Vigilante Hacker Sends Judge to Jail

It is very rare that I write about hackers that do really good things. This is one of those times. Canadian Vigilante Hacker Brad Willman sent out links to kiddie porn users, promising new photos, but instead tricked thousands into downloading a trojan horse backdoor program. Willman then reported all computers with kiddie porn on them to a watchdog group which would file charges against the ISP’s involved.

A judge in California was swept up in this. Judge Ronald Kline had hundreds of photos of nekkid little boys on his computer. From VNUnet here:

Ronald Kline, a former judge at Orange County Superior Court has been sentenced to 27 months in jail for possession of child pornography.

Kline was arrested in 2001 after he was reported to authorities by a vigilante hacker who had been monitoring Kline’s computer without his knowledge.

Kline admitted at the time that he had stored more than 100 sexually explicit images of under-aged boys on his computer.

The hacker, Brad Willman from Canada, was 20 years old at the time. In a 2002 interview with the Ottowa Citizen, Willman admitted to hacking into 3,000 computers using a Trojan hidden in an image that promised a pornographic image of a child.

His actions have since exposed child predators across Canada, the US and Russia.

Kline’s defense attorney had argued that the evidence gathered from the judge’s computer was inadmissible because it had been stolen.

For years Kline dragged out his legal case. At one point, a man had come forward and accused Kline of having orally copulated with him when he was 14, but that case was dismissed because of statute of limitations expiration.

From another account at 4law here:

Bradley Willman, a self-described “computer cop,” then forwarded his findings to a Colorado-based Internet watchdog group, Pedowatch, which relayed the information to Irvine police, who searched Kline’s home, seized his computer and arrested him.

In a legal battle that lasted four years, Kline sought to suppress the prosecution’s evidence by contending that Willman, acting as a government agent, had violated his 4th Amendment privacy rights.

In 2003, Judge Marshall tossed out most of the evidence. But last year the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Marshall, which resurrected the case.

The appeals court found that Willman had acted on his own. “Searches by private individuals are subject to the 4th Amendment only if the private individual is acting as an instrument or agent of the government at the time of the search,” the court said.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined this year to hear Kline’s appeal.

After six years, the sentence was finally handed down. Upon hearing the sentence, the Judge fainted. I’m no expert, but I would guess that fainting child molesting Judges would be easy pickings in the Big House.