Child Porn As a Weapon 774
VoiceOfDoom writes "Want to get rid of your boss and move up to his position? Put kiddie porn on his computer then call the cops! This was the cunning plan envisaged by handyman Neil Weiner of east London after falling out with school caretaker Edward Thompson too many times. Thankfully, Weiner didn't cover his tracks quite well enough to avoid being found out — earlier boasts about his plan to friends at a BBQ provided the police with enough evidence to arrest him for trying to pervert the course of justice. Frighteningly, however, between being charged with possession of indecent images and being exonerated, innocent (if 'grumpy') Thompson was abused and ostracized for eight months by neighbors and colleagues. With computer forensics for police work often being performed by 'point 'n click'-trained, nearly-retired cops, or languishing in a 6-month queue for private sector firms to attend to it, the uncomfortable question is raised: how easily might this trick have succeeded if Weiner had been a little more intelligent about it?"
Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you do (Score:4, Funny)
Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you don't f* with the people who handle your food!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Did you both miss the part where this guy was a janitor?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There's a difference between an IT monkey and a janitor? Since when?
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:4, Funny)
IT folks deal with a LOT more shit.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. I've worked in both industries. As an IT admin, I have yet to be slapped or had a plateful of food thrown my face. I've never been punched in the junk by a child while leaning over a table to deliver food, then yelled at by the parents for almost dropping the food without a word to the giggling child who's winding up to do it again. You really want to compare having to go into work at 2am for a downed server once in a while or putting up with an idiot PHB to working 16hr shifts on your feet with no break and a screeching boss?
I also make at least 4-5 times more than I did in the restaurant business. In an air conditioned office. With actual benefits like health insurance and vacation days (not that I get to use my vacation days much, but at least I *have* them...) Generally sitting on my butt too. At my busiest I'm still just sitting on my butt. I might be busy tapping away at a computer and having users calling me and whining about their slow connections or stupid problems, but it's still heavenly compared to working in a restaurant.
I dare you to quit your IT job and go work in a restaurant for a few months. Then feel free to come back and say that again with a straight face.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Insightful)
How did you go from reading "Janitor" to equating that with the time you worked at a restaraunt, presumably as a waiter?
Yeah, food service sucks. That's why you got a degree and a better job. All us IT guys are just making jokes, not personally attacking your history.
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Thousands upon thousands of crimes go unsolved every day. If you do it correctly, no one ever even thinks to investigate it in the first place. The number of crimes that are solved are definitely in the minority, and usually only come about byway of accident. Shows like CSI are little more than propaganda, fooling the masses into believing that the police will find you no matter what.
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Yes, you need to know who is guilty first, then gather the evidence that proves it.
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Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Funny)
Not surprising, the culprit is an MCSE.
That’s Microsoft Certified Solitaire Expert, right?
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http://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20(Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party) [stallman.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Those questions can be answered once the pedo apologists can provide a legitimate case of a child completely on their own seeking out to have a sexual relationship with an adult (cases of a 14 year old having sex with say a 16 or 17 year old don't count). The problem is that they can never provide such an example and thus always make up these bullshit "No true scotsman" cop outs.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Insightful)
Everywhere in the US, the minimum age to model or act in pornographic material is 18. Below that and it is considered child porn, and to make matters more ridiculous there’s no legal distinction between “child” porn where the girl is 17 and child porn where she’s 7.
Only a dozen states set the age of consent at 18, however. Most of them have the age of consent set at 16, and in the rest it is 17 [list] [wikipedia.org]. Additionally, many states have Romeo-and-Juliet-type laws so that if the two people were close in age they aren’t guilty of a crime, or might be guilty of a misdemeanor instead of a felony. However, all of the states in which you can legally sleep with your 16- or 17-year-old girlfriend will still charge you with possession of child pornography if you get caught with a nude picture of her (and possibly charge her with production of it, and – absurd as it sounds – teens have actually been charged with distributing child porn on the mere rationale that they could be hacked and the hacker might gain access to the photos!).
