I think everyone who didn't read the article should shut the fuck up.
There was no child porn found on his computer. None unencrypted, none encrypted that he refused to decrypt, none encrypted that he decrypted. In fact, it appears there were no encrypted files at all.
There was no child porn at all.
He was convicted of child abuse mainly based on the the testimony of a child who says he took pictures of her.
In fact, I'm vaguly confused as to what a computer has to do with this case at all.
Now, we can argue whether or not the testimony of a 9 year old is enough to have someone convicted, but the encryption software shouldn't have been admitted, and was only there to sway a jury who doesn't understand this stuff into thinking he must have hidden pictures somewhere.
If you know evidence could be used against you and then go about destroying it, in certain situations the court is entitled to instruct the jury to presume that the destroyed evidence would be harmful to your case.
No they aren't. That only becomes true after you've been told not to.
If they cops knock on your door and you run and flush all your drugs down the toilet, too bad for them. If they prove you did that, they have you for the original drug possession, but not for flushing them down the toilet.
It's destroying or tampering with evidence that's illegal, and 'evidence' only exists after the court or police declares something to be evidence and tells you.
In other words, it's perfectly legal to cover up a murder you just committed.
Hell, we know why he had PGP. It's because he was googling for 'lolitas'. Which in 99% of the time means fake child porn, which is still perfectly legal, and maybe 1% of the time real child porn, which is illegal, but, duh, not what he was accused of! (He can't be charged with possession of child porn if he doesn't actually have any.)
But the fake child porn option produces plenty of reasons to encrypt his porn. Um, duh. And it's completely legal.
Of course, he apparently failed to do so. Or maybe he couldn't find any. Because nothing was encrypted.
Intent doesn't matter with child porn. Possession, period, is illegal. Yes, even accidental, so keep the file shredder handy if you're downloading legal porn from unknown sources.
And I really dislike this decision. The only reason PGP was introduced was to put doubt in the jury's mind that he might have encrypted pictures somewhere...which he did not have, or they would have been found, but the jury is probably not familiar with PGP.
What everyone's forgetting is this guy has been charged with taking pictures of children, and even assuming that his use of PGP was to hide stuff, it could easily be to hide downloaded porn.
Now, of course, said porn could be illegal, or it might be 'pretend illegal' (A hell of a lot of 'child porn' is fake. If you see an ad for it, it's probably fake child porn.), or it by be completely legal porn he was trying to hide.
Assuming that 'trying to hide something==that thing is illegal' is idiotic. Plenty of people encrypt perfectly legal porn.
And even if he was downloading illegal child porn, that's not what he was charged with. They're trying to use this as evidence he took pictures, which is just stupid. I'm not pro-downloading-child-porn, but it's not the same crime as making-child-porn.
No, you can't be forced to say something that can be used against you. People are ordered to deliver things that can be used against them all the time, hence search warrants and supenaes
That said, yes, the court cannot force you to tell them your passphrase.
They can, however, issue a warrant ordering you to decrypt the files under their supervision, and hold you in contempt if you fail to do so.
The Fifth amendment applies to things in your head. Enrypted files are not in your head, and you can be ordered to produce them in an unencrypted form.
Manslaughter is weird because it's one of the few times you can have a crime without intent. Or, at least, very little intent.
As far as I know, there is no way to 'accidently' abuse children, so 'intent' is completely irrelevant in this case.
Assuming he's guilty, it doesn't matter if this guy spent two weeks carefully setting up an encrypted system where he wouldn't get caught, or decided to do it on the spur of the moment. That can be a factor in some crimes, but not this one.
And thus I don't know how they'd use PGP to argue that he was planning something. It sounds to me like they're using PGP to argue why they couldn't find any evidence, which is fucking stupid. PGP doesn't hide evidence.
The scanners at a pump require a physical credit card, and have no human intervention. That leaves two possiblities:
1) Someone stole their card.
Which is possible, of course, but the CC company shouldn't let them get away with it without saying 'So your card was stolen, then? On the...12th? Alright, we've invalidated it and are sending you a new one, you should should get it in two to three days. And we're reversed all the charges you've made since that point. How odd, it appears someone paid your phone bill with the stolen card, but don't worry, we've reversed it. Hello? Hello? They must have hung up.'
2) The pump billed them and didn't give them the right amount of gas
In which case they should be required to file a police report, because having gas pumps that overbill is a pretty serious crime. (Under the same laws that require correct scales for food and whatnot.) The CC company should inform the customer that they will be alerting the police, and the customer will probably be called as a witness.
