It's the same thing when someone gets the "sex offender" label -- for all we know it just might mean a guy was caught urinating off his back porch.

How much of the problem is that prosecutors aren't doing their job, part of which IS to use prosecutorial discretion to decide which cases to move forward with and which not to?

They mainly seem to be tough on crime is good for re-election.

"Oops, I accidentally downloaded kiddie porn!"

Um... not sure I buy it.

"But I only had 5 kiddie porn videos and that other guy had a hundred!"

STFU, not an excuse.

Someone remarked that as laws (and mores) become more liberalized, those laws that remain start to seem draconian. I guess because all the underpinnings are gone, people have forgotten the context, etc.

Anyway, I think this falls in that category. That plus the heavily militarized police.

Yeah, this smells fishy. I'm not buying his story. She's trying to tout the masters degree etc as proof he didn't do this intentionally. Sorry chica, kiddie diddlers come in all social backgrounds so that has nothing to do with anything.

If her kid had been kidnapped and drugged and used for those pics, I doubt she'd be chill with it cause he was well educated.

@NicoleK: Here's a thought experiment for you.

Your phone buzzes at you one day and when you check to see who sent you a text message, you find yourself face-to-face with the unsolicited picture of a nude, obviously-underage person in a sexually suggestive position.

Your task is to stay out of prison. How do you accomplish this?

Take all the time you like.

NicoleK, momof4, have you ever accidentally downloaded porn, the legal kind, just using google or bing or ?

It's probably not that difficult to accidentally download the illegal kind -- I would only rarely put my trust in the integrity and values of many players in the porn world.

As the article says, if it's 1 - 5 pictures, found in a web broweser's cache and not stored in user folder somewhere, it's probably an accident, and not at all the behavior of a collector.

Yeah, this smells fishy. I'm not buying his story. She's trying to tout the masters degree etc as proof he didn't do this intentionally. -- momof4 at May 23, 2013 1:28 PM

I have no problem believing it.

Way back in the late nineties when dial-up was king I would set up my PC to download the porno pics off the alt. newsgroups during the night and then go to bed.

I would generally go through them the next day. Every few weeks, when going through to decide what to keep or trash, a few pictures would be kiddie porn. I just deleted them and went on.

Whoever uploaded them couldn't really be found. There were no logons required to post the pics, no real IP address to track, etc. Hell the person didn't even have to be in the U.S.

So I can easily how this happened.

I downloaded some old public domain recording over a P2P, I want paying attention and downloaded the whole thing, buried in it was a file of torrents for some boot leg copies of movies from this year which uploaded to my torrent manager and began downloading without my permission. So his story doesnt sound that fishy

"Unintentionally downloaded"? What is it? A trojan horse?

Unless he's trying to say that the kiddie porn is malware which downloads itself, it was no accident. He quite intentionally downloaded it.

Your phone buzzes at you one day and when you check to see who sent you a text message, you find yourself face-to-face with the unsolicited picture of a nude, obviously-underage person in a sexually suggestive position.

Your task is to stay out of prison. How do you accomplish this?

Take all the time you like.

In a word, bullshit. You have no idea what you're talking about. In the scenario you describe, someone sends it to you, you can see it. However, it is your decision to download it.

You cannot control what someone sends to you for your viewing. You can, however, control whether or not what someone sends to you ends up on your hard drive.

In much the same way, movies are viewed on line, without finding a permanent home on your hard drive. It is your conscious decision to take said movie and store it so that it has a permanent home in your computer, so that you can view it as often as you like, whether a connection is available or not.

The point being is that just because someone sends you something, that doesn't mean it's "downloaded." And your analogy is false. You have no control over what someone else sends you on your phone. You do have control over what websites you visit and what videos you choose to look at.

So, Pattie, you buy a book at a second hand store.

You step out the doors , drop it and some kiddie porn polaroids fall out - you just intentionally bought child porn, right?

Child porn is thought crime. Viewing it online or simple possession should not be illegal. A picture of an illegal sex act is just evidence of a crime. Paying to acquire child porn should be illegal, as it creates an incentive to produce it, just like paying an assassin creates incentive for murder.

