Georgia Criminal Defense Lawyers Blog
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.