However, I suspect the real solution is: If you have tapes of the incident, go to the police with them, and report them for driving off without paying for their gas. In many places, there are specific laws about this. (In my state, you can lose your license.)
Legially, those laws probably don't cover someone who pays and then unpays, or who pays with a rubber check, and they should feel to argue that in court when they get hauled in.;)
seek out groups of marginally damaged people and organize them for a suit
I don't know anything about this, but I have to point out the entire point of class action lawsuits is for groups of 'marginally damaged people' to come together and sue a company that insists on continuing to damage people in small ways.
If the company harmed them in large ways, they'd just sue individually! But no one's going to sue the phone company for their continual theft of two dollars a month or whatever.
Solution: A class action suit, where a large group of people can get together and sue for several hundred thousand.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the amount lawyers get out of class action suits is absurd, and maybe Federal jurisdiction is the solution. But the fact you think it's somehow bad that, recently, large groups of slightly harmed people have started suing companies shows you don't know that's exactly what class action suits are for.
It's very outdated, for one thing. A torrent search engine could find pages that list torrents and then update them every 15 minutes or so, instead of once a week like google does.
And if you use filetype:torrent on google, you don't get the page linking to it. Yes, you can check backlinks, but it's a hassle. Whereas a torrent engine could trivially have 'Here's a torrent, and here's the pages listing it'. And it could combine multiple identical torrents into one listing.
It could also index files listed in torrents, so you could search for filenames.
And it could check and see if the trackers were still up when it refreshes a page. It could even provide cached copies of the.torrent if the tracker was up but not the file, although that's getting into dangerous territory.
In fact, a 'torrent' search engine should actually be a 'tracker' search engine in the first place. Obviously it would find trackers via torrents, but the trackers are what's important.
There's a lot to do with searching torrents that google is not doing, quite possibly on purpose.
I was just taking issue with the original assertation that Stallman charged outrageous prices for 'the source code'.
Which he didn't. He charged outrageous prices (Well, not really that crazy.) for the programs, and the source code was included, or, like you said, probably was in source format in the first place.
I just said something because charging crazy amounts for the source is one of those things you explicitly can't do under the GPL if you give out the binaries.
People talking about who bought the binaries are missing two points, one obvious and one not.
If I have a binary, even sans source, of a GPL program, I can give it out to anyone who wants it. I don't need to get the source first.
In addition, if I distribute binaries that I get from someone else, I can, instead of maintaining a copy of the source, pass along my authorization for a request.
This is how binary mirrors are able to function. Everyone who passes along an RPM is not required to go hunt down the source...they just say 'The package says where to get the source' and people go to Red Hat and get it.
So no company is ever allowed to say 'We didn't sell you a copy of a binary, so you must go elsewhere and get it', because who passed binaries along (which they can do whenever they want.) are allowed to make people skip them and go to the producer of the binary.
In theory, they might be able to demand you produce the binary. But they can't demand you produce a recept.
People think you can contaminate yourself just by looking at code, and, legally, that's the safest position, but copyright really doesn't work that way.
Copyright is not a binary toggle where the slightest touch renders a work a copyright violation. If that were so, we wouldn't, for example, have genres of books like 'murder mysteries', because they'd all be violating the copyright of the first one. (Well, okay, that's out of copyright now, but it wasn't when the second book was published.)
Likewise, in programming, it's not a violation to copy functional aspects of a program. So, ironically, the useful aspects are the least protected. Duff's Device, for example, is not copyrightable at all, because it is purely functional.
And variable and function names are not copyrightable at all, anymore than character names are.
What does that leave us? Well, basically...the overall structure, and specific literal code, as the only things copyrightable.
So, let's say there's some code to move an image around the screen, and you grab the function and rewrite it. People assume that's a copyright violation, but let's break it down:
Literal code, including formatting and comments: Copyrightable, but removed.
The function of each line of code: Not copyrightable, anymore than 'car driving down the street' is copyrightable.
So each line of rewritten code consists of two parts, the copyrightable part and the uncopyrightable part, and the copyrightable part is, by definition, not required, because if it is required, it can't be copyrightable. Hence each rewritten line, on its own, is not copyrightable.
So what about the overall structure? I mean, no one attempts to assert a single pixel on a TV screen is copyrightable.
The same two aspects exist there, you have the uncopyrightable aspect, which can't written any other way, and the copyrightable aspect.
