In today’s electronic world, law enforcement officials investigating crimes often seek warrants to search and seize electronic devices that they believe contain incriminating evidence. However, people also store highly personal information on their electronic devices, from memories to entire conversations. Most of this electronically stored information is often irrelevant to the cri…
The FBI recently admitted that it had operated a child pornography website known as “Playpen” for several weeks in 2015. The FBI was supposedly using this website in an attempt to identify computer users across the world who may have attempted to access illegal child pornography images on the “Playpen” website through the Tor network. […]
We were recently contacted by several individuals who had either been arrested or had their homes searched by federal authorities based on allegations of receiving, distributing, or possessing child pornography through the Tor Network. Based on our experience, it appears that this is a massive criminal investigation by the FBI and other agencies resulting in […]
I thought I would be picking a jury today in a federal child pornography case, but the prosecutor dismissed the case a few days ago. Our client had been charged with violations of 19 U.S.C. § 2252, which meant that he faced a minimum of ten years in prison if convicted on any charge. Fortunately, […]
In the past five years, the number of prosecutions for child pornography has increased by nearly 40 percent as the sentences doled out by judges have become more severe. In recent years, however, many legal scholars and some judges have begun to question the wisdom of such harsh sentences. The dramatic upswing in cases began […]