I'm not generally a fan of secret warrants or broad search and seizure powers, but this really doesn't strike me as a particularly bad case. This seems, by and large, like an eminently reasonable and successful use of those powers.
"During his initial appearance in a federal courthouse in Santa Ana, Calif., the prosecutors indicated a willingness to reduce or drop the child pornography charges if he would tell them about the C-17, said Sara Naheedy, Gartenlaub’s attorney at the time."
No evidence of downloading the porn. No evidence of viewing the porn. The only way, according to their own experts, is if someone directly copied them on.
In other words, "Hey, look what nasty stuff we just happened to find on your computer. Be a nice fella and tell us what we want to know, and we'll make this go away."
I mean, it's one thing to find the stuff in Downloads, along with browser history indicating it came from, oh /b/ on such and such a date, and with atimes` that make some sense.
It's another thing entirely for it to be in Downloads, with no browser history. Did he go into incognito mode?
But 4 drives? With no encryption? And no browser history? WTF?
Yeah, he;s convicted. By 12 people who probably have a blinking 12:00 on their microwaves.
While that does sound damning in a certain light, it's also consistent with their primary mission, which is to counter espionage. I would hope that the FBI would make exactly this kind of tradeoff in its pursuit of spies.
Now, of course, if your implication is that they fraudulently manufactured the CP evidence in order to create leverage to extract this confession, that is indeed reprehensible. But if they just happened to find CP and then used it as leverage to pursue what is, IMO, a more important line of inquiry, then that is just fine with me.
> No evidence of downloading the porn. No evidence of viewing the porn.
While the article does say that, let's be honest. What evidence can there be of downloading porn? We all know how computers work, and this guy was a sysadmin, so he does too. The fact that he didn't forget to clear his browser history does not invalidate the presence of child porn on his computer.
That being said, of course it also doesn't eliminate the possibility that he was framed or that he wasn't at fault for its presence there. But if the FBI finds CP on someone's computer, I expect them to investigate and prosecute the case in the absence of positive exculpatory evidence indicating that it wasn't put there by that computer's owner.
At least that is a possibility. If he really is guilty then I don't feel bad for him.
So? His home may have been searched for other reasons to discover this. Just like anyone else found with these materials on his computer, he'll have to get arrested and go to court over them.
Here it seems like FISA was used to get a secret warrant to build a counterespionage case; the warrant was targeted and specific. There's some unpleasant strong-arm tactics at play, but nothing out of the ordinary (in particular: you can definitely be the subject of a warrant for which the search more or less exonerates you, but be implicated in a different crime during the lawful conduct of the search; that's not weird.)
The scary thing here is that FISA is also used to animate dragnet searches, which are not targeted. It's scary to think that (for instance) phone records seized under the aegis of FISA could be used to start metadata-based criminal prosecutions for things unrelated to terrorism or espionage.
Powers are powers, and if you put them in the hands of the people with the job 'get as many convictions as possible with the powers you have', well, they'll end up being used, even if they have a label that says 'for terrorism only! Promise!'