This is completely dystopian. Did he have the worst legal defense possible, or are Canadian laws such that an IP address is sufficient for any claimed charges to just stick?
The police testified that they had collected evidence from Kik that his username send the messages. Only he had access to that Kik account, ergo it is him. If that evidence is accepted as factually correct you are cooked. Case closed.
Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
Yes, the root cause is that computer systems are seen as reliable witnesses even when they involve fallible human beings, e.g. the person making the request in this case.
> 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 trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months.
What in the world happened in this case?
How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.
> The police also retrieved one voicemail message from CH’s iPhone that was sent to her by “Jay,” with a timestamp of December 13, 2018, at 7:40:54 PM (UTC-6), which was played in court.
So it sounds like they played audio of the actual perpetrator's voice in court, and no one realized it was a completely different person.
> In the final analysis, the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, in fact, “Jay” and that he was the person who had sent her the sexually explicit text messages and had demanded and received sexually explicit photos and videos of CH, who was at the time that those images were exchanged, only 12 years old.
Funny (sad?) that the judge literally says he established this "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as “Jay” and furthermore that, he was the person with whom CH had been communicating over several weeks in sexually explicit messaging and that he had demanded that CH send sexually explicit photos and videos of her, being a 12-year-old girl, to him. The Crown’s direct and circumstantial evidence included numerous references to the IP addresses and other information for accounts such as Google+, Google, Kik which referred to different usernames, like ““Jay” with their subscriber contact being listed as Mr. Brandon Klayme.
I barely know anything about law, but all of this sounds like "circumstantial" evidence, not direct?
> The Court received a Pre-Sentence Report (PSR) prepared by the Probation Officer on July 21, 2023, which indicated that Mr. Klayme, is now 28 years old, single and continues to live at home at his parent’s house. The PSR notes that Mr. Brandon Klayme has a very close relationship with his parents and siblings, is not currently involved in a relationship and also reported that he has never been in one.
> The PSR notes that Mr. Klayme completed grade 12 in 2013, but he advised the Probation Officer that he did not care about school and often was in trouble for not paying attention in class. He has not continued his education, but in terms of future education goals, Mr. Klayme indicated that, in the future, he would like to take a program in sound engineering. Mr. Klayme is presently unemployed, and his employment experience was with the family business and working with his father after graduating from grade 12. He has been unemployed since the family business was sold over one year ago. As a result, he is financially dependent on his parents.
> Mr. Klayme reported that he has good health and that he had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child but took prescription medication to address those issues. He does not use any intoxicating substances but may have a drink on a few special occasions each year. He described himself as being a “very calm person” and has never attended any form of counselling.
> The Probation Officer noted that, during her interview with Mr. Klayme, he presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his “email account had been hacked.”
> With respect to those comments in the PSR, at the conclusion of the sentencing submissions, the Court offered Mr. Klayme the opportunity to ...
What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the conviction after he served the time. Not nothing, but seems pretty inadequate.
Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?
I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons.
Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
How on Earth was he convicted? They couldn’t find any evidence (because it didn’t exist) and yet he was still found guilty? Is there a similar presumption of innocence in Canadian legal doctrine?
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)
Holy fuck! How can someone without no evidence and completely innocent be convicted of an offense like this in Canada? What in the fuck is going on?? What happened to “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?”
Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
That's what "Got to separate the message from the messenger" refers to. Saudi Arabia's faults do not in any way make the situation in Canada any better.
If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part).
I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence.
This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, but they will just assume they wiped the evidence from their local storage. There is no other evidence to be had because the crimes in this category to not require any physical evidence whatsoever. Many of the laws in this category involve byte patterns with a sexual theme, but not all of them. Others include the laws against using the wrong REST API in the wrong way (unauthorized access) or speech restrictions including laws against empty, impossible, never acted on threats or improper ideas (popular outside the US).
Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.
In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
How is E2EE relevant here. And permitting sign ups with only email or less used to be the standard everywhere. Also according the sentencing [0] the perp and victim initially met on Google+.
73 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 22.8 ms ] threadThere’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
> 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 trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months.
What in the world happened in this case?
How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence?
Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime.
What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.
Some interesting bits I found in it:
> The police also retrieved one voicemail message from CH’s iPhone that was sent to her by “Jay,” with a timestamp of December 13, 2018, at 7:40:54 PM (UTC-6), which was played in court.
So it sounds like they played audio of the actual perpetrator's voice in court, and no one realized it was a completely different person.
> In the final analysis, the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, in fact, “Jay” and that he was the person who had sent her the sexually explicit text messages and had demanded and received sexually explicit photos and videos of CH, who was at the time that those images were exchanged, only 12 years old.
Funny (sad?) that the judge literally says he established this "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as “Jay” and furthermore that, he was the person with whom CH had been communicating over several weeks in sexually explicit messaging and that he had demanded that CH send sexually explicit photos and videos of her, being a 12-year-old girl, to him. The Crown’s direct and circumstantial evidence included numerous references to the IP addresses and other information for accounts such as Google+, Google, Kik which referred to different usernames, like ““Jay” with their subscriber contact being listed as Mr. Brandon Klayme.
I barely know anything about law, but all of this sounds like "circumstantial" evidence, not direct?
> The Court received a Pre-Sentence Report (PSR) prepared by the Probation Officer on July 21, 2023, which indicated that Mr. Klayme, is now 28 years old, single and continues to live at home at his parent’s house. The PSR notes that Mr. Brandon Klayme has a very close relationship with his parents and siblings, is not currently involved in a relationship and also reported that he has never been in one.
> The PSR notes that Mr. Klayme completed grade 12 in 2013, but he advised the Probation Officer that he did not care about school and often was in trouble for not paying attention in class. He has not continued his education, but in terms of future education goals, Mr. Klayme indicated that, in the future, he would like to take a program in sound engineering. Mr. Klayme is presently unemployed, and his employment experience was with the family business and working with his father after graduating from grade 12. He has been unemployed since the family business was sold over one year ago. As a result, he is financially dependent on his parents.
> Mr. Klayme reported that he has good health and that he had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child but took prescription medication to address those issues. He does not use any intoxicating substances but may have a drink on a few special occasions each year. He described himself as being a “very calm person” and has never attended any form of counselling.
> The Probation Officer noted that, during her interview with Mr. Klayme, he presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his “email account had been hacked.”
> With respect to those comments in the PSR, at the conclusion of the sentencing submissions, the Court offered Mr. Klayme the opportunity to ...
Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
(available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
Got to separate the message from the messenger
I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence.
Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app)
In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
[0] https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp...