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- Hacker News
- The premise of Brazil (1985)by shen
- Came here to say this! You beat me to it.by dtagames
- Thank you, Mr. Tuttle!by etothet
- This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, but they will just assume they wiped the evidence from their local storage. There is no other evidence to be had because the crimes in this category to not require any physical evidence whatsoever. Many of the laws in this category involve byte patterns with a sexual theme, but not all of them. Others include the laws against using the wrong REST API in the wrong way (unauthorized access) or speech restrictions including laws against empty, impossible, never acted on threats or improper ideas (popular outside the US).by leonvoss
- Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.by inigyou
- Source article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...by xnx
- Connecting 'this account belongs to you' to 'this account did these activities' seems to rely on a chain of high-integrity (in the sense of both ethics and precision) investigative work that clearly doesn't happen because of the system's lazy recourse to subpoenaing internet companies (here with a typing error)by firasd
- You can assume "the system is lazy".
In practice, "the system" is a lot of humans. The police in rural Canada aren't used to challenging the word of Wisconsin police. Police and prosecutors need to have an incredible discipline to hear "we have a suspect in your community who preyed on a pre-pubescent girl in our neighborhood" and remain neutral and dispassionate during the investigation.
The stupid part is that the prosecution is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Then the defense attorney is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Presumably the jury got access to all of the facts of the case and simply ignored the lack of evidence tying the defendant to the offending Kik account. A chain of 3 errors shouldn't happen if everybody is diligent, but in practice "won't somebody think of the children?!?" Turns off cognitive skepticism and encourages moral panic.
by thephyber - > The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty.
There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
by codazoda - There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.by bhk
- The police testified that they had collected evidence from Kik that his username send the messages. Only he had access to that Kik account, ergo it is him. If that evidence is accepted as factually correct you are cooked. Case closed.
Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
by angry_octet - They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.by pseudo0
- It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”by ericcumbee
- "A crime so serious that not even innocence is an acceptable defense" type stuff right here.
Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.
by frozenseven - Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?by binaryturtle
- I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons.
Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
by entropy47 - The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.by kmoser
- Any number of things could have acquitted this man, including that. His lawyer, the judge, the prosecutors, the police and anyone else involved at any stage of this case need to be looked at very carefully and hard decisions should be made about whether it's appropriate for them to be licensed to perform whatever duties they were performing in the course of it.by mvdtnz
- We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?
0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
by ttctciyf - I'd trust a computer to catch a missing underscore way more than humans.by pibaker
- > To identify this person, the cops contacted Kik, but their subpoena accidentally requested information about the Kik user “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response.
> Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so the Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax Regional Police. Halifax police took the IP address they had been given to local Internet provider Bell Aliant. Bell connected the IP address to the physical address of their subscriber, Brandon Klayme.
This is startling to me as it shows how easy to pinpoint exact location based on email alone.
by marethyu - Is it surprising? Every time you log in your IP is recorded, and the ISP can handle the rest.by esafak
- If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part).
I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence.
Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
by thephyber - What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the conviction after he served the time. Not nothing, but seems pretty inadequate.by Macha
- Legal processes take time. The news doesn't wait until the entire process plays out before they start reporting on the news.
Apparently the appeal leading to the acquittal just happened last week.
by thephyber - Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck.
He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money
by femto - > Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question.
> Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges:
> Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication
> Providing sexually explicit material to a child
> Possession of child pornography
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months.
What in the world happened in this case?
How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.
by Aurornis - Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username.
It did. The evidence against him were the messages sent to the girl and the unusual username. It's not like it was John_Smith. It was fairly unique.
They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence. It's not proof of anything either way.
the wrong username
It's very likely the extra underscore was simply glossed over, the way a double space is glossed over. Lawyers aren't generally known for their grasp of computer technology. The lawyer probably saw this a hundred times, thought it was a typo on the subpoena, and didn't put two-and-two together to realize that it was material. After all, the employee at the website could have made the same error but in reverse; assuming that the double underscore was a typo. It's not on the judge, as the judge doesn't go through every piece of evidence checking all the typos; they take the evidence at face value and evaluate its probative value.
by gamblor956 - It is Canada so a decent amount of the process is different and more English than American.
- The crusade and strong Western societal taboo/moral panic on this topic clearly massively cloud people’s judgments (e.g. Chat Control in the EU), unfortunately.by SZJX