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Last Friday, a Michigan man named David Bartels was sentenced to five years in federal prison for “Possession of Child Pornography by a Person Employed by the Armed Forces Outside of the United States.” The unusual nature of the charge stems from the fact that Bartels bought and viewed the illegal material while working as a military contractor for Maytag Fuels at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Bartels had made some cursory efforts to cover his tracks, such as using the TOR browser. (This may sound simple enough, but according to the US government, only 12.3 percent of people charged with similar offenses used “the Dark Web” at all.) Bartels knew enough about tech to use Discord, Telegram, VLC, and Megasync to further his searches. And he had at least eight external USB hard drives or SSDs, plus laptops, an Apple iPad Mini, and a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3.
But for all his baseline technical knowledge, Bartels simultaneously showed little security awareness. He bought collections of child sex abuse material (CSAM) using PayPal, for instance. He received CSAM from other people who possessed his actual contact information. And he stored his contraband on a Western Digital 5TB hard drive under the astonishingly guilty-sounding folder hierarchy “/NSFW/Nope/Don’t open/You were Warned/Deeper/.”
Not hard to catch
According to Bartels’ lawyer, authorities found Bartels in January 2023, after “a person he had received child porn from was caught by law enforcement. Apparently they were able to see who this individual had sent material to, one of which was Mr. Bartels.”
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