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Man faces 20 years in prison for accidentally downloading child porn

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xelios

Universal Access can be found under System Preferences
_Isaac said:
He hopes to get a 3 1/2 year sentence? 10 years probation?! He plead guilty?! All this over a picture? This makes me so angry, and if it truly was an accident, it's really unfair. Prison time is only going to make him a worse person. Registering as a sex offender will ruin his life over a stupid little thing.

Yeah if it was truly an accident I would personally take my chances at a trial.
 

Emerson

May contain jokes =>
When I was younger I got my porn off Limewire and stuff like that, and there's all kinds of kid stuff on there. You could very easily download some on accident. I feel bad for this guy.
 
N

NinjaFridge

Unconfirmed Member
Messypandas said:
I don't remember limewire too well, but didn't you download just one file at a time? Something tells me this wasn't an isloated incident. I'm guessing the FBI doesn't just pounce for small occurences like this, especially if it had an ambiguous name. I don't think we should take this story at face value.

You can select multiple files and download them all at once. I use to do this when i first got it. Downloaded so much fucked up shit.
 

madara

Member
Wow that is very scary shit. I would think as single male +porn maybe even just general forum use, depending on where they cut off the age bracket your chance of accidentally having someone under 18 without any knowledge in todays climate is likely 80 percent. I thought they actually went after real perps, those online chatting messanger lets meet sickos.
 

Calcaneus

Member
_Isaac said:
He hopes to get a 3 1/2 year sentence? 10 years probation?! He plead guilty?! All this over a picture? This makes me so angry, and if it truly was an accident, it's really unfair. Prison time is only going to make him a worse person. Registering as a sex offender will ruin his life over a stupid little thing.
Its disgusting. I don't know why people won't stop for a second and say, "surely this was an accident, we should destroy this guy over this.

MIMIC said:
:lol

And these files were usually under 3MB. If it was that small, I never downloaded it.
I know, right? Its like they were targeting the most computer illiterate people with that stuff, even as a kid I knew that a 3mb video file was probably a joke or something you don't want on your computer.
 
Oh this reminds me of when my mom had downloaded "fun with dick and jane" movie. Never have i laughed so much at a pirate. :lol

Darklord said:
Christ, I didn't even know there was a Russian 2chan site but from what I've heard 12chan is horrible, if that's worse I don't wanna know whats in it. 0_0
Makes me wonder why the FBI go after single people but don't try and stop these sites?

They probably cant stop some site in Russia. I read a few posts on /b/ about guy shitting on a baby and i closed that thread as fast as possible in fear of somehow clicking link (yeah even though you cant click links on /b/) or seeing a picture of it.
 

NimbusD

Member
xelios said:
Yeah if it was truly an accident I would personally take my chances at a trial.

Yeah when you're left with a public defender who's straight up telling you to plead guilty, I think you'd change your tune.
 
Fuck. Am I the only one here who, after reading this, just went through their porn directory specifically making sure there wasn't any naked underage girls that may have slipped under the radar?

Talk about some scary shit. :S
 

Yaweee

Member
This makes me furious and scared. If accidentally seeing an image and deleting it immediately can send you to prison and completely fuck your life even after you get out, then the US justice system is beyond hope.

I can find nothing else about this story, so there is the chance that this isn't telling the entire truth to the press.

Regardless, things have gone too far. Merely looking at pictures shouldn't be eligible for a twenty year sentence. In terms of prison sentences, you'd be better off accidentally killing somebody while drunk driving.
 
NaughtyCalibur said:
Fuck. Am I the only one here who, after reading this, just went through their porn directory specifically making sure there wasn't any naked underage girls that may have slipped under the radar?

Talk about some scary shit. :S


Well this guy erased the image too, right? Seems the FBI has secret ninja skills and find those pics easily.
 

xelios

Universal Access can be found under System Preferences
NimbusD said:
Yeah when you're left with a public defender who's straight up telling you to plead guilty, I think you'd change your tune.

Nope. I honestly don't understand why someone would. In this case your life is messed up whether you admit guilt or are found guilty; it really becomes more than just the time you serve. I'd take my chances at trial regardless, if I was innocent.
 

Agnostic

but believes in Chael
Yaweee said:
Regardless, things have gone too far. Merely looking at pictures shouldn't be eligible for a twenty year sentence. In terms of prison sentences, you'd be better off accidentally killing somebody while drunk driving.
I know someone who served 7 years for killing someone while driving drunk. I'm thinking about throwing out my hard drives tonight and to go out drinking.
 

Ferrio

Banned
Solideliquid said:
Well this guy erased the image too, right? Seems the FBI has secret ninja skills and find those pics easily.

Not even ninja skills. Easy to do, hell a incompetent police department could get at them.
 

KHarvey16

Member
Solideliquid said:
Well this guy erased the image too, right? Seems the FBI has secret ninja skills and find those pics easily.

Deleting things on your hard drive doesn't actually remove the information, it just tells the computer that it can write over that space of data. Even after it's been written over you can use software to access deleted files. They make wiping apps that will continuously write 0's over your hard drive to really get rid of stuff.
 
Solideliquid said:
Well this guy erased the image too, right? Seems the FBI has secret ninja skills and find those pics easily.

Well you can format your harddrive so nothing can be recovered, cant remember what it's called but you can.

Edit : beaten.
 

KHarvey16

Member
evilpigking said:
A year after the deletion though, you'd think it would have been overwritten unless he never fills his drive.

The programs that overwrite with 0's will do like 7 to 10 passes if I remember right.
 

DemiMatt

Member
Milk Lizard said:
Well you can format your harddrive so nothing can be recovered, cant remember what it's called but you can.

Edit : beaten.

*ITT we learn that if illicit images of children are ever accidentally downloaded, wipe your harddrive clean, then take a giant powerful magnet to it, then throw it in the ocean or a high concentrate water tank*

Seriously though, that really sucks. I never downloaded packs of images through a p2p but I do remember downloading music and getting audio files of porn movies. Shitty system and thats gotta be a scary moment for the guy.

PacoDG said:
My boss is an ex-cop, said they use/d stuff like this program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Online_Forensic_Evidence_Extractor (which, incidentally hit one of the major two music torrent sites recently, and the mods removed the torrent of the file)

That is on some Stand Alone Complex level. Which sites did that file get leaked on and is that the type of thing they use to track you down for illegal dl's since it was on a torrent site?
 

-COOLIO-

The Everyman
Kaijima said:
I'm sure plenty of Americans would look at this guy's story, say that he's a sinner and danger to society for searching for ADULT porn, and conclude he and all the other sinners and dirty, dirty people deserve to be locked away anyway.

One reason why we have the delirious witchhunt for pedos in the US is because so many timid, delusional, morally panicked people scream at every government rep they can to punish "evil" at all costs and without any common sense or pause for second consideration. And the politicians take advantage of this, signing off on every extreme law they can because they're in the political class and are used to laws not affecting them. Nothing they do will, usually, make their life harder or cause senseless injustice to fall on them.

So, welcome to the new circus macabre.

if by americans you mean old women
 

Gospel

Parmesan et Romano
Black-Wind said:
Just went to 12chan and my mind is BLOWN! 0_o
I went there by accident just last week. ED's article on that place wasn't joking, surprisingly enough.

Anyway, this scares the absolute crap out of me. Spam on /b/ has gotten so out of hand, and I go there a lot. Ugh. Gotta love this.
 

Geneijin

Member
Solideliquid said:
Well this guy erased the image too, right? Seems the FBI has secret ninja skills and find those pics easily.

You'd be surprised what you can still recover. I had the basic assumption once you deleted files from your recycling bin they were gone, but I was surprised at what file recovery programs were able to find when I accidentally deleted something and found files from 6 years ago. They were damaged though.
 
DR2K said:
How much child pornography was 'accidentally' downloaded?
he accidentally the whole porn

Moral of the story:

1. Put CP into innocuously named misleading zip files
2. Put innocent people in jail for 20+ years
3. Manage a prison and put these people to work (no ?? here)
4. PROFIT!
 
So I guess the smarter thing to have done is to have cut and pasted the picture onto an external USB drive, then dumped it somewhere else as opposed to deleting it?
 

MechaX

Member
NimbusD said:
Yeah when you're left with a public defender who's straight up telling you to plead guilty, I think you'd change your tune.

That is pretty much the reason why I would personally question the public defender's competency at this point. When considering that this probably shouldn't have even reached the trial phase in the first place, I find it hard to believe that any jury would convict him based on admittedly one picture that required some hard effort to recover by the FBI over a year later. Doing a plea bargain and pleading guilty in this case was just down right suicide.
 
Emerson said:
When I was younger I got my porn off Limewire and stuff like that, and there's all kinds of kid stuff on there. You could very easily download some on accident. I feel bad for this guy.
A lot of people tamper with the title as well.
 

Windu

never heard about the cat, apparently
He should be locked up just for using Limewire. POS spyware/virus riddled program.
 
So, if I posted a child porn pic in the very thread, you guys see it, it gets cached, you delete your cache and 2 years later the feds can recover it, making you risk a 20 year jail sentence?


:lol
 

Staccat0

Fail out bailed
If true, that is really sad :(

I may or may not have sought out underage stuff back when I was underage. I assumed most of it was fake anyway (girls who just looked my age) but I may have been fascinated by the idea of them looking like girls I knew at the time.

Not sure where that hard drive is... Think it was sold in a garage sale :/
 

Darklord

Banned
Yaweee said:
This makes me furious and scared. If accidentally seeing an image and deleting it immediately can send you to prison and completely fuck your life even after you get out, then the US justice system is beyond hope.

I can find nothing else about this story, so there is the chance that this isn't telling the entire truth to the press.

Regardless, things have gone too far. Merely looking at pictures shouldn't be eligible for a twenty year sentence. In terms of prison sentences, you'd be better off accidentally killing somebody while drunk driving.

I hate how some laws are taken so literally. A guy hands in a gun he found and gets charged for possessing a weapon and might face jail. A guy downloads the wrong porn by mistake, deletes it and might get 20 years.

Jail is for fucking real criminals not someone like this!
 

siddx

Magnificent Eager Mighty Brilliantly Erect Registereduser
I stopped DL porn years ago from limewire for this very reason. I had downloaded a bunch of porn movies and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea what I was really downloading and that some asshole could easily have put CP on there while labeling it something else.
 

Diablos

Member
They didn't even catch up to this kid until a year later? WTF? They must be working off of a pretty huge list.

There are so many fucked up things about this it isn't even funny. Basically, if you download anything not knowing it may contain even one image of underage porn among a bunch of other files that actually pertain to what you're looking for -- and it's being monitored -- you could potentially end up like this guy.

He's an idiot for using Limewire, but he still doesn't deserve this.

Anyone in this thread could be torrenting, and download something that has one image of CP that you didn't know about, and bam -- you are a child predator heading to prison! The laws need to adapt to the way the Internet behaves. Very scary.
 

Medalion

Banned
Souldriver said:
So, if I posted a child porn pic in the very thread, you guys see it, it gets cached, you delete your cache and 2 years later the feds can recover it, making you risk a 20 year jail sentence?


:lol
If an underage girl accidentally or purposefully sent a revealing/naked pic of herself to you that you never even asked for, she could conceivably ruin your whole life and have you thrown in jail and branded a sex offender in one shot. Their bodies and cell phones are now weapons. It's a wonder this kinda thing doesn't happen more.
 
For a 20 year sentence I would think he would have had to do more than just come across 1 image on the internet. Then again, I really dont know how the system works for this type of stuff.
 

Trurl

Banned
Staccat0 said:
If true, that is really sad :(

I may or may not have sought out underage stuff back when I was underage. I assumed most of it was fake anyway (girls who just looked my age) but I may have been fascinated by the idea of them looking like girls I knew at the time.

Not sure where that hard drive is... Think it was sold in a garage sale :/
If you're feeling paranoid, I don't think that posting about it on GAF is the best thing for putting your mind at ease in this case.

I'm confident that the details after the court makes its ruling will be far less ridiculous than how things seem now.
 

Darklord

Banned
Medalion said:
If an underage girl accidentally or purposefully sent a revealing/naked pic of herself to you that you never even asked for, she could conceivably ruin your whole life and have you thrown in jail and branded a sex offender in one shot. Their bodies and cell phones are now weapons. It's a wonder this kinda thing doesn't happen more.

That would be an awesome way to get back at someone you hate.

You through a proxy: Hey look at this *pics*
Them: WTF?
You: *calls FBI*
 

PacoDG

Member
DemiMatt said:
That is on some Stand Alone Complex level. Which sites did that file get leaked on and is that the type of thing they use to track you down for illegal dl's since it was on a torrent site?

Well, once it hit one site, its now available anywhere/everywhere it seems (just did a Pirate Bay search for COFEE, came up with two results, one from when the incident happened and has a decent file descrip, the other file just uploaded yesterday... more than likely has a virus).

I have no doubts they can use this type of thing to track you down for nearly anything illegal done on a computer, my boss was really shocked/surprised when I told him about it being leaked to the net.
 

Diablos

Member
gnarkill bill said:
For a 20 year sentence I would think he would have had to do more than just come across 1 image on the internet. Then again, I really dont know how the system works for this type of stuff.
It is an extreme case, for sure.

I am inclined to think this guy is innocent, because I remember how unbelievably shady downloading anything on services like Limewire was, back in the day. I accidentally came across porn all the time while trying to download other things on KaZaA, which was basically the same kind of software that Limewire is. I swear, half the userbase were a bunch of pirate trolls injecting garbage into popular search strings, masking it as such.
 

Jackson50

Member
Diablos said:
They didn't even catch up to this kid until a year later? WTF? They must be working off of a pretty huge list.
I do not think that there is a huge list. If there were a huge list they were working on, I am sure we would have heard of many more stories of this nature.
 
-COOLIO- said:
in a year time, expect 20 years.
The site actually does a pretty smart thing and tells people to post pics that arnt "child porn/ transparent underwear/ pelvis focused shots/ link to child porn and etc in the "girl" area. Just seems like their OK with not reinforcing the link rule so people are posting . . . "SFW (in a way . . . their not NUDE but you clearly wouldn't want to see that at work)" pics followed by people posting download links/ sites with passwords.

Its like a big transitional site between pedos to transfer files and links without getting the people who simply go to that site in trouble.

I just feel sorry for the lil girls . . . they must either have shit parents who let someone take pics of them/ live with pedo parents who take pics of them or they are kidnapped child slaves. (;_;)
 
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