And that last bit is the sole reason you can't rewrite an entire program. The structure itself contains creative elements, and if you just copy it wholesale in a line-by-line rewrite, you lose.
However, there's almost no way you can do that by glancing at the code.
Stallman wasn't selling the 'source', he was selling everything for $150. Source, binaries, he was selling a tape of GPL software for $150. (I think it had binaries on it.)
The GPL itself prohibits selling the source to people who you gave binaries to for anything except a nominal cost, and Stallman of all people knows that.
It doesn't, however, prohibit selling the binaries for any amount you want, or selling the source and binaries on the same medium for any amount you want, or selling the source for any amount to people you haven't given binaries to.
But I don't think that's in the same class as other dumb laws. Most dumb laws forbid things people do all the time, or require them to do things they never do, and aren't enforced at all.
Whereas this law forbids something we really don't want people doing anyway, if we were to think about it...it's just that it's hard to imagine how they would, mainly because people walking giraffes around Atlanta are so rare as to be nonexistent.
The other dumb laws are dangerous. If the police need an exuse to arrest you, they can pull out the Tulsa, Oklahoma law and arrest you for opening a soda. Sure, it will get thrown out, but selective enforcement, even if selective means 'almost never ever ever', is bad, because it gives a harrassment tool to police. It's bad to have people break the law all the time, even if it's an absurd never-enforced one.
But the Atlanta law is just funny because it forbids an thing people never do, in such a specific way. It's fun to try to think of what circumstances could have possible lead to that law. I mean, I can see banning giraffes 'outside of circuses' or whatever, but why forbid tying them to two specific objects? Wouldn't people just tie them to street signs or parking meters or something? And why just giraffes? Why not llamas and other exotic animals? (Do giraffes eat the tops of street lamps and telephone poles? I think I'm on to something there. Maybe they bite into the wires and electricute themselves.)
So it's a silly law, but it's not bad law in the way that 'You must walk 50 feet in front of your car ringing a bell' is....police can't haul you in on some absurd charge of giraffe tying, because absolutely no one possesses a giraffe outside a zoo or circus (In fact, you can't legally possess an exotic animal like that without a lot of paperwork.), and they don't wander around the streets with them.
Atlanta makes it against the law to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp.
You know, people make fun of that law, but it works...I've never seen a giraffe tied to a telephone pole or street lamp in Atlanta.
And can you imagine the chaos if someone actually did do that? We'd have all sorts of traffic problems as people slowed down to gawk, and, trust me, Atlanta has enough traffic problems for two cities already. (Luckily, we've started exporting them to surrounding suburbs.)
The one obvious objection seems to be 'but no one would ever want to do that', but there are plenty of laws banning things 'no one' would ever want to do, because there isn't anything stupid enough that some damn fool won't try it.
And if it's true that no one ever wants to do it, I don't see the problem with said law.;)
What are you talking about? Boston, Massachusetts was founded in 1630, and has existed ever since.
Although, obviously, the government of the state of Massachusetts split from the city of Boston at some point, because they started out as a single entity. But cities are just 'virtual' governments...they exist solely because the state government chooses to have them exist. So the colony of Boston's government turned into the State of Massachusetts, and laws that applies to Boston were transfered to Boston's new government. (At least, I'm assuming. This actually could be a state law.)
But, anyway, signing up with the US didn't invalidate any existing state laws. (Before anyone says 'except the unconstitional ones'...restrictions on laws forbidding the exercise of rights under the US constition didn't apply to states until the...what? 14th amendment?)
The example in the story has nothing to do with scanners. The example in the story is 'library officals refused to give info to police until the police got off their ass and got a subpoena like they were supposed to'. (Hell, they should need a subpoena even if the law doesn't explicitly say so.) Presumably, that would continue to happen exactly like that if fingerprint scanners were in use.
However, in the course of the example, the police noticed that many people borrow cards to use computers, and decided they have some right to know who's using computers. Despite, you know, them not knowing who's sitting on park benches or wandering through Walmart, or any of the variety of places people could be findling themselves in public.
This whole story is idiotic. Someone called in a complaint on a person, and not only did the police not get there until after he left, but the complainer didn't bother to follow him outside and note his license plate number. Hey, he's fondling himself! Let's call the police and just stand around like idiots as he walks away.
It doesn't matter if fingerprint scanners work 100% and everyone who fondles themselves while web surfing at a library can be identified...because, um, unless they're going to take hostages and run out of there shooting wildly into the air, they can be identified anyway if anyone will do the slightest bit of work.
