Canada's Top Court Quashes Child Porn Warrant 363
m.ducharme writes "The CBC is reporting that the Supreme Court of Canada has handed down a decision quashing a search warrant used to obtain the computer of a man accused of possession of child porn. 'Urbain P. Morelli maintained his charter rights were violated when police searched his computer for child pornography after a technician who had visited his home to work on the machine expressed concerns to police.' What the Slashdot community may find notable about this decision is the distinction drawn between 'accessing' and 'possessing' digital images, most particularly the recognition that a user does not 'possess' cached data. From the decision: '[35] When accessing Web pages, most Internet browsers will store on the computer's own hard drive a temporary copy of all or most of the files that comprise the Web page. This is typically known as a "caching function" and the location of the temporary, automatic copies is known as the "cache." While the configuration of the caching function varies and can be modified by the user, cached files typically include images and are generally discarded automatically after a certain number of days, or after the cache grows to a certain size. [36] On my view of possession, the automatic caching of a file to the hard drive does not, without more, constitute possession. While the cached file might be in a "place" over which the computer user has control, in order to establish possession, it is necessary to satisfy mens rea or fault requirements as well. Thus, it must be shown that the file was knowingly stored and retained through the cache.'"
Okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
- possess any child pornography (section 163.1(4))
- make, print, publish or possess for the purpose of publication any child pornography (section 163.1(2))
- import, distribute, sell or possess for the purpose of distribution of sale any child pornography (section 163.1(3))
Everything was clearly stated year before this case. I would hardly call that a technicality.
Wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
Accessing CP is a crime in Canada. It's even in the next subsection Criminal Code (163.1(4.1))!
Accessing child pornography
(4.1) Every person who accesses any child pornography is guilty of
(a) an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of forty-five days; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding eighteen months and to a minimum punishment of imprisonme
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Hmm. Does the same "mens rea" apply to that law, or can someone arrange to flash a CP photo on a projector at the next session of parliament and throw the lot of them in jail for a fortnight?
In the UK, accessing is "making" (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed - it's nice to see a country using a more sensible definition of access versus possession, rather than one based on computer technicality.
The UK goes in completely the opposite direction however - the courts ruled that downloading not only counts as possession, but it counts as making child porn. And copy constitutes "making" it. So now we have the media talking about people being arrested for making child porn, with most people assuming that means the actual production, but in many cases that may be
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The "technicality" being the completely illegitimate way the warrant that started the case, was obtained?
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Or that someone using his computer had accessed a page that contained such data. Or would you be fine with being arrested for viewing such things if I put a virus on your machine that cached some pictures?
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Insightful)
The judge didn't say that he was innocent.
The judge said that the existence of CP in the cache doesn't in itself make him guilty; that the prosecution must also show "mens rea" (which translates essentially to "guilty intent", as I understand it).
If this guy is guilty, then show it, and you can chuck him in jail and take his computer. If he's innocent, give him his computer back.
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The judge didn't say that he was innocent.
The judge said that the existence of CP in the cache doesn't in itself make him guilty; that the prosecution must also show "mens rea" (which translates essentially to "guilty intent", as I understand it).
If this guy is guilty, then show it, and you can chuck him in jail and take his computer. If he's innocent, give him his computer back.
Actually, the judge went further and actually quashed the search warrant. Without being able to use the images on the computer of evidence, it will be pretty hard to build any case at all.
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Mens rea = Guilty mind. Meaning you intended to commit the act, thought it through and did it.
Actus reus = Guilty act. The objective action, i.e. downloading something/driving through people/etc.
