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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 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.
People around you will always have this accusation in the back of their minds.
Not only that, but quite often while the initial coverage of the case is headline news, by the time the wheels of justice have ground out a verdict of "not guilty" and the false accusation has been proven, coverage is much less prominent.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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
This is exactly why "possession" (of *anything*) shouldn't be a crime.
No sig today...
I had something similar happen to me. I was a volunteer at a youth center monitoring a computer lab. Each kid was permitted 30 minutes, and there was much fighting about using them. One of the girls didn't like my policy and decided to tell my supivisor that I slapped her on the butt. This accusiation initially only got me suspended, but the local atorney decided to pick the case up. I was forced to get a lawyer to look into the case. After many delay the child was interviewed a total of 3 times over 8 months. Each interview was more scandalous than the last (eventually claiming that I grabbed her breasts). A few days before I was to appear in cort, the atorney decided to look at the case, and simply dropped the case after realizing that the girl was lying. I didn't have the energy to prusue the case any further so I simply accepted the couple thousand dollards of lawyer fees and went on my way. However, when I went to get an internship later, my background had an issue, where the case was still open. It only took a polite visit to the cort house to get it offically closed, but that still delayed when I was going to start work by a month. I did end up going back to my volenteer work for a short while, but things just seemed to be different, an uneasy atomphear; I decided to call it quits a month later.
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 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
First, to get cocaine one would have to get in contact with a seller, buy it, store it, bring it to work with me, etc. Every step of the way entails real legal and in some cases physical risk. There are, of course, risks associated with getting child porn too, but I'm willing to bet that someone who knows what they're doing would have near zero chance of getting caught downloading child porn once; most of the people that get caught are members of 'communities' of people who trade images back and forth.
Second, drugs don't have anywhere near the stigma that child porn does in our society. Someone finds a baggie of crack in your desk and you deny it's yours and are eventually found innocent, people will believe you. Someone finds child porn on you computer and you are instantly and forever labeled as the most disgusting form of human being imaginable. There was an article online a few months ago about a guy who was accused of having child porn, except that the pornstar in question showed up at his trial and testified that she was 25 (25 for christ sake!) at the time the movie was made. People in the comments section of the article were universally of the opinion that he got off on a technicality.
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
I seriously need an editor.
Don't hire the ones that work for Slashdot.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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
Limits on gun ownership don't stop violent crime. A culture opposed to violent crime stops violent crime.
Canada has lots of firearms legally owned, and has a fraction of gun crime per capita. Switzerland has one of the highest rates of ownership per household (if not the highest), and has almost zero firearm violence. US gun violence is a symptom of culture, not the accessibility of firearms.