> 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.
It all comes down to the jury, none of those things matter. The bigger issue here: he knew those messages weren’t him, so the lawyer should’ve gone full force to figure out how this happened. I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him
And yeah, the trial lawyer failed to make the case, but if the defendant couldn't raise money for a defense, they he likely didn't have any experts to refute the prosecution's evidence.
I don't know about the Canadian justice system, but it's very hard in the USA for defendants to get expert witnesses. The state is supposed to pay, but it's almost never done, and when it is they pay bottom rate for the defendant while having unlimited funds for their own experts.
A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied.
I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony
> I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony
This is absolutely horrible to hear!! I know you probably don't want homework, but would you ever consider taking this story to news outlets? I suspect there'd be no compensation, but the uproar might (eventually) result in change.
This is insane. I guess this is because of economic incentives, and expert witnesses risk losing work coming from prosecutors if they ever testify against them?
I was actually dismissed from a jury panel partially because I said I don't know if I could trust the experts because my perception is that individual experts either repeatedly testify for only the prosecution or only the defense.
Weird in my country we have a culture were scientists love going after eachother- its what they live for! Nothing gives you more fame than destroying other people's reputation.
And overturning convictions gets you straight into the history books. It gets so ridiculous that people make their life work out of redoing cases from the 90s.
And the reasonable doubt would come from someone else could have used my account, does the service's account ID match the account ID for my user name, nothing was found on my devices, did the IPs match my known IPs, when did the access take place vs where was I, etc.
Your comment was already asked and answered several times in this HN post.
There was evidence of a crime, only the Kik account ownership evidence was thin. Any decent lawyer would have probed into that aspect of the case, but there are lots of comments here about failures of defense / prosecution / experts / legal system.
They had the exchange with a minor from an account that everyone -- including the defense -- believed to be Klayme's. His only counterargument was that his email had been hacked, which was not true and not the correct explanation.
But what they didn't have is any independent evidence that Klayme had sent the messages or even that he had access to the account that sent them. If they had looked at the IP address from which the messages were sent, they would have seen that it wasn't his and was in a distant geographic location.
Residential proxies exist. Even if they had picked up that the IP was from somewhere else, a decent lawyer could probably have been able to convince a jury that just showed intent because he was trying to conceal his IP.
> I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him
Then you'd ask to change lawyer. If they can apply a standard practice of care and do basic checks like matching a username and time of use because they don't "believe" you when you say these are not you messages, they are not doing their job as a lawyer.
I'd go as far as saying such basic checks not being done amount to negligence/malpractice, they might have a civil case against that lawyer.
He doesn't have to prove that he didn't send them ... that's the prosecution's burden. (In the U.S. ... I know nothing about Canadian law.) But a competent lawyer could figure out how to prove it: get ahold of the IP address from which the messages were sent. Oh look, it was in California! (The IP address they had was from the email address with which Klayme had registered his Kik account with the mistranscribed name.)
Also a competent lawyer would have done a scrupulous audit of the chain of reasoning that led to his client, which would have revealed the username mixup.
Why do you assume that the IP that sent the messages was recorded. They the police went after the email at least suggests that it wasn't in the data that Kik provided during the police investigation.
This case can be the best example of human hallucinations. They made a mistake in username, and assumed everything after that was facts. All that had to be proved was the person is the owner of the mistaken username.
There should be/does anyone know if there is a name for this? When you truth-check exactly once and then just blindly runaway after that?
Edit: Apparently in medicine there exists the concept of "premature closure", where the carer settles on a diagnosis early and stops considering other possibilities. Seems like a decent match?
I did understand that analogy from your first comment, because I have neither been living under a rock for the past few years nor suffered a heavy concussion minutes before making my reply.
That may seem needlessly harshly worded, but I wanted to very bluntly tell you to not expect/treat your fellow commenters like they are pants-on-head stupid.
My intention with GP was finding a good term for this failure to question oneself. That's not even strictly what hallucinations in the context of LLM mean in common discourse, which would be more along the lines of meaning both the (mechanism of) production of the wrong info in the first place, as well as (more implicitly and softly) that propensity to fail to question themselves. You would have understood that, if your model of my ability to understand had been more generous.
Sorry if I sounded to you like assuming fellow commenters like that, but that was not my intention. As you were bringing up medical terms, I was trying to set the context clearly for my previous comment.
"the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username."
