Hacker puts judge in prison{Possession of child pornography}

The Inquirer ^ | 23 Feb 2007 | Nick Farrell

[FLOutdoorsman]

A HACKER'S investigation of Superior Court Judge Ronald C. Kline's computer has finally resulted him being sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for possession of child pornography.

Klince offered "a lifetime of apologies" and then fainted as he was sent down.

During the six years of court battles, Kline lost his job as a judge and was ordered to wear a tracking anklet and placed on home< confinement while his case was decided in court.

Kline will be registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life and will not be allowed to possess any computer equipment and that he not access the Internet during his three years of probation.

The case was all started when a Canadian hacker Brad Willman broke into the judge's Irvine home computer and discovered sexually explicit images of young boys and a diary that revealed Kline's fantasies involving young boys. A subsequent police search of the Judge's court computer revealed more images and more dodgy Web sites.

[FLOutdoorsman]

Btw, thats former O.C. Superior Court judge.

[csvset]

Ronald Kline at a December 2005 court appearance.

REGISTER FILE PHOTO

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Ex-judge Kline gets prison

Six years of legal wrangling ends with former O.C. Superior Court judge sentenced to 27 months for child pornography.

By LARRY WELBORN

The Orange County Register

LOS ANGELES – Former Superior Court Judge Ronald C. Kline offered "a lifetime of apologies" and then collapsed Tuesday as he was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for possession of child pornography.

Kline, 66, had just learned that U.S. District Court Judge Consuelo B. Marshall was rejecting his bid to be placed on probation when his eyes fluttered and his knees buckled.

"I think I'm going to faint," he said as he crumbled into the arms of Paul S. Meyer, his defense attorney.

Meyer and co-counsel Janet Levine guided Kline to a courtroom bench. The two attorneys took off their coats, made a pillow and asked Kline to lie down. A nurse assigned to the courthouse rushed in moments later and checked Kline's pulse. Los Angeles County paramedics later arrived and checked his vital signs and performed an electro-cardiogram.

Kline, who has a history of heart illness, did not lose consciousness, but he remained seated on the bench when the sentencing hearing resumed 45 minutes later.

Tuesday's sentencing ended nearly six years of legal wrangling that saw Kline charged at one point with possessing child pornography in federal court and child molestation in state courts.

The state case was ultimately dismissed, based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the prosecution was pressed beyond the statute of limitations.

The federal pornography case was also threatened in 2003 when Marshall ruled that the evidence of pornographic images found on his home computer had been illegally seized.

But a federal appeals court disagreed with Marshall in 2004, and the pornography charges were reinstated.

A year later, in December 2005, the ex-judge pleaded guilty and broke down in tears.

During the six years of court battles, Kline lost his job as a judge to a write-in candidate in 2002. He also lost his mobility for six years when he was ordered to wear a tracking anklet and placed on home confinement while his case was decided in court.

Tuesday, he lost his freedom. He will not be eligible for parole until he serves at least 23 months. He was given until May 21 to report to federal prison.

Marshall said Tuesday that the seriousness of the porn charges demanded that Kline be punished. She ordered that Kline be registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life, that he not possess any computer equipment and that he not access the Internet during three years of probation.

Kline admitted he stored more than 100 sexually explicit photos of under-age boys on his computer and on several disks found at his Irvine home in November 2001.

Police caught onto Kline after a Canadian computer whiz hacked into the judge's Irvine home computer and discovered sexually explicit images of young boys and a diary that revealed Kline's fantasies involving young boys. A subsequent search of his court computer revealed more images and more Web sites.

Brad Willman, the Canadian hacker, forwarded the information to an anti-pedophile watchdog group, which then sent the information to Irvine police detectives.

Meyer and Levine asked for probation, arguing that Kline should, among other things, be given credit for time served in home confinement.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Staples asked for a 33-month term, arguing in a written brief that "to sentence the defendant to anything other than a long term in prison would signal that our justice system treats its own with favor. … Of all people in society who must be held strictly accountable for their crimes, it is members of the justice system themselves."

