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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."
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.
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?
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
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.
Mod parent up for car analogy.
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.