Hypothetically suppose someone who is looking at porn on the internet honestly stumbles upon kiddie porn. To my knowledge it’s technically illegal just downloading it even if it was inadvertently. How can one go about alerting the appropriate authorities without coming under major suspicion or gettting in trouble? Is it possible to remain anonymous?
You could report it to the FCC. Or drop a dime to your local police, telling them what you told us. I’d imagine genuine child pornsters wouldn’t rat themselves out. Alternately, I’d check out the FBI web site, I believe they have a reporting system.
Here is one place:
and here is another:
Have at it.
I suggest not saying a word, and scrubbing your computer like sin. You looked at it, and in at least one case I read about not to long ago, a person who did nothing more than click on the links was charged with possession- which even if found “Not guilty” ruins your reputation- not to mention 10’s of thousands of $$ in legal fees.
IANAL. No, I have no cite. No, due to the danger involved in clicking on Google Links for “Kiddie Porno”- I am not going to go look for it. If you don’t believe me- fine. Sorry.
I remember reading a story by journalist Mara Leveritt (probably in the Arkansas Times) about a man who did just that and was arrested and prosecuted for it. I didn’t follow the story to learn the ultimate outcome, but I got the impression at the time things were not going well for him. This was possibly as many as 10 years ago. If I get around to it, I’ll try to track down the details.
Actually there were a couple of cases reported where just this thing had happened–somebody stumbled onto a child porn site, reported it, and got into moderate trouble. Or didn’t report it and didn’t realize the images were on their computer and got into lots of trouble. I have some articles on the subject and probably there is something on the internet, but I’m not providing links because (1) the stuff I have is 3 years old, so links probably would not work and laws/practices may have changed–one source was Wired, 10/2002, “Inside Operation Candyman,” p. 126 (2) I started to google this and then decided it would be prudent not to.
I know for an absolute fact that the Wired site had more information than the article but as I said, that was 3 years ago.
What is this “technically illegal”? It’s illegal, and even if you don’t download it your computer may keep the information that you visited the site–and that could be enough to get you prosecuted.
The man Mara Leveritt wrote about was a Little Rock physician named Lonnie Parker. Here is a page with information about his case. Unfortunately, the link to Leveritt’s original story for the Arkansas Times no longer works, but you can see the first few sentances of it. Here is an article from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on the conviction and sentencing of Dr. Parker.
Well, if something is illegal that can be done inadvertently, under circumstances that a number of people might be able to sympathize with… that certainly sounds to me like a technicality. Therefore ‘technically illegal’ seems like a reasonable phrase to use.
On that note, are the laws about posession of child porn ‘statutory’?? In the same sense as statutory rape? That the circumstances don’t matter, the intent of the offender doesn’t matter, all that matters is the fact that somehow those kiddie pics got onto his drive?
Because otherwise, I thought that a crime hasn’t been committed unless the offender had intent to commit the act. (And, that the burden to prove intent would fall on the prosecution.)
Just wondering.
Thanks for the inforamtion everyone. If this is how the government really works regarding this, then I think it’s a shame. It would discourage anyone from reporting it for fear of being branded a pedophile. It sounds as if you accidentally stumble upon it that you are better never mentioning it to anyone and clearing your hard drive as best you can. That’s really a shame because the real people who need to be prosecuted aren’t being because the people who know of their wrong behavior are in fear of getting branded as well. Really a shame.
It’s still better to report it. A lot of pedophiles get caught when they take their computers in to the repair shop, and the repair shop reports them to the police after finding pictures on their harddrives. If you do the reporting yourself, the prosecutor is more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
How common is child porn on the web? I can’t imagine it’s that easy to just stumble onto, since no ISP is gonna be willing to knowingly host it, and I imagine law enforcement types look around for it pretty hard. I would suspect, then, that when sites do pop up, they’re probably pretty short-lived and thus it might not be worth potentially getting yourself in legal trouble by reporting it.
I haven’t looked for it, and I don’t look at porn sites; so I can’t tell you about how easy it is to stumble upon it. However, I did get some spam a couple of months ago that claimed to be links to child porn. I went to the sites, and there they were. I went to a link that someone in GQ provided, and reported the sites to the authorities. I saved the e-mails confirming that I did report the sites, and I got another e-mail thanking me for helping to stamp out kiddie porn. I deleted the spam e-mails from the server without downloading them into my hard drive mailbox, cleared cache, cleared history, etc. just to make sure that, as well as I could be sure, my computer was child porn-free. (It certainly is now, since I have a new hard drive.)
In any case, the offending sites were removed. Unfortunately, while they were hosted by geocities the authors were in Macedonia. It’s unlikely they were prosecuted.
Dunno about the web, but there is plenty on the usenet. Usenet KP is problematic because you often don’t know quite what you’re getting until you see it. I stumbled on some a while ago and reported it to my usenet provider (Easynews).
I would say something anonymously and then destroy my hard drive. And I’m not kidding.
At work, if we accidentally come across a dodgy image, we report it to security immediately - all internet access is logged anyway - and they take care of it.
Of course, at work, we’re not surfing for porn!
Here’s the British site to report it
Seriously? Is it so anonymous that you can post it without getting in trouble?
It’s bad enough to imagine someone looking for that kind of thing. But I can’t imagine what would possess someone to share it. That just seems like a great way of getting your ass in jail. I guess I don’t know enough about how the internet works, but I didn’t think anything you did was really anonymous.
This is the correct answer in the US. And this was suggested to me by a notable Usenet sysadmin about what he’d do if he accidentally downloaded KP. By reporting it, you are basically confessing to having downloaded an looked at KP.