Out of curiosity and definitely not defending this prosecution, but if the chain "unique Kik username -> unique gmail address -> unique ISP user -> guy living alone, happens to have Kik on his device" weren't screwed up by the investigators submitting the wrong username, would you say that's enough for a jury to convict ? I don't know about Canada but in the US at least no judge would step in and say that's not enough for a jury to convict on. Convictions happen based on he said/she said. In fact that's probably what this boiled down to. The defense isn't hiring a computer expert to dispute the chain "validated" by Kik/google/etc. unless the guy is rich. They probably accepted that as fact and just argued it wasn't him using the account. And everyone charged with this type of crime says "It must have been someone else on my computer."
No, there are open wifi routers, there are WPA attacks, friends that were given wifi passwords, and a lot of other things. Convicting on IP address match should disqualify the trial judge.
Judges generally do not evaluate the quality of evidence. Unless the defense challenges, it's assumed that the prosecutions claims are founded in fact. It doesn't matter if the prosecution alleges you did six impossible things before breakfast unless the defense disputes these allegations.
A judge that has no reasonable doubt with this sort of evidence has no business being a judge.
We don't know what defense did in this trial but not picking up on the username mismatch and the assumed non-challenge of the evidence is telling as well.
In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality. That's the job of the defense lawyer. In civil law systems the roles of the judge and prosecutor are combined and responsility for bad decisions is distributed differently.
I am curious if you’ve ever met a judge. Every single one I’ve known was a giant, arrogant, jackass. They aren’t actually (generally) interested in being good at their job, they just like the idea.
Happens all the time. You have to then say ”the ip address does not prove it because X”. If prosecutor have a photo of you committing the murder it is enough evidence. But then maybe you will say ”that isn’t me. That’s photoshopped” and then court needs to evaluate if that can be the case or not. But if you don’t give any plausible explanation to the photo it will be used against you.
That would have been (highly likely) true by construction, after all the single underscore username did exist. The only case it wouldn't have been true is if they deleted the app but not their account I guess.
"That would have been (highly likely) true by construction"
You're assuming people knew what evidence to question. That is having the kik app on his device isn't evidence against the claim that "kik didn't return the wrong guys username". Of course it's evidence in support of what he was accused of.
No. If the target of your "Bayesian inference" is whether the chain kik->gmail->ISP is reliable, then it isn't independent evidence. But that isn't the same as the target of inference in court, which is guilt or innocence, and obviously having kik is additional evidence for that. As I mentioned, the chain kik->gmail->ISP would not even be disputed in a run-of-the-mill accusation in the US, any more than DNA evidence gets scrutinized for lab mix-ups. You would need expensive attorneys and experts for that.
As a software engineer the legal system scares me. How can we put someone in jail (for the rest of their lives in some cases) based on nebulous rules and personal interpretation/application of the law?
Worse, several people will have an aortic dissection tomorrow. Their main arteries will split apart and they will just die from internal bleeding. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day. But only until next week because that's when false vacuum decay will get us.
Just because many things can do something doesn't negate a discussion about one of the things. Your point (which it barely is one) isn't really interesting or useful.
The crusade and strong Western societal taboo/moral panic on this topic clearly massively cloud people’s judgments (e.g. Chat Control in the EU), unfortunately.
I believe its orthogonal to what you refer to as moral panic:
Every day the legal process dragged on, every day this defendant sat in prison, was a day the real perpetrator wasn't recognized, wasn't prevented from harming more victims. Now what you refer to as a moral panic turns out to have interests aligned with the falsely convicted defendant.
Any further harm suffered by victims of the perpetrator should be entitled to sue the police / prosecution, suppose such further harm happened:
as I understood, for a person / entity to be co-liable theoretically requires:
* the person / entity having faulted
* a causal connection between the fault and resulting damages
Please don't push on the basis of what position you consider yourself more or less likely to find yourself in, but push on the basis of what you believe may help prevent false positives and false negatives.
I've seen people argue for lowering burdens of proof for particularly heinous crimes and seemingly unaware they're arguing from a position of rage and need for revenge.
> The police also retrieved one voicemail message from CH’s iPhone that was sent to her by “Jay,” with a timestamp of December 13, 2018, at 7:40:54 PM (UTC-6), which was played in court.
So it sounds like they played audio of the actual perpetrator's voice in court, and no one realized it was a completely different person.
> In the final analysis, the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, in fact, “Jay” and that he was the person who had sent her the sexually explicit text messages and had demanded and received sexually explicit photos and videos of CH, who was at the time that those images were exchanged, only 12 years old.
