Posted 11:23 PM by Floyd

Today's San Jose Mercury News carried a very strange article. It's titled Criminals' new trick, and begins as follows:

CHILD-PORN COLLECTORS USING POCKET-SIZE STORAGE DRIVES
By Jessie Seyfer
Mercury News

They're small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and so unassuming that they are sometimes mistaken for lighters.

But portable storage drives are becoming increasingly popular among child pornography collectors, Bay Area high-tech detectives say.

Twenty paragraphs later, we are still waiting to see just what tricks the child porno pervs are using these drives for. The only information was dispensed to us in law-enforcement-speak, whereby the more or less rational actions of irrational criminals is invested with a strange sense of ritual, as if the police lieutenant in charge of training sessions were describing orangutangs or wildebeasts:

Child porn collectors ``cherish'' their photos, he said.

``They catalog them. They don't want to be without them, and this gives them the capability to take it with them. They want this stuff with them so they can access it any time they want,'' Sibley said.

Well, okay, but ... maybe they find portable drives convenient, just like any other computer user.

I have another bone to pick with the writer; a staffer for the "newspaper of Silicon Valley" should know better than to repeat this tripe:

Even if the photos are encrypted, computer forensics specialists can break through most encryption schemes these days anyway, he said.

Really? 256 bit triple-DES, no problem for the men in blue? I take back my implied criticism of the cops' lack of technical knowhow; sounds like they're getting those new quantum computers that Michael Crichton wrote about in Timeline.