Suppose someone looking for porn on the internet stumbles upon child porn...

[DougC]

• • • I would say to not bother the police right off; no matter what country you are living in, there is a very-good-chance that the website is in some-other-country and your local police can’t do anything about it anyway, and they don’t have anyone there to immediately check into this stuff.
• If it disturbs you, your best bet is to email your ISP about it. An admin (sitting right there at a computer, and who knows a whole lot about the internet anyway) can quickly find out where the material is residing and can figure out very quickly where it should be reported, or if reporting it is even any point at all. There’s little point in bothering your local police about it if it isn’t even a local problem they can deal with.
  ~

[rfgdxm]

@DougC

If it disturbs you, your best bet is to email your ISP about it. An admin (sitting right there at a computer, and who knows a whole lot about the internet anyway) can quickly find out where the material is residing and can figure out very quickly where it should be reported, or if reporting it is even any point at all. There’s little point in bothering your local police about it if it isn’t even a local problem they can deal with.
~

No, no, NO. How could an Internet sysadmin determine if it should be reported at all? He/she would have to download what you told them was apparently child porn to check it out. THAT could be enough to get them convicted and a registered sex offender. The Usenet sysadmin I referred to said he would never download anything he suspected was KP.

If anyone accidentally found KP on the Net and is determined to report it, the only sane way would be to report it to the FBI in an anonymous way. This could fairly effectively be done at a cybercafe or such using an anonymous e-mail remailer. It would likely be near impossible for the FBI to prove who sent that e-mail even if they tried.

[DougC]

…No, no, NO. How could an Internet sysadmin determine if it should be reported at all? He/she would have to download what you told them was apparently child porn to check it out. THAT could be enough to get them convicted and a registered sex offender. The Usenet sysadmin I referred to said he would never download anything he suspected was KP…

• • • The problem with this line of thinking is that (at least in the US) there’s a matter of criminal intent. I’d be surprised if any judge in the US would throw you in jail for unwittingly visiting a KP site one time. It is already widely known that for technical reasons relating to URL spoofing, redirects and trojans, your browser can end up on any website without your knowledge or consent. And if you have read the news stories, the people they usually catch distributing/producing KP tend to have thousands of images and movies, vast collections. Not just a few files. Someone who runs across a single site and tries to report it simply doesn’t fit the typical profile.
• Secondly, if you reported the KP site to your ISP, the FIRST thing they’d want to ensure is that it wasn’t on their servers, and they might also possibly elect to add the domain name to their spam filters (if they run one). They could find that out just by looking up info on the web address, visiting the site isn’t even necessary. And after they did that, if the server providing the material is located on another continent, there’s simply no reason to bother your local police dept or even the national-level police department (of your country) about it at all, because there’s very likely nothing they can do.
  ~

[DrDeth]

@DougC

• • • The problem with this line of thinking is that (at least in the US) there’s a matter of criminal intent. I’d be surprised if any judge in the US would throw you in jail for unwittingly visiting a KP site one time. It is already widely known that for technical reasons relating to URL spoofing, redirects and trojans, your browser can end up on any website without your knowledge or consent.
      ~

That didn’t help the few we have been talking about, see the posts by Alan Smithee, Hilarity N. Suze and myself. Even if a Judge and jury decides you’re innocent, your reputation is shot, you may lose your job, and you’re out perhaps 10’s of thousand of $$ in legal fees.

Some Prosecutors are just plain not taing a reasonable approach- they are either super-bluenoses or are using the arrests for political reasons. Sad, but True. It’s simply not worth the risk.

Thus, as I said- Say nothing, and scrub the hell out of your computer.

[Princhester]

@awldune

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).

Yep, a few newsgroups I’ve been to every now and again are spammed with the stuff occasionally. And of course the effin’ spammers put misleading headers on so you don’t know what you’re getting into. Gives me the shits.

[Princhester]

@Excalibre

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.

If you’re in Outer Mongolia or where ever, anonymity doesn’t need to be preserved, you are beyond the long arm of the law anyway.

[Wallenstein]

@Alan Smithee

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.

Hmm… having read the article it’s not exactly as it seems.

Dr Parker didn’t “stumble across” one or two images - he had quite a few, gathered over several months, and claimed he was helping the police by doing “undercover research”.

That’s immediately a bit fishy!

And then he claimed he “didn’t have time” to save the images to a disk (or print them out) and drop them by the FBI office - which was on his route to work - doesn’t sound right to me.

It’s similar to the rock musician Pete Townsend (from The Who) - he was caught in Operation Ore using his credit card to access kidde porn, and he claimed that he was “doing reseach” as he was abused in his childhood and wanted to get more information about it.

At the risk of straying into GD territory, it’s more likely the case that Dr Parker and similar individuals are not hardcore paedophiles, but just blokes curious to see what all the fuss is about. There’s always a thrill at looking at “the forbidden” - the taboo has a powerful draw, and kiddie porn is probably one of the last really strong taboos we have in society today.

The law, as has been pointed out, doesn’t make that distinction - I’d echo the advice others have given:

• scrub your hard-drive (and really scrub it, don’t just delete folders - blitz them with a proper data-cleaner).

• make a note of when and where you found the images but don’t volunteer it to the police unless they come looking for you

• take more care to avoid dodgy sites; kiddie porn doesn’t just float about, you have to be looking at certain types of site to stumble across it in my experience.

Finally - be aware that even evidence that you’ve scrubbed your computer can be used to point towards your guilt! Theory is: you must have had something to hide.

[rfgdxm]

@DrDeth

That didn’t help the few we have been talking about, see the posts by Alan Smithee, Hilarity N. Suze and myself. Even if a Judge and jury decides you’re innocent, your reputation is shot, you may lose your job, and you’re out perhaps 10’s of thousand of $$ in legal fees.

Some Prosecutors are just plain not taing a reasonable approach- they are either super-bluenoses or are using the arrests for political reasons. Sad, but True. It’s simply not worth the risk.

Thus, as I said- Say nothing, and scrub the hell out of your computer.

Not worth the risk. Scrub it away. And if for whatever reason you absolutely, positively feel you must report it, jot down where it is located (such as URL, what Usenet newsgroup, etc.), scrub your system, and then anonymously report it. If the Feds do want to go after the bad guys, the copies of the KP on your system aren’t what they need. They need to find it on the systems of those distributing it.