I don't care if the guy in this story purposefully downloaded these images and then jerked off repeatedly. Even if doing so re-victimized the victim (which I doubt) the producer-abuser is the one who ought to be punished. Really the producer of the images should be doing this guy's five year sentence.

You also can't preview everything you download.

You can intentionally download a file, but not find out until after the fact that it is in fact child pornography, depending upon how something is labeled.

You might not even make the active decision to download child pornography.

Your smarter kiddie diddlers will infect other computers with viruses, which download child porn to the unprotected system, they can then remotely access and view the files on your computer, thus insulating themselves and making you the culprit when you get caught with it.

And yes, it has happened, and yes, people have gone to jail over it.

Further, it is not always obvious when something is child porn (No not talking about the very young) but some teens do not look like young teens, and you may have it without even knowing it.

Look if a guy has a hundred porno pictures and one of them turns out to be under age, but was deleted as soon as it was opened, its pretty obvious there was no malicious intent. A prosecutor with an ounce of sense would give the guy a stern talking to about reporting such images, so that they may have some hope of finding or identifying the poor kid.

Look a good many years ago I invited a bunch of guys I knew casually while overseas to come by my place before the start of a long weekend, we were going to have some drinks, then go out and bar hop, pick up girls or hit the red light district.

I invited them to use the internet, watch movies, play video games, and whatnot, with only two caveats, no driving home while drunk, car keys left locked up, and if they threw it up at night, they cleaned it up in the morning, and of course (3 not 2 rules) do nothing illegal.

After the weekend was over, I finally sat down at my computer and found that one of the 15-20 people I'd had over at my place had spent their time online viewing and downloading child porn from my computer. They'd tried to hide the folder they stored it in, but I'm a computer geek and found the search keys and file save path quickly.

My first reaction was to delete the files in disgust and horror, I've been to war, but never in my life had I seen something so vile, disgusting, and horrifying to my very soul, and I saw it in quantity.

My second reaction was to go and inform the authorities of what I had found, I turned over my computer and gave them a full statement of the events of the weekend, who I KNEW had used my computer, and who I could not be sure if they had or not. I gave them the names I knew and the numbers I knew, having a little girl and little boy at the time, what I saw hit very close to home. They held the system for about 8 months, the investigation into whom was responsible lasted almost as long, they finally identified a culprit and got a confession. The images and videos were turned over to the FBI to help identify those poor abused little ones. I don't know if they were ever able to do so.

When my system was returned, I didn't even want to look at it, 'sanitized' or not, I tossed it right into the dumpster.

But what if I hadn't reported it? What if my first instinct, 'delete it' had been my only action? What if someone had been monitoring the net then and tracked it to my system? What if I hadn't deleted it because I had no idea it was there?

I would have had no defense that could have protected me, I'd have been in the same situation as the person described in the situation above, and so would any of you.

I loathe and despise such predators and would love nothing more than to inflict agonizing death upon the abusers of little ones...

However sanity MUST prevail for us to have real justice, and horror at a crime, however horrifying it may be, must not result in us just jailing everyone just to be 'sure' we get the guilty.

Reasonable doubt and a pattern of behavior, a modicum of common sense, should help us in determining guilt. If a guy ends up with one or two fubar images that are immediately deleted right after they're opened, its obvious those are incidental and not an indication of abuse. If on the other hand, he ends up with them every single time or with a shocking degree of frequency at least, then you have something to go on and a valid concern about the safety of the most defenseless segment of society, its children.

Gee, Patrick - awful quick to claim others don't know what they're talking about, again. They're all wrong somehow. How does this happen?

This is ridiculous. Think about your having bought the idea that having a picture is a crime - let alone one or a hundred computer files.

Here's an airbrushed painting of a girl who does not exist.

How much of the painting has to be explicit to be a crime? How about if the subject looks like, but is NOT, underage?

How do you tell from your seat, in front of your desk?

Think you should be jailed for looking at this? It's totally legal. The link was on the Pelican Parts forums.

