OT: legal obligations

Tyler Aviss tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Wed Jan 16 19:19:50 UTC 2008


Again, not legal advice, but I'd imagine that the context needs to be
looked at somewhat.

If you somehow find a few banner-ad sized pictures in a client's
internet cache it could have been a leftover from browsing of any site
(many warez sites have questionable banners). Mind you in most cases
you probably wouldn't run across this in casual maintenance.  If
there's an actual repository on the computer it would be a different
story... with the client obviously hoarding the illegal content...



On Jan 16, 2008 2:11 PM, Colin McGregor <colinmc151-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> --- 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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-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2
(647) 477-1784
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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