entrapment on the web

[VileOrb]

There has been a bunch of busts in the last year on child pornography charges. Some of these arrests, I hear, happened after agents sent images to people in a chat room. If the images from the agents are the only illegal material found, how can they convict?

I have viewed sites that shocked me and immediately spent time making sure the images did not remain on my PC. Should I just close the window and not worry about it?

It seems the laws have not yet caught up with technology on some of this stuff. Any insights?

Thanks.

[Omniscient]

Well, the specifics are anything but clear from your post, but the busts in our area have been on men who actively seek teenage girls. Cops go online and when men are asking for underage girls to chat with and eventually meet, they start chatting with them and develop a relationship. No crime is committed until they meet he "child" AFAIK. Another tactic is to post on BB's asking for teenage photos to swap or sell, and when the guys take the bait they strike. Entrapment is a very gray area, and i don't claim to know the finer points.

[NanoByte]

Is it legal for "agents" to send "illegal images" to people in chat rooms and do they really do that? I doubt either one. I think the latter goes beyond entrapment even.

Ray

[Omniscient]

Hypothetically, what if I download an image, later for some reason its found out that the girl was 16 and I am busted. Images online that aren't advertised as a underage lolita could be underage, but I had no way of knowing. Am I committing a crime?

[Mr.Sparkle]

A WAG here but I think legality would vary from the state you live. And also the state laws from where the site originates. So that would mean if a European country had 16 as the age of adulthood, you would be busted in your state even if you didn't know she was underage in your country.

[Sam Stone]

A lot of these laws just haven't been tested properly, and we won't know until someone gets charged and challenges it.

I think we've all been in the situation where we hit some innocuous-looking link and wind up in some window-spawning hell of porn sites and adult images. It drives me nuts. Some of these things are insidious and will spawn off new pages when you close the current one. If you get trapped in a really agressive site, you can wind up with dozens of images on your hard drive that you didn't want and had no intention of looking at. Yet if some of these images are of underage kids, you could wind up facing felony charges if the cops confiscate your computer for some unrelated thing (say, an IRS audit, or you sell the computer) and find the images.

"Possession" laws have to be changed to reflect a technology where you can possess things you didn't want and don't know you have.

[matt_mcl]

I remember reading about a gay journalist who wanted to interview gay youth for a story. He met a kid on a chat room, arranged to meet him, and got arrested! The kid was police officers trying to entrap someone. How unjust is that?

Omniscient, I wouldn't assume that you'd be immune to prosecution. Does the name 'Traci Lords' mean anything to you?

[Satan]

In NC and several other states, it is against the law to look at any pornographic issues on your personal home computer, no matter the age of the subject.

I don't know if this law is actively enforced (a la other sex laws on the books) but it still creeps me out.

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Yer pal,
Satan

[BoBettie]

FYI,
I did computer training for our local police force and a female Special Investigations officer told me about the internet case they did. She went on-line in a kiddie chat room, and eventually some dirtbag adult started chatting with her. At some point he sent her adult materials and offered to meet her and have sex. She agreed, and showed up at the assigned place. He was arrested as soon as he approached her and convicted of attempted rape (the idea being that they had entered into an agreement to have sex and he was picking her up for that purpose). That's how it worked here, anyway.
she never sent him anything, he was the aggressor...Interesting..

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Run for the hills, folks! Or you'll be up to your armpits in martians!

[Chief Crunch]

Yeah, Pennsylvania is another state where, the downloading of pornography of any kind is illegal; however, I've never heard of anyone getting busted for it. Once I read a story in the local paper about a women getting back her computer from her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had been staying. Supposedly, she found underage pornography, as well as other types of porno on the computer's hard drive and reported it to the police. The arresting officer made a statement saying the regular stuff wasn't a major concern and they were only going to charge the guy with the under age stuff.

[VileOrb]

The deal here is that I know someone who has been indicted. After recieving two images of underage models from someone in a chat room, his apartment was raided and the two images were found in the cache though they had been deleted elsewhere. He says he has been offered some deals if he helps them to catch others but when he told them where he got the two images they told him that they knew that already as they had sent them to him. he says they have threatened him with charges of distribution. This sounds farfetched to me but he seems genuinely scared and is someone I wouldn't expect to just make this up. This is taking place in Minnesota, by the way.

