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.

[Graybeard58]

the person is a pervert. (or maybe they all are?

They're giving all us perverts a bad name.

I don't think you have anything to worry about ever. I have never heard of a female being charged with possession of kiddy porn. If it has happened it is rare. Now, your husband brothers or adult sons would be a different story.

[RockyMtnMan]

Actually I could put any image I wanted on your hard drive without you knowing it. All you have to do is...

I won't mention it here but it is easy.

[Lurking Libertarian]

Thanks for quoting that. Maybe you can tell me what it means.

If it's true, it makes it less likely that the pictures were something that got onto his computer without his knowledge. There may be porn sites that plant pictures on your computer that you don't know about, but they don't usually store those pictures in the same file where you keep naked pictures of your wife.

[DB]

Yes, that was one of the items it had on it. It had several... Really nasty.

[TankerKC]

..but they don't usually store those pictures in the same file where you keep naked pictures of your wife.

I usually have one "file" per picture. The agent said the kiddie porn was stored in the same computer file where partially nude images of his wife were also stored.

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

[DB]

It isn't easy without direct access to my hardware.

[DB]

Folder (or directory) is obviously what was meant.

[TankerKC]

Folder (or directory) is obviously what was meant.

That's not what he was reported as saying. The comment makes no sense.

[madison10]

No, it took that long to figure out how to plant them (the unencrypted images) there without leaving a trail right back to the Feds. ;)

[Flashman_at_the_charge]

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

Could have been an archive file such as WinZip, WinRAR or StuffIt.

[asmith92008]

For this "plan" to work, wouldn't you have to download the file and then not say, "Holy crap, this e-mail that I downloaded from a stranger is kiddie porn!" and then fail to delete the kiddie porn?

[asmith92008]

If a law enforcement officer has a valid warrant to search and then finds evidence of another crime in plain sight, that is valid. It's like if they're searching for a gun and then find a bag of cocaine. The criminal can't say that the evidence is precluded because it's not what the cops were initially looking for. Moral of the story: don't commit crimes.

[dasboot]

Oh , that's different. Was that in the article? Didn't see it, my bad.

[TankerKC]

Could have been an archive file such as WinZip, WinRAR or StuffIt.

I'll give you that.

[GrandEagle]

Was that in the article? Didn't see it, my bad.
My apology. My response to you was in reference to my post #11. That's the guy I was talking about. I had a brain blip I guess trying to mix too much Freeping with work.
You are very correct about the fellow spoken of in the original post. The article didn't have very mch information. That in itself could be suspect.

[Arthalion]

There may be porn sites that plant pictures on your computer that you don't know about, but they don't usually store those pictures in the same file where you keep naked pictures of your wife.

Depends. If the program just saved the file into the default "My Documents" or "My Pictures" folders in Windows, it's entirely possible that they could have ended up together without his knowledge (I doubt it, but anythings possible).

As to whether or not it's planted: A decent computer forensics application should be able to easily reveal the origins of the file. The files creation date and its last accessed date should reveal when it was placed on the computer and the last time someone looked at it. Programs used to view the files, from Kazaa, to Paint, to Media Player, also leave footprints in the system registry and various files making access tracing relatively simple for people who know what they're looking for. If he downloaded it off the web, there's probably still incriminating images sitting in his browser cache, or that may be recoverable from previous deletions unless he hashes his free space after clearing his browser (highly unlikely unless he was the extremely paranoid type).

In other words, if he put the images there and looked at them, there should be additional supporting evidence to show where and how. Can this type of evidence be faked as well? Yes, but court recognized computer forensic processes require that timestamped sector by sector disk images be pulled and maintained to show an "unaltered" baseline version (in fact, many LEO's pull the original HDD, do a hardware dupe of the drive, and then do their investigation using the duplicate so that the original data remains "untainted"). If none of this was done, the guy has extremely strong grounds to show that the chain of evidence may have been violated and that the data may be totally inadmissible.

[TLI]

Why even bother with pretending the fourth amendment exists?

It keeps the sheep quiet.

[ExpatCanuck]

I don't understand why the fact that this guy has nude pix of his wife on his computer gives the government probable cause to believe the guy also downloaded kiddie porn from the Internet.

What they are trying to do is establish that he was aware of the pictures because they were in the same directory as pictures that have a direct and irrefutable connection to him (his wife's). His natural defense is going to be 'I didn't know they were there' and this strategy is to nullify that defense. Sounds awfully convenient though.

[GrandEagle]

sometimes these images just keep coming up on the screen
I guess I'm fortunate. I've had tons of e-mail referencing porn (in one account probably 65-150 a day), but I've never had any just pop up.
The only time porn just showed up was when my dad an I did a google search on the B-36 (he worked on them when he was in the USAF). Clicked on a site and WHAM! there we were!
A bit embarrassing too me and dad.
I guess I've led a sheltered life, I still have no idea how you can get porn from a B-36 - we didn't stay long enough to find out either.

[NJ_gent]

Probable cause searches require a reasonable suspicion that evidence of a crime will be found. Evidence of tax evasion would be likely found inside a .zip, .xls, .doc, etc. It's extremely unlikely that there would be evidence of his tax evasion in picture files. Unless, of course, he took pictures of himself evading taxes. If he's got any kind of lawyer worth a damn, there's no way these charges stick.

Personally, I smell setup; but I don't know the guy, nor do I know enough about the situation to form a strong opinion. Either way, the jpeg search was BS.