Child porn, new witch hunt?

An Ottawa man accused of possessing and distributing child porn might have owned the Internet account used to send the images, but was not necessarily the person at the keyboard, the man's lawyer suggested yesterday.

www.canoe.ca...

I have no opinion on this guys guilt and I certainly have no sympathy for child pornographers, but I do think this story illustrates an important point.

It's easy to hack e-mail accounts. So many users of the internet today are innocent, don't really know how things work and fail to take even the most basic security measures. Spoofers routinely gather e-mail accounts and passwords for their own uses. How can anyone really say who owns what e-mail account? How many people go to jail for this sort of thing who are really just innocent dupes?

not to mention it could have just been spam. I've recieved spam advertising child porn several times in my university email account (I swear, I've never recieved so much spam as I do in that account), despite having no real interest in adult porn, let alone child porn. darn email.

edit: by the way, the article link seems to be a 404 page now.

[Edited on 9/10/2003 by MorningtonCrescent]

Exactly! I'm always reading about how some law enforcement officer "recovered" pictures off someones hard drive. Well, if you visit a website, all the pictures there get onto your hard drive, and you don't know what they are until you're already looking at them and by then it's too late.

reply to post by Mycroft


that is simply not true, my wife works for CEO, here in the UK,
they can tell if you have just looked at a site or downloaded pics, they can also tell how long you stay on a page for.

snoopyuk

Originally posted by snoopyuk
reply to post by Mycroft

 

that is simply not true, my wife works for CEO, here in the UK,
they can tell if you have just looked at a site or downloaded pics, they can also tell how long you stay on a page for.

snoopyuk

You beat me to it.

I can assure you that forensic searches of your hard drive and OS will reveal every thing that you clicked / linked / copied / downloaded OR just happend to stumble across and didn't actively do anything on that particular page.

What they can recover is awesome - I have seen fire damaged partialy destroyed hard drives give up amazing amounts of info for the police to work with.

N.B. I was NOT a Police officer - I was a civilian employee.