P2P Applications and Child Pornography

As we explained in our prior post about federal child pornography laws, the consequences of a child pornography or CSAM (“Child Sexual Abuse Material”) conviction are severe and life-altering. And the collateral consequence of being on the sex offender registry can be devastating.

Early on, Conaway & Strickler defended cases that stemmed from activity on classic peer-to-peer applications like Limewire. These type of networks were simply software applications that provided a central hub for various computers to connect. Napster, for example, was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service that allowed users to share and download music files from other users’ computers. These types of programs were utilized to distribute music, movies and child pornography. Law enforcement was able to track those cases more easily.

Today, however, the government has also become well versed in programs like BitTorrent, Limewire and e-Donkey, among others. When a hard drive or device is analyzed by the government, they now will produce a report detailing their forensic examination. They will detail all of the evidence found on the device showing evidence of P2P Networking, search history, bookmarks and they even cite images or image fragments found in cache locations. Here is a recent example of a federal criminal prosecution of someone who downloaded images from the BitTorrent Network.

The P2P software programs allow the P2P networks to break large files into smaller segments that are then shared independently. The original purpose of this was to only optimize the download process by balancing the load among multiple users but it also increased the overall download speeds, as users can simultaneously download multiple segments from different sources. BUT, in early prosecutions of federal child pornography cases using P2P applications, the government was unable to show the actual images on the devices anymore. But, as described above, it is rare for a sophisticated user to have any actual images of CSAM on their devices. So, today, the government’s forensic report will draws a picture of all activities on the device to show that the user intentionally downloaded child pornography. We, at Conaway & Strickler, are well versed on the technicalities of defending a complex case like this and have years of experience of defending federal child pornography cases nationwide. We also have a variety of top notch experts ready to assist us to mirror images these devices in order to do our forensics to mount the proper defense to any federal criminal charges lodged.