It's not like a goddamn bank robbery, it's an idiot with a porn addiction who can't control himself long enough to buy a Penthouse. Quick, he's ambling away! Look, he's getting in his car! No, wait, he can't find his keys! Oh, there they are. He's pulling up the stop sign...he's stopped at it! Hurry up police, he's getting away!
I mean, honestly. If this had been at, say, a coffee shop with him browsing using wifi, or a movie theater, or any of the 99.99% of public places that you don't present ID to get into, the guy would have just gotten away, because the people involved were complete incompetants.
Hell, in many states, you'd well within your rights to detain him until the police got there. (Especially if you asked them if you could do that when you called them.)
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, some of us read the fucking article and noticed it said that the police introduced no child porn or encrypted files as evidence.
There was no child porn found on his computer. None unencrypted, none encrypted that he refused to decrypt, none encrypted that he decrypted. In fact, it appears there were no encrypted files at all.
There was no child porn at all.
He was convicted of child abuse mainly based on the the testimony of a child who says he took pictures of her.
In fact, I'm vaguly confused as to what a computer has to do with this case at all.
Now, we can argue whether or not the testimony of a 9 year old is enough to have someone convicted, but the encryption software shouldn't have been admitted, and was only there to sway a jury who doesn't understand this stuff into thinking he must have hidden pictures somewhere.
Except PGP no more destroys evidence than a safe destroys it.
No they aren't. That only becomes true after you've been told not to.
If they cops knock on your door and you run and flush all your drugs down the toilet, too bad for them. If they prove you did that, they have you for the original drug possession, but not for flushing them down the toilet.
It's destroying or tampering with evidence that's illegal, and 'evidence' only exists after the court or police declares something to be evidence and tells you.
In other words, it's perfectly legal to cover up a murder you just committed.
But the fake child porn option produces plenty of reasons to encrypt his porn. Um, duh. And it's completely legal.
Of course, he apparently failed to do so. Or maybe he couldn't find any. Because nothing was encrypted.
And I really dislike this decision. The only reason PGP was introduced was to put doubt in the jury's mind that he might have encrypted pictures somewhere...which he did not have, or they would have been found, but the jury is probably not familiar with PGP.
Now, of course, said porn could be illegal, or it might be 'pretend illegal' (A hell of a lot of 'child porn' is fake. If you see an ad for it, it's probably fake child porn.), or it by be completely legal porn he was trying to hide.
Assuming that 'trying to hide something==that thing is illegal' is idiotic. Plenty of people encrypt perfectly legal porn.
And even if he was downloading illegal child porn, that's not what he was charged with. They're trying to use this as evidence he took pictures, which is just stupid. I'm not pro-downloading-child-porn, but it's not the same crime as making-child-porn.
That said, yes, the court cannot force you to tell them your passphrase.
They can, however, issue a warrant ordering you to decrypt the files under their supervision, and hold you in contempt if you fail to do so.
The Fifth amendment applies to things in your head. Enrypted files are not in your head, and you can be ordered to produce them in an unencrypted form.
As far as I know, there is no way to 'accidently' abuse children, so 'intent' is completely irrelevant in this case.
Assuming he's guilty, it doesn't matter if this guy spent two weeks carefully setting up an encrypted system where he wouldn't get caught, or decided to do it on the spur of the moment. That can be a factor in some crimes, but not this one.
And thus I don't know how they'd use PGP to argue that he was planning something. It sounds to me like they're using PGP to argue why they couldn't find any evidence, which is fucking stupid. PGP doesn't hide evidence.
In fact, they make MP3 players that are nothing more than something you can plug a USB drive into.
In what universe does a bank need to check your credit before giving you a checking account?
The scanners at a pump require a physical credit card, and have no human intervention. That leaves two possiblities:
1) Someone stole their card.
Which is possible, of course, but the CC company shouldn't let them get away with it without saying 'So your card was stolen, then? On the...12th? Alright, we've invalidated it and are sending you a new one, you should should get it in two to three days. And we're reversed all the charges you've made since that point. How odd, it appears someone paid your phone bill with the stolen card, but don't worry, we've reversed it. Hello? Hello? They must have hung up.'
2) The pump billed them and didn't give them the right amount of gas
In which case they should be required to file a police report, because having gas pumps that overbill is a pretty serious crime. (Under the same laws that require correct scales for food and whatnot.) The CC company should inform the customer that they will be alerting the police, and the customer will probably be called as a witness.
However, I suspect the real solution is: If you have tapes of the incident, go to the police with them, and report them for driving off without paying for their gas. In many places, there are specific laws about this. (In my state, you can lose your license.)
Legially, those laws probably don't cover someone who pays and then unpays, or who pays with a rubber check, and they should feel to argue that in court when they get hauled in. ;)
I don't know anything about this, but I have to point out the entire point of class action lawsuits is for groups of 'marginally damaged people' to come together and sue a company that insists on continuing to damage people in small ways.
If the company harmed them in large ways, they'd just sue individually! But no one's going to sue the phone company for their continual theft of two dollars a month or whatever.
Solution: A class action suit, where a large group of people can get together and sue for several hundred thousand.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the amount lawyers get out of class action suits is absurd, and maybe Federal jurisdiction is the solution. But the fact you think it's somehow bad that, recently, large groups of slightly harmed people have started suing companies shows you don't know that's exactly what class action suits are for.
The tax man might show up with a supenae and themselves know your SS number, but there's no reason at all for the bank to know it, period.
It's very outdated, for one thing. A torrent search engine could find pages that list torrents and then update them every 15 minutes or so, instead of once a week like google does.
And if you use filetype:torrent on google, you don't get the page linking to it. Yes, you can check backlinks, but it's a hassle. Whereas a torrent engine could trivially have 'Here's a torrent, and here's the pages listing it'. And it could combine multiple identical torrents into one listing.
It could also index files listed in torrents, so you could search for filenames.
And it could check and see if the trackers were still up when it refreshes a page. It could even provide cached copies of the .torrent if the tracker was up but not the file, although that's getting into dangerous territory.
In fact, a 'torrent' search engine should actually be a 'tracker' search engine in the first place. Obviously it would find trackers via torrents, but the trackers are what's important.
There's a lot to do with searching torrents that google is not doing, quite possibly on purpose.
Which he didn't. He charged outrageous prices (Well, not really that crazy.) for the programs, and the source code was included, or, like you said, probably was in source format in the first place.
I just said something because charging crazy amounts for the source is one of those things you explicitly can't do under the GPL if you give out the binaries.
If I have a binary, even sans source, of a GPL program, I can give it out to anyone who wants it. I don't need to get the source first.
In addition, if I distribute binaries that I get from someone else, I can, instead of maintaining a copy of the source, pass along my authorization for a request.
This is how binary mirrors are able to function. Everyone who passes along an RPM is not required to go hunt down the source...they just say 'The package says where to get the source' and people go to Red Hat and get it.
So no company is ever allowed to say 'We didn't sell you a copy of a binary, so you must go elsewhere and get it', because who passed binaries along (which they can do whenever they want.) are allowed to make people skip them and go to the producer of the binary.
In theory, they might be able to demand you produce the binary. But they can't demand you produce a recept.
Copyright is not a binary toggle where the slightest touch renders a work a copyright violation. If that were so, we wouldn't, for example, have genres of books like 'murder mysteries', because they'd all be violating the copyright of the first one. (Well, okay, that's out of copyright now, but it wasn't when the second book was published.)
Likewise, in programming, it's not a violation to copy functional aspects of a program. So, ironically, the useful aspects are the least protected. Duff's Device, for example, is not copyrightable at all, because it is purely functional.
And variable and function names are not copyrightable at all, anymore than character names are.
What does that leave us? Well, basically...the overall structure, and specific literal code, as the only things copyrightable.
So, let's say there's some code to move an image around the screen, and you grab the function and rewrite it. People assume that's a copyright violation, but let's break it down:
Literal code, including formatting and comments: Copyrightable, but removed.
The function of each line of code: Not copyrightable, anymore than 'car driving down the street' is copyrightable.
So each line of rewritten code consists of two parts, the copyrightable part and the uncopyrightable part, and the copyrightable part is, by definition, not required, because if it is required, it can't be copyrightable. Hence each rewritten line, on its own, is not copyrightable.
So what about the overall structure? I mean, no one attempts to assert a single pixel on a TV screen is copyrightable.
The same two aspects exist there, you have the uncopyrightable aspect, which can't written any other way, and the copyrightable aspect.
And that last bit is the sole reason you can't rewrite an entire program. The structure itself contains creative elements, and if you just copy it wholesale in a line-by-line rewrite, you lose.
However, there's almost no way you can do that by glancing at the code.
The GPL itself prohibits selling the source to people who you gave binaries to for anything except a nominal cost, and Stallman of all people knows that.
