Stalker Jailed For Planting Child Porn On a PC 368
An anonymous reader writes "An elaborate scheme to get the husband of a co-worker with whom he was obsessed jailed backfired on Ilkka Karttunen, 48, from Essex in the UK. His plan was to get the husband arrested so that he could have a go at a relationship with the woman. To do this he broke into the couple's home while they were sleeping, used their family computer to download child pornography, and then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner."
Not the end of the story... (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately in the UK they publish names of anyone accused of sex crimes in local newspapers so you can bet even with the husband in this case proved entirely innocent he might need to move house, have his car set alight, stones thrown through his windows, and have his name google-able to child porn charges. Plus the child services and new child protection scheme use just rumours to judge people so if he applied to, for example, because a football coach he might be denied (*you need a licence to talk to a child in the UK).
One question - Why was the wife or anyone else using the "family PC" not arrested? Or are only males arrested for child porn?
FYI the guy is niot necessarily a brit (Score:3, Informative)
Although this is slightly off-topic, I'd just like to point out to all /. readers who might be wondering about his name: Ilkka Karttunen is actually a Finnish name. I have no idea if the guy has moved into the UK from Finland or if his parents/relatives have come from here. Well, idiots like him are pretty evenly split between nations anyway, so his nationality doesn't really make a difference. But I know there are people out there who went "What kind kind of name is that for a guy from Essex O.o?".
Re:Strict Liability (Score:5, Informative)
IANAL either, but these guys are:
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a "strict liability" charge – therefore Mr Clarke's allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.
Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
Judge Christopher Critchlow said: "This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.
emphasis mine
My understanding that possession of child porn is basically the same as possession of a shotgun - For the most part you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent, and there are very few, if any, defenses.
Re:Possession laws are stupid for this reason. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually not strictly true, the federal law against gun possession by a convicted felon actually says that the possessor has to knowingly and willingly possess a firearm, meaning that he has to understand that the item in question is a functioning firearm and know that he actually has the item and to have done both willingly.
Furthermore, possession itself is legally defined as having control and dominion over an item. Fleeting contact (such as simply touching an item someone else has) is not considered possession. Also, simply being in the same premises as the forbidden item is not considered possession.
FYI though, IANAL
Re:"Ilkka Karttunen"? Sound it out people! (Score:1, Informative)
Ilkka Karttunen is actually a perfectly normal Finnish name, so it's more likely he's a Finnish emigrant.
Re:The article wasn't clearly written... (Score:1, Informative)
The local newspaper for where the case was tried has some more information that contracicts TFA slightly -- they say it was a pen drive, not a hard drive that was stolen form the house and the Karttunen drew attention to himself by acting weirdly. Link [echo-news.co.uk]
Stealing the HDD didn't ring true -- surely it took time for the police to receive and triage the disk, and in that time the victims would be wondering why their PC isn't working,
Re:Moral of the story. . . (Score:5, Informative)
METRO NEWS BRIEFS: CONNECTICUT; Judge Rules That Police Can Bar High I.Q. Scores [nytimes.com]
Re:This would have worked... (Score:2, Informative)
Have you got a favorite link or anything? I'm curious.
Here you go. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Moral of the story. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Google 'new london police IQ Jordan'.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/19/weekinreview/ideas-trends-help-wanted-invoking-the-not-too-high-iq-test.html?pagewanted=1 [nytimes.com] ... He says he was curtly informed that he did not ''fit the profile,'' which litigation revealed was a score of 20 to 27.
" In 1996 Mr. Jordan scored 33 out of 50 on the exam,
''Bob Jordan is exactly the type of guy we would want to screen out,'' said William C. Gavitt, the deputy police chief"
Re:Geez. (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you mean. If you mean that you couldn't identify a honeypot for the purposes of actually getting them caught, you're probably right, but there are many easier ways to solve that part. If you mean that an average geek couldn't avoid the honeypots for the first two weeks, I disagree. The patterns are rather obvious after you've seen eight or ten slashdot stories about kiddie porn stings; the techniques that law enforcement use tend to involve one of the following:
The first two are taken care of by just not doing those things.
The other two are largely unimportant. It takes time to get a subpoena, time to collect evidence, and time to get a search warrant. It's not like the FBI is going to come knocking on the person's door the day after he/she hits a honeypot site. That said, if you really needed to avoid #3 and #4, you could:
None of those techniques are perfect---none would prevent detection by a determined enemy monitoring your every move---but they would keep your activity well outside the "low hanging fruit" territory that stings tend to go after, which should be sufficient to allow you to plant lots of evidence before you disclose the person to the authorities.
The hard part. of course, is figuring out a way to report it that will actually be successful in convincing people. One possibility would be to take over the person's email client and masquerade as that person, sending child porn out to a lot of people. Another possibility would be for your trojan to replace recently opened files on flash drives with custom versions of itself that contain the original files, much like the .ppt.exe file I suggested earlier. This could be very effective at compromising the target's work machine, which would allow you to plant evidence in more easily accessible places, making it far easier to drop an anonymous email message to an IT manager, for example.
Aren't you glad I'm not the sort of person who would try to frame someone? :-)