'I was falsely branded a paedophile'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7326736.stm

by jacquesm • 16 years ago

84 84 16 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

danskil• 16 years ago

This is really horrible, but i can't help but be reminded of the episode of "The IT Crowd" Where the lead character goes on a date with Peter File. Just goes to show how much value all societies place on titles, no matter how un-deserved.

colonelxc• 16 years ago

Wow, that is the first thing I thought of too.

That's the terrible thing about even being accused of a crime (regardless of your innocence), it can still destroy your life. Even if it's not a bad title (as in this case), just having to defend your own innocence can have high costs (both legal and emotional).

ido• 16 years ago

Took me a second to understand who "Peter File" is...Doesn't really sound that similar to Pedophile when I say it.

jrockway• 16 years ago

It's time for society to realize that "accused of a crime" does not mean "guilty". It should be illegal to fire someone because they are accused of a crime. (And if your parents disown you, it means you have damn bad parents who you are probably better off without.)

ErrantX9• 16 years ago

Damn straight on the employment thing. Suspension is reasonable in certain cases (say you work in a bank and are suspected of fraud) But sacking? Hell no.

dantheman4• 16 years ago

You should be able to fire someone for any reason. It's immoral to fire people accused of crime, you should treat your employees with respect, but there should be no law involved.

timthorn• 16 years ago

It is in the UK (well, it's unlawful rather than illegal, but the gentleman should have recourse to an employment tribunal)

abstractbill• 16 years ago

In case anyone else was curious about the difference between unlawful and illegal: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1609/whats-the-diff...

ErrantX9• 16 years ago

It's a difficult scenario and definitely an extreme example. It's hard to see what could have gone differently (apart from the family and employers being douches)

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

I would say that more than one piece of evidence would have to be brought before arresting someone, and they should have had a very good look at the counter-evidence, which was apparently already available at the time of the arrest.

Very sloppy police work this, basically someones life got altered indelibly for something he really had nothing to do with.

Just think of it, credit card numbers + matching expiry dates and CVVs are for sale in bulk on underground black markets, every piece of evidence found in a case as serious as this should be held to the highest standards before taking steps that can't be undone.

Since his computer wasn't implicated at all before it was seized, if they had tried to tie the case to the guys IP they would have seen he had nothing to do with it immediately that shouldn't have happened at all.

This was simply a fishing expedition and a mans life was changed in a very bad way because of it.

ErrantX9• 16 years ago

What other information? An ip address? Not particularly relevant.

In th case of indecent images the police are pretty much required to investigate with evidence of this type. Not doing so is just too dangerous all round for them.

I'd say this was just one of the extreme cases your always going to come across. It sucks, lots.

Edit: by required I mean its shaky legal ground not to pursue it aggressively. Especially if he suspect is a parent. If hey ignore it and it turns out the guy is guilty they are fucked, badly. The differing ip address is important but only circumstantial because ips are two a penny.

zmmmmm• 16 years ago

> It's hard to see what could have gone differently

Really??? It would have been trivial for them to check and see that the child porn was purchased in Indonesia they should have been able to do a very quick check on his border records and see that he did not visit there. Instead they were just lazy and cast a wide net and pulled everything in. I hope he considers suing them.

ErrantX9• 16 years ago

> It would have been trivial for them to check and see that the child porn was purchased in Indonesia

Not particularly trival. And more importantly accessing another IUP is trivial; there is common software for the purchase of this material that uses various random proxies to protect your location/identity.

The fact the IP address is in Indonesia tells us very little; tracing the actual IP to a physical location is relatively hard and time consuming. There isnt the money available to do that.

mynameishere• 16 years ago

who now sells encryption services

Also: How to use the internet through Indonesian proxies and install OSes on hidden volumes.

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

More likely: Be aware, your identity is easily assumed and 'bad people' may ruin your life very casually.

He's had an object lesson in the consequences, it lost him a ton of money, you really can't fault the guy from trying to recoup some of his losses with his new-found knowledge.

mprime3• 16 years ago

His "new-found knowledge" is what anyone here would call common sense.

enneff2• 16 years ago

If he was savvy enough to take any of those measures in the first place, why would he be stupid enough to type his credit card number in?

noonespecial• 16 years ago

The article indicates that his number was stolen from a well known and generally believed safe online retailer. Someone else was stupid enough to get his number stolen. His savvy-ness is irrelevant.

miguelpais• 16 years ago

Gotta love de virtual credit cards I use to buy stuff online (since I don't have a credit card, that's the only way I can buy online).

cousin_it• 16 years ago

So someone in Indonesia, using only a computer with Internet access, got a man in England arrested, labeled a pedo and disowned by his employers and family? We live in interesting times indeed. Hey guys, I live in Moscow, wanna set up a little extortion racket? I hear it's pretty easy to buy stolen credit card numbers in bulk.