It doesn't, however, prohibit selling the binaries for any amount you want, or selling the source and binaries on the same medium for any amount you want, or selling the source for any amount to people you haven't given binaries to.
But I don't think that's in the same class as other dumb laws. Most dumb laws forbid things people do all the time, or require them to do things they never do, and aren't enforced at all.
Whereas this law forbids something we really don't want people doing anyway, if we were to think about it...it's just that it's hard to imagine how they would, mainly because people walking giraffes around Atlanta are so rare as to be nonexistent.
The other dumb laws are dangerous. If the police need an exuse to arrest you, they can pull out the Tulsa, Oklahoma law and arrest you for opening a soda. Sure, it will get thrown out, but selective enforcement, even if selective means 'almost never ever ever', is bad, because it gives a harrassment tool to police. It's bad to have people break the law all the time, even if it's an absurd never-enforced one.
But the Atlanta law is just funny because it forbids an thing people never do, in such a specific way. It's fun to try to think of what circumstances could have possible lead to that law. I mean, I can see banning giraffes 'outside of circuses' or whatever, but why forbid tying them to two specific objects? Wouldn't people just tie them to street signs or parking meters or something? And why just giraffes? Why not llamas and other exotic animals? (Do giraffes eat the tops of street lamps and telephone poles? I think I'm on to something there. Maybe they bite into the wires and electricute themselves.)
So it's a silly law, but it's not bad law in the way that 'You must walk 50 feet in front of your car ringing a bell' is....police can't haul you in on some absurd charge of giraffe tying, because absolutely no one possesses a giraffe outside a zoo or circus (In fact, you can't legally possess an exotic animal like that without a lot of paperwork.), and they don't wander around the streets with them.
I don't see how that's 'backwards', but my point was, that government still exists. Any laws created by that government still exist, unless repealed.
You know, people make fun of that law, but it works...I've never seen a giraffe tied to a telephone pole or street lamp in Atlanta.
And can you imagine the chaos if someone actually did do that? We'd have all sorts of traffic problems as people slowed down to gawk, and, trust me, Atlanta has enough traffic problems for two cities already. (Luckily, we've started exporting them to surrounding suburbs.)
The one obvious objection seems to be 'but no one would ever want to do that', but there are plenty of laws banning things 'no one' would ever want to do, because there isn't anything stupid enough that some damn fool won't try it.
And if it's true that no one ever wants to do it, I don't see the problem with said law. ;)
Although, obviously, the government of the state of Massachusetts split from the city of Boston at some point, because they started out as a single entity. But cities are just 'virtual' governments...they exist solely because the state government chooses to have them exist. So the colony of Boston's government turned into the State of Massachusetts, and laws that applies to Boston were transfered to Boston's new government. (At least, I'm assuming. This actually could be a state law.)
But, anyway, signing up with the US didn't invalidate any existing state laws. (Before anyone says 'except the unconstitional ones'...restrictions on laws forbidding the exercise of rights under the US constition didn't apply to states until the...what? 14th amendment?)
Don't worry, it's completely legal to own one if you're not a felon.
However, in the course of the example, the police noticed that many people borrow cards to use computers, and decided they have some right to know who's using computers. Despite, you know, them not knowing who's sitting on park benches or wandering through Walmart, or any of the variety of places people could be findling themselves in public.
This whole story is idiotic. Someone called in a complaint on a person, and not only did the police not get there until after he left, but the complainer didn't bother to follow him outside and note his license plate number. Hey, he's fondling himself! Let's call the police and just stand around like idiots as he walks away.
It doesn't matter if fingerprint scanners work 100% and everyone who fondles themselves while web surfing at a library can be identified...because, um, unless they're going to take hostages and run out of there shooting wildly into the air, they can be identified anyway if anyone will do the slightest bit of work.
It's not like a goddamn bank robbery, it's an idiot with a porn addiction who can't control himself long enough to buy a Penthouse. Quick, he's ambling away! Look, he's getting in his car! No, wait, he can't find his keys! Oh, there they are. He's pulling up the stop sign...he's stopped at it! Hurry up police, he's getting away!
I mean, honestly. If this had been at, say, a coffee shop with him browsing using wifi, or a movie theater, or any of the 99.99% of public places that you don't present ID to get into, the guy would have just gotten away, because the people involved were complete incompetants.
Hell, in many states, you'd well within your rights to detain him until the police got there. (Especially if you asked them if you could do that when you called them.)