K9s trained to sniff out child porn?

You’ve heard of bomb- and drug-sniffing police dogs.

You may have heard of service dogs that can detect changes in a diabetic’s blood sugar levels. They are trained to wake their masters before they lapse into a coma.

But did you know police K9s can be trained to sniff out child porn?

The Miami Herald reported the Clay County Sheriff’s Office has a 2-year-old yellow lab named Ty that has been trained to detect the chemical scent of electronics that are often hidden in the most unusual of places, reports WJXT News4 Jax.

It should be made clear Ty isn’t trained to detect the content on the electronics, just the electronics themselves. But it’s safe to assume if someone is going to great lengths to hide a thumb drive, chances are there’s some data on it a person doesn’t want you to see.

Ty’s official title: Electronic Scent Detection Canine, or ESDC for short.

“What Ty is trained on is a chemical odor that most of your electronic devices will have in them, and he picks up on that odor,” Clay County spokesman Deputy Drew Ford told News4Jax.

“The suspects and criminals get very, very creative when it comes to hiding electronic devices,” Ford told First Coast News.

How creative?

Think micro SD cards or thumb drives that hold data, which can include offenses like child pornography, tucked inside books, taped to the bottom of drawers, even slipped inside a shower curtain rod.

The sheriff’s department has found the electronics in all of these places, often thanks to the K9 nose that knows.

When Ty, who works with deputies in the department that tackles crimes against minors, isn’t sniffing out SD cards, he’s used as a therapy dog to help anxious kids.

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GateHouse: Prosecutors face dilemma in child exploitation cases

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

April 5, 2019

Sexual Exploitation of Children, including what is commonly referred to as child pornography, has increased by more than 200 percent in the last decade. This horrific trend has been fueled by the easy spread of illicit material over the internet, according to Enough is Enough, a website dedicated to making the internet safe for children and families.

Easy access to the internet will only increase in the future. The Pew Research Center predicts that more than 30.7 billion devices are expected to be connected to the internet by next year.

With the proliferation of child pornography, law enforcement agencies have become more sophisticated in trackingdown cyber consumers and purveyors of exploitation. For instance, software that tracks images to specific internet connections has become a vital tool for prosecutors.

With this as a backdrop, eight out of 10 Americans believe federal laws against internet obscenity should be vigorously enforced. The question is how far is too far?

This week, ProPublica an independent, nonprofit investigative news agency, exposed cases in which prosecutors have dismissed charges against an accused consumer of child pornography as opposed to turning over the workings of the technology used to detect the illegal images.

Defense attorneys have sought to have the government explain how child pornography was traced to their clients’ computers.

During the early years of the commercialization of the internet there was a peer-to-peer file-sharing network known as Napster. People who used Napster could share music with one another by sharing files directly with other music enthusiasts. The same method is used to distribute child pornography.

Investigators use software programs to scan for child pornography on peer-to-peer networks. According to ProPublica, police rely on modified versions of peer-to-peer programs to flag IP addresses of suspected users of child pornography. This enables investigators to subpoena the internet providers to reveal the identity of the internet subscribers.

After identifying the internet subscriber, investigators obtain a search warrant for computers or other devices at the home, office or physical location of the subscriber who allegedly received the child pornography file.

However, in some cases, according to ProPublica, child pornography was being traced to an internet address, but after examination no illicit images were found.

As a result, law enforcement agencies have, in some cases, been faced with a difficult decision - drop the charges or disclose the workings of the detection software.

“When protecting the defendant’s right to a fair trial requires the government to disclose its confidential techniques, prosecutors face a choice: Give up the prosecution or give up the secret. Each option has a cost,” Orin Kerr, an expert in computer crime law and former Justice Department lawyer told ProPublica. “If prosecutors give up the prosecution, it may very well mean that a guilty person goes free. If prosecutors give up the secret, it may hurt their ability to catch other criminals. Prosecutors have to choose which of those outcomes is less bad in each particular case.”

Software developers want to protect their propriety rights to the software. Law enforcement wants to protect the ability of investigators to utilize technology that is having an impact on the exchange of child pornography.

The sexual exploitation of children is diabolical. Those who create it, and the consumers who trade it, deserve the wrath of the criminal justice system. However, a hallmark of the American criminal justice system is that a person charged with a crime has the right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” and the right to confront those who have made the accusation.

Keeping secret the manner and method of detecting a crime flies in the face of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The end never justifies the means in a court of law. Those who harm children should be held accountable - and those who pursue them must be held to a standard consistent with this nation’s traditions of fairness and transparency.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Child pornography sniffing police dogs

According to the Huffington Post, police dogs in New England are being trained to sniff out child pornography as state police in Massachusetts and Rhode Island to fight child porn trafficking, according to the Providence Journal.
Smart pups, like Thoreau, a golden Labrador who trained at the Connecticut State Police Training Academy for 22 weeks, can pinpoint hard drives, thumb drives and other technological devices that may be hidden in a home.
The Providence Journal reports:

Given to the state police by the Connecticut State Police, the dog assisted in its first search warrant in June pinpointing a thumb drive containing child pornography hidden four layers deep in a tin box inside a metal cabinet. That discovery led the police to secure an arrest warrant, state police Cpl. Eric Yelle says.
“If it has a memory card, he’ll sniff it out,” Det. Adam Houston, Thoreau’s handler, says.

At times, child pornographers hide devices in ceiling tiles or even radios.  

 Of course, not every memory card or hard drive contains child pornography. But police say that hard drives containing illicit material are often hidden away from suspects' computers, the Boston Globe reports. Not for long -- Thoreau and some 65 other dogs trained in the Connecticut police academy program are here to help.
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GateHouse: Supreme Court leaves child pornography restitution muddled

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse News Service
May 2, 3014


Crime victims achieved a significant milestone recently when attorney Paul G. Cassell represented before the U.S. Supreme Court a crime victim named “Amy.” Amy was videotaped being raped by her uncle as a child, and those assaults are some of the most widely distributed images of child pornography ever produced.

When Cassell appeared before the Supreme Court, it was the first time that a lawyer had argued on behalf of a crime victim for enforcement of her own rights in a criminal case filed by government prosecutors.

All nine Supreme Court justices recognized that possession of child pornography is not a victimless crime. Although a victory for crime victims, the court’s ultimate decision is a little murky.

Last month, in Paroline v. U.S., the court acknowledged that “every viewing of child pornography is a repetition of the crime.” The court also agreed that victims of child pornography are entitled to restitution from those who possess the images of abuse.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote on behalf of a narrow five-member majority. He said that damages must be based on the proportion of harm that each defendant caused to the victim. “Of course the victim should someday collect restitution for all her child pornography losses, but it makes sense to spread payment among a larger proportion of offenders.”

He did not say how a trial court should calculate those payments.

Through intensive counseling, Amy was getting her life in order when, as a teenager, she discovered that images of her abuse were being traded on Internet porn sites. She found herself back in counseling and her losses were calculated at nearly $3.4 million.

Kennedy said paying nothing should not be an option. “One reason to make restitution mandatory for crimes like this is to impress upon offenders that their conduct produces concrete and devastating harms for real, identifiable victims.”

But Kennedy said, according to the Washington Post, that making each defendant liable for the total amount would be so “severe” as to raise constitutional questions. Instead, Kennedy said, there should be “reasonable and circumscribed” restitution that “comports with the defendant’s relative role.”

The problem is the Supreme Court did not explain how to determine the amount of restitution owed. Without the court’s guidance on how to calculate what an individual defendant owes, the victim’s access to restitution may be considerably delayed.

The concern is not without merit. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing a mentally disabled person violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The decision contained a loophole that rendered it virtually meaningless in many cases. The decision in Atkins v. Virginia bewilderingly included “we leave to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restrictions upon its execution of sentences.”

The result was a whole bunch of confusion. Individual states came up with individualized methods for determining mental disability. In fact, Atkins, the decision’s namesake, was sent back to Virginia and resentenced to death.

Now, 12 years later, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear another mental disability case with an eye toward cleaning up the mess created by Atkins. Hall v. Florida was recently argued before the court. Sixty-eight-year-old Freddie Lee Hall is challenging the state’s use of a rigid IQ cutoff to determine mental disability. In Florida, an IQ higher than 70 categorically means an inmate is not mentally disabled.

Will victims of child pornography have to wait an additional 12 years before the U.S. Supreme Court will agree to clarify what it failed to clarify in the Paroline decision?

Amy’s attorney is not optimistic. “As Amy has recognized, the Supreme Court’s split-the-difference ruling promises her that she will receive full restitution ‘someday,’?” Cassell wrote. “I just wonder how far in the future that someday will be.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was recently released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
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