Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Someone in Wisconsin has emailed child porn to legislators and administrative staff in the state government, apparently to extort votes or political favour. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnAmcYzYG2Ef0BJwTrf9aYQRIrTAD9HBNFR80
I work in private sector digital forensics, I'd say about 30% of the criminal work I see, in regards to child pornography, was probably planted or probably not belonging to the suspect but because I can't objectively prove it I can't say that when I act as an expert witness. Technology incompetence of all parties (defense, prosecution, the defendant etc.) prevents the right questions from being asked and answered. It's stuff like that which makes me lose faith in the adversarial court system.
So walking around with a bomb strapped to your chest is ok? Or carrying a machine gun into a bank? There have to be limits, silly. :p
Carrying a gun into the bank should be OK. Using it to rob the bank, on the other hand, is a different matter.
But it would be tough to do that if everyone were open-carrying, anyway. Hello, we can end the cycle of victimhood already.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
This is so true. Back in my high school days, we had some bomb threats that got called in to the school. Then a couple of students "came forward" and accused another student of calling it in and planning an actual event (this was shortly after Columbine). The student was arrested and everyone in the town heard about this. It was front page news in local newspapers for a few weeks.
After a few weeks, I hadn't heard anything new and the whole thing slipped from my memory. A few years later, I read in the local paper that the student had committed suicide because of him being constantly ostracized by the town. Turns out that he was cleared of all charges, but this was never announced in the media and most people in my town still thought he did it. When confronted, he would tell people that he was cleared, but most people didn't believe him because his credibility was destroyed by the original media coverage. There was no trial verdict for him to point to since it never went to trial.
If any of you seen what is required to be a law enforcement forensics investigator in the US, you would be pissed.
In most departments the forensics investigator is the poor bastard who has some computer skills.
He gets selected to take a couple of encase or ftk classes and then they use a confiscated computer, add a write block to it and there you go.
Now lets say you get a CS degree, work for a while and decided that you want to do forensics. The odds of you getting a job is next to impossible.
In fact you will be specifically told that they do not want you around. There is a hatred of "nerds" in the law enforcement community.
Not only will you have to go back to school to get an associates in criminal justice, you will have to go through the police academy
and then work as a beat officer for several years before you will even get a chance to touch a computer.
Now lets look at requirements for other kinds of forensics. All of the other forensics fields have lab type people who are specifically trained in their field of expertise. for example, an dna specialist will have at least a masters in biology, a forensic pathologist, has an MD, a ballistics specialist usually has a degree in physics, or engineering. But a computer forensics specialist usually has a high school degree, maybe an associates degree in CJS, and must meet all of the active physical requirements as a patrol officer.
Note. I work in infosec and perform forensic investigations for private, defense cases, and the university level.
Every time I go to a continuing education class, encase/ftk, or other. There will be several leos in there that have no clue on even the basics on how a computer works. As a result the majority of the training is "point and click" as mentioned in the article.
In the days when everyone ran dos, this was doable.
At these classes I will point out the above issues and ask why computer forensics is differnet than any other forensics field.
I will point out that computers have gotten much more complex and standard procedure for most law enforcement agencies if they run into anything but a standard unencrypted windows computer is hand the case to the state police, or the feds, since they lack the skills to even process a linux box running reiserfs. Hell, what am I saying, most of them can not process a macintosh since the tools out there are windoze based and have very limited mac capability. So in order to investigate a mac, one must have core unix skills and treat the case as they would treat any other unix system. Yes there are newer tools to macs, but they suck. So be prepared to go through plists and file system attributes.
Their usual comment, you have to pay your dues son.