Ever Visit a Porn Site? Even Accidentally? Your Hard Drive Could Be Used as Evidence Against You! - 18,445 Views, 10 Comments
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Have you ever visited a porn site, even accidentally? Sure, it really does happen by accident. Heck, it’s happened to me, when I accidentally typed WhiteHouse.com instead of WhiteHouse.gov (don’t do it! It starts opening unstoppable and horribly graphic windows!) Ok, so you all know that accidents can happen. What you may not know is that files from websites you visit can be downloaded and stored on your hard drive without you even realizing it. Often, for example, they often end up in a Temporary Internet Files folder. Now, imagine that you accidentally ended up at a pornography site which caters to people who like younger “models”. And even though you left even more quickly than you got there, those graphics files ended up in your hard drive, in that Temporary Internet Files folder. Now, it may or may not have been by accident, and we may never know, but that is exactly what happened to Edward Ray Barton, who was recently convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison for “possession” of pornography of that younger model nature. Where was that pornography? In his Temporary Internet Files folder on his hard drive. In fact, according to one of the prosecution’s own witnesses, “the files named in the indictment against Barton were in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder only.” This is going to be one interesting appeal. At issue will be, ultimately, the definition of “possession” of those pornographic files. While I of course do not condone the alledged underlying activity here, Lord help us all if files installed on your hard drive without your knowledge are enough to be considered “possession” of those files for criminal purposes.
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Ever Visit a Porn Site? Even Accidentally? Your Hard Drive Could Be Used as Evidence Against You!
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For some time I have been expecting the next nasty level of viruses to download a porn image with the virus.
Comment by Fred Boness — 6/18/2005 @ 1:32 am
And that is what a ramdisk is for. To help protect yourself, simply set your browsers temporary internet files directory to your ramdisk. That way the junk is never on your hard drives,and goes away the second you kill the power. I switched to this years ago after viewing some of the files in my temp internet directory and found pictures of things that never crossed my screen. Or if they did,it was done in a tenth of a second and written over before I could ever see it. I was rather shocked to see what was hidden without my knowledge on my drive. This works well with IE, however some of the other browsers do not seem to give you the option of where they store what.
Comment by Lee — 6/19/2005 @ 6:47 am
“Heck, it’s happened to Aunty, when she accidentally typed WhiteHouse.com instead of WhiteHouse.gov (don’t do it! It starts opening unstoppable and horribly graphic windows!)”
Doesn’t look like that’s the case anymore. It looks like there’s no porn site anymore any it will be a site to search public records. How’s that for a change?
Comment by Angry Canadian — 6/19/2005 @ 1:18 pm
Nice. If I receive spam, and it automatically gets filtered to the spam directory, then I could be in posession of illegal materials, and never know it. To me that is the same thing as a temporary internet folder.
Comment by gfox — 6/19/2005 @ 3:18 pm
Lets see, 450 porn pictures and 156 images of child porn, I don’t think this guy accidently down loaded the child porn pictures. The argument by his defense was that he viewed the child porn pictures on the internet but he did not physically down load them. This is a far cry from inadvertently going whitehouse.com and getting bombarded by porn.
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?show
=localnews&pnpID=730&NewsID=639021&CategoryID=3511&on=0
Comment by chris — 6/22/2005 @ 1:27 am
This is Big Brother at it’s worst! Now we have the Porn Police(state and Federal) to contend with, or is it the Gestapo for the Protection of Public Morals? Add to that the fact that the FBI and numerous local law-dogs monitor certain internet websites, posing as users, in order to trap(entrap?) bad boys.
I have two questions:
(1) Why are the authorites so obsessed with monitoring there own citizens’ computer activities, when they can’t even monitor illegal entrants, many of whom could be terrorists(some have already proven to be such)?
(2)Why are they pursueing computer USERS who have either purposely, or accidently, downloaded porn? Seems like they should be going after the REAL culprits here…those that place the porn on the internet in the first place. This is tatamount to arresting some guy smoking pot while the guy selling it is ignored!
Another question: Can anyone provide a reference to the law that makes it an offense to “download” porn. I would like to read it’s specifics.
I would sure like to have those questions answered , or otherwise hear anyone’s responses to them.
Damn, I hope the ACLU and some clear-headed lawmakers are monitoring this travesty of justice!
Comment by Travis — 9/6/2005 @ 1:19 am
Can you help ? the police say they have found child porn on my Hard drive , not files i dont know how it got there i think it came from a Trojan virous i was watching some over 18 porn then the computer went mental and about 100 pages flashed through i took the computer to the menders and he cleaned out the files ,then he phoned the cops ,
Comment by Lucas — 10/16/2006 @ 2:38 pm
hi
Comment by raj — 12/14/2007 @ 9:00 am
I download porn. Right or wrong, I do, so now that’s out there i can get to my point and ask for some advice. Now, I’m more than aware that there are videos out there whose titles allude to paedophile material, but not being one I steer clear of that stuff with a barge pole. But the other night i downloaded a video and in it there’s a guy with a white circle covering his face. The girl in the video doesn’t look underage to me, but since the quality is not amazing making it hard to determine how old she might be and there’s this white circle thing it’s played on my mind a bit and I’m concerned the police are going to come smashing through my door at any minute.
How can i report it, and who can i report it to?
How can i stop ’sharing’ it?
It baffles me there is stuff available out there like this just floating around but I’ve always just figured that if there was a way to stop it it would have been stopped, so I’ve never thought to contact anyone about the titles that you see, but now I’ve landed with something even dubious I just don’t want any involvement in it.
Comment by Sean — 2/2/2008 @ 8:50 am
Many times child porn is packaged with the over-18 variety. The law should take this into account.
Comment by J — 3/30/2009 @ 3:40 pm