Even Flash images must be rendered on the host computer, and I have recovered thousands of Flash images and videos from page files and unallocated space. Usually, these are images and videos that were never stored on the host computer but simply viewed. Try again.
Terrific. And, what happens when those locations are in China or Russia or some other far away place where the US federal government enjoys virtually no access?
The file system records can show that the user accessed the images from a remote location. Generally, these kiddie porn purveyors are not real sophisticated in the naming of their pictures, so the names of the images and videos are often strong supporting evidence. That, along with the inevitable images and videos recovered from the hard drive go a long way to making a case... But you should know that, with your extensive prosecutorial experience... Having the material that is hosted on an external site would help alot, but is not essential to making your case if you recover enough from the hard drive.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been practicing law for over 50-years, that - unfortunately - doesn't mean she's any good at it.
You know, I've noticed that you make these kind of personal attacks against anyone who disagrees with you on anything. Very "liberal" of you.
And yet, with my admittedly limited understanding of "how computers work", I've managed to poke large, gaping holes in your "theory". How about that.
So far, you haven't poked holes in anything, much less my original statement, which is that you cannot wipe all evidence from a hard drive with a "keystroke or click of a mouse" quickly enough to justify the kind of tactics used in this raid.
While I concur with the later part of your statement (the tactics were not justified) I believe there are steps that a criminal can take to hide the evidence (as stated a couple times in this thread). I think the police would know if this guy was computer savy or not. If they were monitoring his computer they would know what type of capability this guy had. The fact that he wasn't using an onion router or even a proxy then he's clearly not that computer savvy. Plus they think he's doing it from his own house. I doubt he would have some uber cool way of deleting the files quick enough that would make them unrecoverable.
So yes it can be done, but is it likely in this case--hell no.