[voltaire]

This is taking place in Minnesota, by the way.


This illustrates the benefits of living in a state where law enforcement has better things to do with their time and resources.

[dasmoocher]

As far as entrapment goes, I remember as case where a guy was trolling for underage girls in a chat room and got hooked up with an undercover policewoman. This was in the D.C. metro area and the guy was in MD. The officer refused to meet him unless it was in D.C.; so when he agreed and showed up in D.C., he was promptly busted for crossing a state line in addition for whatever other charges that should apply. Now, I think this scumbag needed to be busted, but he had tried to meet "his girl" in MD and the only reason why he went to D.C. was the fact the "his girl" refused to meet him anywhere else (except maybe VA). Was he entrapped into crossing state lines? IIRC, his lawyer made this argument (I'm not sure how it turned out).

[DougC]

- - - I don't know about elsewhere, but it seems that when they bust a guy (usually) for kiddy porn they find hundreds of images, at least - not just a few, and the images are being traded with other people, not posted on a site anywhere. - Now I am kinda wondering how much "evidence" is supplied by the cops, as opposed to how much the perv manages to turn up on his own. - MC

[Stephen]

Here in Central Florida, a girl complained to her mother that a man was making improper suggestions in a chat room. The mother told the police and they told the girl to set up a meeting. The police used the girl (13 years old) as bait. She sat on a park bench with the guy and gave the 'code' word to alert police when he touched her breast!

The chief of police has promised that this tactic will not be used in the future. No disciplinary action will be taken against the detectives who made this ridiculous decision.

The man turned out to be an engineering professor at an area college.

------------------
Stephen
Stephen's Website (http://stephen.fathom.org)
Satellite Hunting 1.1.0 visible satellite pass prediction
shareware available for download at
Satellite Hunting (http://stephen.fathom.org/sathunt.html)

[Sofa King]

According to my lawyer friend, you're liable for anything that gets onto your computer. Buddy of yours e-mails you that .avi of the blond and the dalmation? You can be busted and so can he, unless you know how to destroy all evidence that you downloaded it. No matter that you didn't know what it was and didn't want it once you did. Right now law enforcement is trolling for test cases in order to more fully define what they can and cannot get away with. That makes life dangerous for you, innocent wanderer that you are.

However, computer people are almost invariably more clever than bureaucracies. The porno site www.whitehouse.com (http://www.whitehouse.com) receives thousands of hits every week (and good advertising money as a result), many of them by government employees trying to find the President's latest press conference schedule or whatever.

Someday soon some idiot agency is going to release a statistic about "pornography is on 75% of all government computers, blah, blah, blah," and then it will come out that most government employees have had inadequate training and don't know the difference between a .com and a .gov.

Government officials will probably blame the website.

[bantmof]

In NC and several other states, it is against the law to look at any pornographic issues on your personal home computer, no matter the age of the subject.
It is? Even if it's not a minor? Wow! Sounds like something you'd expect out of an iron curtain country, not the good old yoo ess aye.

I guess the moral here is: use a good encrypted filesystem. Understand where your software puts cache files, and understand that deleting files doesn't necessarily remove all evidence of them.

One of the problems here is that there are many more ways for something to "get on your computer" than you asking for it. Things may be there that you're not even aware of.
--
peas on earth

[DougC]

- - - If porn files glowed, cops could see my computer from Mars. I don't have anything that involves kids, but examples of everything else are likely floating around in there somewhere. - And besides, I'm only interested for artistic purposes - good lighting and camera angle are critical when you're shooting those blonde + dalmation .avi's. - MC

The lighting (among other things) generally sucks in those avi's. Someone usually needs to (as Cecil once said) "Slap a jelly on the baby." Btw, it's "Dalmatian."

Does "format C:" still work?


[Note: This message has been edited by Nickrz]

[handy]

It happened in my city recently like this: A guy working in a skate shop spent time with boys showing them how to skate. The guy downloaded porno [some adult, some child] from the web & showed it to the guys. The guys ratted on him. Guy gets jail.

