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Child Porn As a Weapon
VoiceOfDoom writes "Want to get rid of your boss and move up to his position? Put kiddie porn on his computer then call the cops! This was the cunning plan envisaged by handyman Neil Weiner of east London after falling out with school caretaker Edward Thompson too many times. Thankfully, Weiner didn't cover his tracks quite well enough to avoid being found out — earlier boasts about his plan to friends at a BBQ provided the police with enough evidence to arrest him for trying to pervert the course of justice. Frighteningly, however, between being charged with possession of indecent images and being exonerated, innocent (if 'grumpy') Thompson was abused and ostracized for eight months by neighbors and colleagues. With computer forensics for police work often being performed by 'point 'n click'-trained, nearly-retired cops, or languishing in a 6-month queue for private sector firms to attend to it, the uncomfortable question is raised: how easily might this trick have succeeded if Weiner had been a little more intelligent about it?"
...the obligatory Weiner name.
Moving on.
The idea of this is sick...it's no different than accusing a teacher you don't like of rape. Even if you are found innocent, there is still a stigma attached to you that will never fully dissipate within your community. People around you will always have this accusation in the back of their minds.
Whatever happend to using a whoopie cusion, or putting a flaming bag of poo on someone's doorstep?
Living With a Nerd
The weapon of the future. The more things we make illegal, the more things we can use as legal weapons. marijuana, kiddie porn, anything that they can outlaw they can also plant it in your house and stick you for it.
how many governments get rid of "undesirables" by planting child porn on their computers.
Throwing a baggie of pot behind your toaster is just so passé these days...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He's lucky he wasn't murdered while the cops were messing about.
As for "how easily might this trick have succeeded if Weiner had been a little more intelligent about it?", I'd bet it has succeeded in the past, repeatedly.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
use an encrypted drive and lock down your machine when you arent using it?
In most states, you'll be a registered sex offender for taking a leak in public -- i.e. down a dark alley after a few too many pints. Should it be illegal? Yeah probably. Should it be ambiguous whether you raped a kid or couldn't hold your bladder? I dunno, I don't write laws so I shouldn't have an opinion. Maybe the slashlawer can opine on why these are similar things.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
First off, it sounds like his "trick" DID succeed. The guy's life was hell for 8 months...
/b/. Do you know what was in all of those thumbnails that you scrolled past? Do you even WANT to know? ;)
It's scary to think about, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to frame someone like this. You wouldn't even have to get access to their computer. I imagine it would be as easy as getting an anonymous pay-per-use cell phone, texting someone illegal pictures for a few days, and then reporting them to the police. Maybe they wouldn't get convicted, but their life would still be ruined by the allegations.
Something like this could even happen by accident. God forbid someone rummage through your cache after you spend an hour browsing
very very easy... every time I here about someones brother or uncle got caught with it on their computer I always try and explain how easy something like this would be and we shouldn't jump to conclusions.
Given how many compromised computers there are out there, I'm surprised it's possible to convict anyone on the basis of anything on the computer.
How many of us know what's on our computer? Yours might be serving up kiddie porn, stolen credit card numbers, or trade secrets right now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I can guarantee people are pulling this off successfully. I know of a case where it wasn't until the 2nd appeal that they figured out that the computer was infected with a rootkit that was downloading/uploading the stuff.
My only thought is that, generally speaking, most people can cause 'probable doubt'.
A benefit is that 'most' people don't know how to get the CP in the first place without leaving tracks. It takes more effort than simply crying 'rape', that most people don't think of it.
I don't read AC A human right
"Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us. "
I posit your friend WASNT an idiot, just a normal teenager. I dare to generalize that even most 19 year olds are not monsters for sleeping with 17 year olds.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Remember email bombing? Thousands of anonymous emails with gibberish. How about spam? Now we have kiddie bombing.
It's time we treat child porn as an internet virus and create antivirus scanners which detect child porn and automatically delete, wipe, and report any image saved in the backround with limited user interaction. I don't want to and should not have to risk being prosecuted for possession of something which was sent to me by mistake, uploaded to me, or otherwise infiltrated by trickery, hacking, or anything of that sort.
If we treated child porn as a virus then the only people left who would have large collections of child porn would be the individuals who actually like child porn.
This is primarily why it should not be illegal just to possess a certain set of bits and bytes on your machine. You can make it so you can fool the best of forensics experts. And most law enforcement who does the analysis simply use lame-brain software to scan for the kiddie porn files.
