OT: legal obligations

[Colin McGregor]

--- John McGregor <mr.mcgregor-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi Folk,
>          I repair PCs for a living and since most
> members of the public
> think that a back up is something you do when you
> put a car in reverse,
> this often entails digging through an old hard drive
> trying to recover
> files. I was doing just that on the weekend when
> news of the recent
> arrests for child porn activities were announced.
> This got me to
> wondering what my, and other computer techs',
> obligations are if we find
> illegal content when doing a similar search?
> Thoughts?

Talk to a lawyer is my advice.

Some 10 years ago, in the early day of the Toronto
Free-Net we had one brain-less ass (BA) who decided to
e-mail child porn to every then member of the Toronto
Free-Net board (yes, I was at that time a Toronto
Free-Net board member (still am)). Within 5 minutes of
my seeing that e-mail I was on the phone to the
Toronto Free-Net's lawyer asking "what do we do?".
Needless to say the instructions from lawyer were
followed to the letter...

The police didn't act, and next board meeting BA
showed up protesting. Seems that the Free-Net was evil
because as an ISP it was possible to get at child porn
on the net if you looked, and Free-Net was even more
evil for sacking his account within minutes for
exposing this... Some folks... 

Regardless, possession of child porn for ANY reason is
I gather illegal (even if in the case of the Free-net
board it was MOST unwanted). Ignoring is not an option
in my view (if it is later discovered that you knew
about the porn and ignored it, you could be in
trouble). By having a lawyer act as a go between you
can clearly show that you were acting in good faith,
and you can keep yourself out of legal trouble...

> John

Colin.

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