Whether you use a bittorrent client or a newsgroup to download ANY images, you simply cannot tell what the real content is until it is opened in a viewer. This is the reason library-computer censorship doesn't do much but get in the way. Oh, yeah, "DSC1885.jpg" is nasty, put that bastard in jail!

Tip: During the Reagan administration, Attorney General Meese was ordered to find a link between "pornography" and sex crimes. He couldn't find one. Nowadays, the goalpost has shifted: in an America where a father's picture of his female toddler gets him arrested, where he is banned from watching his daughter in swimming competitions, the apes have all banded together to see who can shout "Pedophile!" the loudest.

Meanwhile, a picture is not a person. Stab it, rip it, burn it - nothing happens to the person in the picture. Yet this means nothing to those who would claim a stick figure was obscene if it was labeled "10yoFemale".

"If on the other hand, he ends up with them every single time or with a shocking degree of frequency at least, then you have something to go on and a valid concern about the safety of the most defenseless segment of society, its children."

Why stop there? If you have a picture of Emma Watson, does that mean you want to rape her?

For the record, no!

Just because a file says it is Iron Man 2, doesn't make it so. You really have no idea what is in a file until you open it. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine downloaded a bunch of free public domain P90x spreadsheets via P2P trying to find one he liked to log his workouts. About a week later he calls me, absolutely terrified. Yep, one of the spreadsheet files was chock full of child porn.

I told him to keep his mouth shut and tell no one. I went over and shredded the file, over-wrote his entire hard drive, then reformatted the drive. Both of us would have preferred to report it, but it wasn't worth the risk.

@Patrick: When you receive a text message on your phone that includes a picture, your phone downloads that picture automatically. That's why you can see the picture in the first place. If it never downloaded the picture to your phone, you wouldn't be able to see what it was.

Now, would you care to give your answer to the scenario? Through no fault of your own, your phone contains sexually explicit picture of a minor. How do you stay out of prison?

Well, 'waste, Chris does not know what he's talking about. He created a totally false analogy. Viewing something online is not the same as downloading it, and if you don't think you can view something without downloading it, you've obviously never heard of YouTube.

Unless you're discussing malware, there is no such thing as "unintentionally downloaded."

"Viewing something online is not the same as downloading it, and if you don't think you can view something without downloading it, you've obviously never heard of YouTube."

WOW, WHAT COLOSSAL IGNORANCE. It also smacks of dishonesty, as you're trying to cite an exception.

Patrick. In order to display anything, material is downloaded to your computer. Use Disk Cleanup, and it will cheerfully show you how many MB, sometimes GB, you have in Internet cache files. Even if you use Internet Options to clear them when you exit your browser, that's not a secure erase option.

You will be prosecuted by the GUID, the Global Universal ID, which appears in the Internet server's log files. Your computer MUST identify itself and its browser in order to assemble what you see as content.

Install NoScript as a browser addon and see what links are automatically made for you when you visit a site.

I bet you think you're only connected to advicegoddess.com right now.

Nope.

Speaking of YouTube: I found this. That's apparently the daughter of a man jailed for child porn, on a site without nudity or person-person action. The models were in "suggestive poses". What does that mean?

If you have a copy of Lolita, Taxi Driver, Pretty Baby or Blue Lagoon, you should go to jail, right? (It's OK, I don't have 'em.)

Waste, tl;dr. yawn

NicoleK, Momof4 and Patrick, please remember that in the USA you're (supposed to be) presumed innocent until proven guilty. The stories of lujlp, Jim P., Robert, and especially Anon show just how plausible the story in the original article are, no matter how "fishy" you personally find it to be. This is something that could easily have happened to your husbands or friends. You don't even have to be downloading porn (see Anon). The case sure seems like a miscarriage of justice to me. Even if I'm wrong, and that particular guy IS a pedophile, if this is how such cases are "investigated" then innocent people are guaranteed to end up in prison. I don't know about you, but I find that incredibly distressing.

Damn, I didn't realize Patrick was a troll or I wouldn't have bothered. :( Ah well, live and learn I guess.

"Waste, tl;dr. yawn"

Which is why you remain confidently ignorant. You're simply wrong about how your computer interacts with the Internet - as anyone can see.

