Digital experts will play key roles in Curtin crisis
Wednesday April 19 2006
Eoghan Casey from the US and Duncan Campbell, from Britain, are expected to determine how the illegal material was downloaded to the judge's computer.
Among the issues they will consider are:
* Did the judge willingly subscribe to a website specialising in the illegal material, providing details of his credit card specifically to obtain images of child pornography?
* Could the images have arrived unannounced and unsolicited after he had subscribed to another, legal, website?
* Was Judge Curtin's computer invaded without his knowledge by a Trojan Horse virus that downloaded the criminal material to his computer's hard drive?
According to the experts, it is not particularly difficult for a qualified digital scientist to examine the hard drive and find the origin of any illegal images.
Duncan Campbell explained: "Finding child porn images on a computer is not unusual, as they can be sent to the unwilling by spam e-mails or automatically loaded by malicious websites.
"But it's not difficult to tell if the user deliberately asked for or collected pictures of children. When such pictures are made deliberately, they are loaded to different places on the computer's memory drive."
Although Mr Casey is expected to be engaged by the Oireachtas committee and Mr Campbell retained by Judge Curtin, neither will give adversarial evidence.
Each expert will simply explain their extremely complex discipline to the committee and how, they believe, the images of child pornography came to be found on Judge Curtin's computer.
They may also be asked to examine Judge Curtin's computer to see if he visited other websites or chat rooms, the nature of them, and if he subscribed for passwords to gain access.
The committee is finding facts for the impeachment process and it is expected to pay both to ensure fair procedures.
