there.
You want to shred unallocated space once in a while.
(Whether or not you'll have this problem of course depends on the implementation decisions of your particular file system.)
In Wisconsin, conviction for possession of child porn requires proof of intent.
WI Code s 948.12(1m)(a) and (b) require merely that the defendant knows that they possess the material and that they know the character and content of the material.
The fucked up thing isn't that this guy is getting convicted. The fucked up thing is what he did is a crime. It shouldn't be but under the law as it stands, he's guilty as hell.
IAALStudent (in Australia).
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
(should also work with /dev/random)
You should use /dev/urandom instead - /dev/random eventually runs out of entropy (it doesn't take too long, actually) and blocks. /dev/urandom doesn't block and is sufficient for this application.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Hopefully the filesystem is a bit better at hiding evidence than its author.
Seriously, everyone reading this story needs to contact the ACLU and the EFF now. I'm not sure what other organizations might have interest, but maybe you all can think of more.
This kind of stuff has to stop.
If they have more evidence and the guy is guilty, fine toss him in jail.
If this guy is really innocent, this is a violation of everything right.
McCarthy(ism) ???
The advice to call the FBI and turn yourself in is the MOST RIDICULOUS I've seen in all that ridiculous case. They're either going to laugh at you or sue you like that poor guy. And the real advice is: never admit having done anything. Even doing something by mistake. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Remember the magic words: "I don't recall." Those words sufficed to get a few war criminals off the hook.
McKinnon is getting the same kind of bullshit -- and it would never have happened had he not admitted doing anything wrong.
This reinforces my belief that one should never volunteer any information to any law enforcement official.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've tried to recover deleted files on my computer before. 2 hours after I deleted them and some sectors were already overwritten with new data. A week later and all sectors were overwritten. This guy says they were recovered files a year later? No way.
"The FBI could not comment on this specific case" We're hearing only one side of this case. I'm sure the FBI has a stronger case then the story suggests.
And don't even get me started on the fine accuracy of TV news.
FBI Guy: Hey, Buddy, someone just downloaded Directory Opus. We better keep an eye on him.
Way to exaggerate. The real problem is that people are too afraid to defend themselves. You can counter sue in cases like this, you know? You can also show that the prosecution is using an unconstitutional interpretation of the law, and even appeal on human rights grounds.
The problem is that people are too prepared to settle for plea bargains handed out by a legal system that functions almost entirely on charge/conviction statistics, by prosecutors who hope to make a name for themselves by having "won" so many cases. It's NOT that people (with the exception of those prosecuting) don't want to prevent injustice - I'm sure if you asked a sampled of 100 random people on the street what they thought of these cases, >95% would agree it was completely absurd - it's that it's simply impossible to help someone who won't help themselves and insists on taking the first possible way out because they're too frightened to stand their ground.
It's like the RIAA cases all over again.
The best thing to do would be to have the FBI agents and Judge killed. And their families and their friends. In public. By rabid, starving dogs.
About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family's home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn't find anything.
The mistake of a lifetime for this unfortunate young man. The answer to that question should have been, "not just no, but FUCK NO."
If they ask for consent to search, it means they likely don't have probable cause for a search and probably can't get a warrant.
NEVER NEVER NEVER give consent to a police search. Ever.
NEVER NEVER NEVER talk to the police voluntarily. Ever.
People will think I'm nuts and off-topic but western countries are turning into a police state.
They somehow managed to sniff all the traffic on a major filing sharing network, then they found the IP's of everyone who had downloaded a certain file and then they just sat on it for two years before going after someone who had downloaded it?
Somehow I imagine that's not how they found him. They probably arrested someone for distribution, and looked at their computer's Limewire logs for everyone they had seeded the file to. Then they knocked on the doors of all those people, and whichever ones cooperated, they looked at the logs of who they seeded the file to, and so on until they found this guy. That process could easily take two years, if not longer. I'm pretty sure they'll never have the capacity to sniff all (or even most) of the traffic on a major file-sharing network, if only because as the government's search hardware scales, so do the file-sharing networks and the Internet itself.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty...