It makes absolutely no rational sense and needs to be fixed, but politicians aren’t about to make child porn laws less strict. That would be political suicide when their enemies use that to claim that they are soft on pedophiles.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:4, Funny)
Stating that a difference exists and claiming that is is big proves nothing. Would you like to elaborate on that difference, particularly on where the moral difference is. Why can a family photo album not be public on facebook?
I am not against child rape or anything like that but... seriously.... ambiguity is all fine and good most of the time, but we are talking about whats "socially acceptable" which seems to translate to "when its ok to send armed thugs out to 'modify' your behavior" then, I think it behooves us to spell out, in detail, exactly where the line is drawn and be absolutely clear about WHY it is being drawn where it is (and the convenience of police or prosecutors is NEVER an acceptable answer in my book; if their job is hard it is because it should be hard to divorce a person from his otherwise inalienable rights).
-Steve
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Funny)
Er um s/not against child rape/not in favor of/
I seriously need an editor.
(talk about the situations where that 1 minute between postings rule really blows)
-Steve
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously need an editor.
Don't hire the ones that work for Slashdot.
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I don't think that's what you meant to say.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:4, Funny)
I am not against child rape or anything like that
I don't think that's what you meant to say.
No?
The Dr. begs to differ. [tinyurl.com]
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Informative)
But there is a huge difference between taking a picture of little Sally in the bathtub for the home photo album than there is posting that same picture on your open-to-everyone Facebook page.
In what way? Apparently many people disagree with you as I've seen exactly such pictures on people's Facebook pages.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you (Score:5, Insightful)
About a decade ago, before the peak of current paedophile hysteria, I had a pen pal from Poland. A real pen pal. A girl, too. Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but there you go.
Anyway, we joked around about nude photos, so she sent me one of herself. When she was about four.
Nowadays, that kind of letter could land me in prison, given a hysterical enough judge.
Yet I don’t see the big deal anyway. I grew up in a nudist family. I am certain a number of people own my nude photos. Nude child photos, at that. I am even well aware of the risk that some paedophile, somewhere, wanks looking at my picture. And I cannot see any evil in it. In fact, if that helped that person defuse their urges, thus making them less prone to actually molest a child, good for them. And for the children left unmolested.
First off... (Score:5, Insightful)
...the obligatory Weiner name.
Moving on.
The idea of this is sick...it's no different than accusing a teacher you don't like of rape. Even if you are found innocent, there is still a stigma attached to you that will never fully dissipate within your community. People around you will always have this accusation in the back of their minds.
Whatever happend to using a whoopie cusion, or putting a flaming bag of poo on someone's doorstep?
Re:First off... (Score:5, Insightful)
People around you will always have this accusation in the back of their minds.
Not only that, but quite often while the initial coverage of the case is headline news, by the time the wheels of justice have ground out a verdict of "not guilty" and the false accusation has been proven, coverage is much less prominent.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is so true. Back in my high school days, we had some bomb threats that got called in to the school. Then a couple of students "came forward" and accused another student of calling it in and planning an actual event (this was shortly after Columbine). The student was arrested and everyone in the town heard about this. It was front page news in local newspapers for a few weeks.
After a few weeks, I hadn't heard anything new and the whole thing slipped from my memory. A few years later, I read in the local paper that the student had committed suicide because of him being constantly ostracized by the town. Turns out that he was cleared of all charges, but this was never announced in the media and most people in my town still thought he did it. When confronted, he would tell people that he was cleared, but most people didn't believe him because his credibility was destroyed by the original media coverage. There was no trial verdict for him to point to since it never went to trial.
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Which media? This sounds like the sort of thing parents could sue over.
Re:Because of that (Score:5, Insightful)
The news of a person being found not guilty needs to be even bigger than the news that a person was accused.
O.J.?
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The idea of this is sick
Yes, but it's nothing new. Anyone could more easily put an ounce of cocaine in his desk and call the cops, no computer expertise needed. What's sickest is someone willing to download, let alone look at, child porn just to get someone in trouble.
