> "During his initial appearance in a federal courthouse in Santa Ana, Calif., the prosecutors indicated a willingness to reduce or drop the child pornography c

> "During his initial appearance in a federal courthouse in Santa Ana, Calif., the prosecutors indicated a willingness to reduce or drop the child pornography charges if he would tell them about the C-17, said Sara Naheedy, Gartenlaub’s attorney at the time." While that does sound damning in a certain light, it's also consistent with their primary mission, which is to counter espionage. I would hope that the FBI would make exactly this kind of tradeoff in its pursuit of spies. Now, of course, if your implication is that they fraudulently manufactured the CP evidence in order to create leverage to extract this confession, that is indeed reprehensible. But if they just happened to find CP and then used it as leverage to pursue what is, IMO, a more important line of inquiry, then that is just fine with me. > No evidence of downloading the porn. No evidence of viewing the porn. While the article does say that, let's be honest. What evidence can there be of downloading porn? We all know how computers work, and this guy was a sysadmin, so he does too. The fact that he didn't forget to clear his browser history does not invalidate the presence of child porn on his computer. That being said, of course it also doesn't eliminate the possibility that he was framed or that he wasn't at fault for its presence there. But if the FBI finds CP on someone's computer, I expect them to investigate and prosecute the case in the absence of positive exculpatory evidence indicating that it wasn't put there by that computer's owner.