You know, as a teenager I watched the movie Red Corner and felt glad *I* didn't live in a country where public defenders urge every client to plead guilty whether they are or not, simply because they're never going to win anyway. You know, one of those Communist ones without a real justice system. Ah, the folly of youth.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
This is remarkably offensive to hear about. What a repulsive violation of White's privacy and a blatant abuse of the American legal system. Yes CP is also disgusting and should be fought, but this is soooo massively over-reactive.. The poor guy was just doing what a healthy male can be expected to do, he deleted the crap he wasn't interested in, there's no problem here... WTF. In hearing these sorts of snippets, I just reflect that: 1. I'm glad I'm not American and 2. I'm glad I don't live in the US. What COMPLETE Bullshit. Totally not a free society.
but not anymore.
I've been to 4chan - once. I clicked a link on the Wikipedia page (because I heard so much about it) and got to /b/. On that page were 4 very obviously CP images, all in my browser cache. I cleared my cache and didn't think twice about it.
Thankfully that was a few years ago and I haven't heard anything since.
But since then I've downloaded a lot of porn from P2P networks. Anyone who's been on Gnutella knows that a search for pretty much any type of porn will have "underage lolita xxx pussy dog teen 16" appended to it, even if the contents are two people clearly over the age of 18 (think sagging). Many people just append a bunch of terms to the end of the filename; there's no reason to heed them.
I've never downloaded a single CP file from P2P, accidentally or otherwise. I'm not that stupid. But a full half of my downloads had terms in them that indicated that they would be CP. If one file ever did, I'd be screwed.
Can any underage make their own porn, post it to a public server like youtube then report to and get FBI to confiscate the server(s)? And can they also sent their porn to anyone they hate?
You've summed it up. Twenty fucking years for downloading a few pictures to a computer? I don't care how vile and disgusting they are or how they could theoretically increase crime against children. Twenty years, basically for possessing certain information. Absurd. This shit happens because the authorities at hand here can't be assed to find real, dangerous criminals (like, I don't know, the people who made the images) and want to have a good public image and feel good about capturing a supposed "evil pervert" or some bullshit like that. Gotta love the quotes around "accidental" in the article's title, too. Couldn't they have come up with something a little less accusatory, given that the argument for his innocence is, at the very least, not completely unreasonable? Also, do those couple sentences of the description seem slightly Orwellian to anyone else?
If you are a mainstream pron junkie which I bet a lot of /. readers are, how careful do you need to be?
Well, this was a freak incident, which is part of why it's making the news. There's an infinity of freak incidents/accidents that could ruin your life--you can't guard against them all.
If you're really worried about it, you're going to have to bow to the REAL intention of the "think of the children" lobby: Stop consuming porn.
You can have your local K-9 unit run the dog through any car you buy if you ask nicely...
This is interesting and useful information. It's still pretty obscene that we would ever need to worry about being prosecuted for such things...
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Wiping files to delete is good, and so is defragging a lot, but really, everyone needs Whole Disk Encryption. Your PC will be stolen some day, either by burglars or by cops, and you don't want them reading your Quicken Data, your Email, or your Porn. Maybe not in that priority order... ;-)
http://www.truecrypt.org
Or hell, even Microsoft BitLocker would be good.
1. go to 4chan
2. accidentally CP
3. ????
4. party van
When one considers the fact that nearly all if not all american currency has some traces of drugs on it, then anyone who has a dollar bill in his or her pocket can be busted, if the authority on the spot needs an excuse.
We have the sheer arrogant gall to call ourselves a "civilized" society. Oh, please; we are at the least generations away from being so. Just because we think we're better than most of what has come before us does not make us the end to all. Many societies in history have thought the same way.
Humanity in general has a long goddamned ways to go before it gets past the petulant teenager stage. Assuming we're that far, I'm not so sure.
I hate to say it, but it seems to me - having lived before and after - that the greatest advance in information dissemination in human history has made us collectively stupider. But then it wasn't the technology that did so, it was the exposure of common idiocy.
Let's see how long the United States of America survives it. Not long, in my estimation. But time, and history, move on.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I myself have accidentally downloaded files I suspect were illegal - but never intentionally. Thanks to FrostWire's preview feature, I was able to see them for what they were, before they completed. Thanks to File Shredder (to which I have no affiliation), I was able to rid myself of that garbage. (make sure you wipe the "preview" file, too! :> )
The government is going TOO far... Go after the people MAKING this shit and ruining kids lives, and the people that download it INTENTIONALLY. A deleted file should say, right there and then, that the person was trying to OBEY the law. Files on the internet/p2p are like buying stuff off TV - you SEE what you're supposed to get, but when it gets there, it's something TOTALLY different.
