
'I was falsely branded a paedophile' - jacquesm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7326736.stm
======
jrockway
It's time for society to realize that "accused of a crime" does not mean
"guilty". It should be illegal to fire someone because they are accused of a
crime. (And if your parents disown you, it means you have damn bad parents who
you are probably better off without.)

~~~
ErrantX
Damn straight on the employment thing. Suspension is reasonable in certain
cases (say you work in a bank and are suspected of fraud) But sacking? Hell
no.

~~~
dantheman
You should be able to fire someone for any reason. It's immoral to fire people
accused of crime, you should treat your employees with respect, but there
should be no law involved.

~~~
xiaoma
> _You should be able to fire someone for any reason._

I disagree. You shouldn't be able to fire someone for being Jewish. You
shouldn't be able to fire someone for not voting how you want them to. You
shouldn't be able to fire someone for not having sex with you. There are a lot
of things that you shouldn't be able to fire someone for.

~~~
dantheman
If you don't like Jewish people and it's your company you shouldn't have to
work with them. It will only hurt you as you are limiting your labor pool to
non-Jewish people, and this is the same for any other form of discrimination.

The only place that should not be allowed to discriminate is the government
since they represent all people.

Freedom of association is the key hear, you should be able t o associate with
anyone you'd like to and vice-versa. Now I'm of course not advocating any sort
of discrimination, but I do think it should be allowed. Just as I don't
advocate hate speech, but I think it should be allowed.

~~~
xiaoma
Firing Jewish people doesn't just hurt the bigoted employer, it hurts the
people wrongfully fired, too! There is something appealing to letting everyone
keep to whatever groups they wish, but historically the idea has led to
horrible things for the shunned groups.

~~~
dantheman
Agreed, it hurts everyone involved -- just as hate speech does.

As for the history of discrimination, I believe that the majority of it was
actually codified into law. So, I don't know if we can blame individuals
acting on their own. Has there ever been a group that was shunned where it
wasn't codified into law/sponsored by the government?

~~~
pyre
"Irish Need Not Apply" was a common sign to see in America when there were a
lot of Irish immigrants (Irish Potato Famine era).

> _Has there ever been a group that was shunned where it wasn't codified into
> law/sponsored by the government?_

What comes first though? The government is made up of people. So people have
to have these attitudes first and foremost before it becomes codified into
law. If the public violently disagreed with said laws, then they would be
repealed as wildly unpopular.

------
cousin_it
So someone in Indonesia, using only a computer with Internet access, got a man
in England arrested, labeled a pedo and disowned by his employers and family?
We live in interesting times indeed. Hey guys, I live in Moscow, wanna set up
a little extortion racket? I hear it's pretty easy to buy stolen credit card
numbers in bulk.

...And also I'd like to go on record saying that the real villains in this
story are those who fan up public hysteria about child porn.

------
philk
_"I made the mistake of telling my father, and he cut me off," Mr Bunce says.
"He then told all my siblings and they also cut us off."_

 _"I've forgiven them [my family] - there's no point in bearing a grudge."_

His family seems pretty loathsome and reconciling with them after the fact
seems like a waste of time.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but even if your family can be pretty loathsome for some people they're
all they've got.

If my family did something like this to me or to any other family member of
mine then I'd disown them instead.

Reprehensible doesn't even begin to cover it, if you are family and you can't
even wait for the verdict to be in before having a hanging party then it's
really sad.

~~~
shrikant
Why wait for the verdict? Ask and accept his word for it as best you can.

------
llimllib
> Each computer has a unique internet protocol number, or IP address, which
> identifies the specific computer and its geographic whereabouts whenever it
> is used to access the internet.

I'm surprised nobody here has responded to this complete falsehood in the
article. Did this paragraph bother anybody else?

~~~
derefr
An IP address is only assigned to one computer _at a time_. If you have a
(recent) timestamp, you can resolve the IP address to a MAC address (and
customer account number/address) by subpoenaing the ISP. You might get a
router/gateway/proxy, but that's still "one computer" and you've still found
it. It's just not the one you wanted.

