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Typo In IP Address Led To an Innocent Father's Arrest For Paedophilia (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader has shared a shocking story about the arrest of Nigel Lang by the British police for a crime he didn't commit. It all happened because of a typo, according to a report. From the report: On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Nigel Lang, then aged 44, was at home in Sheffield with his partner and their 2-year-old son when there was a knock at the door. He opened it to find a man and two women standing there, one of whom asked if he lived at the address. When he said he did, the three strangers pushed past him and one of the women, who identified herself as a police officer, told Lang and his partner he was going to be arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. [...] He was told that when police requested details about an IP address connected to the sharing of indecent images of children, one extra keystroke was made by mistake, sending police to entirely the wrong physical location. But it would take years, and drawn-out legal processes, to get answers about why this had happened to him, to force police to admit their mistake, and even longer to begin to get his and his family's lives back on track. Police paid Lang 60,000 British Pound ($73,500) in compensation last autumn after settling out of court, two years after they finally said sorry and removed the wrongful arrest from his record.
Brazil, come to life.
Dear Slashdot,
We get that you're never going to add in proper UTF support. Fine. Whatever. How about this:
When an editor submits a story to go on the front page, add a filter that checks for common UTF copy and paste errors like Ã(TM). If one is found, redirect to a preview screen along with an error message saying "Improper characters detected" and force the editor to look at it again.
That page can have a button that says "I've verified this is what I really want to post" just in case it is, but couple that with a penalty for any editor who uses it as a rubber stamp. Any editor who makes that mistake more than twice in one day gets written up. Any editor written up more than three times is fired.
It started as a noble ideal: "never, ever."
Then people started having their lives ruined by being framed or making a mistake or simply being under 18 and in control of a camera. The law has no leeway.
Fuck how long has Slashdot been around and they still can't fix this shit? familyâ(TM)s familyâ(TM)sfamilyâ(TM)s This is seriously the only time in my many years on the internet I have not seen a website unable to render text correctly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Maybe this is the lawsuit happy American in me talking, but $73,500 sounds like chump change for a mistake that could quite literally ruin your life even after a retraction.
seriously, if you can't fix it (protip: you probably won't), at least remove them from summaries.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
Say what you will about lawsuits in America but they sure do work great for cases like this. This poor guy has years of his life completely ruined and will possibly have people hate him for the rest of his life because of the implication. Also this kind of stuff still shows up on background checks even if it's removed from your record. I would bet good money that he will have a harder time finding work in the future.
Does 1 year's salary make up for that? It sure wouldn't for me.
Nice try. Partner could be male or female, married or unmarried. It's a neutral term.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
Terry Gilliam, you genius.
IPv6 is only 32 hexadecimal chars long, and you can omit a few zeros, no room for mistakes there!
It's quite scary how sure people are of what an IP address will tell them. There are any number of reasons why it doesn't provide much, if any evidence. You need a lot more than that, especially in a criminal case.
You want Tuttle not Buttle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE
Your Google-Fu is pathetic - http://www.hertfordshiremercur...
Where you miss type and end up in a pop up loop.
http://gizmodo.com/5099383/pop...
This is insane. Everyone knows that racism and sexism only exist in the USA.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sex crimes are horrible - but not worse than murder.
Western culture has demonized it by spreading lies and falsehoods. The truth is:
1) People convicted of sex crimes are LESS likely to commit more crimes than other criminals (this includes pedophiles).
2) Most people convicted of 'sex crimes' are normal, healthy people, not strange perverts.
3) Sex crimes are incredibly subjectively prosecuted. Homosexuals are likely to be arrested, tried and convicted for the exact same behavior that straight men or women would be ignored at (for example, asking someone out for a date => soliciting prostitution) Teenagers routinely create 'child pornography' and usually (but not if the prosecutor dislikes you), have it swept under the rug.
4) Sex, being something people are ashamed of, is often used by the police to legally extort people into confessing to crimes they did not do in order to avoid sex crime charges.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Really ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
"Brazil" starts with a typo. Buttle is being (violently) arrested, processed and in the end executed. Instead of Tuttle.