Staples said Kline possessed thousands of sexually explicit pictures of young boys, used his computers to search for and store images of child pornography, and kept the diary that detailed his interest in boys.

Kline's conduct, Staples said, "sullied the state judiciary."

Kline case timeline

October 1995: Orange County civil attorney Ronald C. Kline is appointed to Orange County Superior Court bench by Gov. Pete Wilson.

May 2000: A Canadian hacker downloads lurid diaries and pictures of nude boys from Kline's Irvine home computer and forwards them to a pedophile watchdog group.

November 2001: Kline is charged in federal court in Santa Ana with seven counts of possession of child pornography.

January 2002: The Orange County District Attorney's Office files five counts of child molestation against Kline after a man comes forward to say he was molested by Kline in 1979 when he was 14.

March-November 2002: Kline does not campaign for re-election and is replaced by write-in candidate John S. Adams.

June-October 2003: A federal judge rules that 1,500 photos of naked boys, diary entries and Web sites found on Kline's computers cannot be used in the federal child-pornography case, contending that the Canadian hacker was serving as an agent of authorities and therefore his "search" of Kline's computer was illegal.

July 2003: A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismisses all molestation charges against Kline because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning prosecution of old sex-abuse allegations.

October 2004: A federal appeals court reverses the pornography rulings, saying the Canadian hacker was acting on his own when he gained access to Kline's computer.

December 2005: Kline pleads guilty to four counts of possessing child pornography on his home computer.

Feb. 20, 2007: Kline is sentenced to 27 months in federal prison.

Contact the writer: 714-834-3784 or lwelborn@ocregister.com

[siunevada]

6 years. That's some real good lawyerin'.

June-October 2003: A federal judge rules that 1,500 photos of naked boys, diary entries and Web sites found on Kline's computers cannot be used in the federal child-pornography case, contending that the Canadian hacker was serving as an agent of authorities and therefore his "search" of Kline's computer was illegal.

And some creative judgin'.

[sgtbono2002]

I am no supporter in any way of any Pedophile.

That having been said, How can evidence illegally obtained by a hacker be used against the man?
What has happened to the hacker who broke into this mans computer?
What has the hacker been charged with?

Compared to pedophilia I suppose hacking is a minor violation,but as an internet user and having been the recipient of various virus and virus attempts on the net Hacker piss me off ---big time.

[ko_kyi]

The hacker saw evidence of a crime and reported it. I would guess that most DAs will not press charges against the hacker because that would discourage people from reporting serious crimes if they doing something even mildly illegal.

Give him a pass on this one incident, I say.

[Gorzaloon]

Compared to pedophilia I suppose hacking is a minor violation,but as an internet user and having been the recipient of various virus and virus attempts on the net Hacker piss me off ---big time.

I despise hackers also, for the same reasons. There is nothing "cute" about destruction of property, and rather than be hired as "Security Consultants", they should be publicly impaled flogged.

That said, though, this case is no different than the one a few weeks ago where a burglar found similar materials and turned them in. Even crooks and vandals have their boundaries, it seems.

[outofstyle]

What has happened to the hacker who broke into this mans computer? What has the hacker been charged with?

My guess is that the hacker, being a hacker, found a way to implicate the judge while preserving his own anonymity. Once the police were alerted, they confirmed the suspicion.

[amigatec]

It's also possible that the Judges pc was unsecured at the time. A lot of people have shares on there PC's and don't know they are sharing it with he world.

That was how a personal porn video of a rock star got released.

[sgtbono2002]

What was the hacker doing in the Judge's computer in the first place.