Take care, fellow slashdotters...
idiot
And never get involved with them about anything for any reason if you can at all help it. Not in this increasingly oppressive culture. Stay out of their clutches. They are about making busts and arrests to the max; the innocent can "tell it to the judge."
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
They seem to think otherwise.
When did the FBI become the mafia?
(funny unrelated sidenote: the captcha for this post was "enforcer"
"Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.. The sniffing dogs smell some dope that got stashed underneath the seat and YOU are the one who gets put in prison."
Perhaps, but in drug crimes the *amount* of drugs possessed has a big influence on the punishment. One ounce of marijuana may carry a misdemeanor, one pound may carry a felony and jailtime.
This guy had *1* file, without intent to distribute. He was not running a 1000 file kiddy porn ring.
If you reported it immediately to the authorities, you'll just end up like this man:
Man Arrested, Faces 5 Years In Jail For Reporting Firearm To Police
Whatever the police may tell you, their only interest is getting as many people arrested as possible. You shold never initiate a contact with law enforcement unless absolutely necessary, or you'll just make yourself the focus of their attention.
For those interested, an excellent lecture by Regent Law School professor James Duane and former Virginia Beach police officer George Bruch on why even innocent people shouldn't talk to cops:
Don't Talk to Cops, Part 1
Don't Talk to Cops, Part 2
If you're really worried about it, you're going to have to bow to the REAL intention of the "think of the children" lobby: Stop consuming porn.
Hah. Ha ha. Hahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAAH. No.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
On Slashdot, I hear a lot about how downloading music/movies/software doesn't hurt sales. I see a lot of truth in that. That concept could perhaps be extended to an argument that downloading kiddie porn doesn't help sales.
Music/movies/software production we want to increase, child porn production we want to decrease (if not eradicate), that's the biggest difference, I understand if that weakens the analogy somewhat.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I know, let's criminalise breathing oxygen. I'm sure that we can trust the police to only use the law against the "bad guys", and we can conveniently do away with the need for pesky things like evidence. And I'm sure than no innocents will be caught by having to meet their targets for catching "people who breath oxygen". If the worst comes to the worst, they can always bring in some guy who taped something off the radio, and sentence him to decades in prison!
Some of the pro-gun people in the US would use that same argument to encourage the women involved to get guns.
When dealing with street criminals, it may make sense to arm the law-abiding citizens, I'm not sure.
However, in this case, with two relatively normal people, a gun (even if both have them) is just going to make things even more of a mess
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
agreed that this is absolutely ridiciolous. What this article/story doesn't tell you is that often times via certain sorts of malicious cookies and javascripts malicious "Uploads" to your computer/PC as hidden graphic files can and are often sent to you. Livewire is famous for this sort of activity.
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 284k members/stakeholders strong!) "Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" -
Please, please don't tell the FBI, but I think I may have deleted a file extolling the virtues of communism. I think I still know where it is. Please give me time to wipe it a dozen times before you call the Feds. I wouldn't want to be arrested for being an accidental commie.
If you want freedom of speech on the internet, encrypt your entire harddrive. Don't ever go online with an unencrypted drive.
It's better to go to prison for not decrypting your key than to go to prison for being a convicted sex offender.
Anytime you outlaw possession of something then your goal is just to put as many people in prison as possible. This does nothing to prevent children from being abused and it's more to give law enforcement the authority and excuse to snoop on peoples computers.
I think we should go after real pedophiles, which would be the people who created the child pornography. If the police want to talk to people who downloaded the images that would be more helpful than putting them in prison. Maybe these people can help the police track own where it came from.
Maybe they created these laws to criminalize people and fill up the prisons. I cannot see how these sorts of laws protect children.
Do you know who is behind these laws? I don't think it should even be considered constitutional.
If its about supply and demand then you go after the people who profit from it. You go after the pimps.
" Possession of readily accessible images indicates demand "
No it doesn't. Demand is not in the minds of individuals, demand is indicated by whether or not they spend money and effort to find it.
