Linked: Government Tossing Child Porn Cases Rather Than Discuss Its Torrent-Tracking Software In Court
Any way you look at it, law enforcement does not look good when it comes to these cases where they are letting people walk instead of showing how they got the evidence in the first place.
“The cases deal with child porn and BitTorrent distribution. The defendants are hardly the most sympathetic. But, like the cases that exposed the FBI’s use of malware to gather identifying information from devices around the world, child porn investigations are on the front line of the government’s tech deployments. From the description of the cases covered here, it almost appears the government had enough evidence to see the prosecution through to the end. It just chose not to because continuing the cases would mean turning over info on their tracking software to the accused. “
There are really only a couple of options here.
1. The government, and the companies who actually own this tech, are so keen to keep their trade secrets that they are willing to let pedophiles free.
2. Or, the software doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and it’s possible the government is charging innocent people with possessing and/or distributing child porn.
The only way to find out is to actually, you know, have some independent sources verify that the software does what it says it does, and that law enforcement is using it correctly to get the correct results.
If you read further, it’s not clear that it is being used correctly, or works, but we’ve got a whole host of child porn charges that can be questioned at the very least, which is not at all what we want.
