Child abuse frame-up backfires on stalker

Very VERY lucky

That man is very VERY lucky that the crook in question was not the smartest cookie in the box and that the police decided to follow it all the way through!.

Thinking about it...

didn't he notice his HDD missing and report this to the police or did the guy replace the HDD?

Was the HDD a copy of the old so he wouldn't notice, or did the guy hope he'd just assume some kind of corruption?

I'm curious now!

Obviously

The Finnish police are better at their job than British plod. Over here the poor victim would have been `caught bang to rights chummy` and chucked in the nick without proof that he'd actually done the crime.

re: obviously

How long exactly has Basildon been in finland Blubster ?

Or did your jaw get tired before you reached the end ?

And I would have gotten away with if not for.....

The scary thing is that if he had been smarter about not leaving such a huge obvious trail he would have gotten away with it. I feel so sorry for the victim who was treated like a pedo (stopped from seeing his children etc), probably for quite awhile before the police got properly on the case.

This case is supposed to show the people in the forums here who always say that you aught to send or in some way plant illegal pr0n to MPs computers and get them arrested that it would not work. It reads like the opposite to me. Just need to wait for someoneto put together a tojan / virus that instead for nicking your bank details, puts illegal pr0n on unsuspecting peoples computers....

Then again if the everone in the country was being arrested for sex offenses maybe it would give the politians pause. Then again probably not....

if

If the guy hadn't posted the hard disk and instead left a tip off with ceop I'm sure he'd have got away with it.

Hmm.

"The man was arrested, and subsequently prohibited from visiting his home or seeing his children."

Presumed innocent, eh?

With a bit more time and effort...

...its possible to stitch someone up without the holes this idiot fell into.

Although I'd have to download the files to his PC without looking at them as it would be hard to un-see them.

passwords

I suppose it's a sound reason to keep even your home PC password-protected.

Scary thought

All this talk about password protecting your machine...

If the guy HAD encrypted his hard disk, what's to stop the guy who broke in installing a hardware key logger to get the key, THEN planting the evidence and making an anonymous phone call (or indeed sending off the HDD).

When the plod ask the guy for his password (which it's a crime not to reveal) only for them to then find this stuff which HAS to be his...after all it's on his encrypted HDD!..

Maybe in this case more security would actually shoot yourself in the foot?

Surely...

if someone posts a disk to the police annonymously, the very FIRST thing the police should consider is that the person who posted it might have tampered with it?

Innocent until proven guilty remarks

Rock - Police - Hard place

Hindsight ftw eh? ffs...

Do you allow *everyone* that is charged with sex offences free access to their children, or nobody? You're screwed either way of course, as if you let them have access and they subsequently turn out to have abused that access there will rightly be uproar (after all, you knew the risk and you let people face it) or you don't let them and it turns out there was nothing awry.

Mindreaders don't exist, it takes time to *properly* investigate matters so you have a period of time where you must choose between protecting the vulnerable people or protecting the rights of the person being investigated. Both are civil rights issues - how do you balance them?

The safest option is to restrict access - you protect the most vulnerable parties at the smallest expense possible. Welcome to the real world. Yes, it sucks. Ofc if you have a "perfect" alternative that could never be wrong feel free to post it.

I agree but

I agree it's a fine line to tread but surely if you get posted a hard drive saying it contains illegal stuff and was taken from x persons home without their knowledge or consent...surely that sets enough alarm bells ringing that your first step ISN'T arresting and JAILING someone (people in jail accused of kiddy porn have a very poor health outlook), tearing up a familly and ruining lives on basically heresay, a randomly posted HDD is NOT evidence for obvious reasons...at least it SHOULDN'T be.

It doesn't say how long this guy was jailed for, but it will probably be on his E-CRB check for life now.

On that note...if he only had the one HDD, and that was stolen then posted to the police...what could possible remain on the PC to count as evidence???

Surely nothing would have survived in RAM...

Maybe ISP records IF he did indeed DL the stuff from inside the house and it was web based pron.....I don't suppose the fact it would have been done while they were both in bed would count for much, and on the same night the house was broken into and the said same HDD stolen....too much just doesn't add up.

I just really want more detail on this case.

On the one hand it sounds like UK plod did a good job, on the other hand it seems like another imense F**K up that they were able to back pedal and make look good....

instead

What if the bad guy installed a backdoor and downloaded the porn in the evening when the dad was home, remotely?

Would the cops have asked for the ISP data and forensically parsed the HDD for a deleted backdoor? Also, would a deleted backdoor and an encrypted IP connection to ... uhhh Bob (the bad guy @ internet cafe) among others constitute a defense of any kind? If so, download a backdoor and connect to someone before you download questionable things next time.

(Also, instead of taking HDD and sending it to cops, Bob the bad guy just posts the pics he downloaded to/from the internet somewhere and/or posts links in forums etc. All remotely from Starbucks of course.)

The Victim was away when the HDD was stolen

Could it also be that it was an EXTERNAL HDD? That would leave a working PC and enough time to put the pre-downloaded stuff on and send the police the HDD whilst posing as a 'concerned friend'.

Missing Drives and Missing Witts,

To all the people wondering how the victim didn't notice that his disc was missing, nowhere in the article did it say that it was an internal drive.

From my limited experience of these kinds of people, some of them have such a sense of entitlement that they see anyone who interferes, even their love interest his/her self, as committing a crime against the universe itself. Once someone's got that mindset they expect absolutely everyone to assist them, he might well have believed that he just needed to make a token effort, and then the police would "see the light" and not really bother with technical details.

It's almost surprising that he bothered using a drive that had belonged to his victim, rather than just copying the data onto a USB stick and posting it to the plods.

Fair point

That's why i want to know more about this case to know how paranoid I should be about my security :)

(it's already pretty stupid as it is!)

exactly

There are so many ways this could have succeded that it's bloody scary.

In this case I suspect the postage of the HDD was what set the alarm bells off and it seems the plod did a good job following up.

What worries me is if someone a tad more competent tried this how technical ARE the cops, I know virus infected PC's have both succeded and failed as defences against having this stuff on PC's.

To be honest you can be as paranoid as you like, if someone really has the time, desire and access they will find a way (spy camera hidden in your home pointing at your PC?, buy the same keyboard as you and physically install a key logger inside it and replace yours etc)

So the only question really becomes:

A) How technical ARE the plod..here it sounds more like old fashion police work of putting 2 and 2 together rather than a tehcnical resolution.

B) How bad is the knee jerk THINK OF THE CHILDREN reaction, are the fathers always going to be Jailed and stigmitised on such....I don't like to use the word evidence....lunacy?

C) We are seeing more and more laws specifying how a suspect should be treated based on their technical knowledge and competency, will having more defence simply incrimnate you more if someone managed to bypass them either sociall engineering or technically?

are we better off simply having no password, auto login, open wifi, no AV, no firewall, feign ignorance.....seems to be the way forward :(

I understand it's an emotive issue...and we don't have full details..but it doesn't sound good.

DNA database records?

"The man was arrested, and subsequently prohibited from visiting his home or seeing his children The Times reports"

Does that mean he's now on the Sex Offenders register with his DNA profile in the DNA database? Can he get his records removed? Or will they be kept for the next 5/10/indefinitely years?

So can 'dad' still volunteer with children now?

After all, there's been allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him leading to his arrest. Wouldn't this show up on the CRB check?

What if someone else lodges a false complaint? Especially if they know that doing so would bolster the case against him. "Arrested twice, huh?"

What about that american visa waiver question - he's been arrested for moral terpitude, so presumably he can't get the waiver online ... does he now have to carry documentation to determine his innocence in the matter?