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You ever been to a picture board?
I avoid them like the plague now for the easy "accidental felonies" available when someone posts child porn as a joke, which will then put the illegal material in your browser cache, history, and in the server logs downloading it. Trolls on 4chan do this all the time, and moderators can never be fast enough to catch all of them.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone pointing their browser at 4chan deserves what they get.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why "possession" (of *anything*) shouldn't be a crime.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Informative)
Disparity in Sentencing for Actual Crimes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:First off... (Score:5, Interesting)
So walking around with a bomb strapped to your chest is ok? Or carrying a machine gun into a bank? There have to be limits, silly. :p
Carrying a gun into the bank should be OK. Using it to rob the bank, on the other hand, is a different matter.
But it would be tough to do that if everyone were open-carrying, anyway. Hello, we can end the cycle of victimhood already.
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Re:First off... (Score:5, Insightful)
Limits on gun ownership don't stop violent crime. A culture opposed to violent crime stops violent crime.
Canada has lots of firearms legally owned, and has a fraction of gun crime per capita. Switzerland has one of the highest rates of ownership per household (if not the highest), and has almost zero firearm violence. US gun violence is a symptom of culture, not the accessibility of firearms.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Informative)
First, to get cocaine one would have to get in contact with a seller, buy it, store it, bring it to work with me, etc. Every step of the way entails real legal and in some cases physical risk. There are, of course, risks associated with getting child porn too, but I'm willing to bet that someone who knows what they're doing would have near zero chance of getting caught downloading child porn once; most of the people that get caught are members of 'communities' of people who trade images back and forth.
Second, drugs don't have anywhere near the stigma that child porn does in our society. Someone finds a baggie of crack in your desk and you deny it's yours and are eventually found innocent, people will believe you. Someone finds child porn on you computer and you are instantly and forever labeled as the most disgusting form of human being imaginable. There was an article online a few months ago about a guy who was accused of having child porn, except that the pornstar in question showed up at his trial and testified that she was 25 (25 for christ sake!) at the time the movie was made. People in the comments section of the article were universally of the opinion that he got off on a technicality.
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First, to get cocaine one would have to get in contact with a seller, buy it, store it, bring it to work with me, etc. Every step of the way entails real legal and in some cases physical risk.
I drink at a tavern in a bad part of town, and walking home I'm almost always approached by hookers and dope dealers trying to sell me their wares. A large city would be even easier. The guy's not going to remember who he sold the dope to. Once it's in your posession, well, how many times have you been stopped and fris
Re:NOT the most disgusting form of human imaginabl (Score:5, Insightful)
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Isn't it a lot easier to get child pornography than to get cocaine? If I recall correctly, it doesn't have to be an actual photo to be child pornography: drawings count, and perhaps doctored photos? Never mind the aforementioned 4chan source.
This is true. Lolicon now counts as "child porn" despite the fact no actual child was ever involved. It's just cartoons. Don't ever sketch kiddie porn on a napkin in a restaurant. You could go to jail for a long time for making naughty with your pencil.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Informative)
I had something similar happen to me. I was a volunteer at a youth center monitoring a computer lab. Each kid was permitted 30 minutes, and there was much fighting about using them. One of the girls didn't like my policy and decided to tell my supivisor that I slapped her on the butt. This accusiation initially only got me suspended, but the local atorney decided to pick the case up. I was forced to get a lawyer to look into the case. After many delay the child was interviewed a total of 3 times over 8 months. Each interview was more scandalous than the last (eventually claiming that I grabbed her breasts). A few days before I was to appear in cort, the atorney decided to look at the case, and simply dropped the case after realizing that the girl was lying. I didn't have the energy to prusue the case any further so I simply accepted the couple thousand dollards of lawyer fees and went on my way. However, when I went to get an internship later, my background had an issue, where the case was still open. It only took a polite visit to the cort house to get it offically closed, but that still delayed when I was going to start work by a month. I did end up going back to my volenteer work for a short while, but things just seemed to be different, an uneasy atomphear; I decided to call it quits a month later.
Re:First off... (Score:4, Funny)
"an uneasy atomphear"
I'd never heard of that word, but looking at it I could imagine a sense of dread pervading every atom of your being and I thought "what a great word"... why haven't I heard of it before?, so I tried googling it.
The google suggestion was "atmosphere"... what a let-down. Pfft.
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I have a friend who works with children who have extreme behavioral issues, and she had a situation similar to this that was just resolved last week. A girl claimed she was touched inappropriately, and my friend was suspended without pay for the last 4 months while the investigation was ongoing. This girl has a long history of fabricating such stories.
Unfortunately, she's also currently engaged in a nasty custody fight where the allegations (of which she was completely cleared last week) are being used to s
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Re:First off... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting that you mention teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
A friend of mine is a high school teacher, and has been accused of abuse 3 times in 10 years. No truth to the charges, just vindictive kids trying to get revenge for imagined injuries, but each time was extremely stressful for him.
It's amazing how many people will believe the worst of someone they don't know just because some a-hole has laid false charges.
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My friend isn't a "quick learner"? How is he supposed to "learn" how to keep kids from bald-face lying about where he was and what happened while he was supposedly there?
You're right about the crushes, though -- all three accusations were from girls who had a crush on him and wanted revenge for him "rejecting" them.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Interesting)
This [huffingtonpost.com] actually just happened in my home state. Senators were blackmailed with child porn placed on their computer through malicious e-mail attachments, apparently in order to sway their votes on some legislation.
Child porn is messed up, but the reaction to it, and the effects stemming from those (over)reactions can be equally messed up.
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Sick, but very common. You hear reports of false rape accusations all the time. There was the Duke Lacrosse case. There were the two women recently who claimed a guy raped them, when they were really just upset that the sex they had with him wasn't very good. There are cases where people are not only dragged through reputation-assassination in the public, but spend days, months, or years in prison for it. And of course, the best part of any sort of false accusation like this is that you can't question the s
Re:First off... (Score:4, Insightful)
What is it about you that makes people escalate what seem to be incredibly mundane disputes into the scenes you describe, I wonder? It seems absurd to me that someone who manages a cheap motel, a person who likely has disagreements with customers on a daily basis about discounts etc., a person who has been trained to resolve those disputes in a way that does the least harm to the chain's reputation, is going to go from "No, you can't have $4 a night off of this room" to "He was trying to have sex with my employees and was screaming at maids." Your tale doesn't make sense.
All it takes is one maladjusted loser (that would be you) getting it in his head that he needs to ruin people he imagines did him harm, and poof - someone's life is wrecked. That's why this kind of thing is so scary, because it's so easy for sick people (again, that would be you) to ruin the lives of anyone they like very easily.
Revenge is a dish best not served at all.
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>>>What is it about you that makes people escalate what seem to be incredibly mundane disputes
I look like I'm easy to push around. People are more likely to do "evil" things to other persons, if they think the victim won't defend him or herself. The Motel 6 guy thought he could kick me out simply because he didn't want to honor the 10% sale price (and he was right). The Boss figured I wouldn't fight an unjustified termination (and she was right too).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a boss like that once. She came in as a touchy-feely Technical Director, and disliked me because I told off some girl for forwarding spam around the company (not in a rude way). She tried to fire me on all kinds of flimsy grounds. Tried accusing me of resisting any kind of QA (I forced the company to set up the QA department), of sometimes arriving after 9am (er I did every day as I cleared it with my line manager to do 10-6 rather than 9-5 to avoid rush hour), and random other things in the hope some
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P.S.
I can also show the Credit Card Dispute where Discover Company sided with me AGAINST the Motel 6 manager, sucked $130 away from him, and refunded it back to my account. Still think I'm lying?
