Reply #74: It does seem odd, doesn't it?

[Occulus]

"It does seem incredibly strange to me, though, that Restronics would somehow mix up the child pornography on his computer and contaminate other computers with it. I'm wondering why they're not getting charged, as well."

Absolutely. In fact, there is only one possible way the images got onto the second computer after Restronix gained possession of both of them, and that's if an employee put them there.

One barely possible scenario: the tech doing the restoration wants to test the network hardware of two PCs from the same location, so he decides to try to transfer all the images from PC A to PC B. Then, he looks at the images on PC B to see confirm they came across the network intact, and "ZOMGWTF KID PR0N I needz has cops". However, while reasonable, this doesn't take into account the huge gap between finding the images and reporting them to the police; that fact all by itself should have turned the prosecutor's attention to the company's employees.

The only way my scenario could be true is if the images on PC B were the same as the images on PC A. If they're an identical set, that might be what happened. If they're altogether different photos, someone at Restronix is downloading kid porn and using other people's PCs to hide it. They'll get caught when someone gets their PC back from the company, finds the pictures, and calls the police.

I'd also like to state that I or any other reasonably competent individual with a decent knowledge of the internet and computers in general could easily "borrow" your laptop for a few hours, load it up with child porn, and hide it such that you'd just never find it, turn you in for having it, and completely ruin your life.

I think these charges are far too easy to bring, and far too difficult to defend against. Short of operating a RAID array on a second, physical box locked up elsewhere so you can prove the images were in fact planted- something few users in general know how to do- you can't prove you didn't get the images yourself.

Some out there might be saying, "what if you set up multiple accounts on your computer?" But that's the thing- it's your computer, and as the sysadmin, you have root access, so the fact that images might be in someone else's /home/user or C:\Documents and Settings\... directory means nothing. You still have access.

What a nightmare.