I thought you guys might find this… interesting.
I fix computers for a living as most of the standbys here know and the last 3 days was a first for me.
This guy got one of my fliers on his door and called Tuesday for me to fix his machine which sounded like it was infested with various malware as many are nowadays.
He brings it to my house, I take the drive and put it in an external rig on one of my Linux boxes to backup his data before I slam the drive. What do I find, but the most nauseating collection of pix and flix featuring very VERY young boys engaged in all manner of adult activity… with each other.
Needless to say I’m sitting there aghast with 1000 thoughts streaming through my head not the least of which is how the hell do I handle this.
Do I finish the job, give it back to him and call the authorities? Do I put in a different drive and give them his? If I give it back and especially if I take money from this guy do I stand to be accused of trafficking in child pornography?
What if he gets a crack defense attorney who tries to say that I put it on his machine? The ISP logs should handle that I thought.
I decided to call the Detroit field office of the FBI Tuesday night and told the switchboard person what the situation was and she took all the information.
The special agent in charge of this stuff for Detroit called me the next morning. She says I did the right thing by stopping right where I was, not altering the drive and calling them and makes arrangements to come to my house.
Wednesday morning Mulder and Scully show up at my house. A big tall guy and a short small woman looking every bit like FBI agents.
They say they can’t view the drive without my statement and a court order. They ask and I answer all the questions you would imagine would be asked. I give them the drive, the machine, pictures of the guy from my surveillance cameras and the contact information he gave me.
I’m supposed to take the machine back later that day, but they say that they can’t get the judge to issue the order until the next day, today. They ask if I think I can convincingly put the guy off until today without raising suspicions which I was successful in doing.
This morning they call back and say they got the court order, have viewed the material, it is definitely a federal offense and could I go ahead and make arrangements to return the machine at which time they instead of I would show up at his house.
I called him back and made arrangements to return his machine this afternoon, called them back and told them when. They went there with their warrants and arrested him.
I guess when you do this kind of work you have it in the back of your mind that this kind of thing could happen, but I was not planning on this at all and it was a bit harrowing having the feds at your house and setting somebody up like this.
The bottom line is who knows what somebody like this could do or maybe has already done and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I later found out that he was harming somebodies kids and I could have helped stop him, but didn’t as much as we do not need this complication in our life right now.
) and we used to see all KINDS of wacky shit… from hells angels stake outs… to drug dens and addresses… notes etc… pretty crazy…