[Homer]

Lets say that I'm a kid who thinks ahead. When I'm 12 or so, I take some pictures of myself jerkin off, stickin things up my ass, giving head to myself, whatnot. I keep these pictures hidden for 6 years. When I turn 18, I post them on a pedophile website. Could I be prosecuted? The only person being exploited is myself, who is over the legal age. I was the one who took the pictures, I developed them myself, no one knew of them or took any part in them whatsoever other than myself. When they were taken it was with full intention of waiting until I was 18, and posting them on my own perverted website. Would there be a case against me?

--Tim

I'm not trying to imply anything about myself, really!

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We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first "lost generation" nor today's lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.

[Louie]

Does "format C:" still work?

Yes and no. Yes, you can't get to those files anymore, but, no, those files are still on your hard drive and the only way to completely erase them is to overwrite it with other files.

There are some programs that can read a hard drive file even after it has been deleted.

[counterattackii]

How about placing a speaker magnet on your hard drive when you see the cops running up your driveway? I bet THAT would work. Lol!

[Montfort]

At my old job contracting at the government (I'm at a new job contracting at a different part, but still) I was given a copy of Norton Disk Clean (or something like that) that we called Norton Toilet Paper, since it was the only government approved deleter to *completely* erase hard drives.

Basically, format c: and standard deleting does remove the files, but traces are still on the disk, and the FAT (File Allocation Tables) need to be cleared of the pesky buggers.

I believe the software is not allowed for commercial use. It's pretty good stuff.

[handy]

Homer, sure you would be prosecuted, the law covers pictures of anyone, even yourself. US anyway.

Formatting to clean? You'd have to format at least 6 times to get to FBI clean.

Even encrypted files can be opened cause the FBI and such has Cray computers & such & they can open ANY file given the time. Im not sure if they finally succeeded with PGP, though.

[bantmof]

Even encrypted files can be opened cause the FBI and such has Cray computers & such & they can open ANY file given the time
It's not quite that simple, even for the FBI.

Even relatively weak encryption like DES is expensive to break - it's been done, but it's definately not a casual task even with a supercomputer.

And stronger encryption is not computationally feasable to break on any current or forseeable computer technology just with a brute force attack. There may be other attacks possible, such as a known plaintext attack. But commonly available encyrption tech is definately quite strong these days - enough to basically be proof against FBI trying to read the encrypted ones directly. But, the _real_ risk lies elsewhere - like unencrypted versions of the file in some temporary directory written by an app and then deleted, remanents in swap partitions, and so on. There's a good chance that approach would yield results even when a direct attack would not.

--
peas on earth

[NanoByte]

Isn't the program Shredder still around to multiply overwrite all unused portions of a hard drive? Isn't that sufficient, assuming all used parts of it are innocent?

Ray

[DougC]

- - - Well now youse got me wondering:
-
- Let's say you have programs on your disk: Windows 2001 - 1 gig, AOL 2001 - 1 gig, and you download pictures to view. Do they get stored on the disk starting after the AOL program, or somewhere else? If you installed another program that you know takes more disk space than the largest image you downloaded, would it write over them? - MC

[Montfort]

MC: The short answer is "yes." Windows 9x (I'm not entirely sure how NT does it, but I imagine it's similar) writes data in blocks. All that ballyhoo you heard about FAT32 and Win98 is true -- you get more data on disks because the block size in FAT32 is much smaller.

Anyway, the Win98 disk defragmenter -- which you should run at least once a month -- re-arranges the blocks on your drive in the best order. As you delete, move, rename, edit, etc. files, the blocks fluctuate, and this slows your PC down. As it defragments, it finds all the blocks that go together (be it for a program, document, .mpg of a nine year old boy, etc.) and sticks them in the right order on the physical drive.

The best way to look at is like a CD. Track one on the CD is the one closest to the center of the disk, and likewise, Win98's defragmenter rearranges the files so the "programs you use most" go there. Hence, your programs load faster. That's their logic, not mine.