...And also I'd like to go on record saying that the real villains in this story are those who fan up public hysteria about child porn.

mprime3• 16 years ago

It's upsetting to read that he just now started being wary of credit cards and shredding his papers. Someone should not have to go through such an ordeal before caring about the privacy of their personal information. The same goes for his "once bitten, twice shy" comment - why did he have to have his life ruined before being 'cautious' (a.k.a. exercising common sense) about online shopping?

Still, this is absolutely terrible. I think the police automatically assuming that anyone buying child porn was stupid enough to use their own credit cards is ignorant and obnoxious.

pyre4• 16 years ago

> why did he have to have his life ruined before being 'cautious' (a.k.a. exercising common sense) about online shopping

It's not even 'online shopping.' A couple of the huge cases of stolen identities were by employees at credit card processors, so it didn't matter how respectable or secure the stores themselves were.

sailormoon4• 16 years ago

"Being arrested and accused of what is probably one of the worst crimes known to man, losing my job, having my reputation run through the mud, it's a living nightmare."

I love how downloading a stream of bytes - simply copying a file from A to B - is now "one of the worst crimes known to man". I wonder how long this kind of crap goes on before the average person considers it a good use of their time to learn about encryption.

pyre4• 16 years ago

Well, you could argue in this case that the crime he was accused of was purchasing child porn which encourages and supports the producers though I have a feeling that the author just mean 'child porn' (in general) when he wrote that.

sailormoon4• 16 years ago

Funny how that argument only works with kiddie porn. I mean, you could argue that by buying Nikes you're encouraging and supporting child labor. You could argue that by buying a diamond you're encouraging and supporting slavery. You could argue that by buying pictures of Abu Ghraib the media "encourages and supports" the behaviour at Abu Ghraib.

But this supposed causal chain of responsibility between purchaser and producer is only enforced, indeed only even mentioned, when it comes to the bogeyman of child porn, which means it's nothing but an excuse.

dgordon• 16 years ago

This is a rather common logical fallacy. It should have a name, but the "zeroes and ones fallacy" doesn't sound too good. A stream of bytes has a meaning which has to do with not only the bytes themselves but their context, and I can think of several ways in which copying a file from A to B could be among the worst crimes known to man. This fallacy ignores the context of the bytes.

llimllib2• 16 years ago

> Each computer has a unique internet protocol number, or IP address, which identifies the specific computer and its geographic whereabouts whenever it is used to access the internet.

I'm surprised nobody here has responded to this complete falsehood in the article. Did this paragraph bother anybody else?

derefr2• 16 years ago

An IP address is only assigned to one computer at a time. If you have a (recent) timestamp, you can resolve the IP address to a MAC address (and customer account number/address) by subpoenaing the ISP. You might get a router/gateway/proxy, but that's still "one computer" and you've still found it. It's just not the one you wanted.

llimllib2• 16 years ago

In the context of the article, the "it" in "whenever it is used to access the internet." refers to the computer that you're using, not your gateway or some proxy machine.

Also, it's not true that an IP address is only assigned to one computer at a time; the IP address 10.0.0.1 is assigned to a whole lot of computers right now. You and I know that, and understand why it's true, but the article implies (pretty directly) that an IP address is a unique identifier for a computer. Which is a widely-believed falsehood that drives me crazy.

philk2• 16 years ago

"I made the mistake of telling my father, and he cut me off," Mr Bunce says. "He then told all my siblings and they also cut us off."

"I've forgiven them [my family] - there's no point in bearing a grudge."

His family seems pretty loathsome and reconciling with them after the fact seems like a waste of time.

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

Yes, but even if your family can be pretty loathsome for some people they're all they've got.

If my family did something like this to me or to any other family member of mine then I'd disown them instead.

Reprehensible doesn't even begin to cover it, if you are family and you can't even wait for the verdict to be in before having a hanging party then it's really sad.

shrikant• 16 years ago

Why wait for the verdict? Ask and accept his word for it as best you can.

philk2• 16 years ago

To be honest I'm puzzled as to why they'd cut the guy off even if he was guilty. Condemning what someone has done doesn't mean you can't provide a bit of emotional support.

ilitirit• 16 years ago

Pertinent issue, but in future please note the date of publication in the title if the article is more than a year old. I wish people started standardizing the way articles are published to the web so that this sort of metadata could be derived as easily as the page title.

'I was falsely branded a paedophile'

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