Pantless [war]driver charged over kiddie porn

TORONTO -- A man caught driving naked from the waist down while watching kiddie porn on his laptop has become the first man in Toronto charged for allegedly stealing an Internet connection.

For the first time, Toronto police laid a theft of communications charge after busting a man driving the wrong way down a one-way street while downloading child porn using stolen wireless Internet signals.

The slow-moving car was pulled over around 5 a.m. by a police officer who allegedly found the driver - with no pants on - watching a movie on his laptop of a 10-year-old girl performing fellatio on an adult.

Police allege the man downloaded the movie using an Internet connection he intercepted from a nearby house.

Stealing Internet, or War Driving as it is sometimes called, is becoming more and more common among perverts trying to avoid online detection. It's also a way they can invade someone else's computer, which could have serious ramifications for unsuspecting wireless Internet subscribers,.

"That means people can use, access and get into your computer, your files and your Internet signal, and if anything illegal was done it would come back to your computer," said Det.-Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto police child exploitation section.

"It's very disturbing. This is a problem that isn't going away and people have to be educated on how to protect themselves."

Gillespie's unit was called in after Wednesday's arrest and together with the OPP's Project P unit, they searched the unemployed man's home.

They recovered 10 computers and thousands of CDs and floppy disks which they suspect contain child abuse images.

"It involves some of the worst child pornography that we've ever seen, including young children and babies. I hate to say it but it's becoming typical of what we're seeing," Gillespie said.

It's going to take investigators between 20 and 40 hours to go through each computer and several more hours to detail each image found on each disk before they will know exactly how many child abuse images the man allegedly had, he added.

Gillespie said the man used Kazaa, a popular file-sharing web program commonly used to share music, to download the graphic material.

In a study using 12 words associated with child pornography, the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 42% of 1,286 files on the peer-to-peer site contained child porn.

Those figures didn't surprise Gillespie.

"It's turned into the largest single way in which like-minded people share and trade child pornography," he said.

Det.-Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt, from Project P, said the last three child porn collectors his unit arrested also used Kazaa to download porn and stole Internet connections to get online.

"It's becoming more and more common," he said. "They always seem to have the technology before we do."

Walter Nowakowski, 33, of Delhi, is charged with two counts of possession of child pornography, accessing child porn, distributing child porn, and making child porn for allegedly burning images onto CDs. He's also charged with theft of communications.

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Pantless driver charged over kiddie porn