Funny (sad?) that the judge literally says he established this "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as “Jay” and furthermore that, he was the person with whom CH had been communicating over several weeks in sexually explicit messaging and that he had demanded that CH send sexually explicit photos and videos of her, being a 12-year-old girl, to him. The Crown’s direct and circumstantial evidence included numerous references to the IP addresses and other information for accounts such as Google+, Google, Kik which referred to different usernames, like ““Jay” with their subscriber contact being listed as Mr. Brandon Klayme.
I barely know anything about law, but all of this sounds like "circumstantial" evidence, not direct?
> The Court received a Pre-Sentence Report (PSR) prepared by the Probation Officer on July 21, 2023, which indicated that Mr. Klayme, is now 28 years old, single and continues to live at home at his parent’s house. The PSR notes that Mr. Brandon Klayme has a very close relationship with his parents and siblings, is not currently involved in a relationship and also reported that he has never been in one.
> The PSR notes that Mr. Klayme completed grade 12 in 2013, but he advised the Probation Officer that he did not care about school and often was in trouble for not paying attention in class. He has not continued his education, but in terms of future education goals, Mr. Klayme indicated that, in the future, he would like to take a program in sound engineering. Mr. Klayme is presently unemployed, and his employment experience was with the family business and working with his father after graduating from grade 12. He has been unemployed since the family business was sold over one year ago. As a result, he is financially dependent on his parents.
> Mr. Klayme reported that he has good health and that he had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child but took prescription medication to address those issues. He does not use any intoxicating substances but may have a drink on a few special occasions each year. He described himself as being a “very calm person” and has never attended any form of counselling.
> The Probation Officer noted that, during her interview with Mr. Klayme, he presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his “email account had been hacked.”
> With respect to those comments in the PSR, at the conclusion of the sentencing submissions, the Court offered Mr. Klayme the opportunity to make any comments directly to the Court or for that matter, any comments directed towards CH or LS, who had remained on the videoconference throughout the hearing on December 18, 2023. Mr. Klayme stated that he was sorry to hear what had happened to CH and her family, but maintained, as he had stated to the Probation Officer, that they were occasioned by another person and not by him.
So it would seem the defense's claim was "He must have been hacked, since he didnt do any of these things". Which, while wrong (He wasn't hacked, they just mixed up two different accounts), I don't see how they could argue that he wasn't hacked?
Like, if we assume in a different case that a person was indeed hacked, and a third party got access to their "kik" account. Would it not be a very similar situation?
An unfortunate fact about the legal system is that it's much easier for lawyers to sway a jury based on emotions than facts. simply labeling someone as a child abuser and then recounting a sordid tale is enough to get most people to switch off their rational faculties completely. Another unfortunate fact is many defense attorneys start work from the premise that the client is both guilty and an idiot, accepting the facts as alleged and trying to develop a counter-narrative that legally excuses or at least mitigates them. Protestations about the validity of the factual allegations are evaluated as legal arguments, with the implicit assumption that the police work will stand up to examination and that challenging it will alienate the jury even more than the initial allegations.
To my mind this is a by-product of legal education, where lawyers are tasked with identifying precedential or logical flaws in an opponent's argument rather than considering the entire set of circumstances. Answering 'First, I would examine all the evidence to make sure it was correct that the police did not make mistakes...' will not earn you any points on a typical law school exam; it's regarded as similar to disputing the givens on a logic or philosophy problem. I don't know about Canadian law specifically, but in US law appeals revolve solely around legal issues and the facts adduced at trial are assumed to be correct by default; you can't appeal on the basis that the facts were wrong or that the evidence was lacking, but must go on the basis that the wrong legal conclusion was drawn from the evidence in question or that your attorney failed to represent you properly (which requires you to explain why you didn't fire them at an earlier stage).
If I ever found myself wrongly accused I would never, ever go for a jury trial but ask for a bench trial instead, where the judge is the sole decider. Unlike a jury, a judge has to write out the reasoning for the decision. (It's sad that even here, the judge failed to notice the discrepancy in the evidence.) And if a defense attorney proposed to go on some other basis than the correctness of the facts I would seek to replace them immediately, even if this meant a longer period of pretrial detention. Most people go along with bad defense strategies because the carceral process is so demoralizing that they want to escape it as quickly as possible, even at the price of pleading guilty or letting the defense counsel field the wrong sort of argument. Even when someone is certain of their innocence like this defendant, starting a fight with one's own lawyer (who might be their only friend in the world if the accusation is lurid or grave enough) is often too scary for a defendant to imagine.
