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Stalker Jailed For Planting Child Porn On a PC
An anonymous reader writes "An elaborate scheme to get the husband of a co-worker with whom he was obsessed jailed backfired on Ilkka Karttunen, 48, from Essex in the UK. His plan was to get the husband arrested so that he could have a go at a relationship with the woman. To do this he broke into the couple's home while they were sleeping, used their family computer to download child pornography, and then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner."
Hasn't this dude ever heard of 4chan? Or dating sims? Or sanity?
Living With a Nerd
He's also out the postage to mail the hard drive.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
>>>"then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner."
You don't provide proof that you broke into a private house.
Instead you go home, wait a few weeks, and then send an anonymous tip that the homeowner has been asking for underage photos on the net, and you suspect he downloaded child porn too. Let the police take it from there. THEY will do the breaking-and-entering, remove the drive, and investigate.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The difference between for you getting put in jail and separated from your children for a week and you getting put in jail and separated from your children for a decade is the sloppiness of the guy framing you.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The answer doesn't seem to be in the article, but why would they search Karttunen's house after arresting the guy he was trying to frame? I understand how he would have been implicated after they searched his computer, but how did they figure out that they needed to search his house in the first place?
Either way, guy is an idiot for copying the guy's hard drive to his own. And an idiot for trying the whole scheme in the first place. And an idiot for getting caught when it seems like it would be hard to trace that back to somebody.
I believe the only thing saving the family was the investigation of the stalkers house (and shed). Without that search warrant into a third-parties house, or without the retardedly self-incriminating evidence stored on his computer, the man accused would have been devastated.
Wait, this is UK, do they even need a warrant?
It's too easy to have someone's life ruined. Even being cleared of charges this person will still have a stigma attached to them. Poor family. To be ripped away like that from your family, your home because some psycho wanted a go at your wife. Investigation wise, they didn't find the hard drive with the man or trace any wrong goings online directly back to him, yet they still charged him with the crime. This seems out of whack to me. Grey area to be sure but to just take the anonymous at their word seems scary.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
Unfortunately in the UK they publish names of anyone accused of sex crimes in local newspapers so you can bet even with the husband in this case proved entirely innocent he might need to move house, have his car set alight, stones thrown through his windows, and have his name google-able to child porn charges. Plus the child services and new child protection scheme use just rumours to judge people so if he applied to, for example, because a football coach he might be denied (*you need a licence to talk to a child in the UK).
One question - Why was the wife or anyone else using the "family PC" not arrested? Or are only males arrested for child porn?
"Finnish Pedophile Immigrant Terrorist Threatens UK Citizen"
Exactly.
It's trivial to ruin someone's life at this point using child pornography. Cracking a WPA password isn't nearly that complicated.
Also, note how the guy he was trying to frame was still arrested, and still barred from seeing his children, after someone sent the police a hard drive they claimed belonged to the guy. Of all the obvious frame jobs, this was dead sloppy, and yet the victim was STILL victimized by the authorities. I'm surprised they aren't summarily castrating people without proof these days. After all, won't someone think of the children...
Although this is slightly off-topic, I'd just like to point out to all /. readers who might be wondering about his name: Ilkka Karttunen is actually a Finnish name. I have no idea if the guy has moved into the UK from Finland or if his parents/relatives have come from here. Well, idiots like him are pretty evenly split between nations anyway, so his nationality doesn't really make a difference. But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Since the UK has "strict liability" laws (which IMO are exceptionally unfair and should be changed) he should have left the hard drive in the system and tipped of the police anonymously. In the UK, simply being in possession of child porn or a gun is enough for a conviction regardless of how it came to be in your possession.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Trying that sort of thing in the US is quite likely to get one's hide peppered with lead.
The Article was dated 1st April - so we don't really know it's true.
Which is part of the reason why I object to serious news outlets participating in April Fool's jokes.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why would you assume the wife did anything at all? A lot of guys are just crazy and let wishful thinking go to extremes. Likewise, it's sometimes easy for people to misread a friendship as something else.
Given that this guy was nuts enough to try a scheme like this and the woman is married, I'd assume that the guy is entirely in the wrong.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
If someone does not like you, whether they be informant, stalker, or corrupt law enforcement, they can plant the gun, the drugs, the child porn into your possession and then arrest you for possession. This is why all laws which involve possession of an object, are fundamentally flawed because it does not make a difference is the possession is voluntary or involuntary.