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Absolutely. The fact that you were so bothered by my single comment that you were compelled to respond no less than 4 times to it indicates to me that you are very likely to overreact to other things as well. Further, your repeated posts in which you keep on trying to add more and more "evidence" of your victimhood here when it's a more or less anonymous internet disagreement about something makes me think you lack a sense of proportion. It absolutely makes sense to me that if there is any disagreement you'
Re:First off... (Score:4, Insightful)
How that got modded insightful I have no idea.
You don't know what happened, You have no reason to flame the guy.
Re:First off... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a friend who's always complaining about rude drivers who cut her off, honk at her, curse at her, and so on.
Later on, I had the occasion to ride with her as a passenger in her car... and found out why "everyone else" was so rude. She parked herself in the fast lane and backed up traffic for miles, her driving was distracted at best, she didn't signal, and she constantly made sudden, unpredictable lane changes.
Had another acquaintance who was constantly getting fired from jobs. Everyone he every worked for was a lousy boss. Always yelling and screaming and making unreasonable expectations. Like actually wanting work done.
Stopped by a restaurant where he was employed once, and found him zoned out in the bathroom, still half drunk from a party the night before. Was fired about a week later, "Because the manager hated me!"
Yep. Funny how the problem is always about all of those "other" people....
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The Motel 6 manager claimed I yelled at his maids, and had sex with a clerk. Now either these things happened, or they did not. I can tell you they did not.
very (Score:4, Informative)
Re: very (Score:3, Insightful)
very very easy... every time I here about someones brother or uncle got caught with it on their computer I always try and explain how easy something like this would be and we shouldn't jump to conclusions.
Given how many compromised computers there are out there, I'm surprised it's possible to convict anyone on the basis of anything on the computer.
How many of us know what's on our computer? Yours might be serving up kiddie porn, stolen credit card numbers, or trade secrets right now.
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He said we needed smarter juries. He didn't say anything about whether he should be on them.
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If you just check the anonymous box, yeah, but not if you log out.
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Is it really so different that the offending items are electronic than if they were physical?
Consider this scenario:
(1) Disgruntled person A wants to get person B in trouble by planting child porn in B's work desk.
(2) A calls the cops on B.
(3) Cops find the porn in B's work desk.
Do the cops automatically jump to the conclusion that B owned the child porn? Or do they try to investigate further to establish how the material likely got there? If yes to the latter question, then perhaps the basic problem is tha
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One difference is, as pointed out in the summary, physical investigations tend to be much faster than computer investigations. Most of the time, whether the case is "real world" or digital, these frame ups get caught. People who do these things tend to do them on the spur of moment and often aren't very smart about it. Unfortunately, while the finger prints on those photos found in your desk might come back in a couple days. Thus showing that your cube-mate was the only person to actually touch them. Th
Devious (Score:5, Insightful)
The weapon of the future. The more things we make illegal, the more things we can use as legal weapons. marijuana, kiddie porn, anything that they can outlaw they can also plant it in your house and stick you for it.
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The weapon of the future. The more things we make illegal, the more things we can use as legal weapons. marijuana, kiddie porn, anything that they can outlaw they can also plant it in your house and stick you for it.
Frylock: "All right...just don't be suprised if I call the cops on your ass."
Ignignokt: "Fryman, we have hidden four kilos of cocaine in your room."
Frylock: "..."
I wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
how many governments get rid of "undesirables" by planting child porn on their computers.
Throwing a baggie of pot behind your toaster is just so passé these days...
8 months? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for "how easily might this trick have succeeded if Weiner had been a little more intelligent about it?", I'd bet it has succeeded in the past, repeatedly.
How do you know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can guarantee people are pulling this off successfully. I know of a case where it wasn't until the 2nd appeal that they figured out that the computer was infected with a rootkit that was downloading/uploading the stuff.
My only thought is that, generally speaking, most people can cause 'probable doubt'.
A benefit is that 'most' people don't know how to get the CP in the first place without leaving tracks. It takes more effort than simply crying 'rape', that most people don't think of it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm, yes... (Score:3, Funny)
trying to pervert the course of justice
No pun intended.
dont get caught (Score:5, Insightful)
In most states, you'll be a registered sex offender for taking a leak in public -- i.e. down a dark alley after a few too many pints. Should it be illegal? Yeah probably. Should it be ambiguous whether you raped a kid or couldn't hold your bladder? I dunno, I don't write laws so I shouldn't have an opinion. Maybe the slashlawer can opine on why these are similar things.
Re:dont get caught (Score:4, Insightful)
Public urination involves a level of "indecent exposure." It's more like flashing, but without the same intent (probably). Should being a flasher get you a "sex offender" rap? I guess, if we're going to have the term "sex offender," a flasher would be one.
Basically, I think that if there is no intent to commit a crime, then that should be taken into consideration in sentencing, if the jury doesn't realize what an asinine state of affairs they've been roped into and acquit. Peeing down an alley beyond a dumpster, making a good-faith effort not to be seen and having the un-luck of a cop coming down just before you zip up is completely different from exposing yourself to kids on the playground humming 'aqua lung' to yourself.
Re:Bloody USians. (Score:5, Informative)
When you sent your damn puritans over here.
Sex Offenders Register (Score:4, Interesting)
According to The Independent [independent.co.uk], the judge has added Weiner to the Sex Offenders Register for the specific purpose of causing the general prison population to identify him as a pervert and make him suffer, even though there is no indication that Weiner possessed this material for any purpose other than to screw up Thomson's life.
I think Weiner is a scumbag who deserves to go to prison, but he is *not* a sex offender and does not need to be kept away from children's playgrounds when he is released. I certainly don't agree with this tactic by the judge - surely placing people who are not sex offenders on a list of sex offenders renders the list meaningless for any monitoring or preventative purpose? And since when was justice about eye-for-eye revenge in this civilised society?!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't write laws so I shouldn't have an opinion.
Are you kidding me! This is where we need better civics lessons - you should absolutely have an opinion and voice it to your elected representatives - and encouraging other too as well! It's called democracy.
You think that's bad? (Score:5, Informative)
So the guy was killed for taking a leak outside.
There was another man who was killed because the previous occupant of the apartment was a registered sex offender and had moved out six months earlier. The killers didn't check that hard.
I understand they're now very sorry that they aren't around to protect their children anymore...
Personally, I think sex offender lists are a bad thing - if they're still dangerous, don't release them. As has been mentioned before, most offenders that target children go after kids whose parent's know and trust them.
You also get the problem that the list is contaminated - bad addresses, drunk pissers, slightly too-young girlfriends, non-pedophiles, etc...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
well... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's scary to think about, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to frame someone like this. You wouldn't even have to get access to their computer. I imagine it would be as easy as getting an anonymous pay-per-use cell phone, texting someone illegal pictures for a few days, and then reporting them to the police. Maybe they wouldn't get convicted, but their life would still be ruined by the allegations.
Something like this could even happen by accident. God forbid someone rummage through your cache after you spend an hour browsing
Re:well... (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't even take any particular malicious action. Operation Ore in the UK fingered all sorts of people, including The Who's Pete Townshend, who were in fact innocent and victims of online credit card fraud. Once you get the name "kiddie porn lover" it's very hard to get rid of.
The problem here is that the cops and the media have created a mad child porn frenzy completely out of proportion to the problem. Innocent people are railroaded through a system that cares more about showing large numbers of accused flowing through than about quality of evidence.
The fact is your average cop doesn't have the know how to analyze forensic evidence. Any competent IT forensics expert is first going to check to see if the computer has been rootkitted, is going to check to see if the credit card has been stolen, etc. and so forth, but between the missionary's zeal to stamp out all child porn and incompetence you don't get that. Operation Ore was a good example of how things can go terribly wrong, and shines a light on how innocent people can even be manipulated into admitting guilt if they are given the choice between jail time and a lesser sentence.
In other words, cops are often moronic bastards, and anyone accused of anything, or taken in for questioning on anything should not say a goddamned thing to them and refuse any co-operation until a lawyer is present.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem here is that the cops and the media have created a mad child porn frenzy completely out of proportion to the problem
Actually, it's the government that did it. Terrorism and kiddie porn are the two best persuaders to get questionable laws through.
