|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
The Trojan Horse Defense in Child Pornography NewsMax.comRecently a man in the United Kingdom successfully defended against a charge of having child pornography on his home computer by arguing that a Trojan Horse virus had taken over his hard drive and was the real culprit in the indecent download of some 170-plus forbidden images, according to a report in the N.Y. Times. Having just won custody of his daughter from his estranged wife, Julian Greene was surprised last October when police knocked on his door and began searching for child pornography. None was found other than on the hard drive. Arrested and jailed with his daughter removed, the man said from the first that he had been unable to rid his computer of a bug that not only dialed the Internet on its own whim but brought up a child porno site each time as the default homepage. Even trips to the computer store could not cleanse the machine of the infernal invader, he said. Greene’s solicitor believed his client and had an expert examine the computer for alien invaders. Nearly a dozen Trojan horse programs showed up on the hard drive. In the end, after much embarrassment and anguish on the part of Greene, the authorities elected not to go forward with the charges – a happy enough result for the defendant but a troubling story for those who follow the vagaries of the Internet and those who use it for nefarious purposes. Most troubling, according to the Times report: a new alibi for child pornographers and others that would be difficult to disprove. On the same par: innocent Web surfers charged wrongly with possessing illegal material that an invading software program has acquired. Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor, told the Times, "The scary thing is that the defense might be right," and that hijacked computers could be turned to an evil purpose without an owner's knowledge or consent. "The nightmare scenario," Rasch added, "is somebody might go to jail for something he didn't do because he was set up." The prosecutor in the case, David Sapieca, told the BBC: "We don't accept the conclusions of the defense expert report, but there were already other issues in the case regarding the history of the computer itself. We cannot show that Mr. Green downloaded the images on to the computer, so the Crown reluctantly offered no evidence in this case." Although British cases have little precedent value in the U.S., Greene’s successful defense has at least the feds musing. A senior official at the Department of Justice said, "There are ways to look at the evidence to see if something like this -- even if it is present -- is responsible for the conduct at issue." A prosecutor facing the novel defense would scan the computer to make sure that it did, in fact, have rogue software. The next step would be to determine whether the rogue software could do what the defendant claimed, the official said. Antivirus software and programs like Ad-Aware can find and disable Trojans, but they must be kept up to date to be effective in a fast-changing field. Reportedly, Green said that he had antivirus software on his computer -- but that it was outdated.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: |
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |