CyberLaw Blog

Archive for September 14th, 2008

Man jailed for downloading 104,523 child porn images – WalesOnline: “Man jailed for downloading 104,523 child porn images

Sep 12 2008 By Robin Turner

A WEST Wales man who built up one of the biggest and most depraved child pornography collections ever seen in British courts was jailed for four years today.

And Carmarthen Crown Court heard 26-year-old Aled Matthews, whose fiancee knew nothing about his twisted desires, boasted to paedophiles on internet chat rooms that he ‘could not wait to have kids’ so he could start abusing them.

And he also claimed on the internet he intended to ‘turn’ his fiancee who, he said, worked with children from ‘the age of zero upwards’.

Matthews, who lived with his innocent fiancee at Heol Morlais, Ammanford, downloaded 104,523 child pornography images onto his computer and stored them on memory sticks and CDs.

They showed children ‘from the age of one upwards’ being sexually abused by adults.

The images were so sickening, experienced Dyfed Powys Police computer crime investigator Sandra Kealey, who had spent years examining child pornography images as part of her job, said she was moved to tears for the first time in her career.

Sentencing Matthews yesterday, judge Michael Burr said : ‘The people who made these images descended to the pit.’

And he told Matthews : ‘You fell into the trap of accessing them on the internet and to your discredit found you had some interest in them.’

Matthews pleaded guilty to 33 sample charges relating to the 104,523 images, 16 of making (downloading) indecent images, 16 of distributing them and one of possessing them.

As well as being jailed for four years yesterday he was also placed on the sex offenders’ register ‘indefinitely’, banned from using computers or other technology capable of holding images and was also ordered to stay away from children under 16 unless they were accompanied by a responsible adult.

He was also disqualified from ever working with children.

Matthews built up what Judge Burr called the ‘vast’ child pornography collection within three months of buying a computer in Swansea.

He began swapping indecent images, which included video footage as well as still pictures, over the internet and it was this which alerted the police.

A labourer with a steady job at a West Wales building firm, Matthews had no previous convictions so it came as a huge shock to his family when he was arrested in May of last year.

His barrister Huw Davies said Matthews asked for voluntary redundancy knowing ‘the game was up’.

The 26-year-old, whose parents watched him being jailed from the public gallery yesterday, told detectives he became bored with adult pornography on the internet and began searching for child related pornography.

Many of the images in his collection contained the most serious ‘category five’ images which include children being sexually and physically abused.

Police interviewed Matthews’s fiancee but, the court heard, it was clear she knew nothing about his criminal activities.

Carina Hughes, prosecuting, said the amount of indecent images in the case was one of the biggest to come before the courts and the abuse depicted was also among the worse.

Police found files on Matthews’s computer which logged his chat room entries.

In one conversation he told another internet user he and his fiancee were ‘trying for kids next year’.

He then says ‘can’t wait’ and places a smiling face icon next to it and later says, ‘am trying to turn the girlfriend onto it, she’s not into it’.

He also said that she worked with children from the age of zero upwards and he hoped that he could ‘have some fun’.

Matthews told police that he made these statements out of ‘bravado’ and in an attempt to attract other like minded people on the internet to talk to him.

He said he had no intention of carrying out any of the suggestions he made in chat rooms.

The defendant’s barrister Huw Rees said his client accepted the harm that the production of the images did to children though he emphasised Matthews merely watched the images and was not involved in making them.

He also said Matthews made no money from distributing the images to others on the internet.”

A Moroccan blogger who wrote an article criticising the King was sentenced to two years in jail after a startling short trial, report the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

On 8 September, the court of Agadir in southern Morocco condemned Mohammed Erraji to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 5,000 Moroccan dirhams (US$620) for “failure to uphold the respect due to the King”. His trial reportedly lasted 10 minutes. According to WiPC, Erraji is in poor health.

Erraji was arrested on 4 September following the publication on the online news site Hespress.com of an article accusing Morocco’s monarchy of encouraging a culture of dependency. He argued that the King’s custom of granting favours, such as taxi licences to a lucky few, encouraged people to rely on handouts. Read an English translation of the article on the Global Voices Online website: http://tinyurl.com/5lo2ol

“Erraji was given a summary trial for which he had no time to find a lawyer and was unable to defend himself,” says RSF. “The Moroccan blogosphere is known for being dynamic, so this is big step backwards for the kingdom.”