Was he merely looking around or was he involved in a case the Judge was sitting on?
If he looked around and found this stuff and then turned the Judge in, what is stopping the police from hiring gackers and looking into your comoputer?
If this evidence is allowed to be used in court ,anything illegal they might find in anyone computer may be used, That sounds like a Constitutional problem to me.

Its one thing going to your home and confiscating your computer and getting information, Its quite another when they can go in and get the info they may want against you without your knowledge.

Now we all know about firewalls and other means of keeping out the amateurs, but hackers are merely slowed down by such thing , not stopped.

[csvset]

We Salute Brad Willman - He Helped to Put Away A Superior Court Pedophile Judge!

Published on March 23, 2006
Internet vigilante
He helped put pedophiles away by hacking into their computers. Was that wrong?
CORI HOWARD

He was a self-described computer geek, young and reclusive. But his online persona was anything but. Between 1997 and 2001, Brad Willman was known as Omni-Potent, an Internet vigilante who would track pedophiles by spending 16-plus hours a day hacking into people’s computers from his parent’s house in Langley, a suburban community just outside Vancouver. Ultimately, he was responsible for the arrests of about 40 pedophiles across Canada and the U.S. Willman’s successful, albeit unpaid and short-lived venture as “Citizen Tipster,” as he was known by police, is now over. But his activities have sparked intense debate over the legality of his tactics.

Much of that stems from one high-profile U.S. case. In 2001, police arrested Judge Ronald Kline, a Superior Court judge in Orange County, Calif., and charged him with possessing child pornography on computers at home and in his courtroom. Many, if not all, of those images were found thanks to Willman’s hacking. After a seesaw legal battle hinging on the admissibility of Willman’s evidence, Kline has pleaded innocent to those charges and to subsequent charges of child molestation, and is set to appear in court this fall. Meanwhile, Willman has had his cloak of anonymity lifted. He says several pedophile groups around the world want him dead. More ominously, thanks to an RCMP order to stop hacking and the seizure of his hard drive for the Kline case, he can no longer access information he had collected on people who, he says, are “a thousand times worse than Kline.”
 
 
 

The evidence against Judge Kline and others was uncovered using a program Willman developed, a kind of Trojan Horse. It let him seize control of about 3,000 computers around the world when users downloaded a picture, in reality a virus, that he had posted on well-travelled child porn sites. It allowed him to record everything the users did, from sending email to posting pictures. Many of his targets were ordinary people, but the list also featured military and police officers, Boy Scout leaders, priests and child care workers.

For the legal system, the Kline case posed a challenge. Initially, the Federal Court threw out the evidence against the judge, saying it had been seized in the course of an illegal search by Willman. In that June 2003 ruling, U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall said that Willman was working as a police informant when he hacked into Kline’s computer and that, as a result, he needed a search warrant. But in October 2004, an appeals court overturned that decision, saying no search warrant was necessary because Willman was an anonymous tipster. In March of this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and Kline is now scheduled for trial this November.

Some, however, think Willman himself should be punished. “The way the information was collected is not appropriate,” says Hasan Cavusoglu, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. “It may challenge the foundation of many institutions we all rely on if everybody starts to do what they deem to be right. We should all abide by the laws.” According to Cavusoglu, it simply is not appropriate for regular citizens to assume the responsibility of going after criminals. And he believes that the ramifications of courts accepting the kind of evidence Willman provided are quite serious. “This will create precedents,” he predicts, “for other prosecutors to attempt to use evidence obtained by illegal means in other trials.”

It all comes down to the fact that hacking, for whatever purpose, is against the law, Cavusoglu says. “Finding some positives in hacking, catching a criminal for instance, will not really change the fact that it is illegal. Those guys are costing millions of dollars to firms, governments and ordinary people by stealing their confidential and personal information. Therefore, they should be treated like criminals. It may seem extreme, but I believe that [Willman] has broken the law. He should be punished for this — even if his findings might have allowed the police to stop a pedophile.”

