Staring at the blue pill: Peer Spectre and wrongful prosecutions

One of the things I hate, hate, hate about being aware is that every time you think you’ve heard it all, that you’re as cynical as you can get, that no level of governmental depravity could possibly surprise you … you learn something new. Something worse.

Sometimes it’s just a little thing you can laugh off. Like Newt Gingrich expecting Christian broadcasters to believe that he cheated on his wives out of patriotism. Or, for that matter hearing commentators claim with straight face that Newt Gingrich is the R-party’s great intellectual light.

I mean, you hear these things and it hurts for a minute as your eyes roll around your head so hard that they smash into your eardrums and bang up against your medulla like careening marbles. But after your eyeballs settle back in their sockets, it’s sort of funny.

Other things … not so. And the “not so” things usually involve either the national security state or — much closer to home — the continuing, growing, and systemic corruption of police and prosecutors.

I can’t go into a lot of detail since this morning’s eye-popper involves an assignment I’m working on. But it involves wrongful prosecutions in “kiddie-porn” cases — situations where the person charged with a crime is completely innocent, and police and prosecutors would know the person was innocent if they bothered to do real investigations. These are cases in which some poor sap ends up with child-porn images on his (or, in at least one notable case, her) computer, often because the computer has been hijacked and has become some pornster’s zombie.

There were a spate of such prosecutions in the mid-2000s — big regional headline grabbers in which some poor victim lost his (or her) job, reputation, and money to prosecutors who never even did forensic exams on the computers to learn how the images might have gotten there. Seriously. Never even examined the computer for viruses or trojans. And the victims of these prosecutors faced decades — literally the rest of their lives — in prison.

In the end, you might like to imagine that justice prevailed. And it’s true; most of those big, high-profile cases ended up with losses for the prosecution — charges dropped or plea bargains favorable to the defense. Yes, the victim’s life was ruined. (Neither your finances nor your reputation ever recover fully from a kiddie-porn charge.) But reasonable people would have to figure that cops and prosecutors would learn from their mistakes, right? They’d be more careful rather than risk wasting their own time and money on losing prosecutions. They wouldn’t really want to destroy innocent lives. That’s what I assumed, anyhow.

Well … not so. With the assistance of software called Peer Spectre, developed by an ex-cop in 2008, they’re actually ramping up these prosecutions of innocent dupes.

Here’s what happens. With no warrant obtained, Peer Spectre sniffs around until it “spots” child porn on a peer-to-peer enabled computer. (I put “spots” in quotation marks, because the fact is that nobody actually knows how Peer Spectre works. It’s available only to law enforcement agencies and neither they nor its makers will allow any examination of the app; for all anybody knows, Peer Spectre could even be planting kiddie porn.) It can allegedly do its snooping even when you’ve turned file-sharing off.

Having located what they believe to be child porn, cops get a warrant after the fact, then swoop in and make a big bust. It’s a kiddie-porn bust — and you know what that means. Media circus. Presumption of guilt, Everybody shunning the Evil, Slimy, Creeping Exploiter of Children, no sympathy whatsoever. It’s all “for the children.” Speak up in defense of the poor sap who’s been busted — and well, you must be in favor of child porn! You’re anti-cop! You’re sick.

Then, months or even years later, when the victim’s life is in ruins and he’s spent all his resources (and then some) on the very same computer forensics examinations that the government didn’t do and the prosecution’s case has crumbled in the face of actual, you know, evidence, the charges are dropped. Or he pleads to some minor, non-sexual charge.

But by then the media isn’t watching any more. The cops and prosecutors have made their splash. They’ve shown their “worth.” And they have absolutely no accountability for the ruin they’ve left in their path. It’s all gravy for them. Nothing but positives. Their power, prestige, and budgets grow. Worse yet, the defense attorneys and computer forensics specialists who repeatedly uncover the prosecutorial wrongdoing have to live in fear that law enforcers will turn their growing computer cracker powers and their ruthless propaganda machines against them.

These prosecutions were going on before Peer Spectre. It’s not the fault of the software — though the fact that no independent examination of Peer Spectre has been allowed is crazy-irresponsible. The software is so little known that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet. Still, federal courts have already decided that warrantless use of Peer Spectre does not violate the Fourth Amendment. And the prosecutions … and ruin of lives … goes on.

—–

I didn’t start out to make this a blog entry about wrongful prosecutions or Peer Spectre. I only intended to mention in passing that I’d learned yet more creepy news from Governmentland, without talking about what I’d learned (and even now I’m leaving out most of it). My point was going to be that it would be so very nice to swallow that blue pill — even though everybody knows that once you’ve taken the red pill there’s no going back. That seems rather minor and petty in light of the terrible suffering of victims of prosecutorial abuse. Really minor and petty in light of the systemic corruption in the injustice system.