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.