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posted by janrinok on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the gotta-play-by-the-rules-and-thems-the-rules dept.

AP reports that a federal appeals court has overturned a civilian's conviction for possessing and distributing child pornography because he was found out by a military investigator who used a high-powered software program in 2010 to search computers throughout the state of Washington. When the program picked up two child porn images and a video, the agent contacted the FBI, which tracked down the suspect's name and address. The naval office then got in touch with local police, who obtained a search warrant. The Department of Homeland Security later got a federal search warrant, and the suspect was charged in federal court.

When the search was challenged, the government argued that the search was justified because there are military bases in the greater Seattle area, and it's a crime for military members to distribute child pornography. Those actions, the three-judge panel said, violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that prohibits the U.S. military from taking part in civilian law enforcement activities. The ruling said the search was so sweeping, it shows "a profound lack of regard for the important limitations on the role of the military in our civilian society." It noted "abundant evidence" that the Navy frequently hacks into civilian computers to search for evidence of child pornography and turn it over to the police if the computer owner has no relation to the military. "This is, literally, the militarization of the police," says defense attorney Erik Levin. "They have enough funding that they can go out and stray from the core mission of national security and get into local law enforcement."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by bornagainpenguin on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:03PM

    by bornagainpenguin (3538) on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:03PM (#94696)

    Fun fact: there is almost certainly child pornography encoded in the Bitcoin blockchain. I've seen forum posts where people have linked to specific transactions which they claimed to have stored child porn in, but I've never actually checked to make sure. Files can be stored to the blockchain in a couple of ways, but the classic one is just sending coins to a series of addresses that aren't real. Put end-on-end, the fake addresses form whatever bits of data you want to store.

    So all of corporate mining operations, all of the true believers, they're all storing child pornography. It's a bit scary to think that those in power could use "think of the children" as an excuse to shut down Bitcoin.

    Of course there is, who do you think put it there, expressly for the purpose of tainting the entire currency by association and for eventual use to justify its future illegality?

    Sad thing is, I find myself paying much more attention to the crazies as more and more often it's turning out they're right about many things. Scary thing, when I consider some of the things I still scoff at to have that small voice in the back of my head going 'What if they're right about $insane_theory too?' and I sometimes wish I could go back to the days when so much of the current reality was called cyberpunk fiction not predictions of a future yet to come...

    Not bothering to post Anonymously since it is increasingly meaningless these days.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by JNCF on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:49PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:49PM (#94709) Journal

    Of course there is, who do you think put it there, expressly for the purpose of tainting the entire currency by association and for eventual use to justify its future illegality?

    I'm not saying that the government wouldn't do that, but I think the paedophiles might have beat them to the punch. I'm not sure which motive I find creepier.

    Sad thing is, I find myself paying much more attention to the crazies as more and more often it's turning out they're right about many things. Scary thing, when I consider some of the things I still scoff at to have that small voice in the back of my head going 'What if they're right about $insane_theory too?'

    There are three types of conspiracy theories: the ones which are correct, the ones which are incorrect but well meaning, and the purposeful fictions. If I were a government with an absurd black budget and a history of conspiracies, I'd want to spread some purposeful fictions around to make the facts and falsehoods harder to tell apart.

    Which (non-proven) conspiracy theories do you consider to be within the realm of reason?

    I sometimes wish I could go back to the days when so much of the current reality was called cyberpunk fiction not predictions of a future yet to come...

    Dystopian cyberpunk fiction. But really, we've been heading in this direction for the last 5000 years or so. So it goes.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:50PM (#94732)

      I'm not saying that the government wouldn't do that, but I think the paedophiles might have beat them to the punch. I'm not sure which motive I find creepier.

      I think you guys are missing a third and much more likely option - somebody did it for the lulz. 4chan has a history of that sort of thing, there were even rumors of people finding FBI "honeypot" websites and embedded images from them on 4chan in order to trick people's browsers into accessing the honeypot and getting in the FBI's logs of people to persecute.

      • (Score: 1) by JNCF on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:56PM

        by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:56PM (#94733) Journal

        Yeah, that's probably fair.