8 ms·

A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

408 points by quantified 2mo ago

silisili 2mo ago
This is completely dystopian. Did he have the worst legal defense possible, or are Canadian laws such that an IP address is sufficient for any claimed charges to just stick?
- protocolture 2mo ago
  I am betting the judge accepted all the messages as evidence, and that was enough to convict. Theres no one technical in a court room.
  - thephyber 2mo ago
    The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts. The lawyers aren't supposed to be technical, but they should know their limitations and hire technical experts. But that also assumes the defendant can afford the defense, which is insanely expensive.
    - sterlind 2mo ago
      does Canada not have public defenders? I know they're overworked but, c'mon, surely they can do better than they did? I want to see the transcripts.
      - thephyber 2mo ago
        If you find them, let us know. In the US public defenders don't have time to try cases. They are basically plea bargain assistants.
        sterlind 2mo ago
        what happens if the defendant pleads not guilty? does the public defender not bother to show up to trial? do they not represent the defendant? what is this charade? I found the verdict here: https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nspc4.html?resultId=23b3d99c2f784deeae3a19526c9a083c https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp... but no transcript is given. it has to be requested, it seems.
        thephyber 2mo ago
        Public defenders are required to build the best case they can, but the nature of a defense requires hiring experts to contradict the prosecution evidence. Without hiring experts, the public defender is just pounding the table or arguing the technicals of law.
        gremlinunderway 2mo ago
        thats not the verdict. Thats the sentencing decision, which just goes into a separate Judge's sentencing hearing and decisions on that.
        qingcharles 2mo ago
        Public defenders will try your case if you demand trial; in fact, a lot of public defenders probably try more cases than paid attorneys. The problem is that public defenders generally are starter defense attorneys, they're in the job to get experience so they can eventually quit and take a cushy private role. And secondly, they have very little time to allocate to each case; if the defendant is stuck in jail, then they have even less time to visit the defendant and prepare any kind of useful defense or trial strategy. A public defender's primary strategy for their client is to, sadly, negotiate the best possible plea deal in the shortest amount of time to get the case off the docket. (This might actually be in the best interests of the defendant; most defendants are guilty of something in the charging document, even if not everything they've been likely over-charged with; the justice system isn't quite so broken that it scoops up a huge number of factually innocent persons)
        account42 2mo ago
      - nianderwallace 2mo ago
        the defendant hired a private lawyer, Peter Planetta, who resigned from the Nova Scotia Barrister's Society a few months after the defendant was sentenced. sources: https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... and https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignation-of-peter-planetta/ https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignatio...
    - protocolture 2mo ago
      >The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts. Yep, So they have a cop stand up in court. "We read X messages" (Here they are look how exceptionally heinous they are) "We then asked the service for the IP." "We then asked the ISP to deanonymise it. " "Heres the guy we found at that IP" He signs a stat dec that using his brilliant super techno crime brain he has correctly attributed the messages to this human. It sounds like the defense from there was: But your honor, there's no history of these messages etc etc. Judge is not technically capable of reviewing the evidence. Defense probably not technically capable of reviewing the evidence either. Prosecution probably not capable either. They are all just playing out parts really. After probably having dealt with hundreds of these, on the balance of probability like most courts do they just backed in the statement by the cop. The end unless you can find some way to challenge the technical evidence. Which he did after some time.
    - OutOfHere 2mo ago
      No, they aren't. If your account gets stolen, you'll be found guilty, but in reality you didn't do the crime. No IP address tied you to the crime, and no real evidence tying you to the crime existed.
  - fsckboy 2mo ago
    >Theres no one technical in a court room. oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. Rather than ban the use of paper, how about technical people ban fonts (designed by clueless font designers) that blend multiple underscores together?
    - protocolture 2mo ago
      >oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. A technical person did make the mistake, likely a police cyber forensics type. But there's no one technical in the court room capable of reviewing their work and identifying the fault.
      - fsckboy 2mo ago
        technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs. it's certainly nobody else's fault.
        protocolture 2mo ago
        >technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs. And they aren't in the court room to assist with technical analysis. Why we need to keep revisiting this confuses me. >it's certainly nobody else's fault. Not sure I would agree, but even if I did how is this a relevant reply? What's important to the defense is identifying the point at which the technical evidence is faulty. Blame and penalty for the screw up is irrelevant to the goal of getting the innocent party out of prison.
- tossitawayplz 2mo ago
  This is absolutely insane, if the article is truly accurate they literally had NO evidence besides the user name (which was wrong.)
  - thephyber 2mo ago
    There was lots of evidence of a crime, just not evidence of the defendant doing it. This is most likely super common for criminal trials outside of highly professionalized police and prosecutors.
- xnx 2mo ago
  I hope this guy gets better lawyers when he sues everyone involved.
  - greenavocado 2mo ago
    It'll be thrown out by the JustUs system when a judge will declare the lawsuit has "no standing."
shen 2mo ago
The premise of Brazil (1985)
- dtagames 2mo ago
  Came here to say this! You beat me to it.
- etothet 2mo ago
  Thank you, Mr. Tuttle!
  - jeff_carr 2mo ago
    I'd rather have Brazil be accurate for the future than Idiocracy. Both suck, but Robert Di Nero as the hero HVAC guy is excellent.
whiterock 2mo ago
Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).
- thephyber 2mo ago
  Who is "they"? Police generally have to send faxes to companies for subpoenas, except for the few mega techs who have digital portals built specifically for police subpoenas. Source: I worked for a company who received subpoenas via fax.
  - mvdtnz 2mo ago
    He didn't say "they" anywhere in his message?
  - qingcharles 2mo ago
    You're right. AFAIK it's still mostly done via fax. All the subpoenas I see are fax copies.
arjie 2mo ago
[flagged]
- BugsJustFindMe 2mo ago
  "Haha" isn't appropriate here.
  - Dilettante_ 2mo ago
    True, this is more of a "honk honk"(like a clown nose) type situation.
    - BugsJustFindMe 2mo ago
      No.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
hunter2_ 2mo ago
At least nobody has figured out my password yet.
codazoda 2mo ago
> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?
- ericcumbee 2mo ago
  It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”
- bhk 2mo ago
  There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.
- pseudo0 2mo ago
  They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.
- angry_octet 2mo ago
  The police testified that they had collected evidence from Kik that his username send the messages. Only he had access to that Kik account, ergo it is him. If that evidence is accepted as factually correct you are cooked. Case closed. Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
  - account42 2mo ago
    Yes, the root cause is that computer systems are seen as reliable witnesses even when they involve fallible human beings, e.g. the person making the request in this case.
Aurornis 2mo ago
> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months. What in the world happened in this case? How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence? Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime. What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.
- crazygringo 2mo ago
  Yes, this is an atrocious article. It makes no sense as presented. The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. But even if the messages no longer existed, there was no actual evidence. Truly, what on earth did the defense argue? How on earth was the jury convinced he was guilty? Everything important about this story is missing from the article. Edit: from another article, it seems like the conviction was made by a trial judge, and didn't even involve a jury: https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... A single judge just decided that "his guilt was the only reasonable conclusion available". Scary. I like a lot of things about Canada, but I'm somewhat horrified at the idea that you can be sent to prison without a jury trial.
  - thephyber 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - nl 2mo ago
    > The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. I think the point is that the message history would show incriminating messages. He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.
Macha 2mo ago
What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the conviction after he served the time. Not nothing, but seems pretty inadequate.
- thephyber 2mo ago
  Legal processes take time. The news doesn't wait until the entire process plays out before they start reporting on the news. Apparently the appeal leading to the acquittal just happened last week.
- femto 2mo ago
  Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck. He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money
  - PxldLtd 2mo ago
    We used to charge innocent men for room and board in prison after being released here in the UK not long ago. They only changed this in 2023 after uproar in a recent case of an innocent man being freed.
    - tefkah 2mo ago
      That sounded so outlandish i needed to look it up, it's true... https://www.gov.uk/government/news/wrongly-convicted-no-longer-face-being-charged-for-saved-living-expenses https://www.gov.uk/government/news/wrongly-convicted-no-long... Although asterisk: those costs were being deducted from the final compensation. Still disgraceful that even happened.
binaryturtle 2mo ago
Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?
- mvdtnz 2mo ago
  Any number of things could have acquitted this man, including that. His lawyer, the judge, the prosecutors, the police and anyone else involved at any stage of this case need to be looked at very carefully and hard decisions should be made about whether it's appropriate for them to be licensed to perform whatever duties they were performing in the course of it.
  - a34729t 2mo ago
    They should all be required to serve the sentence themselves.
  - account42 2mo ago
    More importantly all the other cases they have been involved in need to be re-examined to find out what else they fucked up.
- kmoser 2mo ago
  The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.
- entropy47 2mo ago
  I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons. Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!
nkrisc 2mo ago
How on Earth was he convicted? They couldn’t find any evidence (because it didn’t exist) and yet he was still found guilty? Is there a similar presumption of innocence in Canadian legal doctrine?
- quantified 2mo ago
  There was evidence. Just not pointing to him.
- degamad 2mo ago
  > A: "Hey, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can we figure out where he lives?" > B: "Yep, the phone book says Johnathan BaskinRobbins lives at 123 Main Street, Shelbyville." > A: "Hey Shelbyville Police, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins at 123 Main Street did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can you please check it out?" > C: "Yep, we found that axe at the house of Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street." > D: "Here's the evidence from A that Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe. And here's the evidence from C that Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street had the same kind of axe. Please convict him." > E: "That's a whole lot of evidence. Johnathan BaskinRobbins is probably guilty." .... 18 months later .... > J: "Hey guys, my name is spelled Johnathan BaskinRobbins, not Jonathan BaskinsRobbins..." A, B, C, D, and E: "Oops, sorry..."
firasd 2mo ago
Connecting 'this account belongs to you' to 'this account did these activities' seems to rely on a chain of high-integrity (in the sense of both ethics and precision) investigative work that clearly doesn't happen because of the system's lazy recourse to subpoenaing internet companies (here with a typing error)
- thephyber 2mo ago
  You can assume "the system is lazy". In practice, "the system" is a lot of humans. The police in rural Canada aren't used to challenging the word of Wisconsin police. Police and prosecutors need to have an incredible discipline to hear "we have a suspect in your community who preyed on a pre-pubescent girl in our neighborhood" and remain neutral and dispassionate during the investigation. The stupid part is that the prosecution is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Then the defense attorney is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Presumably the jury got access to all of the facts of the case and simply ignored the lack of evidence tying the defendant to the offending Kik account. A chain of 3 errors shouldn't happen if everybody is diligent, but in practice "won't somebody think of the children?!?" Turns off cognitive skepticism and encourages moral panic.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - SZJX 2mo ago
    Exactly. The strong Western societal taboo and moral panic on this topic have led to a frenzied crusade that easily bypasses reason (e.g. Chat Control), unfortunately. This is just one of the tragic consequences.
    - account42 2mo ago
      Describing the crime here (which was committed, just not by the accused) as a "Western societal taboo and moral panic" is ... something.
reenorap 2mo ago
Holy fuck! How can someone without no evidence and completely innocent be convicted of an offense like this in Canada? What in the fuck is going on?? What happened to “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?” Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!
- thephyber 2mo ago
  I'm guessing there are LOTS of poor/rural parts of Canada (and the US) where convictions happen on less than convincing evidence. Also, the legal system is made up of humans who are ALL fallible and subject to cognitive biases. Canadian police received the case from Wisconsin police, so there was likely too much trust and not enough verification. Same with the prosecution bringing a weaker case with very high confidence.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence. Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.
- thephyber 2mo ago
  He was just acquitted last week. Let the process play out. "News" is called that because it is new and things are still happening.
  - FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
    wow. Well, actually, my dear fellow, "NEWS" is short for N.E.W.S., which is North, East, West, and South. Indubitably. How smart, very intelligent.
ttctciyf 2mo ago
We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh? 0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue (available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ahld/bestofcreativeco00ahld.pdf https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)
- pibaker 2mo ago
  I'd trust a computer to catch a missing underscore way more than humans.
xnx 2mo ago
Source article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-underscore-led-to-an-innocent-halifax-man-s-conviction-9.7283149 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
joeframbach 2mo ago
How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?
- sterlind 2mo ago
  there's no time machine, but at least the charges are removed from the poor man's record. he should probably try to seek damages from the state for his wrongful conviction (and get his lawyer disbarred for grossly incompetent counsel!)
  - nianderwallace 2mo ago
