11/22/03
Pantless driver charged over kiddie porn
By KIM BRADLEY, SUN MEDIA
TORONTO -- A man caught driving naked from the waist down while
watching kiddie porn on his laptop has become the first man in Toronto
charged for allegedly stealing an Internet connection.
For the first time, Toronto police laid a theft of communications
charge after busting a man driving the wrong way down a one-way street
while downloading child porn using stolen wireless Internet signals.
The slow-moving car was pulled over around 5 a.m. by a police
officer who allegedly found the driver - with no pants on - watching a
movie on his laptop of a 10-year-old girl performing fellatio on an adult.
Police allege the man downloaded the movie using an Internet
connection he intercepted from a nearby house.
Stealing Internet, or War Driving as it is sometimes called, is
becoming more and more common among perverts trying to avoid online
detection. It's also a way they can invade someone else's computer, which
could have serious ramifications for unsuspecting wireless Internet
subscribers,.
"That means people can use, access and get into your computer, your
files and your Internet signal, and if anything illegal was done it would
come back to your computer," said Det.-Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto
police child exploitation section.
"It's very disturbing. This is a problem that isn't going away and
people have to be educated on how to protect themselves."
Gillespie's unit was called in after Wednesday's arrest and together
with the OPP's Project P unit, they searched the unemployed man's home.
They recovered 10 computers and thousands of CDs and floppy disks
which they suspect contain child abuse images.
"It involves some of the worst child pornography that we've ever
seen, including young children and babies. I hate to say it but it's
becoming typical of what we're seeing," Gillespie said.
It's going to take investigators between 20 and 40 hours to go
through each computer and several more hours to detail each image found on
each disk before they will know exactly how many child abuse images the
man allegedly had, he added.
Gillespie said the man used Kazaa, a popular file-sharing web
program commonly used to share music, to download the graphic material.
In a study using 12 words associated with child pornography, the
U.S. General Accounting Office found that 42% of 1,286 files on the
peer-to-peer site contained child porn.
Those figures didn't surprise Gillespie.
"It's turned into the largest single way in which like-minded people
share and trade child pornography," he said.
Det.-Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt, from Project P, said the last three
child porn collectors his unit arrested also used Kazaa to download porn
and stole Internet connections to get online.
"It's becoming more and more common," he said. "They always seem to
have the technology before we do."
Walter Nowakowski, 33, of Delhi, is charged with two counts of
possession of child pornography, accessing child porn, distributing child
porn, and making child porn for allegedly burning images onto CDs. He's
also charged with theft of communications.