Willman, 25, actually has sympathy for this point of view. “I knew what I was doing was illegal,” he says. “I think it should be illegal, the idea of monitoring someone.” But, he notes, there should be different levels of legality. “I wasn’t stealing Visa info, which I could have done. I was finding out if they were harming kids.”

Willman’s quest to find and punish pedophiles began by accident, when he was 17 and an online acquaintance offered him sex with his daughter. “At first, I was like, well, maybe,” he recalls. “But then I found out she was 6, and that really freaked me out.” He tried to cut off contact but he kept receiving naked pictures and descriptions of what he should do with the girl. Ultimately, Willman passed on the information to the Langley RCMP; police subsequently arrested an Edmonton man, who confessed on the spot.

Willman felt good about having helped a child, and so the idea for his Trojan Horse program began to develop. It became much like a full-time job, even though Willman was in high school or being home schooled during that period. If someone was simply downloading child porn, he would monitor them. But if they were actually posting photos, he considered that a higher priority. He would verify where suspects were from, and send the information on to Predator-Hunter, an online pedophile watchdog group that would, in turn, send it to other sources to be verified before passing it on to police. “Parents in a number of countries, I think, owe Omni-Potent a debt of gratitude for what he did,” says Wendell Krueth, president of Predator-Hunter. The end justifying the means is a concept Predator-Hunter supports. “We don’t tell people to go hack, but we consider whatever information we get worthy in taking down pedophiles,” Krueth says.

Under U.S. and Canadian law, there’s no question Willman was, technically, acting illegally. But according to Richard Owens, one of Canada’s leading lawyers in the computer field and executive director of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, that doesn’t make the information he gathered any less forceful. “We allow private citizens to make arrests in the real world,” he says, “or to contribute evidence or provide tips. This is not that different. We may need to set certain limits, but for the moment it’s unrestricted and the risks, in this case, are balanced by the benefits of prosecuting a potential child predator.”

Willman, meanwhile, continues to live with his parents as he tries to find a career in the computer field. In spite of the legal questions surrounding what he did, he’s angry at having been forced to stop doing something that was engrossing and useful. “Being made to sign something that says I will never do it again ticks me off because the police aren’t doing the job,” he says. “I was doing it better than they could. I knew it was illegal, but I didn’t care about taking the risk. Kids were being hurt — and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
 
 
 

[IronJack]

In other news, "Man Bites Dog."

[JimRed]

How can evidence illegally obtained by a hacker be used against the man?

The government did not "hack" the judges computer; a private individual did so. If I'm hearing you correctly, you believe that this evidence is invalid?

Draw this parallel: A car thief witnesses an armed robbery committed by the individual from whom he is stealing, IDs the perp and testifies at the trial. Should the testimony be thrown out?

By the way, I agree with you about hackers; shoot the ba$tard$!

[Ramcat]

According to Cavusoglu, it simply is not appropriate for regular citizens to assume the responsibility of going after criminals.

Huh?

[rarestia]

Hackers aren't generally out to make the internet a miserable place. You can blame large groups of "script kiddies" in E. Europe, Korea, China and the Phillipines for the greatest ills the internet suffers. MOST people who get "hacked," or at the least get inundated with spyware, do it to themselves.

A few years ago I was heavy into IRC, peer-to-peer file trading, torrents and "zero-day warez" for programs that would cost the average person hundreds of dollars. I got duped into a licensing scheme with someone who I thought was in Chicago, but I come to find out it was a group of "hackers" in China.

They managed to infiltrate, what I thought was, my pretty robust security infrastructure and went crazy on my servers, stealing personal information, deleting almost a terabyte of music, movies and programs and leaving me with a pretty nasty note on one of my websites that I was in cahoots with the feds and tracing everyone's information who visited my websites (which wasn't true).

After all was said and done, I had to go through the motions to have several bank accounts changed to make sure my identity wasn't stolen (it's been 3 years with no problems, thankfully), moved out of my old apartment and changed service providers. I sold half of my computer equipment to help finance a new car, and I can personally say I've learned my lesson.

