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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."
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.
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...
At least the good guys caught the bad guy here.
And do you wonder already how many times that wasn't the case? Sure, this time the perpetrator was sloppy...but it's relatively trivial to frame people like that "properly"
A witch accusation of our times, it seems.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
IANAL either, but these guys are:
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a "strict liability" charge – therefore Mr Clarke's allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.
Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
Judge Christopher Critchlow said: "This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.
emphasis mine
My understanding that possession of child porn is basically the same as possession of a shotgun - For the most part you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent, and there are very few, if any, defenses.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
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.
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.
Well, he still had to plant evidence. Otherwise, the wife would just inspect the computer, find nothing, and conclude that this guy was even more of a screwball than she already probably thought he was.
That said, if he had been a little bit better with computers, he would have given the person a flash drive with a file called "pictures.ppt.exe" that replaces itself with a file called pictures.ppt and launches PowerPoint, then installs a piece of code that runs automatically at startup and connects to a server somewhere, allowing him to control the other person's PC. Most people would be fooled by that, and as long as it doesn't contain known virus code as a starting point, no virus scanner will ever detect it. Failing that, he could break into that person's house without causing any damage, install the virus, and sneak back out, leaving no evidence of consequence.
So once he had control over the guy's computer, he could have downloaded as much kiddie porn as he wanted to onto the other person's computer over the course of weeks. For the first several weeks, he would go for sources of content that don't leave a significant trail, using Tor or other techniques if necessary. This would ensure that he got truckloads of material. Then, for one week, he would go to lots of sites that have all the hallmarks of an FBI sting (or that of the equivalent body in the country in question), then would send an anonymous tip to the authorities, delete all traces of the bot, and sit back and watch.
Not saying that this would get him the girl---chances are, it would just wreck the family's life and he'd still end up alone---but it would be a highly effective and almost completely undetectable way to frame an innocent person. The scary thing is that for all we know, this may have already happened.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.