Jeff was a computer programmer. Although he worked briefly as an investigator for Yanuck, he made his living writing software.
In 2002, he wrote a program to be used by defense attorneys in sex crime cases.
The program would take an image, break it down into pixels and count the colors of each.
By comparing the colors in each picture, the program could give a guess as to the chances of a match.
(A picture of a sunset would have different colors than pictures of a desert.
The program could find the 1 other sunset picture in a million desert pictures, or could crawl the internet an find other pictures that might be sunsets)
His plan was to enter a known picture of the victims in the sex crime cases he was working on and see if it would match any images out there on the internet.
People who molest children often take pictures to record the event and then share the pictures with other pedophiles.
Finding a picture of the victim being molested by someone other than their client would be a bonanza for the defense.
Children will sometimes report abuse, but name the wrong person as their abuser. This can get the abuse to stop, but would not trigger any revenge threatened by the actual abuser.
Of course it also runs an innocent person through the wringer, but kids don't think of that.
Jeff wrote the program back in the days before everyone had high speed internet connections.
Yanuck had one at his office though and that is what inspired him.
After running it for a very short time, it became clear it wasn't going to work.
Unless the first image was one of a series of images, the program was unlikely to make a match.
The difference in lighting, or cameras, would cause a persons face to be recorded as different colors on the RGB color scale.
That diference alone would keep the program from finding matches.
The plan was abandoned and the program deleted, but the program downloaded the files into one directory and then moved them to another if there was a potential match, or automatically deleted if not.
He must have missed one of the directories when deleting the program and didn't notice until they were searching his computer after his arrest for the manufacturing of counterfeit credit cards.
He says he thought what he was doing was legal because the California Penal Code says a defense investigator may possess child pornography for a case he is working on. (I'll have to look that up)
He said he only pleaded guilty because A) he was going to prison anyway for the counterfeit credit cards, and B) they said they would run the time concurrent with his other sentence.
He claims that his federal public defender pointed out that federal law superceeds state law, so no matter what the penal code said, it might still be a violation of federal law. If convicted, he faced up to 20 years per image.
He took the deal.
Ironically, a year later, the feds started using software to find victims of child pornography.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Child_Victim_Identification_Program
Jeff's amazon.com purchase history was subpoenaed for trial. For the year 2002, his only purchases were:
Investigative Interviews of Children: A Guide for Helping Professionals
Investigative Interviews of Children: A Guide for Helping Professionals
Debra A. Poole, Michael E. Lamb
The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play,...
The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play,...
Sharon Lamb
The Sexual Exploitation of Children : A Practical Guide to...
The Sexual Exploitation of Children : A Practical Guide to...
Seth L. Goldstein
Sold by: Amazon.com LLC
View Order Details
Order placed on Jun 15, 2002
That was the exact time frame he started working for Yanuck on sex crime cases and downloaded the porn.
A previous search on his computers 6 months earlier showed no porn of any kind.
There is not a shred of evidence to suggest his possession of the porn was for any reason but the cases he was working on.