It is a difficult situation for the police. On the one hand, it has "frame job" written all over it, on the other hand, what if it isn't? Arresting him was probably overkill, but limiting contact with children until the whole thing is cleared up makes some sense. The police clearly made more than a usual effort investigate at least, but still. I dunno what you'd call the "right" answer is here. (Except, obviously, don't have a sociopath break into your house and frame you for a difficult to defend against crime)
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Not sure about in the UK, but innocent until PROVEN guilty used to mean something across the pond.
It's just the dumb-ass media castrating police departments the world over. The media is all about front-page spreads ruining someone's life, but they're never about front-page spreads about what they printed ended up turning into blatent libel.
Fucking hypocrites.
Suppose you have a password on the PC. You see, without that linux "hack" it would be impossible to to the downloading. And the timing would be off also, since the owner might be able to prove show he was not at home at the time of the downloading. Then there is always the point that you will have to make a reasonable gues who was behind the keyboard at the time of the offense.
Last point "call the police" is not anonymous as well, since the telephone company keeps log who called who (and in case of a cell phone: where).
Planting fake evidence is not as easy as it seems if you want to do it perfect. Watching CSI does not help because the reality is much more complex.
Anyone else think it's weird when you see a story on /. front page title "Stalker Jailed For Planting Child Porn On a PC", to have to click a link labelled "View picture"?
He stole the hard drive and the family didn't notice that it was missing and report a burglary?
So let me get this straight - if someone broke into your house and swiped your car keys, then sent them along with an empty whiskey bottle to the cops, accusing you of DUI, you'd be just fine with having your driving privileges suspended while the cops investigate? I mean, after all, this completely circumstantial evidence *might* be true, right?
Law Enforcement's "chain of custody" is a tremendously important concept. The "evidence" the police received is horribly tainted, and shouldn't have merited more than a knock on the door and a conversation with the man being joe-jobbed.
My way of thinking about this is that if the wife was open to an adulterous relationship in the first place, he didn't really need to frame the husband to start that. His actions only make sense if she spurned his advances and he was trying to remove a real barrier: not her husband, but her love for her husband. He didn't murder the guy or set him up as a thief; he set him up as something a wife might reasonably be shocked into rejecting completely. To me, she seems very likely to be blameless.
Mod parent up for car analogy.
Not directly related, but another very interesting (if disappointing) article from the BBC today about knee-jerk media reaction forcing the hand of the justice system, this time in terms of the drug trade.
Choice quotes from the latest expert resigning from the government's drug advisory board:
"Not sure about in the UK, but innocent until PROVEN guilty used to mean something across the pond."
As I've already said elsewhere, that axiom relates to conviction, not arrest (on either side of the pond). Always had, always will. Half the time evidence required for conviction isn't found until after arrest. You can be arrested on any strong suspicion backed by reasonable evidence (like a hard drive which is clearly yours and clearly full of kiddy porn). It's not the job of the police to convict you, it's their job to collect evidence and arrest you once a sufficient amount exists. Does it suck? Yes. You got a better idea? No arrests till after conviction should work very well I'm sure.
One of the big problems with the current system is the assumption by many people that arrest is the same as conviction. This leads to: 1) People like you assuming that people can't be arrested until they've been proven guilty and 2) People who have been arrested for crimes that they were later found innocent of or even found to have had no involvement in at all becoming social pariahs. That's a completely separate issue though, and not related to this story.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Child porn is small potatoes. If he really wanted to ruin his rival's life, he should have used the computer to download movies with BitTorrent.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
I'm not sure who exhibited more stupidity, the guy who mailed the hard drive, or the police, who didn't stop to ask who could have removed the hard drive in the first place before jumping on the husband.
The simplest course would have been to plant the photos and then give an anonymous tip to the wife.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I don't want to downplay the financial threat that the MPAA (and other copyright enforcement organizations) could pose, but they're nothing compared to the threat a child porn lawsuit would pose. I'm a married man with two kids and a respectable job. If the MPAA accuses me falsely of downloading/uploading movies, the worst that can happen is that I need to declare bankruptcy. Yes, that's bad, but my family might be able to survive it.
If, however, I'm accused falsely of possession of child porn, my reputation would be ruined with friends/family, I'd likely be fired (and nobody else would hire me), I could be forbidden from seeing my kids, my wife might even divorce me (though I'd hope she'd believe I was innocent). And that's even before I'm convicted of anything!
If the MPAA realized their mistake, I might get legal fees back. Otherwise, I'd be out my own legal fees. A hefty bill, but not something insurmountable.
If the child porn charges were dropped, I'd have still lost months of time with my kids, my job may or may not rehire me and people in my community would still think of me as "that guy that had child porn" (regardless of my acquittal). In short, my life would be in shambles and I'd have to rebuild virtually from scratch.
Yes, the MPAA/RIAA/etc can do great financial harm, but they can only dream of the "whole life" harm that a child porn charge can carry.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Now you're blaming the victim. *Should* they have run a more secure system? Probably, but that's neither here nor there. Running an insecure home system is not a crime. breaking into someone house to take advantage of that lack of security is. This is all completely incidental to whether they should have arrested him or not.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Barring him from seeing his children was absolutely NOT appropriate. Now, his children have had the trauma of seeing the police come and take their dad away for no reason (as far as they're concerned, after all, he didn't do anything wrong) and being kept from even seeing him after. They will never again feel as secure as they did before the incident.
As for the evidence, they did have cause for concern, but they also had nothing like an intact chain of evidence. They had a hard drive that was in the possession of an anonymous person for an unknown period of time. The fact that an anonymous person had the drive to mail proves that an unauthorized person had access to the computer and the home as well. They had perfect evidence of child porn (it was on there after all) but terrible evidence as to who downloaded it.
It was a difficult situation, but unless they want to be routinely used as a weapon against innocent people, they need to tread very lightly until they have solid evidence. Considering how insecure most people's PCs are and how rampant bots and spyware are, PC based evidence is particularly low quality anyway.
There have been a few incidents of anonymous "tips" about drugs being used in similar ways here in the U.S. The police have a habit of practically destroying a home when they search for drugs, so it is possible to cause someone a terrible trauma and many thousand in damages for the cost of a pay phone call. Innocent people have gotten killed due to false reports here.
You guys got it all wrong.
You see, the framer was framed. The supposed target faked the break-ins, and planted all the evidence (computer data, credit card and financial data, and photos) in Karttunen's garden shed computer (which was easy enough to do - it's in a garden shed for pete's sake!).
He then mailed the HD to authorities.
It's all so simple, really - poor Karttunen never knew what hit him.
OOooooh, I want the movie rights for this! =P
Evidence is a tricky thing. I'd have to say from what I know of the law (and IANAL), that drive is worthless as evidence, or even as a hint to start an investigation on anything but a B&E charge. The computer may have the guys personal information on it, but even that can be faked.
The chain of custody isn't always quite so cut and dried. At one point, there was an investigation where I showed up to work where I found a man with a federal badge. He wanted to know about an incident that I honestly knew nothing about. I listened to what he had, and then followed it through to the source, and collected the appropriate information. The investigator told me "I can't ask you for this without a warrant, but if you give it to me it would make my job easier."
At that point it's all in who did what, and who's getting screwed. In my case, there was a server of another client compromised and used to attempt breaking into a federal network. When the client discovered it had been compromised, they pulled the machine for evidence (or to be cleaned later), and restored the data from backups to a clean machine. They were absolutely willing to hand over the machine, as long as they'd get it back. The only person getting screwed would potentially be the person who broke into their server.
While I didn't deal in physical evidence, it was hearsay, which wouldn't be admissible. If I had gone and picked up the machine, there wouldn't be a good chain of custody. With the client's permission I sent the investigator over to them.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
He not only committed burglary. He not only possessed child porn. The stupid knave DISTRIBUTED child porn--in addition to perverting justice.
Hope he gets a few years to think about it!
The Article was dated 1st April - so we don't really know it's true.
Which is part of the reason why I object to serious news outlets participating in April Fool's jokes.
No shit. I love how everyone says "oh just lighten up, it's only one day for jokes". Except that the Internet doesn't work that fucking way. Everything released into the wild on April 1 stays out there forever, it doesn't just evaporate on April 2.
Not to mention the fact that on April 1, you have no damn idea what stories are real, or just clever fakes.
Interesting. We could pass a law requiring that any time a newspaper is forced to print a retraction (not a simply typo clarification, but a real retraction for cause), that it has to take the same amount of space on the same pages as the original story/stories. That might make them a little more careful about what they run.
Have you got a favorite link or anything? I'm curious.
Here you go.
How can I DUI? I don't have my car keys.
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
I understand that - I think my point was that the media then takes this arrest, parrots their latest "ZOMG child molestor" and when it turns out there's nothing there to substantiate the claims, they aren't forced to eat their words, while the victim (the original suspect) is now burdened with his name forever being linked to every google search on child pornographer.
I understand and support the arrest process, on reasonable suspicion, but there has to be suitable repercussions for people involved in fucking up.
Like the idiot police departments who shoot up grandma in a no-knock drug raid based on faulty intel. Those people need to do hard time. Personal responsibility is GONE when it comes to police departments and the media, and we as citizens are expected to have any? Okay, I know I digress, but you're right, except where you think I think people can't be arrested. I'm mostly arguing for your point #2.