Appeals Court Rules Viewing CP Not A Federal Crime

well that's bad in the fight against CP... but it's good for webmasters.. Some of us TGP guys get hit with ass hole cheaters that redirect to pedo CP crap every so often. If the feds busted down our doors we could be charged with CP just for having the files in your history.

KRL can you please post the link to this article.

I have been traded to trades that traded with CP way more often than I ever would have thought.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBKDK24TZD.html

Did you see the article about 500 people busted in Australia?

I have that link also.

disturbing decision

Wasn't there a major CP bust a little while ago where they had over 20,000 people as registered members of these CP sites?

This is hard to even comprehend for the other busts down your way this way.

"Over the past week Australian police have seized computers holding more than 2 million images of child pornography _ including some of children as young as 2 years."

yea I had to start checking all my trades- trades to see who they were trading with and so on. Because i didn't want someone going from my site to another and then getting sent to CP..

does this judgement is like a reference now for all future court cases or is a single decision?

I think it was 95,000 members.

Soul_Rebel pretty much asked the same thing.... does this ruling apply to those 95,000 people?

Thanks KRL. I have been following the pedo bust in Australia and what is interesting is that in all these busts you never see an adult webmaster or anyone from the sex industry involved. It's always the so called pillars of society such as Dr. Police, Clergy etc etc.

Here is the story on the Aussie bust

CREDIT CARD KEY TO A SORDID WORLD


Author: Natalie O'Brien, Investigations editor
Publication: THE AUSTRALIAN (p1, 01-10-2004)
Section: Local
------------------------------------------------------------------------

HUNDREDS of alleged Australian pedophiles were tracked by police through the electronic trail left by credit cards used to pay for child pornography on the internet Yesterday, police described the credit card details as the key that unlocked the door to the secret world of child pornography collectors, who wrongly believed their activities were safe from prying eyes.

The co-ordinated police operation, codenamed Auxin, began in February when Geoff Eyles, an Australian Federal Police officer based at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, attended a briefing by US authorities.

Eyles was told about a US operation that had cracked a huge online child pornography business. Among its customers were hundreds of Australians who had paid to view sexually explicit pictures of children.

A US customs official flew to Australia to tell authorities more about the US operation, codenamed Falcon, which had identified a cluster of about 20 websites run by Russian crime gangs. Investigators from the FBI, Immigration, Customs and the Internal Revenue Department were called in and dozens of arrests made in the US, Russia, France and Spain.

The investigators located the internet processor company that took credit card payments worth more than $3 million.

Among the subscribers were more than 600 Australian suspects. Their details were passed to the Australian High Tech Crime Centre, where the information was stored in locked and coded computer files.

Officers at the AHTCC had been through a similar operation just weeks before when they completed their part in the world's biggest internet child porn bust , Operation Landslide. State and federal police had laid 1000 charges against five Queensland men.

That operation began with the prosecution in the US two years ago of internet porn king Thomas Reedy in an


international scandal that implicated rock legend Pete Townshend.

No charges were laid against The Who guitarist. Reedy was jailed for life.

Reedy's US website business, Landslide Productions, was an internet gateway for 5700 pedophile websites. It had 250,000 customers in about 60 countries accessing sites -- some of which featured young children being raped.

In Operation Landslide authorities had also found databases with thousands of customers' credit card details. That's how they tipped off police in Australia and Britain.

After having just completed Operation Ascent -- as Landslide was known in Australia -- federal agents knew they couldn't risk the information leaking out. So they kept the information on stand-alone servers. The hundreds of thousands of child porn images were also kept on a separate isolated computer.

During the next four months the AHTCC agents scrutinised the credit card details of the suspected offenders and began to build a background profile of the suspects. Each suspect had their name, address, credit card details, occupation and any other information available compiled into individual packages.

They sent urgent messages to the state police to send the confidential packages and together they started the first raids.

To their horror police discovered some of the suspects were "high risk" with widespread access to children and in positions of trust including doctors, childcare centre owners and police officers in Queensland, NSW and Western Australia.

Agent Phelan said they acted on those first. The first arrests were made as early as July.

Over the following weeks and months detectives conducted wave after wave of raids, seizing computers, hard drives photographs, magazines and photographic equipment.

Their searches uncovered evidence that some of the suspects were not just looking at the pictures online.

They were allegedly involved in abusing Australian children and taking their own photographs.

Some of the suspects have also been charged with offences including rape, assault and child sex tourism.

"They can't hide behind their computer screens -- these crimes are no less heinous than others," said Agent Phelan.

NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said yesterday: "The size and the scope and the magnitude of this operation gave us an insight into the depth and indeed the depravity of those involved via Operation Auxin." The suspects were all men aged between from their 20s to their 80s -- most were men in the 30s.

The Australian Institute of Criminology has been asked to study the statistics from Operation Auxin and to give a topology of the offences.


DEPTHS OF DEPRAVITY

Operation Auxin

* National crackdown on internet porn that resulted in more than 2000 charges being laid against more than 150 people across Australia.

* State and federal officers seized more than 380 computers containing more than two million pornographic images involving children, including some showing a twoyearold involved in a bondage scene.

* The Australian High-Tech Crime Centre began investigating in March after a tip-off from US authorities.

* The US investigation identified a US company that provided credit card support to a number of websites, including one based in Belarus. It was this site where many of the Australian suspects allegedly purchased there child pornography.

* The company, called Regpay, allegedly processed nearly $3m in subscription fees.

WA

* Two teachers, a police officer and a state government employee were among 21 people arrested and charged following raids on 50 properties in which officers seized more than 80 computers and computer hard-drives.

* About half of the two million images seized were found in WA, including more than 200,000 from one address.

SA

* Seven arrests after 32 raids, with a further 21 people interviewed and still under investigation.

* Computers, more than 1300 CDs and DVDs, 600 floppy discs, 200 videos and other material such as magazines, books and scrapbooks seized.

NT

* Seven arrested following raids on 14 homes across the NT, including in Darwin, Alice Springs and Tennant Creek.

* More than 10,000 images and 31 computer hard-drives seized.

VIC

* The owner of three Melbourne childcare centres was among 26 arrested.

* 500,000 images of child pornography seized in raids.

QLD

* Eight Brisbane children, aged from five to 13, identified through pictures found on a seized computer.

* Police officers and members of the armed forces were among 57 charged. A policeman has committed suicide.

* Police served 107 search warrants and laid 1890 charges.

NSW

* Sixty-seven properties raided, with about 200 computers, 2000 CD-Roms, 100, 000 child pornography images, 300 videos and 100 magazines seized.

* Forty-two arrested, including government officials.

TAS

* A Tasmanian man has been arrested and charged after nine premises were searched and 12 computer hard-drives and two laptop computers were seized along with various computer-related equipment.

The worst are teachers. 3 so far. One had a camera setup where the kids change into their gym clothes.

That is fucking scary if you have kids when you think 40 hours a week you're entrusting your children to the school system.

Yup teahers are right up there. Here is some more info I was sent.

500 NAMED IN HIT LIST OF PAEDOPHILES

Author: ANGELA KAMPER, VIVA GOLDNER
Publication: DAILY TELEGRAPH M (p3, 02-10-2004)
Section: Local

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A SCHOOL pastor who filmed pupils from behind a mirror, a state government accountant who swapped child porn over the net and a doctor at the country's most prestigious military academy were among those exposed yesterday following Australia's largest series of sex abuse raids. Federal police have so far identified 500 people. The names are on Commissioner Mick Keelty's desk and he warned last night: "If you've been accessing paedophile material, expect a knock on the door." More than 400 search warrants have now been executed across the country, dozens in Sydney and NSW. The number of people charged has passed 200, with 2000 offences alleged.

very disturbing

can I ask something heh

A judge can simotaneously make a ruling in a case in court and also change a law?

It should be a crime to create CP, and it should be a crime to sell or distribute CP, and if they can prove someone paid for it then definately punish those people too ... but I believe it's prudent to side with caution in regards to how strictly you define possession. As some webmasters here have already explained, it's easy to end up with images in your cache that you did not intend to view. I would hope we have judges and lawmakers that are knowledgable enough to discern the difference. It's especially difficult when this country defines a well-developed 16 or 17 yr old as a 'child'. If you were clicking through TGPs, how would you ever know? Hell, most webcam portals are full of topless highschool girls.

Shit, just viewing your email inbox could incriminate you.

The point the judge is making is not that it's okay to view or posess child porn, but that in this specific case, the lack of evidence of interstate transmission of the CP means it should not be a federal crime.

The US constitution's most basic limit on federal criminal jurisdiction is that the crime must involve interstate commerce...if it doesn't, states have jursdiction. The definition of "interstate commerce" is often stretched to make federal cases, like if you use a phone or the Internet in a crime it can be federal because the phone/internet connections *could* cross state boundaries. Drug offenses are even more tenuously considered defacto interstate commerce.

But the judge here is saying, you've got computer discs with child porn on them. There's no evidence how the porn got on them, so there's no evidence that it involved interstate commerce. The CP could have been produced and copied to the discs within the state. Thus it's not a federal crime. The physical discs were manufactured outside the state, but the source of the *data* on the discs wasn't known, and the origin of the discs wasn't sufficient to sway the judge.

All CP viewers should be Shot

That's a good explaination.

Having it on your computer could be accidental, given all the people pushing it but having it burned to discs should be grounds for having your ass kicked into the pit below the jail