Re:well... (Score:4, Informative)
Something like this could even happen by accident. God forbid someone rummage through your cache after you spend an hour browsing /b/. Do you know what was in all of those thumbnails that you scrolled past? Do you even WANT to know? ;)
In my socialist utopia country Norway, there was actually a court ruling that found a man who had child pornography in his browser cache not guilty. The reason was that he did not download them (but he did in fact confess to have purchased them intentionally) and that regular people should not be expected to know that the browser caches images from the web. In effect, the ruling actually means it is legal to surf child pornography in Norway. I don't have any English links about this, but any norwegians reading this post can check out this DB article: http://www.dagbladet.no/dinside/2003/07/05/372987.html [dagbladet.no]
How easy? (Score:5, Informative)
It would not be easily discovered as everyone in the chain of justice is quick to assume the defendants are guilty, and may not do as thorough a job as they should looking for evidence of a setup. Easier to parade around your captured "predator" and get good press, then to search for the truth.
I've seen it firsthand; an old buddy of mine admitted one day that when he was 19, he got drunk at a party and slept with a girl who lied about her age by a single year. She was 17, not 18, which is under the legal age in my state. Today, he is a registered sex offender, cannot vote, has trouble finding work, and cannot live in most communities. He has to inform the communities he is allowed to live in, which makes everyone immediately assume he's some kind of monster after their children.
Was my friend kind of an idiot at 19? Absolutely. But does he deserve to become a lower class of society for the rest of his life over his (ultimately harmless) mistake?
Re:How easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I posit your friend WASNT an idiot, just a normal teenager. I dare to generalize that even most 19 year olds are not monsters for sleeping with 17 year olds.
Re:How easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Double-plus good, my brother.
Re:How easy? (Score:4, Interesting)
This stems from the completely broken Christian concept
How do you figure it's a Christian concept? Or are you just inserting a small rant against Christianity?
These laws aren't created to protect children, they're made to control the people. Children are just the excuse.
Anonymous prosecutions/defendants. (Score:4, Interesting)
Recently there was a big stir caused here over proposed plans to make the defendants in rape cases anonymous [bbc.co.uk]. For some reason it was decided that this would be terrible, as anyone accused of rape is obviously guilty and so deserves no protections... Something about this strikes me as simply wrong - and it applies in this case as well.
The way our society is geared up we don't just have trial by court, but trial by media; if the media decides someone is guilty, then it doesn't matter what the court decides, the defendant is screwed. In my opinion, defendants should have the right to anonymity especially in "socially disgusting" cases such as most sex-based crimes.
Of course, these days child porn over here could consist of stick figures, so the actual laws themselves could do with a serious overhaul - remind me again why mere viewing of material should be illegal?
Why privacy laws matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Here come the kiddie bombs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember email bombing? Thousands of anonymous emails with gibberish. How about spam? Now we have kiddie bombing.
It's time we treat child porn as an internet virus and create antivirus scanners which detect child porn and automatically delete, wipe, and report any image saved in the backround with limited user interaction. I don't want to and should not have to risk being prosecuted for possession of something which was sent to me by mistake, uploaded to me, or otherwise infiltrated by trickery, hacking, or anything of that sort.
If we treated child porn as a virus then the only people left who would have large collections of child porn would be the individuals who actually like child porn.
It's all bits and bytes... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is primarily why it should not be illegal just to possess a certain set of bits and bytes on your machine. You can make it so you can fool the best of forensics experts. And most law enforcement who does the analysis simply use lame-brain software to scan for the kiddie porn files.
It would be easy, for instance, to write a virus that would spread to your machine, download kiddie porn, create fake tracks that would fool forensics, and then delete itself without a trace. Can you imagine if something like that got out and infected millions of computers with kiddie porn?
Well, for one, it would probably end this nonsense of destroying people's lives simply because they had the "wrong" files on their computer!
