MAN ARRESTED AFTER GOOGLE INFORMED POLICE OF CHILD PORN IN GMAIL BOX

 

Houston resident, John Henry Skillern was arrested recently for trading child pornography over his Google Gmail e-mail account. If that is where the story began and ended this news article would be a pretty open and shut affair for most readers.  What changes the dynamic is how he was found out.  His arrested was not prompted as a part of a clandestine operation where authorities posed as the buyer or solicitor, it was not a tip from a victim or a remorseful member of this illegal underground, nor was it the happenstance of a lucky find by physical detectives looking into some other infraction.

John Henry Skillern, 41, was charged with possession of child pornography and promotion of child pornography. Instead Skillern was found to have been engaged in this activity by his email host company, Google. Yes, Skillern was using Gmail to do this, and while sweeping through his personal information for Google’s various algorithms Google found the images being trafficked across their service. This got automatically flagged as an inappropriate use of Gmail using several filters and sent to Google for them to decide what to do with this information. They decided to go to the police, which promptly arrested Skillner for the alleged deed. Police say Google detected explicit images of a young girl in an email that John Henry Skillern was sending to a friend, the company then alerted the authorities. “He was trying to get around getting caught, he was trying to keep it inside his email,” said Detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce. “I cannot see that information, I cannot see that photo, but Google can.”

Skillern is a registered sex offender who was convicted of sexually assaulting an 8 year old boy in 1994. During the search of his electronic devices, police say they found that Skillern had video on his cell phone of the young children that visited the Denny’s restaurant where he worked. A neighbour, Yesenia Gonzales, seemed  just fine with the email scanning that lead to Skillern’s arrest when she told KHOU, “Thank goodness for Google.” While stopping a child predator is never a bad thing, the fact that Google can just take a stroll through your personal info and do what they like does not sit well with many. From most legal perspectives, Google is not in the wrong technically because your fourth amendment rights do not carry over to third parties that are not the US government which is the entire problem. Almost all of your data online goes through a third party multiple times, which essentially makes the World Wide Web a fourth amendment free zone.  You are never safe from the government watching what you do through the corporate proxies that run the show, which is clearly not what the authors of the amendment intended in the slightest.

So where can the line be drawn for users to have the privacy guaranteed to them if they decide to use more archaic technologies like snail mail or hard line telephones, yet still allow investigators to find bad guys online? That is the real sticky widget and it’s one of the most important battles raging right now between advocacy groups and policy makers across the board. There is likely not to be one completely correct answer, but hopefully society can find that compromise that will save us from big brother, but will allow the World Wide Web to be a safe place from predators as well.