In Canada, for most criminal offences you need both to be proven in order to have the proof that the crime was committed. There's some exceptions to this but without spending a few weeks explaining it there's no point. Having only one but not the other leads to other legal avenues. In this case(without reading
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Actually, CP isn't that hard to just "stumble over". You've heard of the dark net, I presume. Go, install I2P, or some other dark net application. Browse around a bit. You'll be surprised to find that A: there is some interesting shitzls on the dark net, and B: about half the content on the dark net is CP. You don't have to look at CP - all you need do is browse around, looking for the rare gem of a political perspective, or some of the activist stuff, and you WILL stumble over CP. It's right there in
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Insightful)
I could think of several ways somebody could have "CP" in his cache and have not gone looking for actual under age Porn
1 went shopping at a site that uses models to show clothes (got caught by "related items")
2 was looking at other Porn and mis-clicked
3 got a virus that does auto surfing
4 bait and switch on a banner
5 did a google picture search (or other graphic search) and got a few slipped in by mistake
6 was not him actually surfing
personally this is a subject where "Think of the Children" is the absolute last thing you need to do
(unless you are talking about thinking of the Victims who btw have a lot of other problems)
Re:I'd Go Further (Score:5, Funny)
We ought to just lock up anyone who looks at a child anywhere at any time, who knows what they're thinking when they see that child?
And apparently some people even MAKE THEIR OWN children, we need to put a stop to this immediately.
You guys are idiots. (Score:2)
I can't believe that this is the kind of activity you advocate. Clearly the legal line on this stuff has been moving the wrong way for a long time, and laws regarding child porn are *way* off the mark.
Have you even thought about blind people? We should lock up anyone who hears, touches, smells, tastes, or sees children. Don't forget people who say child-like things or try to attract children (ice cream men, for instance). Don't even get me started on five-year-old girls who kiss five-year-old boys. The
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Riiight...because putting a bookmark in someone's browser without their approval is so absurdly hard to do that the existence of such a thing is evidence. Don't like this site? Press control-D* to navigate away, or press control-D to win a prize, or press control-D to scan your computer for bad files.
* I'm pretty sure that's IE's shortcut, I don't use IE so I'm not sure, but if it's not replace it with the appropriate shortcut
Wow, Savvy Judge (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't know that our legal system understood computers even that well, to distinguish browser cache "oh crap, what the hell did I just see?!" from deliberate "I done saved 3115 photos to my desktop that I probably shouldn't have".
Of, wait, it's not my legal system, it's Canada's. nevermind. Grats Canadians on having sane judges?
The legal system understands anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
The legal system understands anything that someone explains to it. So if you explain something to a judge or a lawyer, he or she is supposed to think about what you've explained and figure out how the law applies to it. A cache isn't something it's hard to explain, so--particularly when it's really important to a case--a judge will understand it.
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You've never tutored have you? There are people who either refuse or are incapable of understanding certain concepts. Some judges fall into this category in certain areas, and one would hope it wasn't the case, but it happens, especially when judges are elected based on popularity and not appointed on merit.
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Just a note, there's nothing wrong with your post, you just assume the rules in the US happen everywhere else.
Judges are not elected in Canada, but appointed.
Popularity does play a role, since a politician does the appointing, but it's not an election.
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And even though a politician does the appointing, she chooses from a short list of candidates that are vetted by a committee of judges, lawyers, and lay-people. The system works surprisingly well.
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but, most of those judges just do low level things
like Marriages and civil cases (Small claims, etc.).
Tim S.
Indiana, USA
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I'm proud of being Canadian when judgments like this come down. We've had a number of other salient ones in the last number of years too.
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Child porn laws are out of control. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Child porn laws are out of control. (Score:5, Insightful)
Child porn is the root password to the Constitution.
Re:Child porn laws are out of control. (Score:4, Interesting)
You can do anything as long as you're doing it "for the children". Going after child porn is simply one specific example.
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"stop wasting resources hunting pervs that look at the stuff and spend time hunting the predators that actually produce the stuff."
I fully agree. I mean, even if the perv has thousands of images and hundreds of videos, he's not actually touched one single child while collecting them.
In my post above, I mentioned the dark net. The predators are proud of their "work". You get full facial views of the predators enjoying their sport. How hard can it be for the police forces to combine their intelligence, an
The REAL problem with disseminating child porn (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue isn't just one of "gateway habit" escalation. Nor is it just one of "abuse by proxy."
A child is hurt when child abuse happens. Most child porn, not counting teen self- or boyfriend-cell-phone stuff, are photos of child abuse in progress.
While passing those pictures around may or may not cause that particular child any further harm ("abuse by proxy"),* it generally does create a market for child pornography. In the aggregate, spread over all the people who view child pornography, this increases
Re:The REAL problem with disseminating child porn (Score:4, Interesting)
Please reply if this is an inaccurate summary of your post: You think that people who view child porn might be "pushed over the edge" by it and abuse children where they previously would not, therefore imposing some responsibility on the CP peddler for subsequent acts of child abuse.
This is akin to saying that a woman wearing a sexy outfit is responsible for prompting an act of rape unto herself (yes, some people in modern enlightened countries actually believe this). If she is raped and her rapist goes to trial, it may be demonstrated that she increased her likelihood of rape by her provocative dress, but that doesn't mean that her rapist couldn't choose not to rape her. Making it 100% NOT HER FAULT if she gets raped.
Stop shifting blame. People who abuse children should go to prison. People whose closest tie to child abuse is watching a video of it after the fact should not. It's not that hard.
In response to your starred item about "additional trauma": Just like everyone else, I've had loads of embarrassing moments in my life (my arrest a few months ago being the latest example). If a given incident is recorded on video and distributed online, I shouldn't have some crybaby trump card to suppress the distributors' human right of free speech just so that I can pretend it didn't happen. We shouldn't prohibit free speech because it might hurt someone's feelings, and CP should be no exception. There are less heavy-handed methods of discouraging the creation and distribution of CP. For further reading, see: Star Wars Kid; Barbra Streisand.
Re:Child porn laws are out of control. (Score:4, Insightful)
Holy "Slippery Slope" Batman!
Just like how stepping on a grape in a grocery store turns into stealing bunches of grapes at a time, which turns into robbing the store a gunpoint.
Honestly, I'm just glad you restrained from claiming that raping babies was the next logical step.
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It gets especially silly when they want to arrest someone for looking at cartoon porn - who is the victim?
MAFIAA of course. They would surely claims the rights of the usage of Bart Simpson, with clothes or without.
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In this particular case, if you RTFA (yeah, yeah, you must be new here, etc.), you will notice that the Morelli, the accused, was also suspected of creating child porn with his 3 yo daughter.
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Of, wait, it's not my legal system, it's Canada's. nevermind. Grats Canadians on having sane judges?
Let's hope that even though many of us don't live in Canada and the case doesn't directly set precedent in our legal systems the case is widely reported among legal professionals and they get a better understanding of the technical side of the argument. At the very least this should give lawyers in other countries ideas for a better defense for their clients.
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I think that this particular decision was even more sophisticated than that -- the judge made a point of saying that if you took advantage of the existence of the cache to store material, you would be in possession. So surfing to a page isn't possession, but knowingly surfing to a page, so that your cache would contain cp that you could go browze to later, might be.
I was quite surprised at just how well-done that decision was, but if you want to see an example of a Canadian judge getting it wrong, just read
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The SCC broadcasts select hearings over the web [scc-csc.gc.ca]. The court's decisions [umontreal.ca] are all published and searchable [canlii.org] on the internet.
Sl
court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprisingly sophisticated and reasonable thinking on behalf of the court. I'm impressed.
Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problems in Canada all stem from just one key area. The sprawling bureaucracy second to none in the world. Somewhere, at some point, some sub-committee to a sub-committee in charge of helping the team tasked with creating the process that is used to determine the eligibility criteria for immigration decided that the poor need more help becoming Canadian citizens.
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Show off. So, you paid attention in language classes, while I fell asleep. I hate you . . . .
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Actually, if memory serves, material drawn or created for one's own use is not illegal in Canada. That decision came down a few years ago.
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Surprisingly intelligent, yes, but it completely ignores the fact that a technician found evidence that he was producing child porn, only to find that he disassembled his setup and formatted his hard drive the next day. The ruling really is a mixed blessing. Ruling that cached data does not constitute possession is a good thing, but quashing the search warrant based solely on that point was a horrible thing to do due to the rest of the evidence.
Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprisingly intelligent, yes, but it completely ignores the fact that a technician found evidence that he was producing child porn, only to find that he disassembled his setup and formatted his hard drive the next day. The ruling really is a mixed blessing. Ruling that cached data does not constitute possession is a good thing, but quashing the search warrant based solely on that point was a horrible thing to do due to the rest of the evidence.
If he formatted his drives then there was no evidence, a technicians testimony is hearsay not evidence. "No evidence = No prosecution" is a good thing even if it allows some criminals off the hook (as it inevitably will.)
Re:court intelligence (Score:4, Informative)
If he formatted his drives then there was no evidence, a technicians testimony is hearsay not evidence.
A technician can always testify in court to what he saw on the hard drive as a witness, and that would not be hearsay. Hearsay would be a policeman testifying in court "the technician told me..." or the technician testifying "the customer told me..."
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A technician can always testify in court to what he saw on the hard drive as a witness, and that would not be hearsay. Hearsay would be a policeman testifying in court "the technician told me..." or the technician testifying "the customer told me..."
You are right of course. I stand corrected, hearsay is the wrong word.
Still there wasn't any hard evidence of child porn production if I read TFA correctly, just some circumstantial evidence witnessed by the technician from which he developed a suspicion that that was what was going on.
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If the technician is cross-examined in court as a witness, that is evidence. It is up to the judge to decide how credible he is as a witness.
Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, what was that "evidence" again? Oh yea a camera pointed to his fully clothed three year old daughter with her toys. The technician said he found 2 suspicious links (amongst the plethora of porn he had in his bookmarks). What I'm thinking is that the defendant liked petite LEGAL girls(i.e. he probably had a link that said "tiny teens" in his long list of fetishes). It's not untypical for someone to stumble on illegal porn when searching for legal porn. Sorry but this case was bullshit, and I commemorate the judge and jury on their competent choice.
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Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
The search warrant was quashed because it was issued under faulty information. "My god, judge - the guy had a camera setup and was filming his kid, and there were links on his computer to pornographic websites!" Well... was he filming his kid playing for Kodak memories in years to come, and were those links to pornography perfectly legitimate adult websites? Even in the article, you get the idea that simply having links to pornography somehow constitutes reasonable suspicion that you might be a kiddy-fiddler, regardless of whether that pornography is perfectly legal and unassociated with it.
I, for one, am tired of people tacitly assuming that pornography is corrupt and corrupting, regardless of what it contains. It's ignorant moral panic at its finest.
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Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually a fairly easy test:
If you can answer yes to both of those questions, you are automatically suspected of being a kiddie-fiddler.
Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Informative)
Which is particularly sad as many actual pedophiles fail at the first one.
offtopic - sig (Score:2)
Why does your sig go to one of the low-end placeholder websites?
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The technician saw evidence that the man was video taping his fully clothed daughter at play and he saw a few bookmarks that he believes are child porn.
How those links got there, he cannot say. Perhaps the owner put them there, perhaps some rogue javascript or a virus did it. Perhaps the owner reinstalled because CP links and images appeared unwanted on his computer. Who knows?
If an ad can animate a complete XP desktop going through a simulated virus scan, even on a Linux machine running Firefox, then it's
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The technician found no such thing. What he found was a camera in a room, where there happened to be a lot of toys. In other words, the technician found reason to believe that the accused was making videos of his kid while the kid was playing. My impression from the rest of the decision is that they never did find any evidence at all that he was making porn of his kid, even though they did ultimately find child porn of other kids after they seized his computer.
Essentially, the technician found two bookmarks
You hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
it is most unfortunate that the police signally failed in their duty to secure a conviction for one of the most heinous and despicable offences
Looking at pictures of naked children is 'one of the most heinous and despicable offences'? Wow. Where do you put things like theft, rape, assault, or murder then? Personally, I'd prefer a thousand people who looked at pictures of naked children on their computers to one person who went around killing people.
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Looking at pictures of naked children is 'one of the most heinous and despicable offences'?
Doing so deliberately for purposes of arousal, yes it is.
Where do you put things like theft, rape, assault, or murder then?
Rape and murder are also some of the most heinous and despicable offences. Assault can be, depends on the details. Theft, absent aggravating cirumstances, isn't.
Do you really need people to tell you that?
Re:court intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Very often those children are kidnapped, raped, assaulted or even murdered.
But none of these crimes is committed by the viewer of the photos, who - in the age of Photoshop, CGI etc. - does not necessarily have to be aware of how the photos were created in the first place. It's like buying apples at a marketplace. How is one supposed to tell that they were stolen/grown by exploited fruit growers living in desperate coditions/whatever, solely from the looks of the apples?
Re:court intelligence (Score:4, Funny)
Very often those children are kidnapped, raped, assaulted or even murdered.
Have some people completely lost the ability to distinguish crimes from each other?
Some people possess money.
Very often those dollars had been stolen, involved in a bank robbery where innocent people are murdered, involved in drug trafficing where people are murdered..
Therefore anyone found possessing dollar bills should be tossed in jail for life. They were responsible for murder after all, right?
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You cite the worst case scenarios.
But, you offer no citations. Do you have numbers to back that up? It is my belief that the vast majority of abducted children are brutalized for the predator's own pleasure, rather than for CP. No, I have no citations, hence, my statement that "it is my belief".
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Why is it illegal to look at child porn and not Jeffery Dahmer's disgusting crime scene photos?
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"secure a conviction for one of the most heinous and despicable offences."
I might argue that CP is what you say it is - but I won't bother.
I will point out, that plenty of people have been busted for CP, when pornography was the furthest thing from their minds. Time was, when a naked infant, toddler, or even young child in a photograph raised no eyebrows anywhere. Grandma sent many a photo off to be developed in the '50's and 60's. Somewhere in my young adulthood - late '70's, we'll call it - I started r
Solution for CP lovers (Score:2, Funny)
2. "accidentally" browse CP
3. ??
4. Profit!!
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No jury/judge will see it as accidently having muliple CP images. So that's 4. Jail Time!
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"it is necessary to satisfy mens rea"
The discussion is about child porn not gay porn.
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"Making" in the UK, not cache-ing (Score:2)
Sounds a lot worse as a charge...
"Yes M'lud, Mr Taco is charged with making these images"
sounds a lot worse than
"Yes M'lud, Mr Taco is charged with owning a computer running Microsoft Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5, which, when Mr Taco visited the website in question, caused cached copies of the images in question to be stored temporarily on the hard disk, in an area of files not used or accessed directly by Mr Taco, but by the Microsoft products aforementioned"
The latter is also sounding a lot weaker i
Re:"Making" in the UK, not cache-ing (Score:5, Funny)
Mr Taco is charged with owning a computer running Microsoft Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5
This is a serious crime but, thankfully, it is its own punishment.
Is this kind of browsing routine? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was wondering if the service personnel browsing dude's computer was routine? I've fixed a lot of PC's without rifling through the users cache and image files, other than if they were infected with a virus. Even backing up user profiles and data, I could tell you which files were infected but not what they were doing with their computer.
Just wondering why the technician was going through all that stuff? Seems like service people are being a lot more thorough than is required to get the computer working again.
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Sky News did an undercover investigation of computer repairers in England, and found that all but one of them browsed through the photo collection, and some of them even tried to log in with the fake Natwest Bank login details left on a word file on the disk.
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progress (Score:2)
The only problem with this ruling is that, after a few incidents like this one occur, there will be a hew and outcry, and harsher and more encompassing laws passed, which will inevitably result in more arrests and convictions of people who oughtn't be bothered.
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Say What? (Score:3, Insightful)
mens rea
What? What the fuck kind of barbarian country is Canada where mens rea is still alive and kicking? Here, in the Civilized United States of America Incorporated, mens rea was abolished in the Nixonian War On Drugs.
