VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican said on Saturday its police had arrested a monsignor who worked as a diplomat at its embassy in Washington and is suspected of possessing child pornography in the United States and Canada....
The Vatican statement said Capella, who was recalled from the Vatican embassy in Washington last August, was arrested according to articles of a 2013 law signed by Pope Francis. The articles cited by the statement related to child pornography....
The State Department notified the Holy See in August of a possible violation of laws relating to child pornography images by a member of the diplomatic corps of the Holy See accredited to Washington, the Vatican said in September.
Now there are ways to inadvertently download child porn images. You just downloaded a picture of Donald Trump. It is 5x5 pixels, below. If I made it 1 pixel on display, it would still download to your computer. But the chances of accidentally downloading much of it by accident is small. That ISPs are not cooperating with police in looking for such downloads is also small.
Long ago, when "chat rooms" were popular using modems on the telephone line, I had a friend who was arrested for possession of child porn. It turned out that he'd been sent a packet of photos from someone in one of these chat rooms, in compressed format; he opened one picture, saw that it was porn, and immediately deleted them all- or thought he had.
ReplyDeleteHe wasn't well-versed enough with computers to know that merely putting something in the "trashcan" didn't delete it; so the prosecutor told the court that my friend was trying to hide these illegal photos by putting them there. Fortunately for my friend, he was found innocent of the charges (there was also an electronic trail on the computer showing where they had come from originally, and he'd told the truth throughout.)
In court it was almost amusing (the seriousness of the charges certainly weren't funny) watching the judge holding 11"x14" photos, enlarged from the thumbnail pictures, and trying to make out what they showed. The defense attorney told me that all the pictures were very small thumbnails, so it was extremely hard to even tell that it was child porn (if it actually was, which I doubted at the time- but I was never allowed to see the images, so I won't ever know.)