I'm curious (but not optimistic) as to whether anyone in the police, prosecution, or judiciary will face any consequences for their carelessness in this case beyond slower promotion. It's also unclear how the state intends to make the unfortunate defendant whole beyond declaring him the the victim of a procedural error. Compensation in such cases is usually calculated around loss of expected earnings; since it's hard to put a price on the loss of liberty, dignity, safety, or sanity those deficits are usually accorded some fixed nominal value, which tends to be on the low side. For example, the Federal government in the US pays $50,000 per year of imprisonment and $100,000 per year on death row; states have their own formulas and I assume things are approximately similar in Canada. Personally, I don't think $75,000 is adequate compensation for 1.5 years in prison on a child sex crime charge, which notoriously puts a convict at a much higher risk of violence from other prisoners than crimes involving property or ordinary violence.
do people ever do anything that is less beneficial than an alternative?
If the system is railroading you, the judge looks like another member of the system.
If you did it but believe that a jury will decide the law is unjust then you may go for jury nullification. A judge is not going to give you that.
In the U.S you might want to push as far as you can before accepting a plea, based on the idea that the prosecutor will offer better terms the closer it comes to trial. Under these conditions jury trials are more expensive, take longer, and may offer more uncertainty. Therefore ask for jury trial if your strategy is to get improved terms for plea.
In other words, there are reasons why jury trials would be better. There are reasons why people might think that jury trials would be better. However if your thing is about realizing the evidence is a bunch of crap and the charge is something that might emotionally cause people to want to see someone suffer you might want to take a bench trial, because hopefully judges should be able to see through crap evidence.
because they think jury trials work the way they are supposed to work.
the system is broken because juries are not required (or even allowed) to explain their decision, and the selection process is not that good at removing bias. thats how you get cases where the jury is racist or not following the law.
but the idea of using a group decision instead of individual is great, and the jurors not being judges/lawyers avoids professional deformation. if selection was completely fair the system would work as intended but thats not really possible with the way it is now.
> selection process is not that good at removing bias
I'd say it introduces bias.
Here in Blighty, jury selection is *entirely* random. A juror is only going to be 'deselected' in extremis; for example, it turns out they are related to the prosecution or defendant.
It would take anyone reviewing the evidence noticing the double underscore. Part of what makes this infuriating is that it's the type of error we as individuals are prone to making or not noticing on some days.
As the defendant, I'd have been terrified that all this seems to be me yet isn't.
The double underscore error was made on the subpoena/request to Kik, and may not have appeared in the evidence at all.
If the request was made before the defendant was charged, it’s entirely possible that the defendant’s lawyer was not given that document until it was expressly requested.
The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages.
But even if the messages no longer existed, there was no actual evidence. Truly, what on earth did the defense argue? How on earth was the jury convinced he was guilty?
Everything important about this story is missing from the article.
A single judge just decided that "his guilt was the only reasonable conclusion available". Scary. I like a lot of things about Canada, but I'm somewhat horrified at the idea that you can be sent to prison without a jury trial.
Because the message history was for his actual account, not the criminal's account.
The whole point is that they looked up the wrong username. And when they looked it up, they found an innocent man's identity, but didn't bother to look at the message history, which would not have had any of the messages.
Which is super-weird, because if he'd been messaging this one child, you'd think they'd be looking at all of his messages to find potential messages with other children. And then immediately noticing the lack of the messages that started the investigation in the first place.
If the police logged into his Kik account from his device, they would have seen the lack of connection to the case. If they simply trusted the Kik account contents from the subpoena response, then it was up to the defendant/experts to identify the issue and rebut the evidence.
IDK if you know much about kik but the only way this makes any sense is - I suspect he might have had other incriminating messages on his actual account he chose not to reveal.
That is a hazard of the way evidence is collected for cases. If the state has a warrant and they find evidence of another crime while executing the warrant, that might be used to bring more charges. I don't know enough about law to know under what conditions it may be used or must be ignored.
But also, I read the article where it said that no corroborating evidence of any crime was found when searching his house or devices, so I suspect his Kik account is not likely to be full of illegal content if his other possessions weren't.
Maybe he or his lawyers thought he would fare better with a judge? Hard to say. I've heard that there are a lot fewer jury trial in Canada vs US but I'm not sure why.
