CyberLaw Blog

Archive for July 3rd, 2009

Police chief escapes jail for refusing to hand over seized material | Politics | guardian.co.uk

Chief constable cleared of contempt after he returns hard drives containing evidence of suspected child abuse

* Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 June 2009 17.52 BST

A chief constable was criticised by three judges today for defying a high court order to return computer hard drives containing evidence of suspected child abuse to an expert witness.

Colin Port, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset police, escaped a prison term for contempt of court because he returned the files from 87 computer hard drives to the expert yesterday evening, hours before the officer appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Although they dismissed the contempt of court action against him the three senior judges said Port’s actions in defying the order ‘gave grounds for concern’.

The case pitted the chief constable against Jim Bates, a forensic computer analyst, who since the 1990s has been used by police and defence lawyers in paedophile cases.

Bates said the contents of the computer hard drives and hundreds of photographs which were seized were all related to his work as an expert witness.

He claims that Port and other senior police officers involved in child protection are engaged in a campaign to discredit him because he continues to expose serious flaws in Operation Ore, Britain’s biggest online paedophile investigation.

Last year Bates was found guilty of falsifying his qualifications by saying he held a bachelor of science degree when he did not.

‘I have been subjected to intimidation, bullying and even threats of violence by police and some of their misguided supporters,’ Bates said in court documents.

But as he escaped prisontoday Port was defiant. Outside the court he called upon Bates to destroy all the material which had been returned and said the case raised concerns about who was allowed access to highly sensitive material.

‘Each time these images are viewed it is a fresh victimisation of the child,’ he said. ‘Tighter governance is crucial. We need a nationwide accreditation system with clear rules and safeguarding of victims and a fail-safe that allows accreditation to be withdrawn should any aspect of those rules be breached.’

Bates, who has been credited as a world-renowned expert in forensic computer analysis, became the focus of a police inquiry last year when he acted in the case of a Bristol man accused of possessing paedophile images.

He was arrested last September on suspicion of conspiracy to possess indecent images of children. His home was searched and 87 computer hard drives and several hundred photographs of children were seized.

The police claimed Bates had 2,500 photographs of children in his possession. He disputes that, saying there were only about 250 pictures, all relating to historic cases which the police had knowledge of.

Bates challenged the search and seizure at a judicial review and said the material was legally restricted, professionally confidential and required for his work as a defence expert.

In May the high court ruled in his favour saying the search was unlawful and ordered Port to return the material.

But Port refused, saying that the public would not understand a police officer handing back images of suspected child abuse during an investigation.

Bates, who is acting in two forthcoming appeals against conviction in the Ore investigation, has suggested that 85% of the convictions are unsafe because of ‘massive evidence of credit card fraud’.

Operation Ore was launched in 2002 after the credit card details of 7,200 people believed to have paid for paedophile images on the internet were supplied to the British police by US investigators.

More than 2,000 individuals have been convicted as part of the inquiry. Police suspected those on the list of having paid for access to images of children being abused through a website called Landslide, which provided access to 300 adult sites.

But Bates and others say the inquiry was seriously flawed, and said many people on the list were victims of credit card fraud. In the United States only a small proportion of those on the list were convicted.

In his affidavit Bates said: ‘My investigation revealed … massive evidence of credit card fraud within the database (Landslide) and conclusive evidence of breathtaking incompetence in the prosecution’s expert analyses of how this database had been generated and maintained.’

Senior officers involved in Ore are also facing a class action from former suspects who claim their lives have been ruined as a result of a flawed investigation.

In their judgment Lord Justice Stanley Burnton, Mr Justice Wilkie and Mr Justice Calvert Smith criticised Port for attempting to smear Bates in a series of newspaper articles ‘all of which were directed to bring Bates into disrepute as a result of suggestions that there was salacious material which he had on computers otherwise than for purely professional purposes’.

They refused to grant Port’s legal team costs. Bates said he would be pursuing a case for damages against the force and Port.

Has Operation Ore left a scar on British justice? – TelegraphHas Operation Ore left a scar on British justice?

Scores of the men caught by Operation Ore may not be paedophiles, but victims of identity theft, says Alasdair Palmer.

By Alasdair Palmer
Published: 3:49PM BST 20 Jun 2009

There are some unspeakably vile people amongst the thousands of men swept up by Operation Ore, the police’s extensive investigation into paedophilia and child pornography. But it is becoming increasingly clear that a substantial portion of those who were convicted of offences such as “incitement to distribute indecent images of children” had committed no crime at all.

Thirty-five of the accused committed suicide. It’s not easy to think of many things that are worse than being convicted of a paedophile offence when you are innocent of that ghastly crime. Once you are stamped as a paedophile and placed on the Sex Offenders Register, you will probably lose your family, for your wife will divorce you, if only to ensure she can keep custody of the children whom you will now be forbidden to care for. You will lose your friends and you will lose your job.

That’s exactly what happened to dozens of men who either pled guilty or were convicted as a result of Operation Ore. The sole evidence against them was that their credit card details and computer passwords were found on the list of subscribers to websites with such repulsive names as “child rape”.

What could be clearer evidence of guilt than that? As their solicitors told them, it did not matter that their computers had been examined and found to be free of child pornography, or that they could produce alibis to show they could not have been at their keyboards when they were supposed to have signed up for the child porn. Judges and juries found the electronic data irrefutable.

But the electronic data wasn’t irrefutable. One simple possibility appears not to have occurred to the police or any of the lawyers assigned to the accused: that they had been the victims of identity theft. Someone had got hold of their credit card details and identified the perfect way to rack up charges: create a subscription service child-porn web site (it need not actually have any child porn on it, just a suitably disgusting name), then charge a subscription to the stolen card.

Very few people are going to complain to their credit card company, still less to the police, that they have been charged for visiting a site identified as “child rape” – for how do you prove that it wasn’t you? Some of the men had visited legal adult pornography sites on the internet, and given their credit card details so they could watch porn films. They had not been to child pornography sites – but once they had given their credit card details, it was very easy for someone else to do so using their credit card number.

It took a computer expert named Jim Bates to notice that on the full electronic log, the same credit card frequently subscribes to the same child porn site several times on the same day – and yet the “subscriber” never actually visits the site. Moreover, Mr Bates noticed that the same credit card number was being used to subscribe to child porn sites at the same time on three different continents.

Mr Bates’s discovery that the electronic data was riddled with fraud did not find favour with the police. His reward was to be smeared as a paedophile himself: the cops searched his house and accused him of – you’ve guessed it – “conspiracy to obtain indecent images of children”. Employed as an expert witness, he had, in the course of his work, examined computers with paedophile material. The police search was ruled illegal and last week he received back the material that they had confiscated.

Chris Saltrese, a Merseyside solicitor, believes he can demonstrate that scores of the men caught by Operation Ore are not paedophiles, but victims of identity theft. If his arguments convince the Appeal Court – with whom he has just lodged a specimen case – the police may be forced to apologise for their role in causing this country’s most colossal example of injustice. It will be too late for most of the innocent men they convicted. Their lives are in pieces. And they will never be able to put them back together.

Legal challenge to web child abuse inquiry | UK news | The Guardian: “Legal challenge to web child abuse inquiry

Claim that hundreds were convicted through flawed credit card evidence

* Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 20.30 BST

One of Britain’s biggest online paedophile inquiries is to be challenged in the court of appeal amid allegations from campaigners that hundreds of men have been wrongly convicted in a mass miscarriage of justice.

For more than two years a small group of experts have claimed that Operation Ore, the police inquiry into thousands of British men, was tainted because the database at the centre of the investigation contained evidence of widespread credit card fraud. Their allegations will be tested for the first time in the appeal court within weeks, when a judge examines a test case that could expose a huge miscarriage of justice, lawyers say.

The single judge will decide whether the case should go to a full appeal.

(more…)

Index on Censorship » Blog Archive » Tyranny’s shield

Tyranny’s shield
17 Jun 2009

The ruling against blogger NightJack suggests that anonymous speech is bad for society, says David Banisar

The decision by Mr Justice Eady that the identity of police blogger NightJack could be released has been characterised by many observers as part of a ‘privacy versus free expression’ case. However, it would be more accurate to say that it signifies a battle between the free expression rights of newspapers to publish information and the right to individuals and groups to speak and publish anonymously. By ignoring the second right, it sets a precedent for future cases where bloggers or other sources can be identified by upset government or corporate officials.

The decision seems to be based on the underlying idea that anonymous speakers are bad for society. Eady broadly ruled that the public interest would be in knowing the identity of the author — allowing the public to make an assessment of the published material based on the person’s standing. Arguments about the right of informed individuals to criticise government policy or reveal information in the public interest without fear of sanction are discarded without serious analysis on the effects on the flow of information from such sources.

The consequence is that sources of information will be less likely to speak out, because they are told that if they want to say anything of a public interest, they should be identified.

It should be obvious to all now that the Internet can be a powerful tool for revealing information that would otherwise not be public and that anonymity is a key part of the process. One only needs to look at the success of Wikileaks, with its thousands of formerly suppressed documents.

Under Eady’s analysis, Wikileaks (and any journalists who receive information that may be in violation of internal regulations) could be forced to reveal their sources because the public (or the crown in enforcing their regulations) should know who they are. This is inconsistent with 20 years of European Court of Human Rights rulings on anonymous sources as essential to expression. The ‘axe to grind’ argument cited by Eady, suggesting that readers should be aware of any ill-will motivating an anonymous source, is the same one constantly heard by those who want to suppress whistleblowers and dissidents across the world.

The case highlights the basic weakness in UK law in free expression. Across the ocean in the US, the Supreme Court has constantly recognised the interest in anonymous speech. As far back as 1960, the Supreme Court said that ‘anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind’. It ruled in the McIntyre case in 1995 that: ‘Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.’

David Banisar is Deputy Director of Privacy International, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Law, University of Leeds.

Read the full ruling here (Word doc)

US – Facebook cleans up its privacy controls: “(CNET.com)
Revamped privacy settings are coming soon to Facebook. The social network’s privacy controls had gotten so sprawling that they were distributed across six separate pages and 40 different settings. As a result, Facebook’s new controls will be more streamlined so as to offer easier and simpler controls about how much everything from entire profiles to individual pieces of content are shared. Users will be introduced to this through ‘transition tools’ that allow them to toggle how open everything on their profile will be – totally public, friends-only, restricted to company or school networks, etc.

“

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

China backs down over demand to install Green Dam web filter on all PCs: “Chinese authorities have been forced into a last-minute climbdown over a plan to force manufacturers to bundle internet filtering software into every new personal computer sold in the country.

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)