Internet Virus Frames Users For Child Porn
To summarize if you don't feel like reading: People are being imprisoned after their computers are getting infected by viruses which download child pornography. These people do nothing wrong, but end up being robbed of their dignity and reputation and incarcerated. The article gives an example of one man wrongly accused in this way:
Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography, which carries up to five years in prison. He endured death threats, his car tires were slashed and he was shunned by friends.What bothers me is this country's unrelenting stance on child pornography. I would understand if the people being punished were producing child pornography -- but to ruin their lives because there is a sliver of possibility that they were viewing child pornography? That is just unreasonable. Inappropriate interaction with real, living, breathing children is truly worthy of a severe and merciless punishment -- but we are talking about pixels on a screen here.
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The charge was dropped – 11 months after it was filed.
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"It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life," he says.
A very unnerving aspect of this is that it could happen to any one of us. This particular article talks about being infected with a computer virus, but there have also been cases of people being punished for unintentionally downloading child pornography over a file sharing system. Perhaps they were not paying attention to the filename, or perhaps the file was misnamed to mask it's sinister contents, I do not know the details. There is a news story of this happening to a 22 year old guy, and he is quoted as saying:
"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."Frankly, I believe him. But now he is facing 20 years in prison and must spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender, and I feel terrible for him. Imagine yourself in his shoes...
Matt claims he quickly erased the files.
And as the end of the article shows, he's not alone in accidentally stumbling upon such vile material:
Internet searches reveal a large number of complaints from people who say they've accidentally downloaded child pornography through Limewire.This is a scary prospect, and the fear comes from this country's irrational stance on the matter. I guess the take-away message from all of this is:
Be very, very careful what you click on and what you download.
Previously I had thought this to only matter in terms of keeping my computer clean of viruses/spyware/malware, but it seems that following this simple rule can also keep you out of prison.
OK. I am a big proponent of the witch hunt. If there is even a sliver of a possibility that you slap your Oscar Meyer while watching 6 year olds frolic, I would stand in line to slash your tires or crap in your front lawn. This is a rational approach to destoying the marketabilty of child pornography. Why do ppl make this stuff? Money or pleasure. Let's take money off the table, you cannot get rich off of distributing it. Then you are left with people that need some form of help.
ReplyDeleteWith having that been said, since we are computer scientists, we know how hard it is to frame someone. If there is a file that 'mysteriously' appeared on your hard drive, we can use digital forensics to corroborate your story. The most obvious case to prove your innocence would be if we found a bunch of pics in your TempDL folder, and some form of malware with reference addresses that held those pics on a server. We could then go to the server owner and see who it is registered to, link to the account that paid for it, and prosecute the account owner. Your innocence would be proven and we could all go back to watching reruns of GLEE. I am guessing that this did not happen since you were prosecuted. By the way, most of the world's hackers (such as the Chinese national gov't) have no interest in framing you. Actually, any LEET NINJA with mad coding skills could care less about your little fantasies. On top of that, they know how much effort is being poured into finding these sleezebags and would prefer to stay out of it. So.. that leads us to 2 alternatives. Either you are a victim of a novice hacker, in which case the digital trail is there for all to trace, or you clicked on a site that Interpol and the CIA monitor closely. Of course, pleading ignorance is also in the realm of the second case, its just that you maintain absence of criminal intent. Well, I don't know anyone who would want to prosecute someone with a pic or two through erroneous transfers. There is no case of "oops, dammit I clicked, now I have to go to jail." Our penal system doesn't have the capcity to house everyone with bad hand-eye coordination. If we did, no one would be left to play X-box. Not only do I not buy your argument, I am offended that you would bring such a lame argument to such an important issue. It sounds like you are defending your right to sleeze.