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was
the wrong username.
It did. The evidence against him were the messages sent to the girl and the unusual username. It's not like it was John_Smith. It was fairly unique.
They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence. It's not proof of anything either way.
the wrong username
It's very likely the extra underscore was simply glossed over, the way a double space is glossed over. Lawyers aren't generally known for their grasp of computer technology. The lawyer probably saw this a hundred times, thought it was a typo on the subpoena, and didn't put two-and-two together to realize that it was material. After all, the employee at the website could have made the same error but in reverse; assuming that the double underscore was a typo. It's not on the judge, as the judge doesn't go through every piece of evidence checking all the typos; they take the evidence at face value and evaluate its probative value.
I understand that certain segments of the population have remained completely disassociated from videogames, and that's fine, but that doesn't make it a niche or an expert topic.
Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now. More than 65M people bought Skyrim, and many more millions would recognise Fus-Ro-Dah just from spending time on the Internet anywhere near to gaming circles.
The defendant could have told their lawyer and it would have been trivial to research and demonstrate. Not sure what went wrong there.
> Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now
Don't wanna accuse you of anything, but why would you assume thats an important metric for HN populace. I assume most people here don't own a TV to begin with (personal projection obvs).
I have not idea either, other than I understand it is a common text from a really popular video game. Why wouldn't variations of that be a really common username?
oh no please no, not videogame experts in court...
just be sane and force any Cyber attribution link in testimony to present in standardized form (with reference to find explanation) Damerau-Lehvenstein edit distance histogram, cumulative distribution, etc.
So that all parties (defendant & lawyers, plaintif & lawyers, judge or if applicable also jury) can trivially read and interpret the data:
On this platform we also have 4 users exactly 1 edit away, 15 users exactly 2 edits away,...
On this platform we thus also have 4 other users 1 or fewer edits away, 19 users 2 or fewer edits away, ...
And I assure you Klayme or whomever would have read this part of the testimony over and over, and pushing his lawyers towards the right questions, that is if they allow themselves to work in the interest of their client, which usually they refuse to do, and just submit straw-man arguments intentionally because everybody wants to go home or have shorter workdays so prosecution and defense lawyers just pre-judge how the cookie should be crumbled, and then nobody has to read anything...
If you knew anything about the Skyrim community you would know that it is one of the most generic names possible on the level of John_Smith, possibly even more generic.
It is kind of like naming yourself after a meme or "lol".
And in any case, if they had looked at the message history of the account name that they used to track him down and that was entered into evidence at the trial, they would not have found any criminal messages.
> The lack of digital evidence is not proof of innocence.
Misplaced burden of proof.
> Lawyers aren't generally known for their grasp of computer technology.
Good lawyers are known for mastering the relevant details of a wide range of subjects.
I wouldn’t think to much more on it if I were you. It’s not just this article. I’ve been getting the same feeling with other Arstechnica articles that recently trended on HN, so I think I’ll just pass when I see them for a while.
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.
Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck.
He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money
We used to charge innocent men for room and board in prison after being released here in the UK not long ago. They only changed this in 2023 after uproar in a recent case of an innocent man being freed.
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.
> To identify this person, the cops contacted Kik, but their subpoena accidentally requested information about the Kik user “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response.
> Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so the Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax Regional Police. Halifax police took the IP address they had been given to local Internet provider Bell Aliant. Bell connected the IP address to the physical address of their subscriber, Brandon Klayme.
This is startling to me as it shows how easy to pinpoint exact location based on email alone.
And this is why IP addresses are often considered personally identifiable information under the GDPR, as impractical as that makes things like anti-spam/anti-bot.
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"?
The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.
I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons.
Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
Any number of things could have acquitted this man, including that. His lawyer, the judge, the prosecutors, the police and anyone else involved at any stage of this case need to be looked at very carefully and hard decisions should be made about whether it's appropriate for them to be licensed to perform whatever duties they were performing in the course of it.
It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”
The police testified that they had collected evidence from Kik that his username send the messages. Only he had access to that Kik account, ergo it is him. If that evidence is accepted as factually correct you are cooked. Case closed.
Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
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)
In practice, "the system" is a lot of humans. The police in rural Canada aren't used to challenging the word of Wisconsin police. Police and prosecutors need to have an incredible discipline to hear "we have a suspect in your community who preyed on a pre-pubescent girl in our neighborhood" and remain neutral and dispassionate during the investigation.
