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Man faces 20 years in prison for accidentally downloading child porn

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What happens in the skateboard scene? So do you guys think there is more to this story? And honestly, what if you do go to 4chan, if you've never clicked on an image or nefarious link, how can you be liable for what someone else uploads to the Internet if you aren't seeking it out?
 
innervision961 said:
What happens in the skateboard scene? So do you guys think there is more to this story? And honestly, what if you do go to 4chan, if you've never clicked on an image or nefarious link, how can you be liable for what someone else uploads to the Internet if you aren't seeking it out?

In the skateboard scene Bart's penis is shown.

More to this story? Probably. I have no idea why the guy that got caught isn't trying to fight his case so there must be more to the story. Heck, there might have been more CP in the hard drive than he didn't (did?) know.

And to that 4chan thing, who knows? There's no reason to browse 4chan anyways. It's a real messy website.
 
fuck, if he viewed one cp picture on purpose he doesn't deserve 20 years. the whole system is a joke. paranoia and over reaction.

and to those saying the fact he doesn't plead innocent proves he's guilty, just think about it for a minute. put yourself in those shoes, you could go away for 20 years, and your lawyer is telling you is likely to happen accidental or not. 3 years sucks, and it's frustrating as hell, but when you get out you're 25, not 42.
 

WalkMan

Banned
There's probably a lot more to the story than this article. There's a reason why this guy is pleading guilty and with over a year since deletion of evidence - the feds need to be able to clearly say that they have proof for certain it was this guy using the computer at that time - it could have been anyone in his house that used that computer and potentially downloaded the CP. So it's likely the FBI has more serious incriminating evidence against him, there's no reason for the guy to be pleading guilty, cases like these rarely go to trial anyways.
 

Darklord

Banned
Pandaman said:
even more amusing are laws against drawn child pornography.

anyone remember the skateboarding scene in the simpsons movie?

Didn't some judge claim that drawn pictures of children had human rights? Stupidest thing I've ever heard. That means if I few a picture of a kid being killed I'm a murderer.
 

Cheerilee

Member
orioto said:
There is something that bugs me every times with this "we can reconstruct anything that has been deleted on your computer" thing.

Wouldn't that mean that you can have infinite storage place on any hard drive :lol ??
As has been said, when you "delete" something, you don't actually delete it. You just give your OS permission to forget that it's there, and maybe at some point in the future it happens to get overwritten. So the only way to "erase" a hard drive is to write a zero to every little one or zero on the drive.

Buuuttt... hard drives are magnetic. They're basically analog, not digital. If you wipe zeroes across your entire hard drive, then it's good enough to count as zeroed as you would normally read it (or use a program to find deleted files), but if the FBI takes your discs into their lab and rips them apart and looks at them close enough under a microscope (apparently they have nothing better to do), there will be a little "echo" difference in that the zeroes which used to be zeroes still look like zeroes, but the zeroes which used to be ones look slightly like ones. They can use this magnetic echo to figure out what you used to have, even if you deleted everything and wiped your drive clean.

If something incriminating has been overwritten by normal use, and they can figure out exactly what files overwrote it, they can even compensate for that and still dig up all your dirty little ones and zeroes.

It's said that to completely erase a hard drive, you have to wipe it with ones, then zeroes, then ones again, then zeroes again, then ones again, and then finally another layer of zeroes. Six passes. Probably doesn't hurt to spill random data all over the drive afterward either. Unless you randomly create child porn. That would hurt a lot.

So no, your hard drive doesn't have infinite capacity. Maybe you can double or even triple (if you can read an echo inside another echo) it's capacity if you had limitless resources, but each increase is incredibly flaky and unreliable and not really useful.

If you happen to want to bail out of the internet now, a liberal amount of fire is much faster than formatting. Just make sure you get it all, and don't leave behind any unburnt bits.
 

Walshicus

Member
ruby_onix said:
As has been said, when you "delete" something, you don't actually delete it. You just give your OS permission to forget that it's there, and maybe at some point in the future it happens to get overwritten. So the only way to "erase" a hard drive is to write a zero to every little one or zero on the drive.

