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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?"
Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you don't f* with the people who handle your food!
...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.
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.
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
EXTREMELY easy. I'm surprised it hasn't started happening frequently already. As much as we (as a society) demonize people for even being suspected of this crime, I'd hesitantly say it does happen frequently already.
It would not be easily discovered as everyone in the chain of justice is quick to assume the defendants are guilty, and may not do as thorough a job as they should looking for evidence of a setup. Easier to parade around your captured "predator" and get good press, then to search for the truth.
I've seen it firsthand; an old buddy of mine admitted one day that when he was 19, he got drunk at a party and slept with a girl who lied about her age by a single year. She was 17, not 18, which is under the legal age in my state. Today, he is a registered sex offender, cannot vote, has trouble finding work, and cannot live in most communities. He has to inform the communities he is allowed to live in, which makes everyone immediately assume he's some kind of monster after their children.
Was my friend kind of an idiot at 19? Absolutely. But does he deserve to become a lower class of society for the rest of his life over his (ultimately harmless) mistake?
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
According to The Independent, the judge has added Weiner to the Sex Offenders Register for the specific purpose of causing the general prison population to identify him as a pervert and make him suffer, even though there is no indication that Weiner possessed this material for any purpose other than to screw up Thomson's life.
I think Weiner is a scumbag who deserves to go to prison, but he is *not* a sex offender and does not need to be kept away from children's playgrounds when he is released. I certainly don't agree with this tactic by the judge - surely placing people who are not sex offenders on a list of sex offenders renders the list meaningless for any monitoring or preventative purpose? And since when was justice about eye-for-eye revenge in this civilised society?!
"Life is pain Highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something"
Westly, The Princess Bride
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.
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 the guy was killed for taking a leak outside.
There was another man who was killed because the previous occupant of the apartment was a registered sex offender and had moved out six months earlier. The killers didn't check that hard.
I understand they're now very sorry that they aren't around to protect their children anymore...
Personally, I think sex offender lists are a bad thing - if they're still dangerous, don't release them. As has been mentioned before, most offenders that target children go after kids whose parent's know and trust them.
You also get the problem that the list is contaminated - bad addresses, drunk pissers, slightly too-young girlfriends, non-pedophiles, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
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?
Er um s/not against child rape/not in favor of/
I seriously need an editor.
(talk about the situations where that 1 minute between postings rule really blows)
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
But there is a huge difference between taking a picture of little Sally in the bathtub for the home photo album than there is posting that same picture on your open-to-everyone Facebook page.
In what way? Apparently many people disagree with you as I've seen exactly such pictures on people's Facebook pages.
I seriously need an editor.
Don't hire the ones that work for Slashdot.
No, that is a Victorian Era concept. Christian theology and philosophy hold that no one is born innocent and hold that no good can be achieved through evil means (which is what happens when innocent people are sacrificed "for the children.") This is basic theology 101 stuff.
When you sent your damn puritans over here.
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.
Not surprising, the culprit is an MCSE.
That’s Microsoft Certified Solitaire Expert, right?
Ignore this signature. By order.
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.
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.
I am not against child rape or anything like that
I don't think that's what you meant to say.
No?
The Dr. begs to differ.
"Lost time is not found again."
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.
I was working at HP as a consultant. One of the machines in my cubicle was running the officially approved HP Linux distro, which was set up to cycle through all the available screen savers, one of which put up quotes from the fortune files, one of which was the Zippy the Pinhead fortune file which contained the quote "I want to kill everyone here with a cute colorful Hydrogen Bomb!" I never saw it on my machine, but months later, a security guard walking through at 3am sees this come up, immediately goes on point, and reports me as a terrorist. I'm called into a meeting, told "It was on YOUR machine, so it's obviously YOUR responsibility!" and suspended from work (with pay, which is stupid for a contractor). A week later, I'm called back in; due to my coworkers efforts, they have finally discovered that ALL the Linux machines were configured to do that. No apology offered, but I'm allowed to come back to work, and my project that I was on the critical path for is behind a week. Of course, I spent that week off applying for other positions, and a month later I got an offer for a better job closer to home, and said "bye-bye!" to HP.
The point is, shit can show up on your computer completely by accident through no fault of your own. Telling people "It's on your computer, therefore it's your fault!" is a pretty naive reaction.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
CP laws are pretty messed up with the mandatory sentencing in some states being greater than for the actual rape of an adult. Last month here we had two cases come up with police being involved in crimes, one was for CP, and he got 8 years, and one was for rape, and he got 5. I think something is definitely amiss.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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.