The number of member/AC posts per story on slashdot has been dropping rapidly, while posting systems with decent post editing, modern character representation, and 90's-era amenities like decent code blocks, lists, images and democratic up-modding proliferate around us.
The only question is, will the slashdot owners address this before the site becomes a completely forgotten backwater?
Okay, there is one more question: Do they even have anyone who could fix it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm surprised the parent was moderated down. This incident bears a striking similarity to the plot of Brazil. I guess this means that Great Britain (and the rest of the western world) have become "bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four".
US lawsuits sort of one-third-work, when they work. Lawyers benefit, and complainants benefit of the remainder after the lawyer's take their cut if they manage to defeat the system, which certainly isn't a given. There's also no guarantee that any images awarded or recompense offered will be in the range of appropriate, as this US case shows.
Even if a large award (or any award) is given, it rarely affects the agency at fault in any way. All such awards come out of the taxpayer's pocket. The policeman's salary is not affected in the slightest, nor the judges, nor the prosecutor's.
Because of this, there's little to no corrective value to a lawsuit.
Same thing for the next level up, legislation. When legislators write laws that break things and/or are wrongful, they aren't held to account for it. Whereas if you break a law, the gears of (in)justice are quite capable of, and very likely will, grind you into unrecognizable mush. Job, family, friends, savings, reputation... everything.
It's nice to hold power; it's even nicer when you're above consequences for your actions. Welcome to America, land of the oligarchy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Guess who can't do research?
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/arti...
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Addresses need checksums, or built-in redundancy. Same with phone numbers. And social security numbers. And zip codes. Especially phone numbers.
For those who haven't seen the movie 'Brazil,' this event is so close to the premise of that movie that it's eerie.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Even the loopback address can get you into trouble. When I was a grad student we had a technician who got into severe trouble because of it. It turns out that he was using the university computers to look at ordinary porn sites but, unbeknowst to him, the university had tried to block access by fixing the local DNS records of some sites to point to the loopback address. This was in the days of FTP rather than the web and so while hunting for files on his "porn site" he found the local /etc/passwd file with all our encrypted passwords in it (/etc/shadow was not around then either!). Thinking he had found evidence that our machines had been hacked he reported this without thinking about what his FTP command history plus the DNS name he used for the site would give away. Of course it was not helped by a group of us grad students who'd been initially trying to figure it what was going on while he fetched the sysadmin bursting out laughing when we figured it out while the sysadmin stormed off angrily to tell the group's leader!
Sorry, but the Web was never designed for such accidental abuse: And intentional abuse - spoofing, and such large groups of "people" are out to poison the Web or make it sick. It's time to tear it all down and start all over again. This time you keep the villains and potential innocent mistakes in mind - every step you take! Sandbox the hell out of it! And put virtual hidden guards around every corner. Sit back and relax.. and one day you will get a knock at your door! Guilty until proven innocent. The Web today is impossible to disprove.
The problem with proof-reading is that it's hard to mentally divorce what one intends to say versus what they are reading back. Others have complained about their own "intention bias" before, not just me, so I know I'm not alone.
There's a point of diminishing returns on repeat re-reads to proof the copy. Time is often the best solution to clearing one's mind of intention bias. (A second opinion is also good, but hard to come by.)
If you by chance have a special brain that is immune to this, I congratulate you, but us muggles want a muggle-friendly edit system.
Table-ized A.I.
It's one of those unexplainable oddities of British culture, like hating redheads. No one seems to know how it got started.
Had Lang been Pakistani they'd have thought twice, and then a third and forth time before interfering with him. Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford... what's the latest town that's been 'grooming' girls for years while the 'council' and all the authorities look the other way?
The ultimate sabotage tactic. Hack someone's computer and download child porn. Then turn them in.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Seriously, why do people still hand type IP addresses? I know of two excuses... 1. You're transferring it over an audio medium like a phone conversation... you don't have much choice. 2. Someone sends you a screenshot containing their IP address. The point is, IPv4 IP addresses are hard enough to duplicate 100% correct every time... wait til we have to do more IPv6 addresses... maybe that will teach even England's finest to copy and paste their 'evidence'.