Nowadays I have a game computer with very limited access to the internet, my laptop which houses no personal information and is used to access the internet and chat, and a server to store my personal stuff and keep my life secure. Moral of the story here is that if you have a lot to hide, someone can find a way to get to it.

I saw some of the most devious schemes you could conjure against people who seemed pretty innocent. This judge got what he had coming to him, in my opinion, but I agree that being a vigilante hacker isn't exactly an honorable job. I would guess that this judge was getting his kiddie porn from some very prominent but shady websites that disseminate that crap, and this hacker was "packet sniffing" for IPs that were accessing the content.

The rest of you are right about being falsely accused though. When you get infected from something, you open up your machine to all sorts of malicious attacks, and if you're out browsing the net one day and get a popup for something that's really out of the ordinary, I'd suggest turning off your machine and finding the problem. If your machine gets routed to one of the millions of questionable-content websites, you could find yourself falsely accused too.

Better yet, get one computer for your "dirty traffic" habits such as blogging, forums (like FR), web-based email and shopping (i.e. eBay), and another machine for personal business such as banking, client-side email (i.e. Outlook) and general business functions. Then... ratchet up the Windows firewall as high as you can and block cookies, ActiveX controls and the like. You won't be bulletproof, but you'll be more secure and tucked away from being hacked or worse, having your identity stolen.

[N3WBI3]

The hacker posted a virus embedded in an obscene image to a chat room for pedophiles, anyone who downloaded the image handed over the keys to a back door on their PC. From this he was able to get all of the guys chat logs, email, and other data.

If this evidence is allowed to be used in court ,anything illegal they might find in anyone computer may be used, That sounds like a Constitutional problem to me.

If a guy puts a transmitter in an illegal object and waits for someone to take it, and record them doing something illegal would that evidence be constitutionally be in question?

[L98Fiero]

There is an actual story of a man breaking into a guy's house and finding child porn on the guy's PC. He turned himself in for the B&E to report the child porn he found.

It's on FR, I need to find it.

[Beagle8U]

Didn't the article say the hacker hacked into his "Home" computer and found the porn reported?

Then the cops got a warrant to search his "Court" computer and found much more porn.

The evidence from the hacker was never needed as evidence at that point.

I don't like hackers either but it looks like they only used anything he found as reasonable suspicion for the warrant to search the court computer.

[pyx]

I too agree that convicted pedophiles should be castrated.

That said and as despicable as the crime of pedophilia is, I also have some problems with breaking laws to obtain evidence -- although, there may be circumstances where I would condone breaking the law to obtain evidence.


Below is definately worth a read;

Binary over JPEG -- is a mechanism for transferring a Trojan horse code by hiding it in a JPEG image, to be activated when the user downloads the image located on any web page.

More information is available here at TechRepublic.com

[carlo3b]

For the legal system, the Kline case posed a challenge. Initially, the Federal Court threw out the evidence against the judge, saying it had been seized in the course of an illegal search by Willman. In that June 2003 ruling, U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall said that Willman was working as a police informant when he hacked into Kline’s computer and that, as a result, he needed a search warrant. But in October 2004, an appeals court overturned that decision, saying no search warrant was necessary because Willman was an anonymous tipster.

She was named an Inglewood Municipal Court judge in 1976 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who elevated her to the Superior Court the following year. Then-President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the federal bench.

DUH!!!

[GovernmentIsTheProblem]

"Willman, 25, actually has sympathy for this point of view. “I knew what I was doing was illegal,” he says. “I think it should be illegal, the idea of monitoring someone.” But, he notes, there should be different levels of legality. “I wasn’t stealing Visa info, which I could have done. I was finding out if they were harming kids.”"

Of course, now any credit card theif can use this as plausible deniability - "I was looking for online kiddie diddlers!"