That's it. We're invading next Thursday to stop this Godlessness.
--
BMO
Ridiculous decision (Score:2)
Did anyone commenting here actually read TFA (specifically, the court ruling)?
The reasoning for why the conviction was quashed had absolutely nothing to do with cached images. It was quashed because the police were ruled to have conducted an illegal (as per the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) search, despite having a search warrant to search for possession of child pornography.
Essentially, this is what happened:
1) Technician shows up to install an Internet connection on accused computer.
2) Technic
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The court essentially ruled that the technician's observations did not legally justify a search. And I find this patently ridiculous.
Why?
Re:Ridiculous decision (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right and wrong. The question of whether or not he possessed child porn really had little to do with the decision. HOWEVER, the Court did write exactly what the summary quoted. So it will serve as legal precedent.
The reason why he was acquitted is because the search warrant itself was quashed. An invalid search warrant means that the subsequent search is illegal. So while you're right that the police had a search warrant, it was improperly obtained and thus rendered invalid. You made it sound like they had a valid search warrant, which is false. To issue a search warrant, police need to provide reasonable grounds to a judge as to why the search warrant is necessary or, you might be able to see this coming, warranted. This is to protect Charter rights.
The Court found that the police did NOT have reasonable grounds, and that an objective reasonable person would only have a mere suspicion that he might be creating/consuming child porn. Suspicion is NOT enough to issue a search warrant. Furthermore, it wasn't the fault of the issuing judge that the search warrant was issued. The police used misleading language and omitted important exculpatory information in their Information To Obtain (ITO, basically a warrant application). If the police had not been misleading in their ITO, the judge probably would not have issued a search warrant.
You've conveniently included some of the deceptive claims made by the police. The Court found that the following information was pertinent and exculpatory, and, taken with the situation as a whole, would serve to more than mitigate any reasons to suspect the man:
1) The technician did not find probable child porn links. He found links that were entitled "lolita". If you've ever seen porn, you know that the term "lolita" is used in PLENTY of legal porn productions. These are POSSIBLE child porn links, at best.
2) The child showed NO signs of abuse, trauma, or anything other such signs of harm. The child was fully clothed and playing with her toys.
3) The mother was also in the house.
4) From the fact that the webcam was pointed at his daughter, you CANNOT then conclude that he might be making child porn. That would make it so that every person who has a video camera and likes to take home videos of their children child porn suspects. This is ludicrous.
5) The technician saw legal porn. But legal porn is legal, and from Morelli's consumption of legal porn, you can't suddenly conclude that he likes illegal porn. Logically questionable, at best.
The Court found that all of the above created a situation where you may, kind of, sort of, suspect child porn production. But that would involve an AWFUL LOT of speculation. Search warrants, again, cannot be issued on the basis of suspicion or speculation, but rather reasonable grounds. Since there are no reasonable grounds to issue a search warrant and the issuing judge was misled by the police, the original search warrant was invalidated. This means that the subsequent search and all the evidence obtained cannot be introduced in the Court. Without any evidence from the search, the charges do not hold. Morelli acquitted.
Justice (Score:3, Insightful)
Doug Stanhope on MySpace pedophiles (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8APlx9btTn8 [youtube.com]
"Child Pornography is the only crime that is illegal to look at"
"If you are a parent, you probably don't want to hear this but [...] statistically, no one wants to fuck your kid. Now or ever! [...]. You want to think your kid is the reason all those pedophiles are there waiting in position [...] if you wanted your kid to get fucked just to prove how ultrafuckable that kid is you probably couldn't make it happen. If you put him up as bait dressed in a catholic school skirt jumping on a pogo stick with no underwear [...] he would still probably graduate a virgin, and you would look like an asshole."
Best. Comedy. Ever (The great 4: Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope)
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What makes you so sure he wasn't a victim of spam or the like? In the US, you have to show that the person knowingly and willingly sought out to download the images. If there's just 3, that's gonna be impossible to prove. If there's half a billion, then intent is easy to show. This was recently changed because people were spamming the hell out of other people with sick porn to try and get them in trouble. Distribution, on the other hand, ignores intent completely.