Not to mention nailing people for files on their computer does NOTHING to stop the production of kiddie porn. As always, law enforcement is focusing on the wrong end of the problem. They should be going after the guys who pervert children in making the kiddie porn. Why don't they do this? Oh, I get it -- too much work. Poor kids. Too much bother for Law Enforcement to go after the REAL perverts. Sorry, kiddies.
My Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Possession should never be illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
Not for drugs, not for explosives, not for child porn. Sorry, but it's just too easy to exploit (and there's the slight moral problem that possession is technically harmless). Distribution, sure. That would actually have a slight chance of working, and it's a lot harder to frame someone for it. But not possession.
Commie Pinko, Gay, Terrorist, Pedophile, Witch (Score:3, Interesting)
Calling your enemy a witch or whatever and making it stick has always been a way to ruin his life.
In the 1990s calling your spouse a child- or wife-beater or a child molester was a too-common* ploy in divorce cases.
1600s and earlier, and today in some 3rd world areas - witch
1950s - gay or commie
1980s and later - pedophile
2001 and later - terrorist
Throughout history - traitor
*I don't mean to imply that it was numerically common or anywhere a close to a majority of the divorce child-custody cases, only that there was a spike during that time.
State of Computer Forensics (Score:5, Interesting)
In most departments the forensics investigator is the poor bastard who has some computer skills.
He gets selected to take a couple of encase or ftk classes and then they use a confiscated computer, add a write block to it and there you go.
Now lets say you get a CS degree, work for a while and decided that you want to do forensics. The odds of you getting a job is next to impossible.
In fact you will be specifically told that they do not want you around. There is a hatred of "nerds" in the law enforcement community.
Not only will you have to go back to school to get an associates in criminal justice, you will have to go through the police academy
and then work as a beat officer for several years before you will even get a chance to touch a computer.
Now lets look at requirements for other kinds of forensics. All of the other forensics fields have lab type people who are specifically trained in their field of expertise. for example, an dna specialist will have at least a masters in biology, a forensic pathologist, has an MD, a ballistics specialist usually has a degree in physics, or engineering. But a computer forensics specialist usually has a high school degree, maybe an associates degree in CJS, and must meet all of the active physical requirements as a patrol officer.
Note. I work in infosec and perform forensic investigations for private, defense cases, and the university level.
Every time I go to a continuing education class, encase/ftk, or other. There will be several leos in there that have no clue on even the basics on how a computer works. As a result the majority of the training is "point and click" as mentioned in the article.
In the days when everyone ran dos, this was doable.
At these classes I will point out the above issues and ask why computer forensics is differnet than any other forensics field.
I will point out that computers have gotten much more complex and standard procedure for most law enforcement agencies if they run into anything but a standard unencrypted windows computer is hand the case to the state police, or the feds, since they lack the skills to even process a linux box running reiserfs. Hell, what am I saying, most of them can not process a macintosh since the tools out there are windoze based and have very limited mac capability. So in order to investigate a mac, one must have core unix skills and treat the case as they would treat any other unix system. Yes there are newer tools to macs, but they suck. So be prepared to go through plists and file system attributes.
Their usual comment, you have to pay your dues son.
True Story (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is, shit can show up on your computer completely by accident through no fault of your own. Telling people "It's on your computer, therefore it's your fault!" is a pretty naive reaction.
It's time for anonymity for sex-crime suspects! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly why sex-crime suspects need to have their identities shielded until convicted. Even if exonerated tons of damage can and usually does get inflicted by public perception, of which the lingering effects can be extremely destructive.
Glenn Sacks talked about this subject just this morning:
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=4954 [glennsacks.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What if they put it on an unencrypted partition? Maybe just toss a thumbdrive into your stuff, then report it to police?
Heck, the case that resulted in conviction that I know of was the result of a rootkit - it was mere luck that somebody finally noticed that the machine was making requests it shouldn't. Even then it was something of an uphill battle.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think the idea of encrypting is to prevent the police from looking as much as it is to prevent someone getting the data on there in the first place.