It's one thing if you have someone who is buying child porn from a website, it's another if they just somehow stumble across the images. If you cannot determine the difference then you are part of the problem.
All these laws do is create internet sex offenders.
These laws are stupid and just waiting to be abused and exploited, and in my opinion thats the only reason they were invented.
I refuse to believe people are so stupid as to create irrational laws, laws aren't supposed to expression an emotion about how you feel, they are supposed to accomplish some sort of goal. If the law does not decrease child molestation then the law should be canceled.
Even if it's all true, what are you going to do about it?
You can't do anything so STFU.
I have a theory. I have to warn you in advance, they it might get labelled as "conspiracy theory". But just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not after you. So such label will be given ONLY by people who would like to hide the truth from us. The truth, that this theory of mine is actually true.
So, here we go:
This 22-year-young man, lets call him Mark, is in reality a secret agent of Russian federation, gathering secret "intel" for them from US officials. But he works "two ways" - he's also supplying both US and Russian secrets to Kuba, because he is a real communist. And Mark is also ecological activist, human right fighter (yes, just one, I can't tell you which one), he's supporting legalization of dangerous drugs and 3D RPS games, he's pro choice, he's gay and some other stuff. Almost like some twisted superhero.
And the FBI, well, they are trying to protect us from such twisted figures. Hero or not, he's twisted so they have to somehow take him off-line. It is hard to take down a super-hero. So they have to use some super-powers of theirs: "prove" him a paedophile - nobody will then touch him and they can do to him anything they want. Like, put him in jail, etc.
But please, keep that only between us. You know, secret super-weapons tend to loose their power when just anybody knows about them.
:)
hany
Because entrapment is not illegal when done properly by the FBI.
Why not? Banning decreases demand so lets just ban everything we dont want people thinking about until the only books left are made by Disney.
If you read any book that isn't government approved then life in prison.
We do need a government to protect human rights, the constitution, and to keep us from being enslaved by other governments.
When our government starts to enslave us then government is too big and must be limited in its role.
So all victimless crimes should be evaluated. We should do the statistics to determine the percentage of individuals in prison for victimless crimes.
And if the government only exists to put us in prison, that government has to be changed.
Seriously, isn't the point of having a judicial system to separate the criminals from the public (ie determining innocence or guilt), as well as sentencing? Isn't the purpose of a Judge to judge? If not, then write a program (Sentencer 2k10), it would save a lot money.
Just goes to show how incompetent the feds are these days!
That's a great idea - let's everyone mass call/email the FBI every day and say, I am really not sure, but I might have accidentally downloaded some child porn, so I deleted it. Can you please check it out? Let's see them scan 10 million hard drives, then have to return them unscathed to the owners.
NEVER EVER EVER TALK TO THE POLICE:
I recommend watching this presentation on the subject by a defense attorney, this 45 minute video can one day SAVE YOUR LIFE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
NotBornYesterday is clearly being targeted for his views. None of these troll ratings are deserved. This is moderation abuse.
- T
Has anybody out there heard of Title 18 section 2257 United States Code? This is what is is. Anyone displaying pornographic pictures is required to have on file a photocopy of documents verifying the age and identity of the person or people whos pictures are displayed. This law has virtually eliminated child pornography from the internet. Anyone charged with possession of child porn should have the sites 2257 compliance records admitted as evidence. That is what this guy should have done. There are many 18 yr olds out there that look underage that start modeling/porno the day they turn 18. 2257 is your only protection.
One of those COPS TV shows covered an officer who would make jokes when he pulled someone over. He would say "Do you know any drugs, open alcohol containers, or dead hookers in the trunk?" He said that criminals would respond "No" while innocent people would smile and laugh.
Non-disclosure is without liability, and the controlling matter to what law adapts to said property as trespass is covered in Admiralty mode upon the principle controlling interest, not a trustee concealed as a government agency or federal employee giving the alleged law-breaker the second-hand treatment as being a beneficiary in the use or mis-use of said property despite being also the grantor. There is a Principle and Agent Doctrine that is in effect yet eschewed by attornies, lawyers of attornies, trustees, judges of trustees, and now YOU.
