Nintendo Hacker Pleads Guilty To Downloading Child Porn
Bok Mull
21-year-old Palmdale, California man, Ryan Hernandez, has pleaded guilty to charges laid against him for both hacking Nintendo systems and stealing company secrets as well as downloading and possessing child pornography. According to the US Department of Justice website, Hernandez used a "phishing technique" to steal the credentials of a Nintendo employee, which gained him access to Nintendo's servers, where he downloaded confidential files.
Hernandez, also known as Ryan West and RyanRocks, pleaded guilty to a count of computer fraud and abuse for which he is facing a total of 5 years in prison and to a count of possession of child pornography that comes with a statutory maximum of 20 years in prison.
The suspect, now 21, pleaded guilty last week, to both charges. As part of the guilty plea, prosecutors agreed not to pursue a prison sentence bigger than three years for both charges -- of hacking and possession of child pornography.
US Department of Justice released an official statement last Tuesday (12/1) confirming the news, saying that the 21-year-old is guilty of stealing "prorietary information from Nintendo" and "downloading and possessing images of child rape and abuse."
I avoid them like the plague now for the easy "accidental felonies" available when someone posts child porn as a joke, which will then put the illegal material in your browser cache, history, and in the server logs downloading it. Trolls on 4chan do this all the time, and moderators can never be fast enough to catch all of them.
First, to get cocaine one would have to get in contact with a seller, buy it, store it, bring it to work with me, etc. Every step of the way entails real legal and in some cases physical risk. There are, of course, risks associated with getting child porn too, but I'm willing to bet that someone who knows what they're doing would have near zero chance of getting caught downloading child porn once; most of the people that get caught are members of 'communities' of people who trade images back and forth.
In my socialist utopia country Norway, there was actually a court ruling that found a man who had child pornography in his browser cache not guilty. The reason was that he did not download them (but he did in fact confess to have purchased them intentionally) and that regular people should not be expected to know that the browser caches images from the web. In effect, the ruling actually means it is legal to surf child pornography in Norway. I don't have any English links about this, but any norwegians reading this post can check out this DB article: [dagbladet.no]
It's only entrapment if you lure the mark into downloading something that he does not think is child porn, or if you infect someone who visits the site by misspelling a URL. If you bundle the malware with actual child porn images that are advertised as such, you're golden.
No, that wouldn't be entrapment. In the first case it would be committing a crime (tricking someone into downloading child port when they have no intention to do this is a crime), in the second case we have the unfortunate situation that an innocent person will be incorrectly accused of a crime. Neither is entrapment.
Entrapment would be convincing someone who doesn't originally want to download child porn to willingly do it.
No, that wouldn't be entrapment. In the first case it would be committing a crime (tricking someone into downloading child port when they have no intention to do this is a crime), in the second case we have the unfortunate situation that an innocent person will be incorrectly accused of a crime. Neither is entrapment.Entrapment would be convincing someone who doesn't originally want to download child porn to willingly do it.
I'm of the personal opinion that people involved in child porn should be jailed for life without parole if they are found guilty. The rule of law can not be tossed out the window because of my emotion on the topic. That is called chaos or anarchy, and we are supposed to be civilized.
If they provided secure online storage, they shouldn't be guilty. If they were providing secure online storage to people whom they knew or should have known were hosting porn of underage people, they should suffer a significant legal penalty. If they were providing secure online storage to people whom they knew or should have known were hosting child porn of preteens then they should be burned at the stake.
What's at issue here isn't ignorance of the law, but ignorance of the facts, and that, oftentimes, is an excuse. Although possession of child pornography is illegal in most jurisdictions, almost all the statues generally say something along the lines of "it is unlawful to knowingly possess...". There is a very practical reason for this: absent the word "knowingly", anyone could simply e-mail anyone else some images that are illegal, and the recipient could be criminally liable for possession even if they hit the delete key immediately upon seeing it. Defendants could e-mail such images to prosecutors and judges and said prosecutors and judges would be guilty of the same crime the defendant is accused of.
The presumption of innocence IS THE CORRECT ATTITUDE. Humans have an illogical tendency to jump to conclusions, presume guilt, and go on witch hunts. Presuming innocence until proven guilty by facts is the best way to stop that irrational behavior and protect the innocent. Someone who like child porn and intentionally seeks it out (and is therefore believed to be directly or indirectly a danger to children, the whole reasoning behind child porn being illegal in the first place) is not going to download one video, delete it, and never download it again. Everything about the circumstances points to his story being correct, Limewire is famous for misnamed files, and its not the first time I've heard of there being kiddie porn on it. He did not have a collection, nor did he have it even saved, it was clearly deleted. There is no evidence he distributed it, sought it, or wanted it. If there is more to this case the FBI needs to reveal it, of course they won't have to because they have used the fact the legal system is rigged in their favor in this kind of case to scare him into a plea bargain.
This is shocking and appalling and must stop. This sort of thing makes it impossible to be able to even look at webpages on the net. What if one accidentily clicks on a link without knowing what it goes to and ends up with these files in their web browser cache? Clicking on a link is not enough to show intent, we cannot go on a wild witch hunt where everyone is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Under the law, it is the act of taking pictures of children in a sexually suggestive way is what should be considered illegal. For some time it has been argued that those who were purchasing such material were helping to contribute to this. However, an accidental download of such a thing does not contribute in any material way to it whatsoever and in most cases, such as we see here, is completely accidental. There are serious problems with this. This is like arresting a person for seeing a blank sheet of paper on a sidewalk, picking it up and noticing that on the other side there was child porn, since they had simply picked it up and held it. The notion is so outrageous and this is exactly what is going on here. This has nothing to do about protecting children and these prosecutions are not protecting children. That is NOT what this dragnet is about. They are NOT protecting children but they are attacking and destroying the lives of completely innocent people. In fact, many childrens lives have already been destroyed because they took a picture of themselves and simply had the picture on their cell phone. This is about thought control and precrime, because by accidentily downloading this, no one anywhere has been harmed, all it is a copy of bits. Really, this massive abuse of the law needs to stop.
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