~~~
llimllib
In the context of the article, the "it" in "whenever it is used to access the
internet." refers to the computer that you're using, not your gateway or some
proxy machine.

Also, it's not true that an IP address is only assigned to one computer at a
time; the IP address 10.0.0.1 is assigned to a whole lot of computers right
now. You and I know that, and understand why it's true, but the article
implies (pretty directly) that an IP address is a unique identifier for a
computer. Which is a widely-believed falsehood that drives me crazy.

~~~
derefr
10.0.0.1 isn't actually an unqualified "IP address", though; it's specifically
a _virtual_ IP address, which should really be dichotomous to "real" IP
addresses, not considered a subset of them.

Besides, they never said _globally_ unique. Your IP uniquely identifies you to
whatever network you're participating on, the same way your username uniquely
identifies you to whatever website you're logging into.

Alternate ending: In the context of the article, they were talking about
tracing people via their IPs, as recorded in the logs of Internet-routable
("public facing") servers. The only kinds of IPs such a log would record are
other real IPs; there's no real way it could see a virtual IP. Thus, whatever
is in the log is "good enough" for pointing the finger at _someone_ , whether
that someone is a person, a company, or an ISP. The goal of such a trace is to
pass the buck, not to catch the person yourself.

~~~
olefoo
There are all sorts of ways in which a routable ip address can be shared. At
the most basic, a pair of routers or load-balancers sharing a virtual ip using
CARP. And you can do weird and wacky things if you control an entire routable
netblock ( /24 or larger) using bgp to tell different peers to route it to
different gateways etc.

Most of the time you can get away with thinking of an address as being tied
(at least temporarily) to a particular location. But once you throw in things
like NAT and proxying and the like... That abstraction starts to look more and
more sieve-like.

An ip address in a web-servers logs isn't going to tell you much, for one
thing it's probably not the address of a specific device; it's going to be the
address of a gateway that does address translation for a private subnet; for
another, what happens if the machine on the client end of the transaction is
acting as a proxy for the real eventual destination of that stream of bits?

In digital forensics, an IP is only one piece of evidence; you need to be able
to assemble lots of pieces to get a complete picture.

------
danskil
This is really horrible, but i can't help but be reminded of the episode of
"The IT Crowd" Where the lead character goes on a date with Peter File. Just
goes to show how much value all societies place on titles, no matter how un-
deserved.

~~~
colonelxc
Wow, that is the first thing I thought of too.

That's the terrible thing about even being accused of a crime (regardless of
your innocence), it can still destroy your life. Even if it's not a bad title
(as in this case), just having to defend your own innocence can have high
costs (both legal and emotional).

------
mynameishere
_who now sells encryption services_

Also: How to use the internet through Indonesian proxies and install OSes on
hidden volumes.

~~~
jacquesm
More likely: Be aware, your identity is easily assumed and 'bad people' may
ruin your life very casually.

He's had an object lesson in the consequences, it lost him a ton of money, you
really can't fault the guy from trying to recoup some of his losses with his
new-found knowledge.

~~~
mprime
His "new-found knowledge" is what anyone here would call common sense.

~~~
jacquesm
How many people on HN do you think fall in the 'common' bracket?

There is probably more IT competency here than you'd find in a very large
majority of the net population.

For most people this would be news, for you and I, and most of the rest of HN
it's old hat.

~~~
mprime
>"For most people this would be news"

If that's the case, I'm more out of touch with the world than I thought.

------
miguelpais
Gotta love de virtual credit cards I use to buy stuff online (since I don't
have a credit card, that's the only way I can buy online).

------
ilitirit
Pertinent issue, but in future please note the date of publication in the
title if the article is more than a year old. I wish people started
standardizing the way articles are published to the web so that this sort of
metadata could be derived as easily as the page title.

------
mprime
It's upsetting to read that he just now started being wary of credit cards and
shredding his papers. Someone should not have to go through such an ordeal
before caring about the privacy of their personal information. The same goes
for his "once bitten, twice shy" comment - why did he have to have his life
ruined before being 'cautious' (a.k.a. exercising common sense) about online
shopping?

Still, this is absolutely terrible. I think the police automatically assuming
that anyone buying child porn was stupid enough to use their own credit cards
is ignorant and obnoxious.

