Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 311 posts

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#151

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #149
oersted wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not an unusual username, it is actually quite unoriginal, there are probably thousands of users with variations of the same name. It is the name of the headline magic ability in Skyrim, which is probably among the top ten most popular videogames of the last 25 years.

Wonder if there are expert witnesses in videogame niche. I have no idea what you are talking about.

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?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#152

Post by ButlerianJihad »

oersted wrote: post #84
gamblor956 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eith…

It’s not an unusual username, it is actually quite unoriginal, there are probably thousands of users with variations of the same name. It is the name of the headline magic ability in Skyrim, which is probably among the top ten most popular videogames of the last 25 years.

Since the introduction of the Skyrim game in 2011, UrbanDictionary has also indicated that the specific phrase is a term for fellatio. Just sayin'

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#153

Post by dzhiurgis »

thephyber wrote: post #68
nl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. I think the point is that the message history would show incriminating messages. He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.

You are right, but your parent is right too. 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.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#154

Post by vintermann »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #58
Aurornis wrote: post #15

> 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…

"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 t…

> happens to have Kik on his device

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.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#155

Post by SZJX »

Aurornis wrote: post #15

> 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…

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.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#156

Post by SZJX »

thephyber wrote: post #37
firasd wrote: post #19

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)

You can assume "the system is lazy". 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…

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.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#157

Post by illliillll »

srdjanr wrote: post #147
illliillll wrote: post #143

[flagged]

Sure, we should kill everyone who makes an honest, human mistake. Especially if it's so hard to catch that at least 3 people missed it (someone from the police, prosecutor, and defense lawyer).

That’s absurd.

The standard in Canada is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a standard which does not leave much room for “honest, human mistakes” if you actually take it seriously.

If the judge bothered to review the evidence, he’d presumably have been baffled by the fact that nothing has been recovered from the defendant connecting him to the crime. This judge chose to not do that and chose not to be baffled, that wasn’t an honest mistake.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#158

Post by odo1242 »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #144
codetiger wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tunnel vision, probably

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#159

Post by Dilettante_ »

denkmoon wrote: post #113
koolba wrote: post #80

All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man. Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.

Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.

Using LLMs to find errors and using LLMs to produce error-free artifacts are two extremely different levels of challenge.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#160

Post by ralferoo »

jibal wrote: post #123
giantg2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"he likely didn't have any experts to refute the prosecution's evidence." What evidence? They didn't have any other than a user name. An arm chair lawyer who watched too many shows could have created reasonable doubt.

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 w…

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.
Post reply on HN