It would be easy, for instance, to write a virus that would spread to your machine, download kiddie porn, create fake tracks that would fool forensics, and then delete itself without a trace. Can you imagine if something like that got out and infected millions of computers with kiddie porn?
Well, for one, it would probably end this nonsense of destroying people's lives simply because they had the "wrong" files on their computer!
Not to mention nailing people for files on their computer does NOTHING to stop the production of kiddie porn. As always, law enforcement is focusing on the wrong end of the problem. They should be going after the guys who pervert children in making the kiddie porn. Why don't they do this? Oh, I get it -- too much work. Poor kids. Too much bother for Law Enforcement to go after the REAL perverts. Sorry, kiddies.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
As someone who has worked in child protective services. I can tell you, as mentioned in the article; the mere accusation of being involved in child sex will ruin your life. I'm not commenting on his guilt or innocence, but look how many people were willing to believe the worst about Michael Jackson before any facts got out. I mean "the guy's successful and weird, so he must like little boys”!
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
I don't think the idea of encrypting is to prevent the police from looking as much as it is to prevent someone getting the data on there in the first place.
I smell old 4chan copypasta.
Here in UKia (not the most sexually liberated country in Europe I have to say) whenever I participate in an organized race they have men urinals in the open, any passerby can see what is going on.
In Barcelona women that sunbathe topless in the beach are as many as the ones that don't, and it is not uncommon that both men and women use the showers in the beach (no curtains, so you are in full view of everybody) fully naked.
And so on and so forth.
When did you guys lost all sense of proportion?
This stems from the completely broken Christian concept that children are innocent and therefore must be protected at all costs from anything and everything. Many laws are predicated from this concept. And yet, many laws now allow for the prosecution of minors as adults. Accordingly, this means the laws are specifically built to both protect and brutally punish "innocent" children.
So which is it? Are they innocent or so evil we must prosecute them as bad adults? The fact these conflicting laws exist is more or less proof a legal system is broken. Fix the legal system and you won't have need for completely contradictory laws.
Just food for thought... according to current laws, as little as 100 years ago, some 30% of the world industrialized population were pedophiles. I would bet that some half the population would be criminals in one way or another if the laws were retroactively applied.
Its easy to see why prisons are the fastest growing government service in the US and why the US has more prisoners than many industrialized nations have citizens.
And then there is zero tolerance which is a fancy way of saying, "I'm so dumb, I can't be trusted to perform my job correctly yet I have a gavel or a gun and badge with ultimate control over everyone else's life." Again, zero tolerance is a fancy way of saying the the system is completely broken.
A friend of mine is a high school teacher, and has been accused of abuse 3 times in 10 years. No truth to the charges, just vindictive kids trying to get revenge for imagined injuries, but each time was extremely stressful for him.
It's amazing how many people will believe the worst of someone they don't know just because some a-hole has laid false charges.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
One difference is, as pointed out in the summary, physical investigations tend to be much faster than computer investigations. Most of the time, whether the case is "real world" or digital, these frame ups get caught. People who do these things tend to do them on the spur of moment and often aren't very smart about it. Unfortunately, while the finger prints on those photos found in your desk might come back in a couple days. Thus showing that your cube-mate was the only person to actually touch them. The forensic analysis of your hard drive might take months, even assuming the person doing it is vaguely competent and likely to notice any red flags.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Not for drugs, not for explosives, not for child porn. Sorry, but it's just too easy to exploit (and there's the slight moral problem that possession is technically harmless). Distribution, sure. That would actually have a slight chance of working, and it's a lot harder to frame someone for it. But not possession.
The news of a person being found not guilty needs to be even bigger than the news that a person was accused.
O.J.?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Thousands upon thousands of crimes go unsolved every day. If you do it correctly, no one ever even thinks to investigate it in the first place. The number of crimes that are solved are definitely in the minority, and usually only come about byway of accident. Shows like CSI are little more than propaganda, fooling the masses into believing that the police will find you no matter what.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
No, it stems from our distorted 20th century concept of who is a child. Hint: Teenagers are not children.
I seriously need an editor.
Don't hire the ones that work for Slashdot.
Correction: Prisons are a government (tax-payer) funded *private* enterprise in the majority of situations now. The fact that for-profit entities may own and operate prisons is still outrageous to me.
This stems from the completely broken Christian concept that children are innocent and therefore must be protected at all costs from anything and everything.
This is no true Christian concept. The Bible is pretty clear everyone is evil.
I'd say it is more of the helicopter moms thinking their kid is an angel and can do no wrong.
I would say the overlap is higher in the years starting with "1" than almost any other decade in a person's life.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I disagree. I've worked in both industries. As an IT admin, I have yet to be slapped or had a plateful of food thrown my face. I've never been punched in the junk by a child while leaning over a table to deliver food, then yelled at by the parents for almost dropping the food without a word to the giggling child who's winding up to do it again. You really want to compare having to go into work at 2am for a downed server once in a while or putting up with an idiot PHB to working 16hr shifts on your feet with no break and a screeching boss?
I also make at least 4-5 times more than I did in the restaurant business. In an air conditioned office. With actual benefits like health insurance and vacation days (not that I get to use my vacation days much, but at least I *have* them...) Generally sitting on my butt too. At my busiest I'm still just sitting on my butt. I might be busy tapping away at a computer and having users calling me and whining about their slow connections or stupid problems, but it's still heavenly compared to working in a restaurant.
I dare you to quit your IT job and go work in a restaurant for a few months. Then feel free to come back and say that again with a straight face.
ad astra per alia porci
I actually think that many people don't comprehend the distinction you are making unless it is forced upon them to realize it, insane as that is. The people with pointed opinions on this easily get so rabidly fixated on child porn that they become unable or unwilling to distinguish between people who through no fault of their own are sexually attracted to children, the subset of those that look at pictures of children, and the subset of those that actually molest children. Next time you have the misfortune of overhearing a rant against child porn, observe that (most probably) there will be no distinction between "pedophiles", "possessors of an illegal photograph" and "child molesters". They are all just "pedophiles" and equally blameworthy. This is the real and insane reason for opposition to pornographic drawings of imagined children - anyone who would like to look at such a thing is at the level of a child molester, and we don't want to do anything the benefits child molesters. I can't recommend trying to bring sanity to this topic anywhere but in an anonymous arena such as this, by the way, because sanity would benefit the (non-child molesting) pedophiles, and that raises the question of why you are talking the case of child molesters if you are not one yourself - that is how this particular insanity survives.
Despite creepiness, it does raise an interesting question: To what extent and in what ways is a child harmed by "pedophilia" (in quotes so as to include pubescent minors) in which they are honestly a voluntary participant? How much of that harm is due to either reaction of others towards the scenario or treatment for it?
About a decade ago, before the peak of current paedophile hysteria, I had a pen pal from Poland. A real pen pal. A girl, too. Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but there you go.
Anyway, we joked around about nude photos, so she sent me one of herself. When she was about four.
Nowadays, that kind of letter could land me in prison, given a hysterical enough judge.
Yet I don’t see the big deal anyway. I grew up in a nudist family. I am certain a number of people own my nude photos. Nude child photos, at that. I am even well aware of the risk that some paedophile, somewhere, wanks looking at my picture. And I cannot see any evil in it. In fact, if that helped that person defuse their urges, thus making them less prone to actually molest a child, good for them. And for the children left unmolested.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Yes, you need to know who is guilty first, then gather the evidence that proves it.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Those questions can be answered once the pedo apologists can provide a legitimate case of a child completely on their own seeking out to have a sexual relationship with an adult (cases of a 14 year old having sex with say a 16 or 17 year old don't count). The problem is that they can never provide such an example and thus always make up these bullshit "No true scotsman" cop outs.
The point is that legally speaking, there is no such thing as an underaged person voluntarily participating in a sexual act. They are legally too young to have the capacity to consent. A 15 year old consenting to a 40 year old is seen (legally) as impossible. The generally accepted theory being that a 15 year old is going to be so naive and manipulable by a person of much greater experience that there can not be true consent. Is this always true? No. Can this also be true with people of legal age? Yes. But the law has to draw a line somewhere. And while less harmful than physical force, emotionally manipulating someone who is unready for it into sex is still harmful to that person. As a society, we have decided this is a harm from which we wish to legally protect persons under a certain age (who are seen as being more vulnerable to this).
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
How did you go from reading "Janitor" to equating that with the time you worked at a restaraunt, presumably as a waiter?
Yeah, food service sucks. That's why you got a degree and a better job. All us IT guys are just making jokes, not personally attacking your history.
Everywhere in the US, the minimum age to model or act in pornographic material is 18. Below that and it is considered child porn, and to make matters more ridiculous there’s no legal distinction between “child” porn where the girl is 17 and child porn where she’s 7.