    from https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... : Klayme’s trial counsel was Peter Planetta, who no longer practises law. A quick search shows that his trial lawyer/counsel resigned from the bar several months after the defendant was sentenced in the first trial. see https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignation-of-peter-planetta/ https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignatio... [edit] Since his old lawyer wasn't practicing anymore, Klayme got a new lawyer who discovered the missing underscore.
- qingcharles 2mo ago
  He's lucky. In the USA a lot of appellate options are not available if you are no longer incarcerated. You are basically out of luck, the conviction is a lock-in.
yieldcrv 2mo ago
Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed? Got to separate the message from the messenger
- ktallett 2mo ago
  Huh? I am not sure Saudi Arabia can hold the moral high ground and this is definitely not the way to do it.
  - yieldcrv 2mo ago
    It was their turn on the UN seat and they were correct Was it an incorrect message if a different country’s delegate said it?
    - ktallett 2mo ago
      No, but they need to perhaps be more open on their human rights and 9/11 first as well. They can accuse another country who at least will admit they got it wrong. I don't see Saudi doing the same.
      - yieldcrv 2mo ago
        Like I wrote, separate the message from the messenger otherwise you would have no idea that Canada is railroading people because you’re waiting for the infallible messenger
        ktallett 2mo ago
        You can only seperate the message from the messenger when you don't try to hold the higher ground or compare. Saudi Arabia doesn't need to be mentioned in the original message. You can simply say, Canada has an issue with this. France has an issue with this. It is the same when you often see on forums, "It is better in Japan". It isn't a relevant comment and therefore invokes comparison.
rootusrootus 2mo ago
The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.
thephyber 2mo ago
If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part). I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence. Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-underscore-led-to-an-innocent-halifax-man-s-conviction-9.7283149 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...
a34729t 2mo ago
Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?
- qingcharles 2mo ago
  AFAIK, only one prosecutor in the history of the USA has been jailed for malicious prosecution or intentional fabrication of evidence. And in this case there was no intent (that we know) to convict an innocent person, just wild incompetence, so likely just a stern talking-to from the head prosecutor is all they get.
  - illliillll 2mo ago
    Obsessing about intent here is so gross. A careless psychopath firing a gun into a crowd doesn’t necessarily care if he hits anyone. Despite the lack of intent, most would consider that careless psychopath worse than an individual that commits premeditated homicide for a reason other than “fun”. Intent is irrelevant. The person firing a gun into a crowd knows the consequences of their actions just as well as a lazy judge or prosecutor does.
    - mothballed 2mo ago
      The job of the prosecutor is to convict, I don't think it matters whether the person is innocent or not. They have no moral responsibility, if it is most efficient to their career to damn an innocent person the system is designed for the purpose of doing so.
      - cindyllm 2mo ago
        [dead]
      - gus_massa 2mo ago
        > They have no moral responsibility They may have no legal responsibility, but they have a moral responsibility. Getting paid to make a bad things is not a excuse.
aussieguy1234 2mo ago
This guy should sue
leonvoss 2mo ago
This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, but they will just assume they wiped the evidence from their local storage. There is no other evidence to be had because the crimes in this category to not require any physical evidence whatsoever. Many of the laws in this category involve byte patterns with a sexual theme, but not all of them. Others include the laws against using the wrong REST API in the wrong way (unauthorized access) or speech restrictions including laws against empty, impossible, never acted on threats or improper ideas (popular outside the US).
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.
ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
I had never heard of "Kik" so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app) In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.
- leoqa 2mo ago
  It was a popular platform briefly for college students etc. I remember college kids posting drama on Kik etc
- account42 2mo ago
  How is E2EE relevant here. And permitting sign ups with only email or less used to be the standard everywhere. Also according the sentencing [0] the perp and victim initially met on Google+. [0] https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nspc4.html?resultId=23b3d99c2f784deeae3a19526c9a083c https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp...
jokoon 2mo ago
How could they manage to forget that underscore if that's their only evidence?
mlmonkey 2mo ago
How tf could he be convicted without any evidence??!?
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
Ozzie-D 2mo ago
[flagged]
ibudiallo 2mo ago
The missing underscore didn't send an innocent man to prison. In this story, an incompetent lawyer, an incompetent judge, and an unjust system walked into a bar... When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence. Throughout the article, it clearly says there was no evidence from all searches. What did they find? Not a pixelated picture, not an ip address, not even an AI auto classifying him as prime suspect. What did the detective on the case have to say? > Detective: "Yep, that's the user name" > Partner: "What about the email, does it match?" > Detective: "Email? what's that? Is that like a fax machine?"
- kmoser 2mo ago
  > When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence. IANAL but to be "found guilty" means you are determined to be, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Actual guilt is irrelevant. As for evidence, there's the "matching" username (which, we all now know, didn't really match).
frozenseven 2mo ago
"A crime so serious that not even innocence is an acceptable defense" type stuff right here. Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.
koolba 2mo ago
All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man. Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.
- denkmoon 2mo ago
  Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.
  - Noumenon72 2mo ago
    My LLMs frequently find subtle typos and never make subtle typos. I don't think that's equally likely at all.
    - denkmoon 2mo ago
      Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM. Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.
      - phendrenad2 2mo ago
        Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context? I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.
        Silamoth 2mo ago
        If a lot of people make the same claim, then from their perspective, you’re the one with a “wildly different” experience. What makes you so certain your experience generalizes to “most people’s experiences”?
ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045335
mvkel 2mo ago
Now imagine dumping the corpus of this case into an LLM and asking it to find discrepancies. I'll bet your bollocks to a barn dance that it'd point out the extra underscore. This is yet another example of human confirmation bias leading to terrible outcomes for other humans. Our judgment is not so virtuous. Now the question is whether being fallible is a feature. It seems like society is interested in keeping humans in the loop FOR the possibility of mistakes; makes it feel more authentic. Meanwhile, innocent people suffer.
- phendrenad2 2mo ago
  There's probably a lot of alpha in getting (legal) access to a bunch of court records and finding discrepancies, and then using that to convince municipalities into buying a subscription to your discrepancy-finding AI SaaS. Give it a cool YC name like "Convictly.ai"
  - mvkel 2mo ago
    I don't get it. We're snobs about facts being more accurate? In a system that is innocent before guilty, more accuracy favors the person.
RagnarD 2mo ago
They arrested Mr. Buttle rather than Tuttle.
luciana1u 2mo ago
[flagged]
sltr 2mo ago
can we go after the real perp now?
- qingcharles 2mo ago
  Only person asking this, but it's possible they ran out a statute of limitations by going down the wrong path. (SoL normally begins when the prosecution becomes aware that the crime has happened. In the USA SoL for most felonies is often 3 years.)
  - sltr 2mo ago
    that's the real tragedy here
OutOfHere 2mo ago
In other words, if you want to frame anyone with an underscore or dash in their username, just add a matching underscore or dash!
marethyu 2mo ago
> To identify this person, the cops contacted Kik, but their subpoena accidentally requested information about the Kik user “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response. > Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so the Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax Regional Police. Halifax police took the IP address they had been given to local Internet provider Bell Aliant. Bell connected the IP address to the physical address of their subscriber, Brandon Klayme. This is startling to me as it shows how easy to pinpoint exact location based on email alone.
- esafak 2mo ago
  Is it surprising? Every time you log in your IP is recorded, and the ISP can handle the rest.
  - stkdump 2mo ago
    One of the rare cases where a vpn actually does help. Though of course only if they don't also turn over records.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      I thought everyone knew that hiding your IP address from the government was a big reason to use trustworthy VPNs.
  - kalleboo 2mo ago
    And this is why IP addresses are often considered personally identifiable information under the GDPR, as impractical as that makes things like anti-spam/anti-bot.
    - account42 2mo ago
      GDPR requires a lawful basis for collecting and processing PII and one of possible lawful interest is "legitimate interests" that reasonable anti-spam/bot systems would fall under, i.e. ones that don't needlessly store the IP forever and don't use it for other purposes than security.
lefra 2mo ago
This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph
- srdjanr 2mo ago
  Only if non-ASCII characters are allowed in usernames, and generally I don't think they often are
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    I don't know what's most common these days, but quite to the contrary there's often a great deal of agitation for full i18n of name fields, such that people can specify their preferred name / spelling, in their native language. This is often pitched as a rights/respect issue. I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack> By contrast, Unicode has something on the order of 160,000 distinct characters. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode> This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker. <https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-person-know https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-...>
    - account42 2mo ago
      Yes and pretty much all languages already have widely used and well known ASCII embeddings aka romanization schemes because early computing did have many places where more wasn't possible or at least not for more than one language at the same time.
phoenixreader 2mo ago
Link with more complete info to this case: https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-chronicle-herald-metro/20260725/281608132217867 https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-chronicle-herald-metr...
Peacefulz 2mo ago
Hmm. No mention of a need for subpoena on the google end... Wonder why that is? Is that rubber stamp just public knowledge at this point? Google and Apple both are appendages of the State.
paul_h 2mo ago
Way back lots of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore couln't bring cases against all because the expert witnesses (US law enforcement website trap-setters) wouldn't go to the UK to testify. How come Canada was able to press ahead without the expert winesses being cross examinable?
illliillll 2mo ago
[flagged]
- srdjanr 2mo ago
  Sure, we should kill everyone who makes an honest, human mistake. Especially if it's so hard to catch that at least 3 people missed it (someone from the police, prosecutor, and defense lawyer).
  - illliillll 2mo ago
    That’s absurd. The standard in Canada is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a standard which does not leave much room for “honest, human mistakes” if you actually take it seriously. If the judge bothered to review the evidence, he’d presumably have been baffled by the fact that nothing has been recovered from the defendant connecting him to the crime. This judge chose to not do that and chose not to be baffled, that wasn’t an honest mistake.
    - tomhow 2mo ago
      Could you please stop posting ragey comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's not okay to assert that anyone “deserves a bullet in the head” here, for any reason. In the case in question, clearly the system, and multiple people within it, failed to notice the issue. On HN we expect people to be thoughtful and curious, and ”bullet in the head” is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
      - illliillll 2mo ago
        Tom, you live in a democratic country where the death penalty is codified in law as a legitimate punishment for certain crimes. What is it in the guidelines that should keep me from arguing in favour of expanding the scope of such penalties to also cover other, perhaps more harmful behaviour? > is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario. You are inherently calling US voters at large barbarians and medieval here. You may not share my views on how misconduct by judicial officials should be treated, but you can hardly condemn my opinion as illegitimate given the country you choose to live and pay taxes in. Taxes which fund executions carried out by your government.
laszlojamf 2mo ago
The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...
- echoangle 2mo ago
  I don’t get the hypothetical, the perpetrator and the guy arrested were both using Kik and the account names were confused. There was no other service in this case.
pelasaco 2mo ago
18 months in a male prison as pedophile but innocent.. no money can fix it. If he had died in the prison - common for such perpetrators - nobody would never review his process and note "ops, we missed an underscore"
notorandit 2mo ago
This is not the first time I see people copy-typing text by hand instead of copy-pasting it. I am not sure why they do that, but when I see a DevOps engineer doing it I have a chilling feel.
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  Depends on the context. If running code samples from a remote (untrusted) site, re-typing may spare you some grief. I've addressed the homoglyph issue in my immediate prior comment. Other transcription errors are also of course possible with identifiers.
- account42 2mo ago
  How is it weird? It's often much faster to re-type a short identifier than to select, copy and paste it.
  - canthonytucci 2mo ago
    They’re talking about likelihood of a typo, not speed.
    - account42 2mo ago
      Well I guess hyper-focusing only on some motivations that affect the situation can make you confused about why others do certain things.
rpaddock 2mo ago
"A well placed underscore can make the difference between a S_EXCHANGE and a SEX_CHANGE." - Intel 8048 manual ~1977. The Intel manuals of today lack such humor.
- m463 2mo ago
  more on-target would be an extra underscore in findtherapistonline
- account42 2mo ago
  If only the founders of expertsexchange.com had read that.
fortran77 2mo ago
People and judges will trip over each other to show how repulsed they are over child sexual abuse. Nobody will stuck his neck out for the accused.
superkuh 2mo ago
These Wisconsin cops, the judge, and everyone involved in this should face serious consequences. Their actions need to have consequences.
angrypie 2mo ago
So someone at Kik can fabricate a report, and another person is going to be sentenced for life with no evidence?
- account42 2mo ago
  Yes, it's scary that what a company says in these kinds of cases gets treated as 100% reliable when at the end its still just fallible humans.
gqgs 2mo ago
[flagged]
heaney-555 2mo ago
This is insane. People often pontificate about how AI hallucinations could cause huge issues, but I guarantee you GPT 5.6 Sol or Claude 5 Fable would have spotted this mistake if asked. Human stupidity is a bigger threat than AI hallucination.
EmilioMartinez 2mo ago
This is now my quintessential example for the use of clear cut monospace fonts in information systems

