When suspected child pornography is discovered on workplace computers and networks, Stroz Friedberg’s understanding of the legal and technical challenges of handling this contraband is relied upon both by our corporate clients and outside counsel. Transferring, reproducing, shipping, possessing or destroying child pornography can carry serious civil and criminal penalties, depending upon the circumstances. The discovery of child pornography may occur in multiple ways:
- Inside tipsters may alert management or Human Resources that an employee is accessing child pornography via the corporate network
- A routine security audit of the company network may reveal large numbers of image files, which upon examination turn out to be child pornography
- Electronic discovery in an ongoing litigation matter or internal investigation may reveal the presence of child pornography image files on a computer with relevant data
- IT staff may notice heavy Internet usage or improper installation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing program on an employee’s computer and, upon examination, find the employee has used the program to search for and download child pornography images
- Following a computer intrusion, IT staff scrutinizing network servers may uncover hidden stashes of child pornography that were stored by the hackers for illicit access and distribution
Finding suspected child pornography triggers a number of questions: Is this really illegal child pornography or just highly offensive material? Is the employee found with child pornography on his computer acting alone or are other employees using company assets and facilities to share child pornography images? Was the employee using the company network to distribute child pornography as e-mail attachments to others, and were those e-mails sent to other employees? Was the employee merely viewing child pornography images online or intentionally storing those images on the company computer? Was the employee actively posting or uploading child pornography images to any sites from the company network? Are the child pornography images only on the employee’s desktop or laptop computer or are they also on other company assets used by the employee, such as servers, PDAs, CDs, thumb drives, or other removable media? Could the illegal child pornography images have migrated from the employee’s computer to other parts of the corporate network through automatic system back-ups?
Answering these questions requires careful handling and expert analysis to ensure that the scope of the problem is identified and contained, and that evidence of criminal activity has been preserved, both for referral to law enforcement and in possible wrongful termination proceedings with a former employee. The respected law enforcement backgrounds of Stroz Friedberg’s management, combined with the expertise of our technical experts in investigating child exploitation cases as former government agents, provides invaluable assistance in evaluating suspected child pornography images and crafting protocols to produce the suspected child pornography to law enforcement, while protecting confidential information and data of the company.