Posted on 06/27/2015 6:06:58 PM PDT by BBell
A Saucier, Miss., man whose computer had a child pornography IP address registered to someone else will still have to serve time, according to a report in The SunHerald. The sentence was a bifurcated one.
Circuit Court Judge Larry Bourgeois sentenced Keith Joseph Cuevas, 37, to a 10-year sentence but then suspended 6 ½ years of it, meaning Cuevas must serve 3 ½ years. Cuevas, who will not be eligible for early release, will then face five years of supervised probation and lifetime registration as a convicted sex offender, the paper reported.
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
This could set a dangerous precedent. The guy lived in a house with multiple people and the IP address used to commit the crime was not even his. This could make it easy to frame someone. If the guy is guilty he deserves what he got.
Remember to always password protect access to your computer.
This is thankfully how it should have been done.
If I pay the internet bill, but a friend or family member downloads on to their computer illegal images, the person who did that should be the one who goes to jail—not the bill payer.
That sounds like what happened, here.
May be accessory to the crime, but not the full crime.
Accessory to the crime would require knowledge or some activity.
Cafe owners don’t go to jail for what patrons download.
“Accessory to the crime would require knowledge or some activity.
Cafe owners don’t go to jail for what patrons download.”
It is their responsibility to ensure that their property (computers, internet access, etc) is not used in a crime. Make money from criminals paying you, you should pay for it.
guy phones in a bomb threat... is AT&T responsible? no
guy drives a ryder rental into a building and it blows up... ryder responsible? no
Thanks for the clarity.
“guy phones in a bomb threat... is AT&T responsible? no
guy drives a ryder rental into a building and it blows up... ryder responsible? no”
Are airlines responsible for terrorists hijacking their airlines? no
Are cruise ships responsible for icebergs capsizing their ships? no
It was his computer and he was using someone else’s IP address. He’s guilty. The owner of the IP address is a dupe.
“It is their responsibility to ensure that their property (computers, internet access, etc) is not used in a crime.”
No it’s not. That turns the law on its head.
Where did you get your info? I did not read anywhere that he was using someone else’s I.P.
Justice Kagan, is that you?
Internet traffic comes through an ISP, a service provider, who has a router. That router assigns IP addresses to its customers, who also have routers. (These can either be static, or permanent, or vary by session through something called DHCP). What an IP address trace does is to get you through the ISP's router to the home router, usually through the logs on the ISP's router.
The home router has multiple computers attached to it. It has its own little bag of IP addresses that are different from the one used at the vendor (this is NAT, or network address translation). Its job is to take traffic sent to it by its common IP address and split it up into the various computers hooked up to it. Only here is there a hook between the IP address the vendor knows about and the one assigned to the computer. This information can be logged but seldom is because who would read it?
So that's where the IP trace breaks down. The investigator knows that the illegal traffic reached the home router, which is registered to whoever has the account at the vendor. That's all the investigator knows.
What happened at that home router level to divvy that traffic up to the ultimate destination is normally not recoverable, although for routers managed by IT staff at places like companies, it can be. For home routers, not so much; they either don't log it at all or the logs roll over from limited storage space.
So what happens is that the guy with the computer hits his home router, offers his only unique, hardware-level ID known as a MAC address (machine access code), is matched to an IP address by the home router that is good only for that session (it's actually called a "lease"). For the duration of that session only, the connection is traceable all the way from source to destination. When the session ends, the IP address assigned by the home router is recycled.
That's why there were different IP addresses and the true route was probably not recoverable. But it was enough to tell the investigator that something attached to the home router received the illegal traffic, probably enough for a search warrant. Again, only guessing, but it was probably the presence of the illegal material itself on the guy's computer that resulted in the conviction.
All of this is not true all the time for all setups, so this is nothing more than a guess. But that's why the guy's computer had a different IP address from the furthest one the investigator could trace. The guy registered to the home router was also the last guy the investigator could trace to. But he wasn't the perp, and I doubt if anyone even tried to charge him because it wouldn't have stood up in court.
God, this is still IT gibberish, I'm sorry. Welcome to my world. :-(
> Where did you get your info? I did not read anywhere that he was using someone else’s I.P.
Read the article. His computer. He lived in a home with other people and he was using the IP address of one of the other residents. In my opinion, he was using the other address and not his own, so things wouldn’t get traced back to him.
In several Intellectual Property cases the courts have held that an IP address does not identify a user. There must be other facts not included in the article.
This article really doesn’t make a lot of sense. What is a “child pornography IP address registered to someone else”?
Also the article seems to dodge around whether or not any actual pornography was found on anyone’s computer, just an IP address.
This guy needed a better lawyer.
This should remind everyone to lock up their routers and wireless servers. Even then you aren’t protected. You can buy network cards and adapters that will let you change MAC and IP addresses in seconds. Anyone can just go cruising through your neighborhood pinging for that information and spoof it for nefarious uses. Find an open routers like at a McDonald’s and it now appears you are on line doing the crime.
Probably just crappy journalism.
Thank you. I’m still a bit confused but I’m an illiterate when it comes to technical stuff dealing with computers.
It does not say that he was using the IP address of one of the other residents anywhere.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.