408 points by quantified 2mo ago

This is completely dystopian. Did he have the worst legal defense possible, or are Canadian laws such that an IP address is sufficient for any claimed charges to just stick?

protocolture 2mo ago
I am betting the judge accepted all the messages as evidence, and that was enough to convict. Theres no one technical in a court room.
- thephyber 2mo ago
  The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts. The lawyers aren't supposed to be technical, but they should know their limitations and hire technical experts. But that also assumes the defendant can afford the defense, which is insanely expensive.
  - sterlind 2mo ago
    does Canada not have public defenders? I know they're overworked but, c'mon, surely they can do better than they did? I want to see the transcripts.
    - thephyber 2mo ago
      If you find them, let us know. In the US public defenders don't have time to try cases. They are basically plea bargain assistants.
      - sterlind 2mo ago
        what happens if the defendant pleads not guilty? does the public defender not bother to show up to trial? do they not represent the defendant? what is this charade? I found the verdict here: https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nspc4.html?resultId=23b3d99c2f784deeae3a19526c9a083c https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp... but no transcript is given. it has to be requested, it seems.
        thephyber 2mo ago
        Public defenders are required to build the best case they can, but the nature of a defense requires hiring experts to contradict the prosecution evidence. Without hiring experts, the public defender is just pounding the table or arguing the technicals of law.
        gremlinunderway 2mo ago
        thats not the verdict. Thats the sentencing decision, which just goes into a separate Judge's sentencing hearing and decisions on that.
        qingcharles 2mo ago
        Public defenders will try your case if you demand trial; in fact, a lot of public defenders probably try more cases than paid attorneys. The problem is that public defenders generally are starter defense attorneys, they're in the job to get experience so they can eventually quit and take a cushy private role. And secondly, they have very little time to allocate to each case; if the defendant is stuck in jail, then they have even less time to visit the defendant and prepare any kind of useful defense or trial strategy. A public defender's primary strategy for their client is to, sadly, negotiate the best possible plea deal in the shortest amount of time to get the case off the docket. (This might actually be in the best interests of the defendant; most defendants are guilty of something in the charging document, even if not everything they've been likely over-charged with; the justice system isn't quite so broken that it scoops up a huge number of factually innocent persons)
        account42 2mo ago
    - nianderwallace 2mo ago
      the defendant hired a private lawyer, Peter Planetta, who resigned from the Nova Scotia Barrister's Society a few months after the defendant was sentenced. sources: https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... and https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignation-of-peter-planetta/ https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignatio...
  - protocolture 2mo ago
    >The messages ARE evidence for a case. They are the proof that a crime happened. The problem is that they don't tie the defendant to the acts. Yep, So they have a cop stand up in court. "We read X messages" (Here they are look how exceptionally heinous they are) "We then asked the service for the IP." "We then asked the ISP to deanonymise it. " "Heres the guy we found at that IP" He signs a stat dec that using his brilliant super techno crime brain he has correctly attributed the messages to this human. It sounds like the defense from there was: But your honor, there's no history of these messages etc etc. Judge is not technically capable of reviewing the evidence. Defense probably not technically capable of reviewing the evidence either. Prosecution probably not capable either. They are all just playing out parts really. After probably having dealt with hundreds of these, on the balance of probability like most courts do they just backed in the statement by the cop. The end unless you can find some way to challenge the technical evidence. Which he did after some time.
  - OutOfHere 2mo ago
    No, they aren't. If your account gets stolen, you'll be found guilty, but in reality you didn't do the crime. No IP address tied you to the crime, and no real evidence tying you to the crime existed.
- fsckboy 2mo ago
  >Theres no one technical in a court room. oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. Rather than ban the use of paper, how about technical people ban fonts (designed by clueless font designers) that blend multiple underscores together?
  - protocolture 2mo ago
    >oh c'mon, if a technical person receives a piece of paper with a printed out user__name on it with the wrong number of underscores they'd just as likely make the same mistake. A technical person did make the mistake, likely a police cyber forensics type. But there's no one technical in the court room capable of reviewing their work and identifying the fault.
    - fsckboy 2mo ago
      technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs. it's certainly nobody else's fault.
      - protocolture 2mo ago
        >technical people developed the systems that print out confusing glyphs. And they aren't in the court room to assist with technical analysis. Why we need to keep revisiting this confuses me. >it's certainly nobody else's fault. Not sure I would agree, but even if I did how is this a relevant reply? What's important to the defense is identifying the point at which the technical evidence is faulty. Blame and penalty for the screw up is irrelevant to the goal of getting the innocent party out of prison.
tossitawayplz 2mo ago
This is absolutely insane, if the article is truly accurate they literally had NO evidence besides the user name (which was wrong.)
- thephyber 2mo ago
  There was lots of evidence of a crime, just not evidence of the defendant doing it. This is most likely super common for criminal trials outside of highly professionalized police and prosecutors.
xnx 2mo ago
I hope this guy gets better lawyers when he sues everyone involved.
- greenavocado 2mo ago
  It'll be thrown out by the JustUs system when a judge will declare the lawsuit has "no standing."

shen 2mo ago

The premise of Brazil (1985)

dtagames 2mo ago
Came here to say this! You beat me to it.
etothet 2mo ago
Thank you, Mr. Tuttle!
- jeff_carr 2mo ago
  I'd rather have Brazil be accurate for the future than Idiocracy. Both suck, but Robert Di Nero as the hero HVAC guy is excellent.

whiterock 2mo ago

Perhaps there should be input fields that are paste-only, no typing allowed (or only with extra modal warnings).

thephyber 2mo ago
Who is "they"? Police generally have to send faxes to companies for subpoenas, except for the few mega techs who have digital portals built specifically for police subpoenas. Source: I worked for a company who received subpoenas via fax.
- mvdtnz 2mo ago
  He didn't say "they" anywhere in his message?
- qingcharles 2mo ago
  You're right. AFAIK it's still mostly done via fax. All the subpoenas I see are fax copies.

arjie 2mo ago

[flagged]

BugsJustFindMe 2mo ago
"Haha" isn't appropriate here.
- Dilettante_ 2mo ago
  True, this is more of a "honk honk"(like a clown nose) type situation.
  - BugsJustFindMe 2mo ago
    No.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

hunter2_ 2mo ago

At least nobody has figured out my password yet.

codazoda 2mo ago

> The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. There’s a lot missing in this sentence. What evidence ended up convicting him?

ericcumbee 2mo ago
It’s not inconceivable that it was on those chat logs alone. In the us the jury instructions read something to the effect of “this is what beyond a reasonable doubt means. It is up to you to determine if the prosecution has met that burden and you choose to apply as much or little weight to any piece of evidence or testimony as you see fit”
bhk 2mo ago
There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.
pseudo0 2mo ago
They had the victim's device and logs from the messaging service. The issue was that the logs were attributed to the wrong user.
angry_octet 2mo ago
The police testified that they had collected evidence from Kik that his username send the messages. Only he had access to that Kik account, ergo it is him. If that evidence is accepted as factually correct you are cooked. Case closed. Courts are inherently bad at understanding that technology has bugs. Injustice is the norm.
- account42 2mo ago
  Yes, the root cause is that computer systems are seen as reliable witnesses even when they involve fallible human beings, e.g. the person making the request in this case.

Aurornis 2mo ago

> Nothing linked Klayme to the girl. No intimate images were found. Klayme did have a Kik account, but cops couldn’t even show that he had accessed the service during the period in question. > Still, Klayme was arrested and hit with three charges: > Luring a person under 14 years of age by means of telecommunication > Providing sexually explicit material to a child > Possession of child pornography > The case went to trial, where Klayme was found guilty. He then went to prison for 18 months. What in the world happened in this case? How can someone be convicted of these charges without any evidence? Unless the article left something out, the only possible evidence they had was the wrong username. They couldn't even find evidence that this person used Kik at the time of the crime. What defense did his lawyer even try? I'm so confused.

crazygringo 2mo ago
Yes, this is an atrocious article. It makes no sense as presented. The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. But even if the messages no longer existed, there was no actual evidence. Truly, what on earth did the defense argue? How on earth was the jury convinced he was guilty? Everything important about this story is missing from the article. Edit: from another article, it seems like the conviction was made by a trial judge, and didn't even involve a jury: https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... A single judge just decided that "his guilt was the only reasonable conclusion available". Scary. I like a lot of things about Canada, but I'm somewhat horrified at the idea that you can be sent to prison without a jury trial.
- thephyber 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- nl 2mo ago
  > The first thing the records should have shown was the full messaging history which would not have contained any of the incriminating messages. I think the point is that the message history would show incriminating messages. He'd have been saying "this isn't me", but somehow no one noticed it was the wrong username.

Macha 2mo ago

What the article doesn’t mention, since this was an incorrect conviction that led to a served 18 month sentence, loss of income from the loss of whatever job he had, and likely life long reputational damage (as this kind of conviction now needs to be explained and some people will adopt a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” attitude…) was there any compensation for this man? It sounds like all he got was voiding the conviction after he served the time. Not nothing, but seems pretty inadequate.

thephyber 2mo ago
Legal processes take time. The news doesn't wait until the entire process plays out before they start reporting on the news. Apparently the appeal leading to the acquittal just happened last week.
femto 2mo ago
Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck. He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money
- PxldLtd 2mo ago
  We used to charge innocent men for room and board in prison after being released here in the UK not long ago. They only changed this in 2023 after uproar in a recent case of an innocent man being freed.
  - tefkah 2mo ago
    That sounded so outlandish i needed to look it up, it's true... https://www.gov.uk/government/news/wrongly-convicted-no-longer-face-being-charged-for-saved-living-expenses https://www.gov.uk/government/news/wrongly-convicted-no-long... Although asterisk: those costs were being deducted from the final compensation. Still disgraceful that even happened.

binaryturtle 2mo ago

Stupid question: wouldn't a simple comparison with the body(parts) from the inappropriate pictures sent to the girl have helped the innocent guy? I mean those thingies all look different, no, like some sort of "fingerprint"?

mvdtnz 2mo ago
Any number of things could have acquitted this man, including that. His lawyer, the judge, the prosecutors, the police and anyone else involved at any stage of this case need to be looked at very carefully and hard decisions should be made about whether it's appropriate for them to be licensed to perform whatever duties they were performing in the course of it.
- a34729t 2mo ago
  They should all be required to serve the sentence themselves.
- account42 2mo ago
  More importantly all the other cases they have been involved in need to be re-examined to find out what else they fucked up.
kmoser 2mo ago
The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.
entropy47 2mo ago
I don't think it would matter - the crime is sending images, not necessarily sending images of you. Entirely plausible a perp might use a random image they found online rather than a genuine personal photo for a multitude of reasons. Terrible luck and a terrible legal defence. The stuff of nightmares!

nkrisc 2mo ago

How on Earth was he convicted? They couldn’t find any evidence (because it didn’t exist) and yet he was still found guilty? Is there a similar presumption of innocence in Canadian legal doctrine?

quantified 2mo ago
There was evidence. Just not pointing to him.
degamad 2mo ago
> A: "Hey, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can we figure out where he lives?" > B: "Yep, the phone book says Johnathan BaskinRobbins lives at 123 Main Street, Shelbyville." > A: "Hey Shelbyville Police, we have a bunch of evidence that someone called Jonathan BaskinsRobbins at 123 Main Street did a bunch of crimes with an axe - can you please check it out?" > C: "Yep, we found that axe at the house of Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street." > D: "Here's the evidence from A that Jonathan BaskinsRobbins did a bunch of crimes with an axe. And here's the evidence from C that Johnathan BaskinRobbins at 123 Main Street had the same kind of axe. Please convict him." > E: "That's a whole lot of evidence. Johnathan BaskinRobbins is probably guilty." .... 18 months later .... > J: "Hey guys, my name is spelled Johnathan BaskinRobbins, not Jonathan BaskinsRobbins..." A, B, C, D, and E: "Oops, sorry..."

firasd 2mo ago

Connecting 'this account belongs to you' to 'this account did these activities' seems to rely on a chain of high-integrity (in the sense of both ethics and precision) investigative work that clearly doesn't happen because of the system's lazy recourse to subpoenaing internet companies (here with a typing error)

thephyber 2mo ago
You can assume "the system is lazy". In practice, "the system" is a lot of humans. The police in rural Canada aren't used to challenging the word of Wisconsin police. Police and prosecutors need to have an incredible discipline to hear "we have a suspect in your community who preyed on a pre-pubescent girl in our neighborhood" and remain neutral and dispassionate during the investigation. The stupid part is that the prosecution is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Then the defense attorney is supposed to be competent and ethical (but one of those failed). Presumably the jury got access to all of the facts of the case and simply ignored the lack of evidence tying the defendant to the offending Kik account. A chain of 3 errors shouldn't happen if everybody is diligent, but in practice "won't somebody think of the children?!?" Turns off cognitive skepticism and encourages moral panic.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- SZJX 2mo ago
  Exactly. The strong Western societal taboo and moral panic on this topic have led to a frenzied crusade that easily bypasses reason (e.g. Chat Control), unfortunately. This is just one of the tragic consequences.
  - account42 2mo ago
    Describing the crime here (which was committed, just not by the accused) as a "Western societal taboo and moral panic" is ... something.

reenorap 2mo ago

Holy fuck! How can someone without no evidence and completely innocent be convicted of an offense like this in Canada? What in the fuck is going on?? What happened to “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?” Everyone needs to be investigated for this, this is absolutely unbelievable and sickening!

thephyber 2mo ago
I'm guessing there are LOTS of poor/rural parts of Canada (and the US) where convictions happen on less than convincing evidence. Also, the legal system is made up of humans who are ALL fallible and subject to cognitive biases. Canadian police received the case from Wisconsin police, so there was likely too much trust and not enough verification. Same with the prosecution bringing a weaker case with very high confidence.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

FrustratedMonky 2mo ago

The article didn't mention any follow up. He actually served his full sentence. Did he sue after? Was there any accountability?.

thephyber 2mo ago
He was just acquitted last week. Let the process play out. "News" is called that because it is new and things are still happening.
- FrustratedMonky 2mo ago
  wow. Well, actually, my dear fellow, "NEWS" is short for N.E.W.S., which is North, East, West, and South. Indubitably. How smart, very intelligent.

ttctciyf 2mo ago

We're really getting into Computers Don't Argue[0] territory here, eh? 0: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue (available in Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2 at https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ahld/bestofcreativeco00ahld.pdf https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/bestofcreativeco00ah... , p.133)

pibaker 2mo ago
I'd trust a computer to catch a missing underscore way more than humans.

xnx 2mo ago

Source article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-underscore-led-to-an-innocent-halifax-man-s-conviction-9.7283149 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...

joeframbach 2mo ago

How does one vacate a sentence that was already served?

sterlind 2mo ago
there's no time machine, but at least the charges are removed from the poor man's record. he should probably try to seek damages from the state for his wrongful conviction (and get his lawyer disbarred for grossly incompetent counsel!)
- nianderwallace 2mo ago
  from https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-quashes-dartmouth-mans-convictions-in-internet-luring-case-enters-acquittals https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/halifax/appeal-court-qu... : Klayme’s trial counsel was Peter Planetta, who no longer practises law. A quick search shows that his trial lawyer/counsel resigned from the bar several months after the defendant was sentenced in the first trial. see https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignation-of-peter-planetta/ https://nsbs.org/general-notices/council-approves-resignatio... [edit] Since his old lawyer wasn't practicing anymore, Klayme got a new lawyer who discovered the missing underscore.
qingcharles 2mo ago
He's lucky. In the USA a lot of appellate options are not available if you are no longer incarcerated. You are basically out of luck, the conviction is a lock-in.

yieldcrv 2mo ago

Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed? Got to separate the message from the messenger

ktallett 2mo ago
Huh? I am not sure Saudi Arabia can hold the moral high ground and this is definitely not the way to do it.
- yieldcrv 2mo ago
  It was their turn on the UN seat and they were correct Was it an incorrect message if a different country’s delegate said it?
  - ktallett 2mo ago
    No, but they need to perhaps be more open on their human rights and 9/11 first as well. They can accuse another country who at least will admit they got it wrong. I don't see Saudi doing the same.
    - yieldcrv 2mo ago
      Like I wrote, separate the message from the messenger otherwise you would have no idea that Canada is railroading people because you’re waiting for the infallible messenger
      - ktallett 2mo ago
        You can only seperate the message from the messenger when you don't try to hold the higher ground or compare. Saudi Arabia doesn't need to be mentioned in the original message. You can simply say, Canada has an issue with this. France has an issue with this. It is the same when you often see on forums, "It is better in Japan". It isn't a relevant comment and therefore invokes comparison.

rootusrootus 2mo ago

The underscore is the least interesting part of this. That is a garden variety fuckup. Everything that came after that is the scandal.

thephyber 2mo ago

If you read it carefully, the victim was in the US and the defendant was in Canada (I suspect a rural part). I think everyone is rightly questioning why the defendant's lawyers failed to tear apart the prosecution's case. This generally requires that the defendant have money, the defendant hire a competent criminal defense attorney, and the attorney hires a team of experts to rigorously challenge all of the evidence. Here is some additional Canadian news coverage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-underscore-led-to-an-innocent-halifax-man-s-conviction-9.7283149 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/how-a-single-unde...

a34729t 2mo ago

Ultimately the prosecutor should then go to jail for say 10x the time. Maybe that would make prosecutors less zealous?

qingcharles 2mo ago
AFAIK, only one prosecutor in the history of the USA has been jailed for malicious prosecution or intentional fabrication of evidence. And in this case there was no intent (that we know) to convict an innocent person, just wild incompetence, so likely just a stern talking-to from the head prosecutor is all they get.
- illliillll 2mo ago
  Obsessing about intent here is so gross. A careless psychopath firing a gun into a crowd doesn’t necessarily care if he hits anyone. Despite the lack of intent, most would consider that careless psychopath worse than an individual that commits premeditated homicide for a reason other than “fun”. Intent is irrelevant. The person firing a gun into a crowd knows the consequences of their actions just as well as a lazy judge or prosecutor does.
  - mothballed 2mo ago
    The job of the prosecutor is to convict, I don't think it matters whether the person is innocent or not. They have no moral responsibility, if it is most efficient to their career to damn an innocent person the system is designed for the purpose of doing so.
    - cindyllm 2mo ago
      [dead]
    - gus_massa 2mo ago
      > They have no moral responsibility They may have no legal responsibility, but they have a moral responsibility. Getting paid to make a bad things is not a excuse.

aussieguy1234 2mo ago

This guy should sue

leonvoss 2mo ago

This is always going to happen with these types of laws, because they can be broken with very little effort from anywhere. That directly causes it to be easy to frame people for breaking them, by accident or on purpose. If the crime is purely the transmission of the incorrect byte pattern, the evidence is always logs, server and local. Eventually a bug will lead them to people who did not transmit the wrong bytes, but they will just assume they wiped the evidence from their local storage. There is no other evidence to be had because the crimes in this category to not require any physical evidence whatsoever. Many of the laws in this category involve byte patterns with a sexual theme, but not all of them. Others include the laws against using the wrong REST API in the wrong way (unauthorized access) or speech restrictions including laws against empty, impossible, never acted on threats or improper ideas (popular outside the US).

inigyou 2mo ago
Theres a site called AbuseIPDB where you can report that someone is portscanning you. Some server hosts watch this database and will suspend any server that's accused by it.

ButlerianJihad 2mo ago

I had never heard of "Kik" so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_(app) In 2016, CBS News called it "a predator's paradise", and Wikipedia notes that it lacks E2EE while permitting sign-ups without providing any valid contact information.

leoqa 2mo ago
It was a popular platform briefly for college students etc. I remember college kids posting drama on Kik etc
account42 2mo ago
How is E2EE relevant here. And permitting sign ups with only email or less used to be the standard everywhere. Also according the sentencing [0] the perp and victim initially met on Google+. [0] https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nspc4.html?resultId=23b3d99c2f784deeae3a19526c9a083c https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp...

jokoon 2mo ago

How could they manage to forget that underscore if that's their only evidence?

mlmonkey 2mo ago

How tf could he be convicted without any evidence??!?

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

Ozzie-D 2mo ago

[flagged]

ibudiallo 2mo ago

The missing underscore didn't send an innocent man to prison. In this story, an incompetent lawyer, an incompetent judge, and an unjust system walked into a bar... When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence. Throughout the article, it clearly says there was no evidence from all searches. What did they find? Not a pixelated picture, not an ip address, not even an AI auto classifying him as prime suspect. What did the detective on the case have to say? > Detective: "Yep, that's the user name" > Partner: "What about the email, does it match?" > Detective: "Email? what's that? Is that like a fax machine?"

kmoser 2mo ago
> When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence. IANAL but to be "found guilty" means you are determined to be, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Actual guilt is irrelevant. As for evidence, there's the "matching" username (which, we all now know, didn't really match).

frozenseven 2mo ago

"A crime so serious that not even innocence is an acceptable defense" type stuff right here. Honestly, this should be a gigantic scandal. The moment where you'd reevaluate how your entire justice system operates.

koolba 2mo ago

All of this boils down to an extra underscore in his username. It’s the type of thing I’d hope our LLM-powered future solves for the common man. Catching typos like that would be load bearing for someone armed only with a public defender.

denkmoon 2mo ago
Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.
- Noumenon72 2mo ago
  My LLMs frequently find subtle typos and never make subtle typos. I don't think that's equally likely at all.
  - denkmoon 2mo ago
    Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM. Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.
    - phendrenad2 2mo ago
      Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context? I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.
      - Silamoth 2mo ago
        If a lot of people make the same claim, then from their perspective, you’re the one with a “wildly different” experience. What makes you so certain your experience generalizes to “most people’s experiences”?

ChrisArchitect 2mo ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045335

mvkel 2mo ago

Now imagine dumping the corpus of this case into an LLM and asking it to find discrepancies. I'll bet your bollocks to a barn dance that it'd point out the extra underscore. This is yet another example of human confirmation bias leading to terrible outcomes for other humans. Our judgment is not so virtuous. Now the question is whether being fallible is a feature. It seems like society is interested in keeping humans in the loop FOR the possibility of mistakes; makes it feel more authentic. Meanwhile, innocent people suffer.

phendrenad2 2mo ago
There's probably a lot of alpha in getting (legal) access to a bunch of court records and finding discrepancies, and then using that to convince municipalities into buying a subscription to your discrepancy-finding AI SaaS. Give it a cool YC name like "Convictly.ai"
- mvkel 2mo ago
  I don't get it. We're snobs about facts being more accurate? In a system that is innocent before guilty, more accuracy favors the person.

RagnarD 2mo ago

They arrested Mr. Buttle rather than Tuttle.

luciana1u 2mo ago

[flagged]

sltr 2mo ago

can we go after the real perp now?

qingcharles 2mo ago
Only person asking this, but it's possible they ran out a statute of limitations by going down the wrong path. (SoL normally begins when the prosecution becomes aware that the crime has happened. In the USA SoL for most felonies is often 3 years.)
- sltr 2mo ago
  that's the real tragedy here

OutOfHere 2mo ago

In other words, if you want to frame anyone with an underscore or dash in their username, just add a matching underscore or dash!

marethyu 2mo ago

> To identify this person, the cops contacted Kik, but their subpoena accidentally requested information about the Kik user “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response. > Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so the Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax Regional Police. Halifax police took the IP address they had been given to local Internet provider Bell Aliant. Bell connected the IP address to the physical address of their subscriber, Brandon Klayme. This is startling to me as it shows how easy to pinpoint exact location based on email alone.

esafak 2mo ago
Is it surprising? Every time you log in your IP is recorded, and the ISP can handle the rest.
- stkdump 2mo ago
  One of the rare cases where a vpn actually does help. Though of course only if they don't also turn over records.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I thought everyone knew that hiding your IP address from the government was a big reason to use trustworthy VPNs.
- kalleboo 2mo ago
  And this is why IP addresses are often considered personally identifiable information under the GDPR, as impractical as that makes things like anti-spam/anti-bot.
  - account42 2mo ago
    GDPR requires a lawful basis for collecting and processing PII and one of possible lawful interest is "legitimate interests" that reasonable anti-spam/bot systems would fall under, i.e. ones that don't needlessly store the IP forever and don't use it for other purposes than security.

lefra 2mo ago

This is a mistake that shouldn't happen. It means that someone commiting crimes could trivially hide and get the wrong person accused by using homoglyphs [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

srdjanr 2mo ago
Only if non-ASCII characters are allowed in usernames, and generally I don't think they often are
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  I don't know what's most common these days, but quite to the contrary there's often a great deal of agitation for full i18n of name fields, such that people can specify their preferred name / spelling, in their native language. This is often pitched as a rights/respect issue. I feel otherwise: usernames and other identifiers (URLs particularly, and a number of other widely used identifiers), should be drawn from well-known, common, and small charactersets. The original 7-bit ASCII characterset (128 distinct characters), or some subset of that (e.g., Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals) may not be the native representation of all cultures, but it is all but certainly a familiar representation, and avoids numerous homoglyphic attacks. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack> By contrast, Unicode has something on the order of 160,000 distinct characters. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode> This greatly exceeds the typical vocabulary (distinct known words) of most native-language speakers, estimated at between 20k -- 35k words for a typical adult English speaker. <https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-person-know https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-does-the-average-...>
  - account42 2mo ago
    Yes and pretty much all languages already have widely used and well known ASCII embeddings aka romanization schemes because early computing did have many places where more wasn't possible or at least not for more than one language at the same time.

phoenixreader 2mo ago

Link with more complete info to this case: https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-chronicle-herald-metro/20260725/281608132217867 https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-chronicle-herald-metr...

Peacefulz 2mo ago

Hmm. No mention of a need for subpoena on the google end... Wonder why that is? Is that rubber stamp just public knowledge at this point? Google and Apple both are appendages of the State.

paul_h 2mo ago

Way back lots of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore couln't bring cases against all because the expert witnesses (US law enforcement website trap-setters) wouldn't go to the UK to testify. How come Canada was able to press ahead without the expert winesses being cross examinable?

illliillll 2mo ago

[flagged]

srdjanr 2mo ago
Sure, we should kill everyone who makes an honest, human mistake. Especially if it's so hard to catch that at least 3 people missed it (someone from the police, prosecutor, and defense lawyer).
- illliillll 2mo ago
  That’s absurd. The standard in Canada is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a standard which does not leave much room for “honest, human mistakes” if you actually take it seriously. If the judge bothered to review the evidence, he’d presumably have been baffled by the fact that nothing has been recovered from the defendant connecting him to the crime. This judge chose to not do that and chose not to be baffled, that wasn’t an honest mistake.
  - tomhow 2mo ago
    Could you please stop posting ragey comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's not okay to assert that anyone “deserves a bullet in the head” here, for any reason. In the case in question, clearly the system, and multiple people within it, failed to notice the issue. On HN we expect people to be thoughtful and curious, and ”bullet in the head” is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - illliillll 2mo ago
      Tom, you live in a democratic country where the death penalty is codified in law as a legitimate punishment for certain crimes. What is it in the guidelines that should keep me from arguing in favour of expanding the scope of such penalties to also cover other, perhaps more harmful behaviour? > is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario. You are inherently calling US voters at large barbarians and medieval here. You may not share my views on how misconduct by judicial officials should be treated, but you can hardly condemn my opinion as illegitimate given the country you choose to live and pay taxes in. Taxes which fund executions carried out by your government.

laszlojamf 2mo ago

The scary thing is that it's unclear to me what would have happened if the guy hadn't had a Kik account, and the real perp had used just one underscore. Can you just pick somebody's username from another service to frame them for grooming? Couldn't you do this to anyone in that case, if that's all that it takes? I sure hope this article is leaving something out, otherwise this is some kangaroo court shit...

echoangle 2mo ago
I don’t get the hypothetical, the perpetrator and the guy arrested were both using Kik and the account names were confused. There was no other service in this case.

pelasaco 2mo ago

18 months in a male prison as pedophile but innocent.. no money can fix it. If he had died in the prison - common for such perpetrators - nobody would never review his process and note "ops, we missed an underscore"

notorandit 2mo ago

This is not the first time I see people copy-typing text by hand instead of copy-pasting it. I am not sure why they do that, but when I see a DevOps engineer doing it I have a chilling feel.

dredmorbius 2mo ago
Depends on the context. If running code samples from a remote (untrusted) site, re-typing may spare you some grief. I've addressed the homoglyph issue in my immediate prior comment. Other transcription errors are also of course possible with identifiers.
account42 2mo ago
How is it weird? It's often much faster to re-type a short identifier than to select, copy and paste it.
- canthonytucci 2mo ago
  They’re talking about likelihood of a typo, not speed.
  - account42 2mo ago
    Well I guess hyper-focusing only on some motivations that affect the situation can make you confused about why others do certain things.

rpaddock 2mo ago

"A well placed underscore can make the difference between a S_EXCHANGE and a SEX_CHANGE." - Intel 8048 manual ~1977. The Intel manuals of today lack such humor.

m463 2mo ago
more on-target would be an extra underscore in findtherapistonline
account42 2mo ago
If only the founders of expertsexchange.com had read that.

fortran77 2mo ago

People and judges will trip over each other to show how repulsed they are over child sexual abuse. Nobody will stuck his neck out for the accused.

superkuh 2mo ago

These Wisconsin cops, the judge, and everyone involved in this should face serious consequences. Their actions need to have consequences.

angrypie 2mo ago

So someone at Kik can fabricate a report, and another person is going to be sentenced for life with no evidence?

account42 2mo ago
Yes, it's scary that what a company says in these kinds of cases gets treated as 100% reliable when at the end its still just fallible humans.

gqgs 2mo ago

[flagged]

heaney-555 2mo ago

This is insane. People often pontificate about how AI hallucinations could cause huge issues, but I guarantee you GPT 5.6 Sol or Claude 5 Fable would have spotted this mistake if asked. Human stupidity is a bigger threat than AI hallucination.

EmilioMartinez 2mo ago

This is now my quintessential example for the use of clear cut monospace fonts in information systems