The stupid part is that the prosecution is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Then the defense attorney is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Presumably the jury got access to all of the facts of the case and simply ignored the lack of evidence tying the defendant to the offending Kik account. A chain of 3 errors shouldn't happen if everybody is diligent, but in practice "won't somebody think of the children?!?" Turns off cognitive skepticism and encourages moral panic.
Exactly. The strong Western societal taboo and moral panic on this topic have led to a frenzied crusade that easily bypasses reason (e.g. Chat Control), unfortunately. This is just one of the tragic consequences.
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).
Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.
This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0].
A bit off topic but is there a reason why the Cyrillic letter in the example image is slightly different than the regular “a”? Did someone redraw it from scratch and it looks kind of different or did someone actually take the “a” glyph and slightly modify it to make it Cyrillic? Because the small difference is so small that it can’t really be on purpose to make them look different, right?
It's not required, you can re-use the exact same glyph. The letters are effectively the same (both descendants of the Greek 'alpha').
Generally when this happens, it's because they copied the Latin glyph and then made some tweaks to the whole Cyrillic alphabet to make it look more even, etc., and the changes to the 'a' may not even be intentional, but the 'a' got caught up in a batch change or something.
I don't know what's most common these days, but quite to the contrary there's often a great deal of agitation for full i18n of name fields, such that people can specify their preferred name / spelling, in their native language. This is often pitched as a rights/respect issue.
I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks.
This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker.
AFAIK, only one prosecutor in the history of the USA has been jailed for malicious prosecution or intentional fabrication of evidence. And in this case there was no intent (that we know) to convict an innocent person, just wild incompetence, so likely just a stern talking-to from the head prosecutor is all they get.
A careless psychopath firing a gun into a crowd doesn’t necessarily care if he hits anyone. Despite the lack of intent, most would consider that careless psychopath worse than an individual that commits premeditated homicide for a reason other than “fun”.
Intent is irrelevant. The person firing a gun into a crowd knows the consequences of their actions just as well as a lazy judge or prosecutor does.
The job of the prosecutor is to convict, I don't think it matters whether the person is innocent or not. They have no moral responsibility, if it is most efficient to their career to damn an innocent person the system is designed for the purpose of doing so.
Way back lots of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore couln't bring cases against all because the expert witnesses (US law enforcement website trap-setters) wouldn't go to the UK to testify. How come Canada was able to press ahead without the expert winesses being cross examinable?
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?
The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts.
The lawyers aren't supposed to be technical, but they should know their limitations and hire technical experts. But that also assumes the defendant can afford the defense, which is insanely expensive.
>The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts.
Yep,
So they have a cop stand up in court.
"We read X messages" (Here they are look how exceptionally heinous they are)
"We then asked the service for the IP."
"We then asked the ISP to deanonymise it. "
"Heres the guy we found at that IP"
He signs a stat dec that using his brilliant super techno crime brain he has correctly attributed the messages to this human.
It sounds like the defense from there was: But your honor, there's no history of these messages etc etc.
Judge is not technically capable of reviewing the evidence. Defense probably not technically capable of reviewing the evidence either. Prosecution probably not capable either. They are all just playing out parts really.
After probably having dealt with hundreds of these, on the balance of probability like most courts do they just backed in the statement by the cop.
The end unless you can find some way to challenge the technical evidence. Which he did after some time.
the defendant hired a private lawyer, Peter Planetta, who resigned from the Nova Scotia Barrister's Society a few months after the defendant was sentenced.
what happens if the defendant pleads not guilty? does the public defender not bother to show up to trial? do they not represent the defendant? what is this charade?
That depends mostly on the jurisdiction, the structure of public defense in said jurisdiction, and the quality, resourcing, and culture of the individual Public Denfender’s Office. I do understand the view from strictly statistical analysis, but there are subtleties (particularly, misdemeanors vs felonies) in how plea vs trial plays out in various parts of the US not captured by large granularity stats.
No, they aren't. If your account gets stolen, you'll be found guilty, but in reality you didn't do the crime. No IP address tied you to the crime, and no real evidence tying you to the crime existed.
oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. Rather than ban the use of paper, how about technical people ban fonts (designed by clueless font designers) that blend multiple underscores together?
>oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake.
A technical person did make the mistake, likely a police cyber forensics type.
But there's no one technical in the court room capable of reviewing their work and identifying the fault.
>technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs.
And they aren't in the court room to assist with technical analysis. Why we need to keep revisiting this confuses me.
>it's certainly nobody else's fault.
Not sure I would agree, but even if I did how is this a relevant reply? What's important to the defense is identifying the point at which the technical evidence is faulty. Blame and penalty for the screw up is irrelevant to the goal of getting the innocent party out of prison.
The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...
I don’t get the hypothetical, the perpetrator and the guy arrested were both using Kik and the account names were confused. There was no other service in this case.
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!
I'm guessing there are LOTS of poor/rural parts of Canada (and the US) where convictions happen on less than convincing evidence.
Also, the legal system is made up of humans who are ALL fallible and subject to cognitive biases. Canadian police received the case from Wisconsin police, so there was likely too much trust and not enough verification. Same with the prosecution bringing a weaker case with very high confidence.
He's lucky. In the USA a lot of appellate options are not available if you are no longer incarcerated. You are basically out of luck, the conviction is a lock-in.
Police generally have to send faxes to companies for subpoenas, except for the few mega techs who have digital portals built specifically for police subpoenas. Source: I worked for a company who received subpoenas via fax.
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?"
> When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence.
IANAL but to be "found guilty" means you are determined to be, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Actual guilt is irrelevant. As for evidence, there's the "matching" username (which, we all now know, didn't really match).
18 months in a male prison as pedophile but innocent.. no money can fix it. If he had died in the prison - common for such perpetrators - nobody would never review his process and note "ops, we missed an underscore"
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.
Now imagine dumping the corpus of this case into an LLM and asking it to find discrepancies. I'll bet your bollocks to a barn dance that it'd point out the extra underscore.
This is yet another example of human confirmation bias leading to terrible outcomes for other humans. Our judgment is not so virtuous.
Now the question is whether being fallible is a feature. It seems like society is interested in keeping humans in the loop FOR the possibility of mistakes; makes it feel more authentic. Meanwhile, innocent people suffer.
There's probably a lot of alpha in getting (legal) access to a bunch of court records and finding discrepancies, and then using that to convince municipalities into buying a subscription to your discrepancy-finding AI SaaS. Give it a cool YC name like "Convictly.ai"
Hmm. No mention of a need for subpoena on the google end... Wonder why that is? Is that rubber stamp just public knowledge at this point? Google and Apple both are appendages of the State.
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?
> A: "Hey, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can we figure out where he lives?"
> B: "Yep, the phone book says Johnathan BaskinRobbins lives at 123 Main Street, Shelbyville."
> A: "Hey Shelbyville Police, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins at 123 Main Street did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can you please check it out?"
> C: "Yep, we found that axe at the house of Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street."
> D: "Here's the evidence from A that Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe. And here's the evidence from C that Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street had the same kind of axe. Please convict him."
> E: "That's a whole lot of evidence. Johnathan BaskinRobbins is probably guilty."
.... 18 months later ....
> J: "Hey guys, my name is spelled Johnathan BaskinRobbins, not Jonathan BaskinsRobbins..."
Only person asking this, but it's possible they ran out a statute of limitations by going down the wrong path. (SoL normally begins when the prosecution becomes aware that the crime has happened. In the USA SoL for most felonies is often 3 years.)
No, but they need to perhaps be more open on their human rights and 9/11 first as well. They can accuse another country who at least will admit they got it wrong. I don't see Saudi doing the same.
Like I wrote, separate the message from the messenger otherwise you would have no idea that Canada is railroading people because you’re waiting for the infallible messenger
Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM.
Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.
If a lot of people make the same claim, then from their perspective, you’re the one with a “wildly different” experience. What makes you so certain your experience generalizes to “most people’s experiences”?
> Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person
If it's just for "Catching typos", a hallucinated missing/extra underscore would just be a false positive to dismiss.
> A machine cannot be held accountable.
Seems unlikely that his lawyer, the law firm, the judge, whoever made the typo, or the police department will be held accountable either.
Nor can any of the tools they used, since that's not really the level at which it makes sense to hold accountability, but that's no reason not to use a tool that could find errors and reduce the chance for an innocent person to spend time in prison.
What's insane is that people say things like this in 2026. I suspect it stems from being retired and not really using LLMs for work, and instead using them for leisure, and therefore not knowing that they're extremely capable for logical operations, much more than they are for entertainment. Your second point about "machine cannot be held accountable" is a non sequitur, so I'll leave it.
> 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.