~~~
pyre
> _why did he have to have his life ruined before being 'cautious' (a.k.a.
> exercising common sense) about online shopping_

It's not even 'online shopping.' A couple of the huge cases of stolen
identities were by employees at credit card processors, so it didn't matter
how respectable or secure the stores themselves were.

------
sailormoon
_"Being arrested and accused of what is probably one of the worst crimes known
to man, losing my job, having my reputation run through the mud, it's a living
nightmare."_

I love how downloading a stream of bytes - simply copying a file from A to B -
is now "one of the worst crimes known to man". I wonder how long this kind of
crap goes on before the average person considers it a good use of their time
to learn about encryption.

~~~
pyre
Well, you _could_ argue in this case that the crime he was accused of was
_purchasing_ child porn which encourages and supports the producers though I
have a feeling that the author just mean 'child porn' (in general) when he
wrote that.

~~~
sailormoon
Funny how that argument only works with kiddie porn. I mean, you could argue
that by buying Nikes you're encouraging and supporting child labor. You could
argue that by buying a diamond you're encouraging and supporting slavery. You
could argue that by buying pictures of Abu Ghraib the media "encourages and
supports" the behaviour at Abu Ghraib.

But this supposed causal chain of responsibility between purchaser and
producer is only enforced, indeed only even mentioned, when it comes to the
bogeyman of child porn, which means it's nothing but an excuse.

------
ErrantX
It's a difficult scenario and definitely an extreme example. It's hard to see
what could have gone differently (apart from the family and employers being
douches)

~~~
jacquesm
I would say that more than one piece of evidence would have to be brought
before arresting someone, and they should have had a _very_ good look at the
counter-evidence, which was apparently already available at the time of the
arrest.

Very sloppy police work this, basically someones life got altered indelibly
for something he really had nothing to do with.

Just think of it, credit card numbers + matching expiry dates and CVVs are for
sale in bulk on underground black markets, every piece of evidence found in a
case as serious as this should be held to the highest standards before taking
steps that can't be undone.

Since his computer wasn't implicated at all before it was seized, if they had
tried to tie the case to the guys IP they would have seen he had nothing to do
with it immediately that shouldn't have happened at all.

This was simply a fishing expedition and a mans life was changed in a very bad
way because of it.

~~~
ErrantX
What other information? An ip address? Not particularly relevant.

In th case of indecent images the police are pretty much required to
investigate with evidence of this type. Not doing so is just too dangerous all
round for them.

I'd say this was just one of the extreme cases your always going to come
across. It sucks, lots.

Edit: by required I mean its shaky legal ground not to pursue it aggressively.
Especially if he suspect is a parent. If hey ignore it and it turns out the
guy is guilty they are fucked, badly. The differing ip address is important
but only circumstantial because ips are two a penny.

~~~
jacquesm
No, seriously, the fact that there was no other corroborating evidence means
that there are _NOT_ enough grounds for suspicion.

A credit card number is way too easily jacked / faked / cloned. I've had it
happen to me in a restaurant, before I finished my trip home (another 700 km
drive) there had been a few thousand $ of online charges on the card.

A credit card number is not an identity. If it isn't enough to cross a border
with then it certainly shouldn't by itself be a reason for an investigation.

Especially because in cases like these the chances of the perp using
fraudulent information are substantially higher than when looking at the
transactions for say amazon.com.

Of course pedos are going to try to cover their tracks, using a stolen credit
card number is a lesser crime considered to the one they are already
committing so the barrier is a pretty low one.

~~~
flipper
Yes, if I was the victim in this article I would strongly consider suing the
police for wrongful arrest. He would have an excellent case against the police
for negligence causing him substantial loss. If the police had investigated
his case properly they would have seen that there was no prospect of
successful prosecution, but every chance of ruining his life.

~~~
enneff
"there was no prospect of successful prosecution, but every chance of ruining
his life."

Which is probably why they did it. "Even if we can't convict him, we'll at
least destroy this filthy pedo's life."