Buuuttt... hard drives are magnetic. They're basically analog, not digital. If you wipe zeroes across your entire hard drive, then it's good enough to count as zeroed as you would normally read it (or use a program to find deleted files), but if the FBI takes your discs into their lab and rips them apart and looks at them close enough under a microscope (apparently they have nothing better to do), there will be a little "echo" difference in that the zeroes which used to be zeroes still look like zeroes, but the zeroes which used to be ones look slightly like ones. They can use this magnetic echo to figure out what you used to have, even if you deleted everything and wiped your drive clean.

If something incriminating has been overwritten by normal use, and they can figure out exactly what files overwrote it, they can even compensate for that and still dig up all your dirty little ones and zeroes.

It's said that to completely erase a hard drive, you have to wipe it with ones, then zeroes, then ones again, then zeroes again, then ones again, and then finally another layer of zeroes. Six passes. Probably doesn't hurt to spill random data all over the drive afterward either. Unless you randomly create child porn. That would hurt a lot.

So no, your hard drive doesn't have infinite capacity. Maybe you can double or even triple (if you can read an echo inside another echo) it's capacity if you had limitless resources, but each increase is incredibly flaky and unreliable and not really useful.

If you happen to want to bail out of the internet now, a liberal amount of fire is much faster than formatting. Just make sure you get it all, and don't leave behind any unburnt bits.
Wonder how this would work in the world of SSDs.
 

gerg

Member
ajim said:
I think threads like this show that people should be more computer savvy and even consider full drive encryption, especially for their laptops. Not so much for things like this, but, computers these days are our lives, we do everything with them, our taxes, work related stuff, personal details, banking etc

On a pragmatic level, I agree. Otherwise, I don't think the right attitude to a (supposedly) unjust law is to make sure that we all fall in line with it.

neoism said:
Wow that's fucked up!

It depends. On the one hand, the ruling in this certainly seems incorrect, and may betray the goal of the law in general. On the other hand, age limits for sexual consent are justifiable (so as to protect those who can't prove their lack of consent), so it's a tricky situation to say the least.
 

Onny

Member
Hello!

Lots of uninformed crap going on in this thread.. hope I can shed some light on some of these issues!

I work for a Law Enforcement Agency, as a Digital Forensic Specialist. So I deal with recovering data and all that jazz.

First of all, regarding the case itself; we are hearing the suspect talk about his side of the case, not what may be the truth. Personally, knowing what I know about how filesystems work, I would be amazed if he had downloaded child porn by accident a year ago, deleted it, and it would still show up in the unallocated space on his HDD. To my mind, the only way this would happen would be if maybe he deleted the images, switched off his PC and didn't use it until the feds knocked on his door. So yeah, that's highly suspicious.

Secondly, why would the FBI "suddenly" turn up at his house a year after the event? If this was specifically due to his "accidentally" downloaded CP then TBFH they could have turned up the next day. And what could have brought him to their attention? It all sounds very fishy.

Finally, bear in mind that this case still has to go to trial, so the jury may yet still find him innocent. If all that he says is true, then IMO he has a reasonable chance of getting off. So to speak (tee hee!).

It is very easy to beat your chest and say how unfair all of this is, but you really need to think about why it has happened. Do you really think your investigators have the time to be chasing after a guy who accidentally a CP image over a p2p network once? Of course they don't.


Other items of business:

- TrueCrypt and other encryption techniques are good but not perfect. And bear in mind that (in the UK, at least) if you don't tell the authorities the passphrases to your encrypted volumes, you are liable for 2 years in jail.

- Different filesystems have different ways of dealing with deletions, but it is correct to say in broad terms that when you delete a file the filesystem does not remove the data itself from the disk, which is why data can be recovered which has previously been deleted.


Hope that's helped a little bit. I can go into the more technical details of file recovery if you'd like, but to be honest there are far better recources online. Christ, just look up FAT or NTFS on wikipedia, that's a good start. :)
 

Darklord

Banned
Onny said:
And bear in mind that (in the UK, at least) if you don't tell the authorities the passphrases to your encrypted volumes, you are liable for 2 years in jail.

You can also be jailed for finding a gun and handing it into the police so it's not like police haven't pulled this kind of crap before.

