 Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor and welcome to my blog. Today's topic has to do with child pornography. Now I know most people think, wow, that's something I would never have to worry about, but believe it or not, everybody who has a computer and who shares files does have to worry about this stuff. We have computer forensic experts that are the best if you should happen to fall in the web of frost wire and lime wire. In order to be a computer forensics expert, a person has to be certified in NCASE and FTK, pass a written exam and also take a practical exam which consists of 60 days to complete. It's quite extensive. Now when the government is looking to charge people, they will go into your computer and only look for chargeable images. They will never look for exculpatory evidence and they don't care who is actually at the keyboard. They just assume it was you and that's not always the case. Basically your computer contains thousands of cached images on your hard drive which you got from web browsing in the temporary internet files. That means you're online, you're browsing, anything you look at actually gets cached and you're probably totally unaware that that's on your computer. Now the media player cache, that happens when you open a Windows media player and it's created automatically, that being the media player cache. This exists without your knowledge to most people and it's not actually downloaded by you. It occurs automatically. Incomplete folders. An incomplete folder in your computer contains files that either did not complete loading or that the user canceled during the download. Now this happens all the time. This is where you're downloading something that takes too long and you say forget it, cancel. Whatever was downloaded goes into your incomplete folder without your knowledge. So this means you could be downloading something you've never even looked at such as kiddie porn and it ends up in your computer. These incomplete folders can be shared without your knowledge and you can be completely unaware of the content. Now why is it important that it's shared? Well that's where the second charge of distribution of child pornography comes in. The government looks to charge you with possession and distribution. By the way in Arizona each count of possession carries a mandatory minimum 10 years in prison for each image. Each image is stacked on the other one by law. So if you have five images that's 50 years in prison minimum. The maximum is 23 times 5, 115 years in prison. Federal government they usually offer you five years but if you're convicted it's 17 to 20 years on a single count of possession and distribution combined. So pretty bad stuff. The government uses a special codex to view files that the average user doesn't have. So even though you may have some of this and you're in complete file and you can't even view it the government can see it. Now in regards to LimeWire, LimeWire was shut down about a year ago and they immediately restarted as FrostWire. Now this is a file sharing program that a lot of you are probably familiar with where you can share music, photos, videos, etc. Now when you open an account it automatically creates a saved folder, a shared folder and an incomplete folder. Everything you have defaults automatically to shared and saved. It does this as part of the contract you sign with FrostWire or LimeWire to share your music and your videos. Now once a user enables LimeWire or FrostWire to send music files directly to your iTunes library it automatically creates an incomplete folder and it places files in there without your knowledge. So what happens is for most people if you have an incomplete file a user never wants to move or access incomplete files, in fact you don't even think about them. Yet child porn can automatically default into that file without your knowledge. So if you're automatically downloading somebody's music that you like, you see somebody and they have 10 songs that you really like and you realize, hey this guy likes the music, I like, I will just browse all, control A and I'm going to do a mass download. No problem. Well there is a problem. The problem is of the 2000 songs or videos you're downloading into your iTunes account you don't realize you're not looking at the titles of some of these and they may have titles in there that say child pornography or something less obvious that is indicative of child porn but only to the government or people who are purveyors of child porn. So you don't see this, it downloads into your iTunes account and now you have a video that contains child pornography. The other problem is mislabeled files or malware. So if you download something that says cute kittens and you don't preview it you just download it. Well you don't know if it's really cute kittens it could have child pornography. Now in order to preview something you cannot preview what you downloaded until it completes downloading. Then you can take 10 minutes, you can then start looking at it in 2 seconds and you can go I don't want this, delete. Right? You're fine. Wrong. You're not fine. It's in the incomplete file even though you tried to delete it and that folder still exists. You may have watched the first 2 or 3 seconds and there is no child pornography and then you really don't know what's on there and you delete it but it's still there and that's the problem. How does the government know it's there? They look what's called hash values. Hash values are basically the number of pixels and there's a certain hash value for every video or picture that's out there. So there's known child pornography that contains, I don't know, a hash value of 22,572. And the FBI knows that that hash value is child porn. So when you go down and you click on cute kittens without realizing it's child porn and you say, yeah, I want to download that and you click on to it, it immediately alerts the government. Boom, there's that hash value. Now, 2 seconds later you may say, oh, I've got to run the phone's ringing. You stop the download, you cancel it and so you never even completed the download, you never even previewed it but the government's been told you downloaded kiddie porn because the hash value matches. That's enough for the government to get a search warrant. Then they go into your house and then once they're in your computer, unbeknownst to you, you've done a mass download and you have actual child pornography in that computer. That's a huge problem. If you are a loved one or ever charged with child pornography or if the government has executed a warrant taking your computer away and they haven't quite charged you yet but you're in what's known as the pre-charge phase, you need to get a lawyer who knows what they're doing. Some other resources, you also need an expert who knows what they're doing. We've found that one of the best experts in the United States actually lives in Arizona. She lives in Tucson. It's Tammy Lears, L-O-E-H-R-S and she can be found at forensicexpert.net. She is excellent. We used her in a trial in Tucson and she was fantastic. Also you might want to trial consult it and we found that the best one in the nation is Kim Hart, H-A-R-T. Kim Hart started the National Child Abuse Defense Resource Center and she can be found at falsealligation.org. That's the National Child Abuse Defense Resource Center. As a trial consultant, she can be found at kimhart.com and she is also excellent. If you are a loved one or charged or a warrant's been executed, you need to get a lawyer who knows what they're doing and you should consult at the very least Kim Hart or Tammy Lears. If you have any other questions, we welcome you to contact us at dmcantor.com and we'd love to talk to you about this. My feel is I was ecstatic when they shut down lime wire. I wish they'd shut down frost wire but that's what I think, tell me what you think.