Tax protester faces kiddie-porn charges

Philadelphia Daily News ^ | Thu, Jun. 17, 2004 | Jim Smith

[Lurking Libertarian]

Tax protester faces kiddie-porn charges

A Montgomery County man who has publicly dared the Internal Revenue Service to arrest him for not paying federal income taxes was charged yesterday in federal court in Philadelphia with possession of child pornography.

IRS agents seized 10 computers from the Hollywood home of Larken Rose more than a year ago, but have yet to charge the tax protester with any tax crimes.

The child pornography was "inadvertently discovered" by an IRS agent who was examining one of the computer's hard drives, an FBI agent alleged.

FBI agent Beatrice A. DeFazio said the computer images contained explicit sexual situations involving underage girls.

The agent said there is "probable cause" to believe that Rose downloaded the kiddie porn from the Internet because the pictures were stored in the same computer file "where partially nude images of his wife" were also stored."

Neither Rose nor his wife could be reached last night.

[VRWC_minion]

There are several Trojans that hijack your computer and turn it into a porn server...

And load them in the same place you store your wifes pictures ? Smart program. I would have thought the hijack uses temp directories.

[VRWC_minion]

One file with numerous pictures in it? I don't think so.

If he did mean a file then he is talking about a zip file. If its a zip file then its very logical to assume he deliberately saved them.

[NJ_gent]

"The password protected ZIP file would have been bypassed in the search until they cracked the password."

Zip files generally use extremely weak encryption. I can bypass most zip file passwords on my home computer in under a minute. Using a brute force program, I can take down an 8-character long password, regardless of the characters used, in less than a week. I should certainly hope the feds are a little brighter than I am. Either they're lazy, stupid, incompetant, or severely backlogged, or this was an agent or two pissed off at the prospect of not being able to put this guy away after countless hours of fruitless work.

"Remember, this clown was using his computers to sell fraudulent tax schemes so the computers were fair game."

If the police have a warrant to search my home for a shotgun that was used in a crime, my home is 'fair game'. That doesn't mean that evidence they find in my cookie jar is fair game. Unless they can show that they had a reasonable suspicion that evidence of the crime being investigated would be found, they can't perform the search. You're not likely to find a shotgun in a cookie jar, and you're not likely to find evidence of tax evasion in a jpeg. Upon opening the zip, they had every right to look at files that could potentially contain incriminating evidence. Jpegs probably don't fit that mold.

If this guy's guilty of what they say he's guilty of, then he's a disgusting pig who deserves to die a horribly painful death. That being said, the feds still don't have the right to look in my cookie jar for that shotgun, and they don't have the right to go on a fishing expedition in this guy's computers to drudge up anything they can possibly find to make their efforts worthwhile.

[Freebird Forever]

people have killed themselves over the IRS and it's Gestapo tactics.

Wouldn't it be a shame if the IRS started auditing jihadi types?

[NJ_gent]

Post 56 doesn't seem to take into account that with a couple hours of work, anyone worth their weight in salt working at the local computer shop could have at least a dozen files set up on a computer with altered timestamp information. Timestamps are easily faked, and there's only so much you can do to prove they've been altered. In the end, you're relying on bits stored on a magnetic disk. It doesn't matter if you bring the actual platters into the courtroom - you're still looking at bits on a disk which anyone with a little knowledge can modifiy. These guys had a year to play with these computers. It's quite likely that one or two overzealous agents decided that this guy needs jail time, even if there's no law against what he was doing. Couple weeks of work and, voila!, jailtime for the offender.

[Your Nightmare]

One file with numerous pictures in it? I don't think so.

Lots of graphics programs (eq. Photoshop) make image "contact sheets" or indexes. Basically, a bunch of little pictures in one big image file. Some USENET newsgroup software will automatically create an image index when uploading a bunch of pictures.

[NJ_gent]

I was working on a computer once and ran into some shots I thought were pretty bad. Guy had a few (4 or 5) pictures of his kids, roughly 3 or 4, in the bathtub. They weren't explicit or anything, but I had that gut reaction of them being a bit old to be photographed in the bathtub. Instead of jumping the gun, I nosed around a bit instead and found a ton of family photos - birthday parties, weddings, vacations, etc. At that point, I realized that while those few pictures were a bit odd, it wasn't the result of a pervert, but rather someone who loves his family and his camera roughly the same. The scary thing was that if I'd jumped the gun and reported it, I could have utterly destroyed an otherwise perfectly happy and reasonably healthy family.

[NJ_gent]

"But your files keep all sorts of corrobrating data like dates and sequences of data."

They keep timestamp information. Friend of mine wrote a simple app in a weekend to change timestamp info on a Windows machine because he got tired of XP interferring with another program he used due to timestamp changes.

"Some files keep track of internet sites you access."

Easily shredded or modified by anyone with a bit of computer knowledge.

"In addition, the ISP has records also to cross reference."

Records? Of every bit of data transferred and every site visited by every subscriber? Let's see - for Comcast, that'd be roughly 156,000 Terabytes of information a week. Even tracking the sites visited for more than a couple days at a time would be extremely difficult. To say that an ISP could store that kind of data for an entire year is insane. The data storage alone would put all but the smallest ISPs out of business.

[NJ_gent]

"If its a zip file then its very logical to assume he deliberately saved them."

That narrows it down to either him putting them there, or someone who really thinks he ought to go to jail putting them there. If they'd charged him with a tax crime, then later on said they'd found evidence of other crimes, I'd be a little less likely to view the KP charges as BS.

[ColdSteelTalon]

Aggreed. I am not a fan of the IRS or the tax system but it is unfortunatly the law. :(

[ColdSteelTalon]

Aggreed. I am not a fan of the IRS or the tax system but it is unfortunatly the law. :(

[macrahanish #1]

The fact that it took the feds a year to proceed raises a red flag, in my opinion.

[TheMightyQuinn]

Deletion does nothing except change the first letter of the file name. The file is still there and it can be easily recovered.

[Feiny]

I heard about a lady who took her film to get developed at Wal-mart & the photo guy tried to get her arrested because of some naked kid pictures....they were of her kids and there was nothing perverted about them. This guy must have thought all naked photos are sexual....that poor woman got quite a scare when she picked up her film.

[NJ_gent]

That guy sounds like an idiot. I guess that's why he's in the photo room as opposed to the board room. I wonder what the police did when they showed up.

[streetpreacher]

I'm on a university network and I was shocked when I found that I could access several other users computers and even move or delete their files if I wanted. I had just started using Windows XP and had never had this experience with 98. I went in and disabled Sharing from the root of my (C:) Drive. If I remember correctly, one of the user's files was infected with a virus.

If I had wanted I could have deleted everything or even placed files on their hard drive and as far I know, it would have been legal. After all, they essentially gave me "permission" to access their drive.

[streetpreacher]

You really shouldn't be able to get a trojan from any media file. More than likely, the file's extension was faked in order to "trick" your son into thinking it was a movie when it was really an executable.

[streetpreacher]

At least they didn't find his wife's pics on someone else's computer :-)

[freedumb2003]

Many tiff's are multi-image.

[jwpjr]

I'm sure at least a few others will also enlighten you, but B-36 could be a reference to a bra size. Not that pictures of bras sized B-36 would be porn, but it could be a starting place.