Trial of programmer accused in CIA leak ends in hung jury

One reason this happens is that police and prosecutors alike put a lot of work into investigating crimes, and they do not like working in vain. They are especially bothered by the prospect of not apprehending anyone, and much more so by the prospect of being unable to convict someone they believe is guilty. It would be fair to say that they have at least some bias toward convicting someone-- anyone. It's also the case that they are sometimes wrong but very much don't want to believe they are. People easily find ways of justifying things they want to believe.

Another reason is that trial lawyers tend to develop a preoccupation with winning. Consider that, for a prosecutor, the only way to win is to get a conviction. This can lead them down the path to all sorts of hell and is probably the biggest contributor to grand juries being shams and evidence being withheld.

It is true that there are career benefits to winning a lot of cases, but for your average ADA that's typically just the privilege of being given more serious cases to prosecute. Plenty of ADA's lose a lot of trials with few ill consequences. Where this is more of a problem is with elected prosecutors, the actual District Attorneys. They are the ones who benefit most from high profile investigations, indictments, and convictions. It's very much in their political self-interest to get convictions.

Lastly, the courts (judges) generally let prosecutors get away with all sorts of shenanigans for a variety of reasons. It may be that they themselves are "tough on crime", or prefer to give prosecutors the benefit of the doubt, or simply that they're lazy. Any trial lawyer will tell you it happens with shocking regularity that judges allow evidence into trial that they really shouldn't under the guise of the questionable rationale that they should just "let the jury decide." Let us not forget that one of Alexander Hamilton's main arguments in favor of the jury system was as a safeguard against corrupt judges.

In short, little stops them from doing these things other than their own consciences, a handful of weakly observed procedural safeguards, and some extremely vigilant defense attorneys who fight back hard.

Something along the lines of MKULTRA or COINTELPRO. (I would argue that even in the era where those programs were rampant, planting child pornography would still seem unlikely. Though certainly a lot more likely.)

As I wrote in my post, he wasn't capable enough to clean up a lot of his leaking. They found various kinds of evidence. A lot of it was covered up, but a lot wasn't.

>Also he was never recognised for the kiddie stuff before ?

I would bet the majority of people who download child pornography probably never end up getting on anyone's radar. Or at least a large percentage don't.

>Why not? They claim end-to-encryption is protecting pedophiles... And it's their selling point. That trench of absolute human shit is their marketing. - For impact, they need to sell it over the value of e2e for the citizen.

Sure, I don't like that one bit, but it's a huge leap to go from that to planting child pornography evidence on a suspect's computer. Many people do legitimately believe encryption is a net negative and enables criminals like pedophiles and terrorists. I don't agree with them, but this is a belief people have. On the other hand, there is no belief or rationale that could ever justify planting child pornography on someone's computer.

Are you suggesting that this is a double-layered conspiracy - not only a way to get a leaker convicted, but also a way to make those who use encryption seem like pedophiles? If so, you're going to need to provide even more evidence than if you were just posing the first claim. I could think of like four more layers of conspiracy theories I could pile on top of that, but they're also meaningless without evidence. I could spin your comment as you being part of a conspiracy theory to protect pedophiles; also meaningless.

>Planting that shit seems a perfect candidate to get a no questions asked lock up. And lets be honest, if its true, we would all burn his balls attached to him and than let him go to prison.

Sure, that'd be one of the best ways to secure a conviction if you're trying to think of what sort of evidence to plant, but I don't see how it relates to your other points or to the likelihood of it being true. Conspiring to crash planes into financial and government buildings on 9/11 would be one of the best ways to start a war in the Middle East if you're trying to think of some casus belli, but that doesn't mean that's what actually happened.

I would recommend reading the documents. Yes, some are long, but they're much more informative than completely blind speculation from HN commenters going off of nothing but a thread title.

Neither, because they're both contrived strawman scenarios.

>The US Intelligence Community has had some really massive screwups and straight up illegal operations become exposed over the last couple of decades (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, COINTELPRO, PRISM, the list goes on...).

I mentioned COINTELPRO in another comment, but I don't consider any of the other things you listed as ranking as highly as planting child pornography, and even COINTELPRO never went that far.

>They have lost the legitimacy required for blind trust in them.

Another weakman argument. Obviously I don't trust any government, let alone any government's intelligence agencies. Few people do. Most people, in all countries around the world, are well-aware that they're some of the least trustworthy entities to ever exist.

I still think evidence is required when accusing an intelligence agency of heinous offenses, even when they have been guilty of many offenses in the past. I would even say the same of far more authoritarian and ruthless governments' intelligence agencies, like China's, even in spite of the fact that I think China's system and police state is a serious threat to humanity.

It would not shock me much if the CIA did this. It would shock me if everyone out-of-hand believed it was more likely than not that they did this despite not a shred of evidence, or in the vast majority of cases didn't even look for any evidence, or cared about there being evidence, or even read anything related to the situation beyond a condensed title or a comment from someone who also read nothing but the title. It's intellectual laziness. Not that prosecuting a leaker is a high-stakes social issue, but future issues may arise where such a poor approach to epistemology could pose a great threat to our country or world. This thread so far is only a hair's width better than an InfoWars comment section.

Could you show how you know they're still storing the photos, and not just the hashes?

>The government has people clearly capable of torturing actual living children in Guantanamo Bay, so I doubt they will have trouble finding someone capable of planting a picture taken in the 1960s.

Unless you're talking about cases of formally government-sanctioned raping of children by adults, I don't think this analogy works.

I could also say that any organization fine with assassinating people in cold blood would be fine with planting child pornography on someone's computer, and there may be some superficial logic to that, but I think it's completely false. I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.

Of course, with any intelligence agency (and the FBI), one's prior for anything like that happening is much, much higher than average. I definitely believe they could've wanted to do such a thing and could have done it. But even with that prior, it's still a big claim, and it requires at least a little evidence. Ideally big evidence; not no evidence, and especially not nothing to even refute the comprehensive evidence and logs the FBI has laid out over hundreds of publicly released pages, and probably hundreds or thousands of more pages that we're not (yet) privy to.

Also, is torturing any better if the people are guilty? One of the many problems with torture is you can never know if they're innocent or guilty, in addition to the fact that even torturing guilty people is unethical. Unless you're alleging the CIA tortured people who they knew to be innocent, or who they knew were very likely innocent, which is a much more severe allegation. If you had evidence of them doing that within the past decade, my prior for their planting child pornography would increase by a lot, absolutely.

I think if the FBI or police covered up a conspiracy theory of planted child pornography evidence, and this were found out, it would be a massive scandal that would dominate the news for months or years.

You are perfectly normal to be suspicious of the actions of the CIA, and some of the theories are likely to be true, but that was not the point I was making.