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Man Gets 12-Year Jail Sentence For Planting Child Porn On Enemy's Computer
An anonymous reader writes with an update to a story we discussed in August about Neil Weiner, a man who sought to ruin the life of a school caretaker by planting child pornography on his computer. Weiner has now been convicted on two counts of possession of child pornography and one count of perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail.
"The judge told Weiner that his plot to have Mr. Thompson sacked and prosecuted very nearly succeeded. Police had been careful not to make public their arrest of the caretaker and only informed those at the school who needed to know, he said. 'But you gratuitously and spitefully informed the local press so that he and his wife suffered the distress of the unwelcome publicity which followed.' Mr. Thompson's health and that of his wife suffered. The judge said: 'There are still those who believe, and probably always will, that he is a pedophile. I am wholly satisfied that Mr. Thompson is innocent.' ... Weiner had discovered the caretaker's password by looking over his shoulder one day and been caught doing so. When Mr. Thompson was asked why he did not change it, he said he wished he had, adding: 'Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?'"
What an appropriate charge. Also, this guy can rot.
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"Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?'"
Maybe I'm becoming disillusioned and cynical as I grow older, but my first response to this was "who wouldn't?" (Also: "would could"?)
That said, Thompson has my sincerest sympathy; what Weiner did was really horrible, and no man or woman should have to endure this.
Should have been much longer in my opinion.
Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?
This clearly illustrates that until lay persons learn to think otherwise in terms of privacy and security on systems and networks; nothing is going to get better.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
This isn't surprising when you have laws forbidding the possession of information and a stigma that persists if someone were to openly come against ridiculous laws simply forbidding possession of information.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Mr Weiner will be very popular amongst his jailmates with a name like that.
weiner
I don't usually agree with arresting people for possession of child pornography, but considering this asshole distributed the pictures by copying them onto somebody else's computer and nearly cost that person his freedom, I say the sentence is well deserved.
Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?
the "would could could" aside.... REALLY? in your WORST nightmares people aren't stooping low enough to commit homicide? no physical harm at all? a tarnished reputation later exonerated by a judge is your WORST nightmare? why do you think passwords exist? because accessing your account is something someone might do... having the password already acknowledges this threat...
i feel no remorse for a victim who would hypocritically exaggerate the truth to the media and attempt to exploit their reach to create more sympathy for yourself and more hatred towards the already convicted offender. you can't have it both ways. if you want to whine about someone using the media, don't turn your back and do the exact same thing with your own exaggerated hypotheticals.
how is this for a nightmare: what do you think this guy is going to do when he gets out in 12 years?
The depths to which people will stoop to prevail over another are astounding.
Mr. Weiner is fortunate that he only got 12 years. And if the inmates on the inside find out that he was using kiddie porn as his means to an end, he is going to have a very, very long 12 years.
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frame someone for trying to frame you for having child porn.
recursive crime
...one count of perverting the course of justice.
Does that satisfy Rule 34?
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'Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?
When I was growing up, my dad once told me something along the lines of, "Boy, think of the worst, meanest, most downright, terrible thing you would be willing to do to someone that you truly hated. Now, you can safely make the assumption that someone else out there could come up with something worse if you give them enough reason. Remember that."
I always did.
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to have a picture of a naked child on your computer? Is this a federal law or a state/local law?
What a dick.
While I can understand some naivity, it's not like computer kiddie porn is the first witch hunt.
Whether criminalizing kiddie porn is a good idea or a bad one (I can understand the viewpoint of the porn enabling the crimes / creating the demand), when you have thoughtcrimes on the books, everyone really should be expecting that sometimes innocent people will be harmed. I think that when someone says they can't believe it would happen, they probably really mean that they think it'll probably never happen to them. Probably.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I am surprised it hasn't happened sooner. I'd even bet that it has, just that in this case the perp was caught. I think 12 years is pretty lenient. This was not a joke, it was clearly very malicious.
12 years is a bit excessive.
In your sig, shouldn't that be, "Nationalism is bigotry.", not "Patriotism is bigotry."? If I said, "Go USA!" that would generally be perceived as patriotic; supporting a nation, but not denigrating another. If I said, "USA is number 1!", that would be nationalistic as it says that the USA is above or superior to other nations.
Is there any doubt that this sentence was motivated by revenge and not justice? If anyone can actually put an ounce of trust in such a legal system, then please, do tell us why.
If I was the victim, I'd want redemption, not justice. I wonder how much redemption (yes, meaning cold hard cash) this victim will actually see. I'm guessing zero.
More than anything else, this is the single best reason for keeping your security tight and your password secret - especially from caretakers, who will have free, unfettered and prolonged access to your work computers after you've gone home..
