Editor's comment: Real issue is ease of accessing porn sites

“Isn't access to porn a basic human right nowadays? There's a significant chunk of the population who either never get any or their spouse has gotten fat or unattractive. This editorial piece sounds like something from the middle ages lol.”

“A moralising journalist. Isn't that an oxymoron?”

“Uhm, what? No, that is absolutely not "the real issue" at all.

The real issue is that the state in form of the police is behaving unreasonably and are displaying complete technical incompetence.

That person's "life style" and addiction to legal porn is completely irrelevant here and simply distracts from the authorities' behaviour.

The real issue (as I understand it, I have only read the original article, I don't know if the information in it is accurate and complete) is this: the police have confiscated some computers/ hard drives. They have determined that that a handful of images that qualify as child pornography exist on these drives. They are also saying that they believe these images only landed on the hard drives by accident (e.g. as part of the browser cache I presume), and weren't downloaded on purpose.

They are also claiming that it is not possible to fully erase these images from the harddrive, which is false for all practical purposes. While a normal 'delete' operation will simply remove the entry in the file system's table of files, but not clear the sectors containing that data (until they're overwritten by other data), it is absolutely trivial to overwrite those files with random data and purge the data from the harddrive, thus making them pretty much unrecoverable for anyone but perhaps specialist labs and intelligence agencies. These are standard techniques that are used to remove confidential files as well, and should take seconds at best. And since they believe that these images were only on the drive by accident, they have no reason to believe that that person would even try recover them.

Imagine if this was a small businessman's computer that contained data that is important to the running of his local business (yes, of course that should be backed up then, but presumably the police would confiscate any local backups they find as well then), and the police find a few accidental images of child pornography, and then refuse to hand back the drives or the data. Would anyone find this acceptable?

(Just like N% of all bank notes in circulation have traces of drugs on them, I would bet that a considerable amount of computers used in businesses and government agencies have some files on them that are considered illegal, so this is not an entirely hypothetical scenario. All it takes is to end up on a dodgy website through some search engine result.)”

“Yes, the ease with which pornography can be found on the internet IS acceptable. Those who do not want to access have a simple action: Don't!

Censorship is far more insidious than pornography.”

“And salt in the wound is that he has to pay over £1500 in costs. It amazes me that a newspaper editor would be in favor of censorship and the morality police invading privacy.”

“Appart for the porn and the rights or wrongs of down loading it, how did Mr Garrard afford so may computers on his disability befefits ?”

“Like every person who has ever called for some form of censorship/restriction/control of the internet, you have completely and utterly failed to understand how the internet works.

"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it”

“"Regardless of how they got there – and Mr Gerrard denies downloading them – the police are surely right to confiscate and destroy his lap-tops and PCs."

Mr Editor, have you found all the hidden files on your computer?

Why confiscate his computers? Just trash the hard drives if you don't have the expertise to remove the files and it seems the police don't have that from their comments. This smacks of censorship and if you allow that, governments will seize upon it and suddenly start classifying any dissent as pornography”