alt Hacker NewsA missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
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What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the conviction after he served the time. Not nothing, but seems pretty inadequate.
We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh?
0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty.
There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part).
I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence.
Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?
Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?
This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, but they will just assume they wiped the evidence from their local storage. There is no other evidence to be had because the crimes in this category to not require any physical evidence whatsoever. Many of the laws in this category involve byte patterns with a sexual theme, but not all of them. Others include the laws against using the wrong REST API in the wrong way (unauthorized access) or speech restrictions including laws against empty, impossible, never acted on threats or improper ideas (popular outside the US).
All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man.
Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.
Connecting 'this account belongs to you' to 'this account did these activities' seems to rely on a chain of high-integrity (in the sense of both ethics and precision) investigative work that clearly doesn't happen because of the system's lazy recourse to subpoenaing internet companies (here with a typing error)
Source article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
How tf could he be convicted without any evidence??!?
"A crime so serious that not even innocence is an acceptable defense" type stuff right here.
Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.
This is completely dystopian. Did he have the worst legal defense possible, or are Canadian laws such that an IP address is sufficient for any claimed charges to just stick?
How could they manage to forget that underscore if that's their only evidence?
Holy fuck! How can someone without no evidence and completely innocent be convicted of an offense like this in Canada? What in the fuck is going on?? What happened to “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?”
Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).
The missing underscore didn't send an innocent man to prison. In this story, an incompetent lawyer, an incompetent judge, and an unjust system walked into a bar...
When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence. Throughout the article, it clearly says there was no evidence from all searches. What did they find? Not a pixelated picture, not an ip address, not even an AI auto classifying him as prime suspect.
What did the detective on the case have to say?
> Detective: "Yep, that's the user name"
> Partner: "What about the email, does it match?"
> Detective: "Email? what's that? Is that like a fax machine?"
How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?
I had never heard of "Kik" so I looked it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app)
In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
This guy should sue
At least nobody has figured out my password yet.
How on Earth was he convicted? They couldn’t find any evidence (because it didn’t exist) and yet he was still found guilty? Is there a similar presumption of innocence in Canadian legal doctrine?
Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed?
Got to separate the message from the messenger
The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence.
Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.
[dead]
> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question.
> Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges:
> Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication
> Providing sexually explicit material to a child
> Possession of child pornography
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months.
What in the world happened in this case?
How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.