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.

Comments

Brazil

[Anonymous Coward]

Brazil, come to life.

Only $73,500?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Re:Only $73,500?

[TheGratefulNet]

I'd start off with a $10M asking. I'd settle for about half of that.

first, punishment that is EXPENSIVE will tend to teach the authorities their lessons.

second, you may be unemployable for the rest of your life by this mistake; I'd need about 2-5million to be able to retire and live on.

not my mistake; I should not have to pay a dime for THEIR stupidity.

ip address does not equal a person. even more so when they don't even bother to check their work BEFORE A LIFE IS RUINED.

what would fix this: remove the safety net for public 'authority figures' and when they screw up, let their own insurance cover the costs. if they had to pay, directly, they'd surely think twice before going off half-assed on a witch hunt.

Re:Only $73,500?

[segedunum]

£60,000 is a joke amount of money. It's not just the hurt and devastation it has caused but there has to be some kind of deterrence in the future.

IP Addresses Again

[segedunum]

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.

Re:familyâ(TM)s

[Khyber]

" they already know that the low ID lusers like you will keep coming back filling their pockets with ad revenue "

Yea, right. Pretty much all of us low-UID "lusers' are smart enough to use adblockers and script blockers so they don't get shit from us.

Leave it to an AC to be wrong as always.

Re:familyâ(TM)s

[Khyber]

"Agreed, and not being able to edit a post (for even a 1-minute grace period) is fucking embarrassing"

What's more embarrassing is your inability to proof-read before submitting off the fucking handle like the majority of you tend to do.

Re:familyâ(TM)s

[PPH]

not being able to edit a post

That's what the Preview button is for.

Re:Zero tolerance has failed

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The intersection of the set of people who call for zero tolerance and the set of people who understand real analysis and binary classifiers is empty.

Reminds me of 'Brazil'

[Hussman32]

For those who haven't seen the movie 'Brazil,' this event is so close to the premise of that movie that it's eerie.

Re:familyâ(TM)s

[slinches]

If I recall, not having the option to edit was an intentional decision. Since this site is about the users having technical threaded discussions, it makes sense to make the posts fixed as it preserves the integrity of the discussion (i.e. no going back to edit out the part where you were wrong)

Re:familyâ(TM)s

[fisted]

Yep, same here.
Karma: Excellent, 15 moderator points expire 2017-03-16, and all notwithstanding. The checkbox has gone. Before it only occasionally unchecked itself.

Re:The fix is in

[frank_adrian314159]

Just port the fix from Soylent News

It's been fixed there for months. And it's open source! Take it!

Re:Zero tolerance has failed

[gweihir]

"Zero tolerance" is the authoritarian idea that every deviation from what they find acceptable has to be crushed with extreme force. Of course, in the case at hand, the accusation was extreme, but the same shit does happen for things that are nowhere near as bad. And you would think that before destroying a person's life they would double-check they have the right person. But not so, because the authoritarians behind this believe everybody to be guilty and giving people a chance to prove they are innocent is optional.

No, there is nothing at all "noble" with zero tolerance. It is a purely fascist idea. (And yes, I do know the actual definition for "fascism". It fits.)