If you haven't seen Brazil, watch it.
A fly falling inside a printer caused a typo, and a swat team is sent to the wrong home.
What I don't understand is how I constantly read articles like this on slashdot and yet there are still thousands of people that don't think 'Government is too big' or "Police have too much power" or "our Justice system has become corrupt" or "We have too many laws on the books" or "Decades of 'Tough on Crime' politicians have destroyed peaceful society"
Is it just my own confirmation bias at work, or do the "Pro-Big Government" People see something I don't?
Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies).
Yeah, Great Britain has that whole innocent until PROVEN guilty thing, too. Who knew? I heard it's really neat if you can afford a good lawyer.
Apparently it's part of this one weird trick that a group called Un (?) has, too? I think they call it Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11 or something.
Sounds like it would be a great thing, if we could just get the Powers That Be to go along with it. That would take a lot of work. Maybe even a r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n, but you didn't read that here.
Nope. I say we all just go along with the status quo and keep our heads down. After all, you only need to be worried about the police if you've done something wrong, right?
Like being deeply traumatized and living your entire life in fear unable to trust
A dozen years ago i was just searching the web at random and up popped a picture of a young boy that was clearly intended to be pornographic. I have no interest in nude boys at all but it shocks me that an image on a drive could be taken to mean that you desired to see it or have it in your possession. The panty raid hunters have gone over the edge. We need laws to protect innocent people from being harmed, put to trial etc. over this and many other things as well. Police must have proof before they make an arrest or even investigate a situation in my opinion. this is the oldest game in the world and bad people misuse such laws. In the past it was put a bag of dope under a car seat and call the cops and tell them the driver has dope in the car and sells drugs. The idea that someone possesses drugs simply because they are in his car or home should not justify an arrest.
Without bothering RTFA, this sounds like horrendously bad police work and he should get a much bigger settlement. Hitting that IP address warrants surveillance, not arrest. After some nominal period of time looking at his traffic, they would have realized it was an anomaly and nobody outside the precinct would have known about it.
In real cases of pedo that get a conviction, there are usually whole hard-drives full of disgusting stuff that gives agents PTSD. You can't get that with a typo.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Faggot is also a meat rissole or another name for a bassoon (the musical instrument not the part of the brain).
Slashdot needs UTF support, as pointed out by people who didn't see how many other people already pointed it out.
We need to watch the movie, "Brazil" as also pointed out by people who didn't see all the other posts about needing to watch Brazil.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
So no badges and no search warrant: Now we have the real reason that UK civilians were disarmed.
Of course, the (alleged) crime couldn't be committed by a woman or a visitor.
The police were lucky there were no other adults around to arrest them (or worse) for trespass or child kidnapping.
Try being excellent for years and getting nothing due to being rtbl'd.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Just picturing you goosestepping round your bedroom.
In the USA, they would have given him a plea bargain. Plea guilty to a minor porno offense with a few week jail time already served on remand. Or we throw the book at you and you'll go down for 21 years. And we have all the evidence. IP addresses. Images found on your computers that we have in our possession.
Not because all police are evil. But just because nobody wants to admit to a mistake. It would open up the entire system to scrutiny. Do the bargain, he's already been in jail so no more harm done, and the problem goes away.
Of course he will plead guilty. Any non-multi-milionare would. And then there will be no article in Slash Dot. Just an article in the local paper about what a good job the police are doing in tracking down evil pedophiles. Planting images on a computer is even easier than planting drugs.
Typo In IP Address Led To an Innocent Father's Arrest For Paedophilia
What an odd misspelling of "Hysterical Witch Hunt".
problem solved
60000$, can you make this mistake at my home next time ?
The settlement is too little too late.
The apology is too little, too late.
Those who made the arrest haven't apologised.
It'd be interesting to doorstop them with a BBC news team and see how they like it.