Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Basically, it recommends Eraser for ordinary images, and Cccleaner if you have been dabbling with P2P or newsgroups. Despite recent Which-inspired hysteria, it is not recommended that you go around hitting your hard drive with a sledgehammer. Yes, MI5 teams hellbent on securing the safety of the nation can probably recover most things (we watch Spooks too). But your average police forensics department has neither the time nor the capability to do magnetic force microscope imaging.

Once upon a time, it appeared to be the case that individuals who had possessed, say, indecent imagery on their PCs could still be prosecuted even if they subsequently deleted them. Legal precedent has evolved, to the point that you need only put the imagery beyond your capability to recover it. That may or may not seem unfair. What it boils down to is that if you are the sort of computer geek who is clearly capable of restoring files from varying degrees of deletion, and you have the wherewithal to do so, you are considered to be in a different category from the average computer user who thinks that hitting the big "x" thingy at the top of the screen is an end to it.

Whether the even more cunning plan of hiding an encrypted file within an encrypted file is possible, we leave to those techies we feel sure are going to comment on this article (Yes it is - Ed).

But what if the worst happens? Plod has burst through your front door at two in the morning. All your PC equipment is now in a van on its way to the local police forensics unit, and you are sat sweating the wrong side of the interrogation room, trying to decide whether the copper offering you a cigarette is the good one or the bad one?

First of all, remember that everything that happens from here on in is actually a process. When the police arrived, they should have had a warrant, which they showed you, and which detailed exactly what they were allowed to take. Without that document - if you have not previously been arrested for an offence - you are well within your rights to send them on their way. You may be arrested, whereupon your fingerprints and DNA become the property of the Police. But an arrest is no indicator of guilt or innocence. It is simply a useful procedure.

At the police station, you may ask for a lawyer - either your own or the duty solicitor - and you absolutely should not respond to any questions until you have spoken to this person. At the end of the interview, the police might offer you a caution. Be very careful at this point: a caution is tantamount to a criminal conviction. Police like cautions because they save time and paperwork, and they instantly add one to their clear-up rate. By contrast, lawyers we have spoken to recommend that you should never accept a caution, because if one is offered, it means the police may not have a good enough case to prosecute.

Organisations such as CAAN and Backlash are equally adamant in advising individuals to refuse cautions. In part this is for the reasons above: in part it is the beginning of a fight back against the law. They believe the police made widespread use of cautions when it came to child porn because it made life easier and the majority of people just couldn't face a full court case. As one spokesperson put it: "the police wanted this law. We should not make it easy for them".

If the matter ever does get to court, then the prosecution has to prove that any images found on your PC were put there by yourself and not by accident, and that they meet all the criteria set out in the law. At this point no-one knows - we repeat, no one knows - whether the law will eventually cast its net wide or narrow. That will depend on what the courts do with the first few cases that come before them.

It is possible that some form of Human Rights defence will be available. It is also possible that the Government has shot itself in the foot on this law. Throughout its passage, and in guidance since, the Ministry of Justice has claimed absolutely that this law would not pick up any material not already covered by the Obscene Publications Act. Such advice does not exactly have the weight of law: but it could well prove a strong ground for mitigation.

As a judge argued in another case (R v. O'Carroll 2003), individuals cannot wait for a jury to determine whether an image is indecent or not: they must have some idea of what the common understanding of that term is. So, too, with obscenity. Individuals wishing to take the argument one stage further might follow the advice of CAAN - which is planning to issue an "approved by the IWF" stamp for erotic pictures - and forward images they are not sure about to the IWF.

Since part of the IWF's remit is to deal with material deemed to be criminally obscene and hosted in the UK, the conclusion must be that if an image is deemed not to be obscene by the IWF, then according to the Ministry of Justice, it cannot fall foul of the extreme porn law. There is a pleasing sense of karma to this syllogism, since if it is denied, then either the Ministry of Justice will have to admit to giving duff advice, or the IWF would have to own up to not being experts on the law.

Some final words of caution. This guide is about self-preservation and survival. So do remember to take precautions to protect your own PC against external attack. Various viruses, trojans and assorted malware can and do deposit nasty images. No doubt you would hope to be able to prove this in time. However, if you already collect slightly extreme porn, an argument that the rest "just sort of appeared" would be considerably weaker.

Besides, if anyone believes that the authorities understand how malware functions, they have only to look at the case of Julie Amero in the US.

Finally, being found guilty of looking at extreme porn is not necessarily the end of the world. Unless it is seriously extreme, the chances are it will not attract a prison sentence, and is very unlikely to land you on the Sex Offenders Register. On the other hand, the lead up to any court case can be seriously draining emotionally, especially if it is preceded by the police seizing every piece of computer kit in your house.

As reported previously, different forces have different guidelines for what happens next: yet another reason for going high profile and kicking up a fuss in the press is that some forces will move forensic examination forward if the case is out in the public arena. However, do take a moment to consider what would happen if you are self-employed and vital work-related files were to be impounded for a matter of months. Could your business survive?

Best advice, always, is for small businesses to keep vital data backed up at an entirely separate location. That works if your premises catch fire. It also works - or should work - if your home office is raided and your PC removed. It might be that you have to borrow or buy new PCs until your case gets to court. But so long as you have continuing access to key data, you should survive.

D-day approaches. You now have no more than a couple of weeks to set your house in order. Read the law. Delete what you feel you need to delete (and that includes hard copy images as well). Apply your disk-scrubbers. Make back-ups. Install firewalls. Then cross your fingers, and pray. ®

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