Cuyahoga County Operation Cyber Safe
I would please to like to draw your attention to this link. http://www.newsnet5.com/news/21985268/detail.html
Now that you've skimmed this news article I would like you to be a skeptic. I KNOW for a fact that at least one of these people is innocent. He's my brother. (I shall name no names).
He got fired from a job he's had for 15 years, and his name is completely smeared in his community for something he didn't do.
I've talked with him, he has a Limewire account where supposedly the distribution and download of the child pornography took place.
I've never had Limewire but I've had other file sharing programs so I only know a little about how they work.
It's very feasible for things like that to be planted on someones computer.
My brother had never seen anything like that on his computer, even up until the day he got fired. He obviously wasn't doing thorough sweeps of it so perhaps someone could have planted it in an unused obscure folder, but it's more likely that it just wasn't actually there until after the fact.
This to me seems like an obvious political agenda. The district attorney (Bill Mason) obviously wants to get re-elected and so is leading this Operation Cyber Safe because child pornography has been a big issue in Cuyahoga County in the past. But as they mention in the article the conviction rate for it is 100% and it's usually fairly well publicized. It seems to me that it's unlikely that ACTUAL offenders would be transferring these types of files on a program as well known as Limewire, particularly as there are many other ways of getting things from one computer to another in ways that are much more discreet and not monitored by an outside party.
Not only that but it appears that this was his WORK computer, and not his home one. Which makes the conviction even that more suspicious. Anyone who can keep a job for 15 years, obviously isn't distracted by porn of any type that he's surreptitiously looking at during work hours. Especially not highly illegal porn, even if he WERE into that sort of thing (which he's not).
Why my brother might have been targeted for this is anyone's guess. But I DO know that this accusation is false. Whether someone else was using his computer, or the files were planted there using Limewire or other means.
My mother (reading over my shoulder a tad) wants me to warn you off of programs like Limewire, because she figures that it's all their fault. But really the risk of things showing up on your computer, anything from viruses to child porn, is the risk you take upon yourself when you use a file sharing program. So while I would caution you to always be aware of the sort of stray files you might be downloading when you download that new pirated movie, I wouldn't directly caution you away from the program you use to download it.