Experienced Child Pornography Criminal Defense
Sarasota 941-366-3506
June 2018
Has Child Pornography ever popped up on your Computer?
A lot of people look at adult pornography on their computer or cell phone. Doctors have even suggested that patients look at porn as an alternative and in addition to taking drugs for erectile dysfunction. The simple fact is that men (more than women) can be visually stimulated. There is however a danger. Some men become addicted to pornography. Porn addiction is becoming more and more of a problem. There are “self tests” you can take on the Internet to diagnose if you have this addiction.
Here is the real problem. If you look at adult porn long enough, eventually, by accident a child porn image may unintentionally pop up on your computer.You may have accidently clicked on a thumbnail, now knowing what it contained. You may have clicked on a JPG icon, and when it opened, discovered is was an image of a child being sexually abused. It may be an image that is 100% illegal, but you may have 100% seen it by pure accident. You may have used a search term that triggered both and adult and child porn image.
OMG, there is child porn on your computer. What do you do? It was an accident, what do you do?
You may think that if you delete it, it is deleted. It is not.
You may think it is gone, but it is not. It is still in your computer in the “unallocated space” part of your hard drive. The only way that ever takes anything totally off of a hard drive is wiping the hard drive totally clean and reformatting it. Cleaning programs do not work. If you take it to a computer shop to have them do it, and they find child porn, even if it was totally accidental, they will report it to the police. Do not become a criminal, a registered sex offender by accident.
Here is some good advice. Never, no never, use a peer to peer file sharing program like Shareaza or any of the “bittorrent” file sharing programs. If you are looking at adult porn and you ever see a link that says “download this program to view”, do not do it. You may accidently download a peer to peer file sharing program.
All child porn has what they call a hash value. It is like a fingerprint of an image. ICAC, the federally funded agency has a program that identifies any child porn image or video that is transmitted. The image is then tracked to an IP address. The police then have another program they use to come into a person’s computer via a peer to peer file sharing program and the police can actually download from a person’s computer anything in that file sharing program. They do this without the person’s knowledge or consent.
I have suspected for a long time that law enforcement may be posting links to child porn. I am not suggesting that they are posting child porn, but there is a lot of suspicious activity indicating that they may be responsible for people downloading certain peer to peer programs. If you have a file sharing program on your computer, take it off. No one should ever intentionally look at child pornography. The best way to not get arrested is to not commit a crime. What you have to avoid is “accidently” doing something the police will see as a crime.