I bet the jury won't find him innocent either. A man going up on child porn charges means half of them would already call him guilty without seeing a scrap of evidence.
 

Binabik15

Member
Darklord said:
You can also be jailed for finding a gun and handing it into the police so it's not like police haven't pulled this kind of crap before.

I bet the jury won't find him innocent either. A man going up on child porn charges means half of them would already call him guilty without seeing a scrap of evidence.


And we all know how good the British authorities are with keeping data confident :lol


Remember the guy that claimed his cat had downloaded tens of thousends of CP pictures while walking over the keyboard :lol
 

eggandI

Banned
Sol.. said:
I have trouble believing this was accidental and if it was it was a law enforcement plant.

p.s. I was just laughing at a friend today when he mentioned searching for porn on frostwire. who fuckin' does that? WHO DOES THAT?!

There is no way this was a plant by the FBI. The FBI would not upload a child porn vid with the title Girl's Gone Wild. This dude is lying his ass off.

Onny said:

Very informative post. Thanks man :)
 
Solideliquid said:
Well this guy erased the image too, right? Seems the FBI has secret ninja skills and find those pics easily.

http://www.killdisk.com/

When you delete a file, it just breaks the symbolic link to the file in your OS; the bits still sit there on the actual disk platter in your HD.

Even if you format your HD, even if you overwrite that disk sector, even if you rip your hard drive apart, it is still there in some recoverable format (though the more passes you make, the harder it is to recover and the more physical damage you do to the platter, obviously, the better).

Onny said:
- Different filesystems have different ways of dealing with deletions, but it is correct to say in broad terms that when you delete a file the filesystem does not remove the data itself from the disk, which is why data can be recovered which has previously been deleted.

I see it's already been brought up.
 

eggandI

Banned
Also, how the hell do you download a jpg when trying to download a GGW video? did this guy not notice the difference between .jpg and .avi or the damn file size? Haha there is no way he is telling the whole story. :lol
 

Onny

Member
Physical examination of the drive platters is extremely rare, and from what I understand it doesn't always give you a good return on the time and effort needed.

Maybe if you're bin Laden himself your HDD would receive that sort of treatment :D
 

Drek

Member
See, this is why you got to stick with name brand American made porn. They protect you from this shit.

I know I'll never accidentally get kiddy porn, because all my porn is high quality Hustler, Red Light District, Brazzers, Bang Bros., etc. products with girls that I've seen gobbling knobs for long enough to know that they are FBI approved.

Be safe, steal American!
 

water_wendi

Water is not wet!
eggandI said:
Also, how the hell do you download a jpg when trying to download a GGW video? did this guy not notice the difference between .jpg and .avi or the damn file size? Haha there is no way he is telling the whole story. :lol

Lots of files have false extensions especially on filesharing programs. Its one of the main ways to get a virus. People download mp3s that arent mp3s.. they try to play it, nothing happens, and they delete the file thinking it was just a "bad download."
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
Milk Lizard said:
Well they dont want to have wasted their time. I remember the days of kazaa and shitty p2p like that and accidentally downloading all kind of weird sick porn by searching for live concerts.

Yep, it's been years but I remember. The guy shouldn't be going to jail for 20 years because he hasn't discovered bittorrent.
 

xelios

Universal Access can be found under System Preferences
Yeah, I think it's a bit naive to just assume there's not more to the story. If you downloaded a pic on accident while searching for something else I have a hard time believing the FBI would be this aggressive. They'd also be able to see what you searched for in the first place to stumble upon that file, which would be "intent".

Been burned too many times by stories like these when more info comes out to not be skeptical. I guess since he's pleading guilty we won't get more info in trial, oh well.
 
I've recently been trained on FTK in my Computer Forensics class; it's amazing how easy it is to find and reconstruct data even after it has been overwritten. The program itself has a cache of hashes of known child pornography that has been discovered and documented by the FBI.

Pedophilia is prosecuted so aggressively that it's impossible to call the process objective. If the authorities set their sights on you, you're guilty until proven otherwise. I know it's like this for a lot of crimes but it's even worse for accused pedophiles.

We recently had to interface with the GBI because of child pornography found on a customer computer. In all likelihood, the pornography was put on there by a virus. It's even possible that their computer was used as remote storage for a real pedophile because the computer was entirely vulnerable (Weak firewall settings, no antivirus/antispyware). Computer illiteracy is fucking dangerous now.

xelios said:
Yeah, I think it's a bit naive to just assume there's not more to the story. If you downloaded a pic on accident while searching for something else I have a hard time believing the FBI would be this aggressive. They'd also be able to see what you searched for in the first place to stumble upon that file, which would be "intent".

Been burned too many times by stories like these when more info comes out to not be skeptical. I guess since he's pleading guilty we won't get more info in trial, oh well.

Trust me, they are absolutely ruthless with suspects of pedophilia. My instructor is a former FBI investigator for this sort of crime. We've met former prosecutors in the field; if you're in their spotlight, you're guilty until proven innocent.

eggandI said:
Also, how the hell do you download a jpg when trying to download a GGW video? did this guy not notice the difference between .jpg and .avi or the damn file size? Haha there is no way he is telling the whole story. :lol

Video packages often come with jpg files for covers and inserts. Aside from that, there is the other possibility that others have presented in that it could easily have been mislabeled.
 

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
The other thing I don't understand is suppose he is guilty. Suppose he did have a couple of images a year ago and intentionally deleted, and then pleaded guilty in court. 20 years for that? People get away with less with murder.
 

xelios

Universal Access can be found under System Preferences
WickedAngel said:
Trust me, they are absolutely ruthless with suspects of pedophilia. My instructor is a former FBI investigator for this sort of crime. We've met former prosecutors in the field; if you're in their spotlight, you're guilty until proven innocent.

Well can someone clarify exactly how much info is available during an investigation like this? Aren't there records of your search queries with the ISP (Like if you were looking for "Girls Gone Wild" in the search box vs. " Little girl gets _____")? Also when the file was deleted vs. when it was first put on the hard drive? If you kept it around a month vs. deleting it soon after.

There has to be more info than just "child porn was on the hard drive at some point", because there are many innocent ways that can happen. People who know this can take advantage of that or they may be telling the truth. This would be where the other info comes in, to prove intent.

I guess all this would be presented at trial, and it's a possibility of why he plead guilty (or why his attorney urged him to). It's a shame we'll never know.
 

tino

Banned
DR2K said:
How much child pornography was 'accidentally' downloaded?

Have you used limewire? There are at lease 20-30% of content on it have inaccurate file names. Even the simple mp3 songs.

Although I have never accidentally downloaded any child porn.
 

madara

Member
Drek said:
See, this is why you got to stick with name brand American made porn. They protect you from this shit.

I know I'll never accidentally get kiddy porn, because all my porn is high quality Hustler, Red Light District, Brazzers, Bang Bros., etc. products with girls that I've seen gobbling knobs for long enough to know that they are FBI approved.

Be safe, steal American!
:lol You straight dudes have it rough though, what if you dont like those fake big boobed woman? Its the era of amateur with no real way to tell ages at the lower bracket.
 

Particle Physicist

between a quark and a baryon
WickedAngel said:
We recently had to interface with the GBI because of child pornography found on a customer computer. In all likelihood, the pornography was put on there by a virus. It's even possible that their computer was used as remote storage for a real pedophile because the computer was entirely vulnerable (Weak firewall settings, no antivirus/antispyware). Computer illiteracy is fucking dangerous now.


jesus.. that freaks me out. what is happening to them? how do you prove that? i have always wondered what would happen if someone broke into my wireless network and did illegal shit.. how would i prove it wasn't me? what a mess.
 

Medalion

Banned
This is the one crime where guilty until proven innocent really applies, where supposedly it's the opposite for other crimes even murder.
 
quadriplegicjon said:
jesus.. that freaks me out. what is happening to them? how do you prove that? i have always wondered what would happen if someone broke into my wireless network and did illegal shit.. how would i prove it wasn't me? what a mess.

I don't know what happened to him. We haven't seen him since the police took the computer and they they took him in for questioning :lol That's not even the half of it, really. The remote access can hide files on unpartitioned space of your hard drive which would make you look even more suspicious.

As far as what goes for actual probable cause in acquiring a search warrant, I don't know. I know a lot of it starts with an investigator trolling on chatrooms. I'm sure there are specific techniques that he didn't tell us about. Generally speaking, they get the bare minimum that they can get to justify getting a warrant for the home and access to the tech in the house and car.
 

Chao

Member
Guys

GUYS

20shms4.jpg


What do we do now
 

rvy

Banned
Milk Lizard said:
If you think 12chan is bad you haven't visited russian 2chan... They managed to freak out /b/ which is a pretty big achievement.
The fuck are you talking about, srsly?
 

suaveric

Member
Onny said:
Hello!

Lots of uninformed crap going on in this thread.. hope I can shed some light on some of these issues!

I work for a Law Enforcement Agency, as a Digital Forensic Specialist. So I deal with recovering data and all that jazz.

First of all, regarding the case itself; we are hearing the suspect talk about his side of the case, not what may be the truth. Personally, knowing what I know about how filesystems work, I would be amazed if he had downloaded child porn by accident a year ago, deleted it, and it would still show up in the unallocated space on his HDD. To my mind, the only way this would happen would be if maybe he deleted the images, switched off his PC and didn't use it until the feds knocked on his door. So yeah, that's highly suspicious.

Secondly, why would the FBI "suddenly" turn up at his house a year after the event? If this was specifically due to his "accidentally" downloaded CP then TBFH they could have turned up the next day. And what could have brought him to their attention? It all sounds very fishy.

Finally, bear in mind that this case still has to go to trial, so the jury may yet still find him innocent. If all that he says is true, then IMO he has a reasonable chance of getting off. So to speak (tee hee!).

It is very easy to beat your chest and say how unfair all of this is, but you really need to think about why it has happened. Do you really think your investigators have the time to be chasing after a guy who accidentally a CP image over a p2p network once? Of course they don't.


Other items of business:

- TrueCrypt and other encryption techniques are good but not perfect. And bear in mind that (in the UK, at least) if you don't tell the authorities the passphrases to your encrypted volumes, you are liable for 2 years in jail.

- Different filesystems have different ways of dealing with deletions, but it is correct to say in broad terms that when you delete a file the filesystem does not remove the data itself from the disk, which is why data can be recovered which has previously been deleted.


Hope that's helped a little bit. I can go into the more technical details of file recovery if you'd like, but to be honest there are far better recources online. Christ, just look up FAT or NTFS on wikipedia, that's a good start. :)


I have a friend in law enforcement and from what I know, I believe it could take the FBI a year to show up at this guy's house. The Feds have huge backlogs of people they're trying to hunt down for this stuff.
 
Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a guy getting into serious legal trouble over some fictional erotic stories he wrote at one point in his life depicting minors engaging in sexual acts that ended up on a computer at work? I mean, if you can get locked up over fictional text, then anything goes really.
 

Medalion

Banned
NaughtyCalibur said:
Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a guy getting into serious legal trouble over some fictional erotic stories he wrote at one point in his life depicting minors engaging in sexual acts that ended up on a computer at work? I mean, if you can get locked up over fictional text, then anything goes really.

That was a canadian story. In Canada, writing about underage erotica is as guilty a penalty as actually harming an actual underage girl by soliciting them for sex.
 

Medalion

Banned
This is about censoring all sexuality with kids under the ages of16, not about being a sex offender, it was for a higher moral victory they were making an example of that girl.
 

Binabik15

Member
Medalion said:
This is about censoring all sexuality with kids under the ages of16, not about being a sex offender, it was for a higher moral victory they were making an example of that girl.


While the teen girl who sent these nude pictures of herself to others via MMS is not alone, she has been the only person arrested. She also spent a weekend in jail awaiting arraignment and a bond hearing. The statute she has been accused of breaking has exemptions in place that allows parents and/or guardians to take pictures of their naked children for a list of acceptable purposes. Interestingly, the statute does not provide the same exemption for the child themselves. While the consequences for her have already been laid out by the prosecutor in the charges, the recipients of her messages may be also facing prosecution for their passive role(s) in this incident.

allows parents and/or guardians to take pictures of their naked children for a list of acceptable purposes.

a list of acceptable purposes

Freedooooom!

Seriously, the site has a damn sketchy name and I don´t know hom much I can be trusted, but it´s not like retarded laws about all things naughty (I can´t say "Sex" without blushing, I shower with my undies on) are new.
 
teh_pwn said:
The other thing I don't understand is suppose he is guilty. Suppose he did have a couple of images a year ago and intentionally deleted, and then pleaded guilty in court. 20 years for that? People get away with less with murder.

If prosecutor's did not have the ability to threaten defendants with draconian sentences, it would be much more difficult to get plea bargains (i.e. convictions) in cases like these. The people who are casting doubt on the defendant solely on the basis of his accepting a plea are missing the entire point of the modern judicial system. Massive sentences are used as leverage by prosecutors to score convictions without having to go to trial. If you think you would fight to maintain your innocence, you don't understand the intimidation factor that's at work here. For a person being put through this system, their incarceration is a foregone conclusion. All that's left for them to decide is how harshly the court will treat them.

On television, clever defense attorneys come up with brilliant legal strategies to protect their clients. But in real life, over 90 percent of people charged are subsequently convicted. Both the prosecutor and your shitty public defender would make this clear to you, and you'd plead guilty too.

This is the general policy not just with sex offenders, but with most crimes. Prosecutor's lobby really hard to get maximum sentences raised, promising it will increase convictions. Politicians who want to appear tough on crime vote to increase penalties and as a bonus, are able to tout higher conviction rates in their districts come election time.
 

itsgreen

Member
He must have done something, else you wouldn't settle.

3,5 vs 20... ok.

But afaik, and i'm no American, your life completely fucked when you get a sexoffender registration.

Would fight it till my death.
 

Medalion

Banned
Even the phrase "child pornography" will be a phrase you can't say anymore or you get questioned by authorities, it doesn't matter the context. That's how bad it'll get if they keep it up this way.
 
itsgreen said:
He must have done something, else you wouldn't settle.

3,5 vs 20... ok.

But afaik, and i'm no American, your life completely fucked when you get a sexoffender registration.

Would fight it till my death.

Again, it's easy to say that when you're not staring down the barrel of a team of extremely zealous prosecutors and a 20-year sentence when you're already behind bars.

Ignis Fatuus said:
Child pornography is available on huge portions of the internet?

Thanks to viruses and trojans? Yes.

You don't even need to do anything to get caught up in the web. If someone hates you and decides they want to hurt you, they could send you an MMS with embedded child pornography from one of those throw-away phones and report you anonymously. It's not like you can deny an incoming text message if you have that service on your phone.
 

Oli

Registered User
This kind of crap definitely scares me. I very rarely download anything, and never anything of that variety. But what happens if you get tricked into visiting a bad site or something like that? That kind of stuff happens occasionally if I'm careless about clicking links, though pretty rarely. Will the FBI visit someone for that? It definitely makes a person worry, and certainly makes me want to stay off the internet. Good grief.
 

Yaweee

Member
kame-sennin said:
If prosecutor's did not have the ability to threaten defendants with draconian sentences, it would be much more difficult to get plea bargains (i.e. convictions) in cases like these. The people who are casting doubt on the defendant solely on the basis of his accepting a plea are missing the entire point of the modern judicial system. Massive sentences are used as leverage by prosecutors to score convictions without having to go to trial. If you think you would fight to maintain your innocence, you don't understand the intimidation factor that's at work here. For a person being put through this system, their incarceration is a foregone conclusion. All that's left for them to decide is how harshly the court will treat them.

On television, clever defense attorneys come up with brilliant legal strategies to protect their clients. But in real life, over 90 percent of people charged are subsequently convicted. Both the prosecutor and your shitty public defender would make this clear to you, and you'd plead guilty too.

This is the general policy not just with sex offenders, but with most crimes. Prosecutor's lobby really hard to get maximum sentences raised, promising it will increase convictions. Politicians who want to appear tough on crime vote to increase penalties and as a bonus, are able to tout higher conviction rates in their districts come election time.

This. Plea bargains and the relatively high sentences for people that don't make them amount to punishing people for exercising their constitutional right to a trial.
 
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