Viet-Justice

Edward Ray Barton was recently convicted in a Walker County Superior Court case involving posession of child porngraphy. This is currently being appealed to the state supreme court. In the past the mere presence of it on a hard drive has been considered posession and we have utilized the same definition during the course of our investigations at the office. If the defense is successful merely visiting a web site and having its images cached in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder will no longer be considered material posession .

This is one of those legal cases that is sure to cause controversy and inflame many people. Sure most people think that child pornography is bad and that Barton should hang for posession. On the other hand this case is going to quite possibly end up protecting a lot of people.

According to some news outlets Barton is claiming his wife planted the child pornography on his computer. That’s an extremely plausible situation and quite honestly if you wanted to get back at someone planting some kiddy porn on their computer and calling the FBI on them would be a hell of a lot easier than hiring a hit man to off them. Barton’s wife would have had physical access to his computer, but something just as easy could happen without touching his computer. Spam email or popups from less than reputable sites could also plant images in a persons “Temporary Internet Files” as well.

Or take this scenario:

Get a webserver in a country where porn workers under the age of 18 are legal. Use Tor, SSH, or some other encrypted protocol to setup your web server. For added paranoia route through a computer in a neutral territory such as the Caymen Islands. Setup a political blog, or some other site to entice your future victims. Add some child pornography but set the display size to 1px by 1px. The visitors to the site will be downloading the full sized images to their computers without knowing it. Then take down the site and put up a real kiddy porn site, forward the logs to the FBI of all the people who had been visiting your site and claim that they used stolen credit cards to access your site. When the FBI sees what kind of site they used stolen credit cards on they’ll get a warrant to search for child porn and the usual stolen credit cards and identity theft. And of course they’ll find it because you’ve been seeding their hard drives with it the entire time.

As I said before it’s an inflamatory issue and I’m sure many people would argue that taking this avenue of catching pedophiles out of the picture would be wrong and limit the courts in prosecuting these sickos. To those people I would say beware of who you piss off. There’s no telling how far a former friend or disgruntled co-worker would go to ruin your life and the way the law is today it’s very easy for them to do just that.