Only a dozen states set the age of consent at 18, however. Most of them have the age of consent set at 16, and in the rest it is 17 [list]. Additionally, many states have Romeo-and-Juliet-type laws so that if the two people were close in age they aren’t guilty of a crime, or might be guilty of a misdemeanor instead of a felony. However, all of the states in which you can legally sleep with your 16- or 17-year-old girlfriend will still charge you with possession of child pornography if you get caught with a nude picture of her (and possibly charge her with production of it, and – absurd as it sounds – teens have actually been charged with distributing child porn on the mere rationale that they could be hacked and the hacker might gain access to the photos!).
It makes absolutely no rational sense and needs to be fixed, but politicians aren’t about to make child porn laws less strict. That would be political suicide when their enemies use that to claim that they are soft on pedophiles.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is exactly why sex-crime suspects need to have their identities shielded until convicted. Even if exonerated tons of damage can and usually does get inflicted by public perception, of which the lingering effects can be extremely destructive.
Glenn Sacks talked about this subject just this morning:
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4954
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Did YOU miss the part where the moron blabbed about it at a BBQ? I hate to say it, but the poor bastard he set up got lucky. The "point n' click" thing is right on the money, especially with smaller PDs. I have had to deal with the police, both local and state, several times over the years at my shop, and while there are a few of them that really know their foo, sadly many are "clicky clicky next next next" types I wouldn't trust to install WinXP without fucking it up.
Sadly this is what happens when you have a witchhunt. CP has become the new "red scare" and you are guilty until proven innocent. Sorry I can't find the link but I remember reading last year about a guy losing his job, house, and spending several months looking at 50+ years, and the whole time it turned out the IT dept had disabled the AV and left the firewall off the laptop so it has a hole big enough to drive a semi through. IIRC the ONLY thing that saved the guy was some forensic guy HE HIRED showed that the files were being downloaded by batch files slamming the network and several IP addresses were accessing this machine from outside the network.
So I'm afraid we'll be seeing this a whole lot more, only we won't know about it. It will be "dirty perv caught with cp, says he's innocent" because someone who ISN'T a total moron will decide to get rid of them by pointing and saying WITCH! and if they don't have a REAL forensic team they'll go up.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There are actually a whole load of reasons for the distinction.
1. When an underaged person consents to non-televised sex with someone, that person usually does it because he or she enjoys the act. When an underaged person does porn, there are usually one of two reasons for it: either to make money or because that person wants to make his or her partner happy, but with the expressed condition that the porn be kept private. Either way, creating and distributing such porn is considered more degrading to the person than simply having sex with that person.
2. In a number of jurisdictions, it's not legal for everyone to have sex with an underaged person. In some places, for example, you're only allowed to have sex with a 16-year-old if you're under 19. But pornography can be viewed by anyone once it's out in the open, which makes your "if it's legal to do one then it should be legal to do the other" argument moot.
3. Pornography is an international concern due to the ease of distribution, so most countries have the same laws about child pornography, much like how most countries have accepted the Berne Convention. Age of consent is always considered an internal concern, on the other hand. Therefore, there are many different sets of laws concerning sexual consent but only one concerning consent to taking part in pornography. It should come as no surprise that these don't always agree, and in fact they do agree in some cases.
That said, some prosecutors go too far and completely ignore the spirit of the laws. There have been cases where a young man has been charged for having porn of his underaged girlfriend even though he's never shown it to anyone. Then they charge the girl for making and distributing child porn. Of herself. That sort of thing is completely absurd, but has nothing to do with the general validity of the laws.
Rob
Except this has nothing whatsoever to do with "protecting" children but with fucked up Christo-Islamist (that is why they hate each other so much - too alike for comfort) religious bigotry where children are seen as "innocent" victims ready to be corrupted by the evils of "sin", sex being chief amongst them. If they had their way, the religious retards (and all those politicos and "law enforcement" opportunists who see power and money in it) would have the legal age of consent at 50, legal age for alcohol consumption at 60 but would gladly see the legal age to enlist in the armed forces lowered to 10, for fighting religious wars in foreign lands for fun and profit is a sure way to heaven...
That is the insane mentality that is driving the draconian and inflexible laws (in the US the legal age for having sex with a girl is already higher than that for tossing grenades into houses and then perusing the naked dismembered bodies of the said foreign girls).
This insane mentality can be further exposed by looking at what happens when children themselves violate the laws meant to ostensibly "protect" them: they are punished, in most draconian ways, for life. That is because instead of "protection" the real, thinly veiled, point of these laws is, and always was, fighting "sin".