Too many laws? You're a fucking liawyer, not a scientist. Get disclosure. If there is no disclosure through notice and grace, then there is no liability and whomever asserting an interest in prosecuting is nothing more than a champerain and counterfeiter. Here in this instance, you confuse with a man outside his capacity of person as "farmer" to sell his own f*cking property no different than waiting for offers from anyone passing-by to his reception. He isn't selling a commercial product. It's his property and can trade or redeem for whatever banknote or coin he pleases; it's a sale when he accepts a cheque or draft as would a Promisory Note or Bill of Exchange within a similar written clause of Warehouse Receipt in its maturity. As well, people don't "do business" or even be construed liable as "nonconforming business use" until they are enfranchised by their person employed by a corporation; the same goes in the matter that a corporation buys time(re-appraised as labor) through the trust of that employed person hosted by said man; it's the corporation profiting and reselling the wages of said labor, not the man. A "person" in statutory law always includes corporations and natural persons, yet the business clauses are diversity of citizenship issues where at their peak of limited liability would only apply to person/corporation not natural person. It's only been construed recently to spread surveilance, predatory business practices and monopolies, tyranny, intimidation, fear, and stupidity. Farm income you say: what is farm income to do with his dispensing with unneeded excess property also retained by him?
You are confusing an amusement park with the joy and happiness of neighborly affection. I also don't use that word "hobby" because it would cannote other reasons by some tyrannical government office deriving an implied trust to regulate anyone in the bounds of their definition of "hobby" construed from their mission statement.
Come on. Does the NASA build Space Shuttles that break the Law of Gravity or over-rule it with brute force without the efficient graceful
Salem Witch Trials were specifically the killing of Covenanters (a non-competing original Christ-following body of believers) whose beliefs and ways were so vastly different from Cathaholics and their closet-catholic Protestants that they were oppressed for having honest objections to such Chruch doctrine and interpretation that it conflicted with the Torah union of the Christ Jesus and his original implicit fold of scripture. Notice how all Christian denominators influenced by Catholics and Protestants all espouse theirselves by saying thing, doing another as chastisement for disagreeing (against Christ's command to agree with an adversary), and then bearing witness of theirselves in all vain principle of self-sanity derivative thought that any reasoning objected is ignored by the persecutors.
All the religious crap itself is more to distract neighbors from their own un-studied work ethics to disuade them from the sciences and arts to destroy eachother so the higher class of wealthy individuals can retain their monopolies and the people suffer more under societal decay and servitude.
The world is devoid of common sense -- people are clueless and and these worthless, scum-sucking paper pushers probably get an emotional high from "properly" following "procedure" despite all evidence pointing to "procedure" being idiotic and too encompassing to actually catch real predators but hapless peer-to-peer downloaders accidentally downloading the wrong file. The same mentality occurs in management where your supervisor flips out because you harmlessly put something in the wrong place even though nobody with a clue cares, for example. I'm sure people here know what I'm trying to say.
I'm going to assume the FBI was sharing CP files and collected the IPs of everyone who downloaded from them. It makes you wonder just how many of the files they are sharing have misleading file names. They know downloading "grannie_goes_wild.avi" would get someone convicted even if it was bona-fide child pornography. They don't care, it was illegal, so in their eyes, they have to go and unleash the mangy, distempered legal dogs.
Even if this particular instance the victim of the law was actually guilty, you can bet something like this has happened before, elsewhere. So it is best just to assume he is innocent, anyways, because somewhere down the line somebody has gotten screwed off this.
I laughed at this: "'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative."
Okay, I didn't laugh, more like made a depressed sigh, because the only reason the FBI would confiscate a computer would be to ACTIVELY TRY TO BUILD A CASE AGAINST YOU. What is the alternative they are talking about? Thats egregious double-speak. They're not going to confiscate your computer to show your neighbors that you're a good, law-abiding citizen.
If the current owner of the car is smart, they'll refuse to do that, for exactly the same reason you would not want to do it once it is your car. I sure would refuse if I was the seller, if you don't want the car then, fine. Another buyer will come along.
Aside from all the porn-deleting goodies, it's actually a fantastic file manager. Options out the wazoo, scriptable, extendable, and configurable down to the pixel.
I don't leave home without it.
SDelete on Windows. I'm not aware of such a tool for other OSs.
.sig: No such file or directory