The problem with hearsay evidence is that the police have
to follow up and get documented evidence to corroborate
before applying for a warrant. It's a step they cannot skip
because executing a search solely on the word of a third
party is a crime in itself.

If they tried to get a warrant without it, they'd be laughed
out of the building.

Tips are good, but you cannot consider them an order to go
through doors and seize evidence. If that was so, anybody
could get police to storm any home with a single phone call.

... with a lawyer message containing a screenshot and an eye-wittness.

Using only a screenshot just got rejected by a court in germany, because the eye-wittness had disappeared. Before that, using just screenshots was common practice.

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Hi guys and gals, I want to use the D-ban program to nuke part of my hard drive. I have a few questions. My situation is this. In the past I have 'possibly' illegally d/l copious amounts of music, movies, porn ect... from lime-wire and other programs. Since then I have deleted it from the shared folders and pasted onto the other partition on my hard-drive for library keeping and then deleted the shared folders. My thinking is this. They can't prove I didn't acquire those files by legal means and since they are all just mp3s and avi's or whatever they should be safe if they are just there or am i wrong?

First: I have all this data on one partition that is just music and movies ect... I don't want to reinstall these if possible cause its like 90 gigs so using this program can I choose to nuke just the partition that windows and programs are on (i.e. limewire and my shared folders ect... and history)? And if so how complete a nuke would this be? Would the other partition which is just media files and never had a program or anything else on it still be vulnerable to incriminating forensic analysis? I guess what I'm saying is does a partition effectively make two separate entities, in which I can clean one and be at ease? Because if alot of what I d/l was maybe pirated media and erasing all the d/l info programs and history ect... from the one partition would erase evidence no?

Also, If I backed up my partition with windows and programs on a blank hard-drive, nuked the partition, and then restored it with the copy on the back-up hard-drive would that just replace the information and stuff I was trying to remove. If so is there a way to selectively back up and nuke so that I don't have to reinstall 50 things in my program file and even windows itself, but still rest at ease knowing that the computers history is fresh at least in the eyes of any potential law in-queries?

Exactly! There absolutely has to be some sort of verified and
solid evidence in hand before the police can proceed.

A phone call or email is never enough by itself, so the police
have to investigate and get some probable cause that a
crime has been committed before getting a warrant for
search or arrest. Someone who has accidentally
downloaded and then deleted a file is never going to find
themselves in such a position because no such evidence
exists. Any search or arrest (which would have to be based
solely on hearsay or suspicion) against such a person would
automatically be thrown out of court as soon as it is
discovered that the mandatory hurdle of probable cause had
been ignored.

Even if a person had been caught with millions of files, that
evidence would be permanently inadmissible if the police
had obtained it illegally. In the case where an innocent
person is illegally tagged with a single file, it would be the
policemen and prosecutors facing criminal charges, not the
other way around.

What you are describing there is a case involving a person
who shares such files, against whom a screenshot
showing the files being shared can be obtained. If
you are imagining a case in which an innocent person could
be logged downloading such a file, don't forget that
the only person capable of providing a screenshot or
testimony is the very same person who is actually
sharing the file and breaking the law. The police
cannot ever commit a crime to catch a criminal, so that
scenario is completely ruled out too.

The bottom line is that anyone who accidentally downloads
and then deletes an illegal file of any kind is completely
safe from prosecution. The only way they could get
themselves in trouble is to let themselves be tricked into
confessing to more than they actually did. Even then, any
competent lawyer could expose the trickery and nullify that
improbable and hypothetical threat.

So, there's not much point in destroying all your data and
reformatting your whole disk when just deleting the file and
defragging or wiping free space is going to work well
enough. In fact, taking such an extreme measure will tend
to indicate to anybody that more was going on and would
tend to raise suspicion.

Just having them is not illegal anyway, no matter how you got them.

Downloading is not going to get you in trouble anyway.
What you have to control or prevent is the uploading of files
from you. If you're not doing that, you have nothing to
worry about because not even the record companies would
sue you if you're not uploading a lot of music.


Most backup software doesn't bother to save the contents of
empty sectors or even the slack space in clusters at the end
of each file so yes, that would be safe. Still, it would be far
faster to use a secure wipe program to just clean up all the
empty and slack space without the long backup and restore.

Some backup software can be made to save a complete
image of a disk, empty sectors and all, so you wouldn't
want to use that feature if you wanted to be rid of old
deleted data.

Thank you mr. Walkhouse for your fast and informative response I got a letter from my university informing me that Universal or some studio was able to d/l the movie halfbaked of my pc which i didn't know I was even sharing so they took my internet away (on roomates pc) and i've been a nervous wreck ever since. I will do as you suggested and hopefully this will all blow over.

@sageecl: Please excuse me for not giving you that much feeling of security.

You were possibly sharing it, so they have evidence against you. Be careful in what you do, and get someone skilled in law _now_, so you know how to respeond if someone should suddenly come in.

@Aaron Walkhouse:

Correct information:

Backup software won't copy deleted files, as long as you remembered to empty the trash...


Mistakes:

Just downloading doesn't get you into trouble

In germany downloading is illegal and will get you into trouble.

The law was changed a few years ago, so yout info might just be outdated.

They can't catch you if you don't share

And they can just join the download mesh of your file, so they don't even need to share it. Your client tells them "I have parts a...z of the file". Same is true for BitTorrent and edonkey.

Please research the inner workings of Gnutella before giving this wrong advice again.
A good starting point is Gnutella for Users - Gnufu

The topic is "the download mesh".

The police acts only on solid evidence

Again german law (that's what I know best): If they need to secure evidence, they will get a warrant from a judge. Yes, it will take some time, but a few weeks definitely suffice - and some judges are faster in that than others.

Tell a judge "we have information, that this person shares files illegally, but we need to get his computer to secure hard evidence" and the judge will give you a warrant (more exactly: He'll give the warrant to the police - there goes your computer).

And that search is then authorized by a judge and all "secured" evidence can be used against you in court.

How else should anonymous tips ever be efficient?


Please be more careful what you tell unsuspecting users, especially since you won't be the one running into problems from your info, but others might pay for your carelessness.

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Perhaps Germany has always been an anomaly with the
law. