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Man faces 20 years in prison for accidentally downloading child porn

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Forkball

Member
http://cbs13.com/local/limewire.child.porn.2.1346842.html

A local man is likely to go to prison for years after he says he accidentally downloaded child pornography onto his computer.

Matthew White, 22, said he was surfing for pornography two years ago on Limewire -- a fire sharing application that allows users to trade music, movies, games and pictures -- when he discovered that some of the files he had downloaded were images of children.

Matt claims he quickly erased the files.


"It didn't appeal to me," he said. "I was looking for women my age, so I just wanted to download 'College Girls Gone Wild' and accidentally downloaded underage pornography."

About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family's home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn't find anything.

Investigators later were able to recover the deleted images from deep within the hard drive.

"I asked them, 'Where did you get that? I don't remember that.' I asked them, 'Could I access that if I wanted to?'" Matt said. "They said no."


Facing 20 years in prison for possessing child pornography, Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence. He will also serve 10 years probation and have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Matt's father says other parents need to be warned about the consequences of stumbling across illicit material.

"One day, you're going to get a knock on the door and have your child taken away for many years," he said.

Matt's court date has been moved to January 8th due to paperwork issues, according to reports.

The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.

Internet searches reveal a large number of complaints from people who say they've accidentally downloaded child pornography through Limewire.
thumb_1259822011197_0p07906385659902515.jpg
 

Pakkidis

Member
Searching porn on limewire is just plain stupid, but I do feel for this guy, honest mistake. How did the feds even track him if he deleted the file a year ago?
 

Ferrio

Banned
Calcaneus said:
Wait, so if its basically confirmed that it was an accident, why are they still trying him?

He claims it was an accident. Even if it is, and he's acquitted his life is pretty much fucked up at this point.
 

BobsRevenge

I do not avoid women, GAF, but I do deny them my essence.
Calcaneus said:
Wait, so if its basically confirmed that it was an accident, why are they still trying him?
Because its child pornography. Even if you had never looked at child pornography in your life, or any pornography at all, if someone merely pointed a finger at you in public and said the words, you'd be put in prison for at least 5 years.
 
Calcaneus said:
Wait, so if its basically confirmed that it was an accident, why are they still trying him?

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.
 
Christ, that's just wrong.


It's exactly one image (which he deleted immediately). Doesn't that confirm it was a honest mistake and the guy obviously isn't into child porn? Why not search for the thousands of real nasty people with gigabytes of that stuff on their pc, or worse, the ones who make that stuff.



Edit: this could've happened to any of us. Everyone has to learn how the web works, and everyone has been a naive noob at one point who didn't know which are the right networks/sites/... to search for pron (it doesn't even have to be a porn search to end up with vile stuff).
 

KHarvey16

Member
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.

Exactly. You didn't even have to search for porn to get illegal garbage. This is ultimately a waste of time and resources, as the people caught on P2P filesharing are likely not funding the development of child pornography nor are they likely to be producing it. Go after the people who are and stop with this ridiculousness.
 

Medalion

Banned
We must make examples of people.

Any child porn in anyone's hand on purpose or not, you are automatically sent to jail and registered as sex offender. That is how serious we take this issue dammit.
 

Kurtofan

Member
Medalion said:
We must make examples of people.

Any child porn in anyone's hand on purpose or not, you are automatically sent to jail and registered as sex offender. That is how serious we take this issue dammit.
what about arresting the true culprits?
 

MIMIC

Banned
Wow. That sucks. I don't think I've EVER tried to download pictures from ANYWHERE. They could easily be mislabeled and since pictures are so small in size, there's a good chance it could be anything.
 

ant_

not characteristic of ants at all
The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.

I don't understand this at all.
 

zon

Member
That's horrible, poor guy.

This reminds me of what happened to me when we had just gotten a internet connection. I was 15 and had just started to look for porn and downloaded one of the many videos with all kinds of words in them. Substitute limewire with direct connect, the cp with scat porn and you get the picture.
 
It's exactly one image (which he deleted immediately).

Investigators later were able to recover the deleted images from deep within the hard drive.

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.
 

Aesius

Member
That's super fucked up.

What if he had destroyed the hard drive beyond the point of the data being recovered?
 

Furcas

Banned
Medalion said:
We must make examples of people.

Any child porn in anyone's hand on purpose or not, you are automatically sent to jail and registered as sex offender. That is how serious we take this issue dammit.

You're being sarcastic, right?
 

Medalion

Banned
Kurtofan said:
what about arresting the true culprits?

We don't know his true intentions if they are what his story suggests or other.

He wanted to see GIrls Gone Wild, girls around his age or in College... what if the girls in the videos were actually 17 or 16 and the Age of Consent in his state is 18, it would still be underage porn and he'd still get in trouble.

Wonderful times these...

Furcas said:
You're being sarcastic, right?

Yes I was.
 

Ferrio

Banned
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.

Could of been a zip.
 

Darklord

Banned
How the hell would they track him after 2 years? Jesus, I guess P2P is easy is track people, right? This type of stuff always makes me paranoid, obviously I don't download that type of porn but if some sick fuck puts it up somewhere or if I downloaded it by mistake like he did that could ruin your life. Bloody harsh. It's like finding drugs, throwing them away then 2 years later getting arrested for possession of drugs.
 

Jayge

Member
From what I remember back when I would actually download things off of Limewire, every time porn popped up it would inevitably be called "Horse Fuck Big Dicks Black Booty Bitches Interracial Marraige Milf 12yo BJ amateur Anal Doggystyle Ass to Mouth Triple Penetration Bukkake Facials Asian Girl on Girl Teen College Big Tits Tight Pussy dildo scat teacher sex rape bondage 3"
 

xelios

Universal Access can be found under System Preferences
If they can go back and find the files, wouldn't they also be able to see if it was really "deleted immediately" i.e. a mistake? Doesn't that info exist? Also what he typed in the search bar and things like that. Aren't there records of practically everything somewhere?
 

MIMIC

Banned
Jayge said:
From what I remember back when I would actually download things off of Limewire, every time porn popped up it would inevitably be called "Horse Fuck Big Dicks Black Booty Bitches Interracial Marraige Milf 12yo BJ amateur Anal Doggystyle Ass to Mouth Triple Penetration Bukkake Facials Asian Girl on Girl Teen College Big Tits Tight Pussy dildo scat teacher sex rape bondage 3"

:lol

And these files were usually under 3MB. If it was that small, I never downloaded it.
 
You have to stay ontop of that downloading shit.

I remember when I was in my early teens and our comp was just THERE, connected to the web without any Kaspersky or anything and me and my sister used it to down load music on Kazam or some shit.

One day well looking for a game on the comp I saw a strange file. Opened it and it was FULL of lil nude girls. And there weren't even "sad", it seemed like some pics a pedo dad would take. There were in the back yard of some suburb playing with a waterholes which at some point transitioned to the guys (his face was never in frame) dick being . . . with the lil girls.

I thought "WTF is this shit!?!?! 0_o". Then I thought of who could be watching this sense it was only me, my sister and mother living in the house. I deleted all of it and never spoke a word of it. Comp at some point got too full of viruses to do anything and we trashed it.

Years later (in college comp gen-ed class) I learn't that people could host pedo stuff on other people's comps to keep their tracks clean and that thats why you should have protection like I do now (Kaspersky!).
 

Adonymous

Neo Member
Anyone that's ever surfed 4chan, should just blow up their computer right now. Even if you didn't click on any "porn pics" the thumbs are still saved in the cache somewhere on the harddrive, and the FBI has nothing better to do soo...
 

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
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.
 

Darklord

Banned
Adonymous said:
Anyone that's ever surfed 4chan, should just blow up their computer right now. Even if you didn't click on any "porn pics" the thumbs are still saved in the cache somewhere on the harddrive, and the FBI has nothing better to do soo...

The FBI wouldn't be able to track 4chan like a P2P network...would they? I seriously doubt they'd be tracking people on a site that huge trying to catch people with thumbnail pictures. Now 12chan on the other hand...
 
Adonymous said:
Anyone that's ever surfed 4chan, should just blow up their computer right now. Even if you didn't click on any "porn pics" the thumbs are still saved in the cache somewhere on the harddrive, and the FBI has nothing better to do soo...

A man was actually found not guilty for exactly that here. Pro tip for pedos : save the pics to your cache folder.

Darklord said:
The FBI wouldn't be able to track 4chan like a P2P network...would they? I seriously doubt they'd be tracking people on a site that huge trying to catch people with thumbnail pictures. Now 12chan on the other hand...

If you think 12chan is bad you haven't visited russian 2chan... They managed to freak out /b/ which is a pretty big achievement.
 
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.
This.


It's a form of mass hysteria where people who show nuance are part of "the evil". I'm sure in many groups if you tried to point out the unreasonable and questionable stuff in this news story, you'd be labeled a "pedo-sympathizer" or pedo yourself.
 

_Isaac

Member
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.

EDIT:

So I take it all these chan sites are pretty classy places.
 

Darklord

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.

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?
 
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