Hope that answers your question. Check out the "Show Details" option next time you run the defragger.

[Contestant #3]

Check this out:
http://www.sightings.com/politics4/disneysex.htm



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Contestant #3

[DougC]

- - - I live in the St. Louis area, and a few weeks back a retired police chief from the area got busted for kiddy pix on his computer. - MC

[NanoByte]

The Oct 4 Time Mag has this on Naughton:
http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,31486,00.html

I'm wondering: This article says nothing about the guy's intended activities with the girl beyond "he offered to meet her in Los Angeles to "'kiss, make out, play and stuff.'" I suppose there exists something more explicit in his conversation, but I wonder. While this is certainly enough, as said by a 34-year-old to a 13-year-old to get him in very hot water, including quickly fired, the language of the federal code subsection he was charged with [18USC2423(b)] is entitled "Travel With Intent To Engage in Sexual Act With a Juvenile", and reads:

Travel With Intent To Engage in Sexual Act With a Juvenile. -

_ _ A person who travels in interstate commerce, or conspires to do so, or a United States citizen or an alien admitted for permanent residence in the United States who travels in foreign commerce, or conspires to do so, for the purpose of engaging in any sexual act (as defined in section 2246) with a person under 18 years of age that would be in violation of chapter 109A if the sexual act occurred in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both.

Subsection 8USC2246(2) reads:

"the term ''sexual act'' means -

_ _ _ _ _ (A) contact between the penis and the vulva or the penis and the anus, and for purposes of this subparagraph contact
involving the penis occurs upon penetration, however slight;
_ _ _ _ _ (B) contact between the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the vulva, or the mouth and the anus;
_ _ _ _ _ (C) the penetration, however slight, of the anal or genital opening of another by a hand or finger or by any object, with an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person; or
_ _ _ _ _ (D) the intentional touching, not through the clothing, of the genitalia of another person who has not attained the age of 16 years with an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;


[emphasis added]

It would seem that technically he would have had to have said something in the chat room that went further than what Time quoted, or else the FBI found other evidence that supports an intent of his to engage in a "sexual act", as defined above, with his imagined object of his tryst -- to be convicted of the charge. I don't think "make out" would necessarily imply non-clothing-intervening contact. Probably law enforcement's main goal is to scare everyone on the Net that would be apt to do anything of this sort, and Naughton, having overcome such charge, probably would be in no position to sue any government for his severe professional damage and costs of litigation.

Ray

[Stoid]

regarding this last...what I have a problem with is this: in the case of people busted after having engaged in conversation with ADULTS POSING AS UNDERAGE PERSONS, then arranging to meet the "underage" person, for ANYTHING: they are being busted for something they DID NOT DO. It is the equivalent, to my mind, of busting someone for buying oregano they THOUGHT was pot. You can't do that. What if I were a real cute babe, 20 years old, but I could easily pass for 15? I tell a guy I'm 15. he fucks me. Can he then be prosecuted for INTENDING to screw a 15-year-old, even though he actually screwed a 20 year old? Isn't that making THOUGHT a crime??? Isn't that just NUTS?

This came up as a topic in our house a while back when we heard about some guy getting hassled or busted, can't remembe rwhich, for videotaping kids in a playground. People saw him doing it, didn't think anything of it. He never touched or bothered anyone. But when they saw the video, they saw that he focused on little girl's underpants when their skirts flew up, on their crotches, etc. Obviously he was a pedo and he probably jacked off to the pictures. SO??? Did he HURT anyone???

This just strieks me as insane. If you want to bust some pedo predator, great...but don't twist our legal system into a pretzel to pull it off. Get a REAL 15 year old to trap the guy, don't make me sick by pretending to be one and then busting him for "intent". That is bogus.



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*************
This is a non-smoking area. If we see you smoking, we will assume you are on fire and act accordingly.

[Harmonious Discord]

There's a local area guy being prosecuted now. He arranged to meet this girl at some local place, and when he got there, he was arrested. He had actualy aranged a meeting with a cop posing as a minor on the internet. The key point is he showed up to meet this fictious girl.

Though I do not like what this guy did, this reaks of entrapment to me.