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Police had been careful not to make public their arrest of the caretaker and only informed those at the school who needed to know, he said.
Good for them, exercising a bit of restraint while the suspect was not yet proven guilty!
As others have pointed out, you were a contractor. Your choice. And this is your side of the story, I'm sure it leaves out some details. If you had an actual case, you could go to court. But you don't, do you? And so you daydream about ruining someone's entire life. Did you know the idea of "an eye for an eye" was originally not seen as harsh,because it was meant to replace "Your life for an eye." Of course nowadays, even "an eye for an eye" is seen as unjust. But you seem to think that even "an eye for an eye" is not harsh enough.
If your boss had a problem with you watching Fox News, it sounds like you were simply not a good fit. Why stay at a place you are not wanted, especially as a contractor? Do you not feel confident in your abilities to find work? If that's the case, perhaps you should not be a contractor. She did you a favor, enabling you to look for a job where your political views would not be an issue. If you were a real employee, you might have a case. If you had some sort of protections written into your contract, you might have a case. But that is not how contractors generally work, they generally work at the whims of those that employ them, and can be let go for any reason or none, at any time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I must be reading your post incorrectly, because what I'm getting from it is that you consider child pornography to be 'information'. Please tell me I'm wrong.
I'm not surprised that your post hasn't been labeled Troll. Society is turning VERY right wing, your post (and many of the others here on Slashdot) are just another example.
Wondering why a school janitor needs a work computer? Yes, I know that he can receive really important emails from the school administrators, but, really, it's a school. A few dozen employees. Everyone works in the same building. I just don't see the point of the janitor having a school computer.
He planted it and got 12 years. This guy DID IT with hundreds of kids and gets 8-1/2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-11403984 Doesn't anyone see what the fook is wrong here????
If you catch somebody at work doing it, report it to their manager immediately! I've had people fired for this, at IBM we are trained to swivel 180 degrees when a client is entering a password. This is non-trivial, DO NOT ALLOW THIS!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Everyone that goes to /b/ probably has some child porn in their cache. They may not have looked at it or purposely acquired it but it's still there. It seems that it would also be possible to set the image size to 0 on a more respectable website and infect a person's computer with questionable images as well. Exactly what here constitutes "possession"? Does merely going to /b/ show the intent to acquire child porn?
So can pervs just use this excuse, now, any time they get caught and would like (a) freedom plus (b) an enemy or other arbitrary member of society to take the heat for it? Let's remember something: Martha Stewart's trial hinged on destroyed computer evidence -- DELETED computer evidence -- that there was no proof ever existed because one person claimed to have had access to the computer, to the "logs" that would have tracked the files' existences and deletions, and by way of deleting the "logs" also deleted any trace of the data. And yet, she was convicted. That's a precedent; this is a precedent; straight, normal people beware!
The moral is: computer data should rarely ever be considered evidence. This used to be a given, but for "some reason" over time in America computer data has become more and more "tangible" in courtrooms. Bad! Not good!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It also provides the back story.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/man-jailed-for-12-years-for-putting-child-porn-on-rivals-pc-2088115.html
'Who in their worst nightmares would could have thought that anyone could stoop to do what he did?'"
Isn't that 4chan's credo?
If I strongly suspect someone I was working with might plant child porn on my work computer, I would try to change jobs before he gets a chance to.
He doesn't need my passwords. He could take the hard drive out, plant the porn and put it back in again. Or use Knoppix.
Disk encryption might help, but a determined person might still find a way to frame me, one way or another. Why work in a hostile environment?
One of her best friends just called her. This woman's house was just raided by the FBI this morning. Turns out that her boyfriend was into child porn. I've hung out with them, he seemed like a regular guy. I liked him. Now I don't know what to think, or feel. I know I feel a little dirty just from having hung out with him. But I also feel some sympathy, because I know the guy, and before I found this out, I liked him. I can't imagine what his girlfriend is going through. Can you ever take enough showers to feel clean after that?
I know he had a screwed up childhood. I guess I just didn't know how screwed up. And now I can't help but contemplate his future. It isn't pretty. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it, kiddie porn is inexcusable. But his life is over now. If I were somehow in his position, I know what I'd do. I know the man owns guns. There aren't many situations where suicide might just be the best answer, but along with painful terminal illness, this is one of them.
I just feel sick now, I could barely eat lunch today. The wife and I offered to help clean up after the mess the FBI left, tearing up the place. But cleaning the physical mess is only the first step.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And the ones that don't disagree with yours. I also noticed a goalpost shift there. Originally, this was about people who had been sexually abused vs people who were dead (the latter one has no recorded incident of people recovering from), but now you've made it ALL people who have emotional issues, not merely rape.