Erraji is the first Moroccan blogger to be prosecuted and convicted for an article posted online. He is Hespress.com’s Agadir correspondent and writes regularly for the site. He also has his own blog published under his real name, “The World of Mohammed Erraji”, that was started in March 2007 and
deals mainly with political and social issues.

A website and petition have been setup in solidarity with the blogger at:
http://www.helperraji.com as well as a Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=30771925854

In a separate case, newspaper editor Ahmed Reda Benchemsi, who is also facing charges of disrespect for the King, had his one-year case adjourned indefinitely last week.

Benchemsi told RSF, “The court was clearly trying to close the case without having to reach a verdict … I am supposed to see this decision as a conciliatory gesture. But the judge can call me back to court whenever he wants.”

Visit these links:
- ANHRI: http://www.anhri.net/en/reports/2008/pr0908.shtml
- RSF: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=28449
- RSF on Benchemsi: http://tinyurl.com/6cwvfy
- WiPC (email): Cathy.McCann (@) internationalpen.org.uk
- Help Erraji website: http://www.helperraji.com
- Erraji’s blog: http://almassae.maktoobblog.com

Justice Department Moving to Immunize Snooping Telcos: “The Justice Department said Friday that by September 19 it would ask a court to immunize the nation’s telecommunications companies for their assistance is helping the Bush administration secretly spy on Americans. President Bush signed the immunity legislation July 10 after Congress passed the measure the day before. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to overturn the immunity legislation, saying it is unconstitutional.

(Via Wired News.)

Judge rules probable cause of criminal activity needed to get cell location data:

A federal district court judge in western Pennsylvania made what could possibly wind up being a precedent setting ruling this week, with him stating that the government must obtain a warrant based on probable cause of criminal activity before asking a carrier to provide cellphone location data. The ruling specifically addressed historical cellphone tower location data, which the government had argued was no different than routine transactional records (like past credit card transactions), and therefore should not require probable cause. While the EFF and ACLU are both praising the ruling, it looks like it’s not quite settled just yet, with a Justice department spokesperson saying that the government is still ‘considering options’ on an appeal.

[Via Mobile Burn]

FOXNews.com – YouTube Yanks Radical Islamist Videos After Lieberman’s Complaint

Thursday, September 11, 2008

YouTube has heeded the call to stop featuring radical Islamists’ video clips.

“Google’s community guidelines for YouTube will now bar videos that incite violence, in addition to videos that contain hate speech and gratuitous violence,” Sen. Joe Lieberman said in Washington on Thursday.

“YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world, including right here in the United States, and Google should be commended for recognizing that,” he said. “I expect these stronger community guidelines to decrease the number of videos on YouTube produced by Al Qaeda and affiliated Islamist terrorist organizations.”

Lieberman (I-Conn.), head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent an open letter in May to Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, which owns YouTube, asking him to yank “videos produced by Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups” off the site.

At the time, Google said it had taken down about 80 clips that featured gratuitous violence and hate speech, but added that “there’s nothing in our guidelines that says something produced by a certain group gets censored.”

The “Community Guidelines” on the video-sharing site, updated Sept. 10 according to the official YouTube blog, now read in part:

“Things like predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate the Terms of Use are taken very seriously. Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube.”

A brief search of YouTube found some radical Islamist preachings, including some from Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader Ayman al Zawahiri, but no violent clips.

However, clips of bombings, beheadings and other violence committed by radical Islamists are readily available elsewhere on the Web.

Mail and phone scams catch out 3m: “Fraudsters solicit £3.5bn a year from Britons but less than one in 20 victims report the cons”

Data loss firm contract axed: “The firm blamed for losing the details of thousands of criminals on a memory stick, has its £1.5m Home Office contract cancelled.”

(Via BBC News.)

YouTube bans violent videos: “YouTube has moved to ban videos that incite violence following criticism in the UK and US that it needed to toughen its policies. By Mark Sweney”

Supporters back arrested Malaysian blogger: “The arrest of a blogger who dared to criticise the Malaysian regime backfires as other bloggers express their solidarity”

Virginia Court Strikes Down Anti-Spam Law: “The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers.”

(Via NYT > Freedom of Speech and Expression.)