Brings to mind Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" with Chris Hansen. This show has the internet busybodies (although I'm sure they'd prefer the term "watchdogs") known as "Perverted Justice." Their decoys pose as underage children on the Internet and eventually, they attract the attention of perverts who entice them in into all kinds of juicy stuff, even after their contact has made it clear that they're underage.

They then go to a house to meet with what they think is a underage teen (actually an actor around eighteen or nineteen, but looks much younger). Once the actor has given enough information to identify themselves as the would-be perp, Chris Hansen walks out and self-righteously lectures them on the evils of sexually enticing someone who is underage.

Originally, after getting a tongue-lashing, they're free to go, although their interview will be broadcast. Then they changed the format. The local authorities got to join in the fun and arrest these guys as they left the house.

I asked a lawyer about this, because it seemed wrong. They're arresting someone who soliciting a minor (who wasn't actually a minor, either on the computer or in the house). But my friend the attorney assured me that the the mere attempt is sufficient to press charges.

This show was cancelled after it led to a suicide.

'Unless you're discussing malware, there is no such thing as "unintentionally downloaded."'

First there are zillions of malware sites on the net, and it doesn't matter if it is a virus on your computer, or spammers or click jackers or bot net owners why do you think malware is somehow rare?

All in all, Patrick's statement is as true as a statement saying the Internet runs on phlogiston farted by squirrels.

It demonstrates a complete non-understanding of how browsers and html work and web sites work.

Research web-bugs, google analytics, web trackers, ghostery, disconnect, browser accelerators, third party cookies,

Or click here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=legal%20teens%xxx&tbm=isch (nsfw) (potentially not legal at all)

The story is fishy because after 5 pictures were found, a warrant was obtained for further investigation. According to this article, nothing else was found.

Under some of the arguments above, we've all potentially been exposed to downloading child porn. Why don't we all know someone that this has happened to? Why aren't articles rampant with innocent people bei ng captured? A judge or jury will find innocence for true accidents.

The article writer sounds like she is in disbelief and is reporting the opinion her friend told her, not the facts of the case.

To Catch a Predator wasn't cancelled just because there was a suicide. The suicide came with a costly lawsuit of which the network didn't want to spend their time litigating the cases. Networks aren't in the business of right and wrong, they are in it to make money.

"Damn, I didn't realize Patrick was a troll or I wouldn't have bothered. :( Ah well, live and learn I guess."

Why is it as soon as someone has an unpopular opinion, (read-someone disagrees)they are referred to as trolls?

Anyway, I think the main point has been missed. Whether or not the man did it intentionally is not the issue.

Child predators are not going to be "fixed" by harsher and harsher sentences.

It is an illness. Some sickos like blow-up dolls and plastic va-jay-jays, some sickos like sheep, some like kids.

Throwing them in a box isn't going to cure them, nor will it give back the innocence to those who have lost it. You cannot "fix" a child predator, you cannot dissuade them, you cannot reason with them. They aren't stupid, they're sick. They know it's wrong. They know they hurt people, they know they destroy lives and do it anyway. No amount of therapy is going to fix it, and neither is locking them away.

Chemical castration, physical castration, or the death penalty. And the first two aren't really all that effective. They don't need a penis to do what they do.

It isn't always men either. Women, especially Catholic nuns, are just as guilty.

I should also add that most child predators were abused themselves.

As a former claims intake worker for minor survivors of sexual abuse, I can't begin to tell you the amount of cases where the abuser turned out to be the abused, once upon a time.

That isn't to say I condone or excuse their actions, merely to point out that it is a mental illness. In this case, an incurable one.

NikkiG: A judge or jury will find innocence for true accidents.

Don't be naive. Read the whole article. Or just let me quote for you: "As the presiding judge in his trial rightly identified, he is not a pedophile and poses no threat to society."

So why wasn't he set free? A mandatory sentencing law, fueled by irrational zero-tolerance thinking, tied the judge's hands. The files were downloaded and "distributed" (since the guy was using a P2P sharing program), therefore a sentence was required. Lack of malicious intent, lack even of knowledge of the files' content until after the download, didn't matter. Wasn't allowed to matter.

Why don't we all know someone that this has happened to?

Um, three commenters mentioned either themselves or someone they knew having child porn downloaded to their computers without their knowledge or consent. That's hardly insignificant. And why would you expect many to mention they accidentally downloaded child porn? It's disgusting and terrifying, both for its content and because plenty of people just don't believe someone could download it accidentally. People like you.

And I suspect that articles are not rampant with innocents being captured because 1.) the FBI can't come close to catching every time child porn is downloaded, intentionally or not, 2.) mandatory sentencing laws have not always been severely enforced (but are likely increasing along with the general rise of zero-tolerance thinking in the justice system these days), and 3.) again, hardly anyone believes someone who ends up with child porn on their computer could be innocent.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how rare such innocents are, although they are surely less rare than you think. They don't deserve to be labeled sex offenders and lose five years of their lives in prison. By the way, that's also a horrible, horrible waste of our tax money. Only getting rid of mandatory sentencing laws will allow justice in such cases. But today everyone seems to want to assume guilt and crack down on crime, even when there is no criminal intent. No one believes that they or their loved ones could innocently run afoul of a flawed law until it's too late. It's more and more likely to happen to you though, if things continue like this.

Damn, I didn't realize Patrick was a troll or I wouldn't have bothered. -- Chris at May 24, 2013 6:33 AM

No he isn't a troll, he just wants to be willfully ignorant. Look at the link he posted over here. That is is because someone's civil liberties are being infringed.

But then he is on the TSA side here.

I really don't know how someone holds the conflicting ideas in their mind at the same time.

A coworker was yakking over the last two days about someone he knew who has been convicted of DWI (Driving While Intoxicated) because the arresting officer insisted he must be...even when the breathalyzer and then a blood test found no intoxicating substances. Yes, a jury convicted them. Though I guess today the jury hung-over over the punishment.

This is the sentence that makes me doubt his story:

"(This number is minuscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of images and videos that are collected by serious offenders.)"

Because it sounds a LOT like "Oh I was just a little bad, not as bad as those guys so I shouldn't be punished. I'm not a SERIOUS offender, just a dilettante!"

Serious, 1 or 1,000, if you downloaded it, you downloaded it.

Now, I AGREE that if it really was an accident, then yes, it needs to be looked into. But him saying, "Oh I only had a few" makes me very, very suspicious.

NicoleK, he didn't even say what you're quoting. That was his friend and the author of the article. I can understand that phrase gets your hackles up. I don't think it was meant as an excuse, but rather to show the numbers actual pedophiles tend to collect. But anyway, you are calling the guy suspicious for defending himself with something he never once said, which is mad. Did you read the article?

Again, the case was "looked into", the guy was monitored closely by the FBI for months and determined by the judge to be neither a pedophile nor a threat to society. Yes, the judge believed the download was unintentional. But the mandatory sentencing law did not allow exemption for an accident. Ridiculous? You bet! Yet it happened, thanks to a zealous prosecutor and bad law.

You accidentally download child porn, its not worth the risk to report it. If you dont now how to REALLY wipe out a hard drive I'd suggest removing it an burning it to slag with thermite

If you dont now how to REALLY wipe out a hard drive I'd suggest removing it an burning it to slag with thermite -- lujlp at May 25, 2013 8:10 PM

No need to go that far. Just open the case and then rub the platters with some steel wool.

True, but thermite is so much fun!!

I have a friend that is living this exact nightmare right now. He's facing 5-10 years in a federal prison and a lifetime SO label. His crime was searching for ADULT porn through peer-to-peer file sharing (limewire), and kiddie porn made it through. He deleted those file, kept the adult stuff - he likes videos of women squirting - and he now sits at home with an ankle bracelet waiting for his trial to start. So yeah, I believe it happens...a lot. I also believe the laws need to be changed. The umbrella reaches far too wide. As for why you don't think you know someone this has happened to, just wait. Unless laws are changed, we will all eventually know of someone who is in this hellish nightmare.