Computer Sex Crimes

(The content below was transcribed from an interview done with Acacia Law. We think you'll find it much easier
and more enjoyable to read this way.)

Interviewer: You know what this brings to mind? Now, everyone is on social media. What if, for instance, parents have a picture of their kid coming out of the bath, and they've put it up on Facebook. Could they be facing a sex crime?

Acacia Law: That's a good question. Actually, that is something that absolutely could be deemed to be lewd or obscene. Again, I don't personally find it to be so. But the problem is that when you put something on the Internet, you essentially should go under one presumption. Everything that you type into your computer, every time that you go on the Internet, whatever you are typing, whatever you are looking at, whatever you are projecting from your computer is public knowledge. I think a lot of people, and you know a lot more about computers than I do, but the forensic detectives that they have for computer crimes, basically can extract almost any bit of information from a computer. So, if you take a picture of a child coming out of a bath that shows, say, frontal nudity, okay? That is probably something that is going to be looked at. It's not necessarily, in and of itself, going to raise alarm bells. Let's say, for example, you only have a few people in your own immediate family who look at your Facebook.

Interviewer: Okay.

Acacia Law: That's fine. However, you have to go under the presumption that anyone in the world can see what you post online.

Interviewer: That's true.

Acacia Law: And that's where people run into problems; is that they make the assumption that whatever they are looking at by simply erasing their hard drives, is going to take care of anything that they might have either posted, or written, and it simply isn't the case.

Unless that hard drive, and pretty much everything, including the CPU and motherboard, are completely destroyed, the forensics will be able to extract the information. Essentially, what I have frequently is situations where people are looking at pictures that they shouldn't be looking at. That normally often includes pictures of anyone under the age of 18 either dressed or suggestive or basically in an obscene or nude fashion that is sexual in nature. The problem is that it's really subjective.

Interviewer: Right.

Acacia Law: For example, if I was to show a picture of my daughter coming out of the bathtub, as you mentioned earlier, at the age of three, posted it on my Facebook so that her grandparents could see it, they'd probably think it was cute. Another person might come on and look at it, and actually be sexually aroused by it. You see, therein lies the problem. For some people, it's just a cute picture. For someone else it's an object of desire, and so it's a really, really difficult line to draw in the sand.

And one of the other problems that you have when it comes to these computer sex crimes is that you're dealing with international and interstate communications. So that a lot of times you can be just as easily charged under Federal law as you can under state law for these types of crimes. Because technically, everyone who examines it is from another state as you, you have communicated something across state lines.

Interviewer: I'm sure that a lot of people look at pornography on the Internet. Are there traps there that people searching for- that could look at images they are not supposed to look at unknowingly, or is this the duty of the people hosting those images to let you know that they are legal?

Acacia Law: That's a good question. Normally speaking, during the course of the past ten years, I can't think of the names off the top of my head, but there's about two or three different, what I would call host sites, that might have a list of links to various websites. If you look at them, they ordinarily have written at the top that no-one in these pictures in any of these sites depicted is under the age of 18. And, basically, if you as an individual go to one of those sites, you are pretty safe.

Here's where you're going to run into problems. If you go to a site like that, even though it says it's hosted and that they are 18 and over, if you click on one of those websites and start seeing pictures of some boy or girl who's clearly under the age of 18…

Interviewer: Okay.

Acacia Law: You've got to get off that site immediately, and you should know that they can keep track of how long you've been on a site. If you see a picture like that and jump off in two seconds, without saving it, without trying to gawk at it...

Interviewer: Understood.

Acacia Law: …then you've landed on a bad site that was poorly presented by the host.

Interviewer: Yes, because that's a natural reaction to be repulsed and to immediately jump off the site.

Acacia Law: Exactly; and most people will do exactly that, and there won't be any problems. However, I have had other people and some clients who will download the pictures and save them.

Interviewer: Oh, I see.

Acacia Law: Now, they've done something that's overt.

Acacia Law: It'd be sort of like if you had a pound of pot on the kitchen table, and you saw it and you walked out of the room so you wouldn't be associated with it. Then there are some people who would walk in, see the pound of pot on the table and pick it up and take it out the door with them. Now, the person who just walked out obviously is not somebody who did anything but walk away. The other person, however, has now engaged in the criminal activity. Because you are not supposed to be looking at those, and you're not supposed to be downloading pictures like that, you will be charged accordingly.