Re:This is total horseshit (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you are basically stating for the public record that YOU PERSONALLY ACCEPT TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY for every last byte of data stored on your computers...
I hope your computer are stocked in a vault to which only you have physical access, and which is blocked from the net, and which doesn't have any mains power.
After all, you just stated you believe it is an absolute offence with no possible or acceptable defence.
Good of you to volunteer me for the same bullshit without first asking me though.
Re:This is total horseshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I was with you until
What is it with Americans being so gleeful about prison rape? It's barbaric.
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Probably for the same reason crusaders against adulterers and homosexuals are often caught doing those very acts. The more vocal someone is against something, it's because they're trying to prove they're against it.
In this case, I think someone has a deep, dark secret fantasy of being someone's bitch.
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Every time someone says "Every time someone crusades against X, I think they must secretly like X", I think they must one of those people who likes to crusades against some Y yet secretly likes Y. (Y may or may not be the same as X.)
In fact, maybe I should start a crusade over this.
Re:This is total horseshit (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of crap would not fly in the United States. The computer user might not have knowingly possessed the images through his computer's browser cache, but I am sure he knowingly viewed the images through his browser.
But the law specifically says you cannot possess such material. It does not state that you cannot *view* the images. Which means that while the cache constitutes likely proof to show that he did view it -- that is not a criminal act. The distinction you're trying to erase is exactly the one that prevented him from being convicted.
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Let's see.... based on the description, it is possible that the guy was into child-porn. However, what bugs me is that the evidence that was described to get the search warrant was this:
- a web cam pointed at an area where a three-year old plays, and plugged into a vcr
- a list of links in the taskbar, where it is unclear whether the technician actually followed them to identify them as adult and child porn. Or where they labeled "adult porn" and "child porn"? The article is unclear here.
And... that's about
Re:This is total horseshit (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe he didn't. A number of browsers nowadays have a prefetch feature: they'll follow any links on a page and fetch the pages those links point to, to help speed things up when (or if) the user clicks on those links. That results in data in the cache for pages the user never visited.
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with ubuntu there is a directory called .thumbnails and in there another one called normal. currently on my netbook there are just under 3000 thumbnails some of which are images i recognise as having viewed them some are images of well known people, some from slashdot , facebook and there are photo's of people i know but have never seen before.
I think theres nothing there to worry about but would hate to think anything in that directory could be used as evidence against me of anything.
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It's much more likely and far more reasonable that you could have cached images on your computer without your consent than contraband in your car without your consent. The prosecution could still argue that you are responsible, but they would have a difficult time overcoming the "reasonable doubt" of innocence. On the other hand, if you had contraband in your car, you would have to give a reason why it could be there without your knowledge. After all, your car didn't pick them up itself. Still, if you d
Re:Curious to how this relates to the US. (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't, it is Canada.
Constructive possession is a concept where if the drugs are accessible to you, e.g. you are the passenger of a car and drugs are found in the center console, you can be charged with possession without even knowing you are there. This sort of charge routinely fucks people out of gainful employment for decades; imagine this. Your buddy picks you up, and you are pulled over, drugs are found in the center console. Although you had no idea the drugs were there, you can be charged with possession if the driver doesn't admit to owning the drugs, or perhaps even if he does. If you are moderately wealthy, you get a lawyer, he plays buddy-buddy with the judge and prosecutor, and the charge will get dropped or downgraded to a non-drug offense, but if you are poor which is overwhelmingly the case, you wind up with probation and no hopes of finding a job in the next decade.
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I've had objectionable stuff pop up through ad-blockers before when randomly surfing as well that I'd like to report (not even sure if it was legit or not, closed windows fast) ... but haven't, for that very fear. Sad, but what can you do? I'm certainly not going to incur thousands of dollars of legal fees to try to figure out the "right" way to report something that would probably either be ignored, on a jurisdiction that the police are unable to do anything about, or might get me accused of a felony. I