"You will be suspected by many of being a paedophile and, like Mr Thompson, you may find that you suffer, both in prison and on release, for the rest of your life.
"All these consequences will last for life and the irony is that you have brought them upon yourself by your own deliberate conduct
The judge is basically treating the social stigma of being assumed a pedophile as part of the sentence- even though "the judge said there was no evidence that Weiner was a paedophile" (from the article). I realize the justice system can't change how others accept him, but at the least I would hope the judge to precede the above quote with "unfortunately"*, as opposed to acting like society's witch hunt is a tool for punishment.
*I'm assuming the journalist isn't cherry picking quotes.
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Is it still on Thompsons background and does he have to list it on job applications and hope that some does not just see child whatever there and does not look any lower.
Does he have a NOT guilty card to show people?
For hundreds of years in thousands of paintings and statues, there have been cherubs, nothing sexual about them. We're aware of that history, but we have a blind spot about it, while somehow anything made recently results in pedosteria. I think people over-react to it because they are afraid that if they don't they might be seen as a pedophile themselves. And I mean they are afraid, really afraid.
Think about it. Pentagon Staff, Government employees, you name it: they are all accessing porn. Just like how drugs that tamper the same regions of your brain for principle'd "stimulation", there are people that are going for more masochistic styles of rape and plunder. They are going all the way, and in doing such that are looking for every avenue to weaken the populous from prosecuting them if ever they were caught. This is being done, all the while framing people along the way just to generate stiff opposition to Sex Offender registries. It can't be stopped simply because the psycho-analysis of it all simply wreaks of the justice system being corrupt in expanding to these ventures of asserting itself in maintenance-forms of government. We need more of the people to be qualified greater than vigilantes, no different than open-cary firearms. Anyone caught molesting a children must be disciplined on the spot by both religion scripture and corporal punishment, and any aspect of film they produce to be prepended and appended in conjunction to the porn so that it is circulated by help of the RIAA and MPAA as to the completeness of it as art for consumption by pederasts that they too will be caught and punished if ever they produced such kinds of pornography.
Doing law as this will empty prisons, put scars (not wrinkles) on the backs of people that deserve it, remove the revenue-incentives of government from preventing people from being recompensated because their abuser is locked-up in the prison-Castle Doctrine, and it puts FEAR and reconciliation in the minds of them to know that the result of such harm to children is what possibly creates the environment of lust and mischievous economy of pornographic-consumption that we see littering the radiowaves. We must know that a pederast is someone that is quite honestly a victim of pederasty against them that they are re-enacting to discharge their psychological impulses.
If you want to see the source of much pederasty, just look into the Jewish Babylonian Talmud and Islam itself: that are horrific about child-brides in Islam and infant-sodomy incest in Talmud.
A child is clothed in beauty, as Jesus the Christ said of the creations of God. It was the serpent that beguiled Eve to realize of her coming nakedness when her knowing this from non-approved literary trees.
This is why The United States is no longer a Christian nation, because the law of God is more rational than the State-religion of monetarily-conscripted Relative Humanism. Is it any wonder that the jail sentences are influenced with such rate of Time or Money that the leading prosecutors are all Jewish? Remember it was Christianity that spake of nakedness, while the Jews' Babylonian Talmud that actualy asserts that sex with a child under 3-years-old is not "sex" itself because there lacks the child ability to reproduce. Then you have Islam that asserts it's child-bride weddings as soon as a girl drops her first menstrual period, and off she goes to be wed to the first bastard ranging between 25-years-old to 70-years-old.
Government as a religion: think about it, because you are being forced to choose one religion over another, and whether you want two Shemitic religions and Freemasonry-government over original Christianity is your choice of Science to balance what is better in your favor or the children.
Am I the only Slashdot reader old enough (and a porn consumer for long enough) to know the history of child porn laws?
It's amazing how many times I've needed to post something like: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1790178&cid=33671018
Thanks for reminding me of this. It doesn't matter what it is, they just invent exploits to spread like wildfire in the imaginations of men as reason to have jurisdiction to establish Order rather than assist in the dispensing of remedy to any damages that might ensue.
... if it weren't for those meddling kids.
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But maybe the first discovered and prosecuted...
Who knows how many people are jailed because hackers (meaning "evil computer intruders") planted CP or used the victim's machine as a relay or distribution point... Kinda scary but then all the more reason to keep the machine patched and avoid pissing off collegues who might snoop your password or install a keylogger...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
http://slashdot.org/journal/256272/Oh-shit
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton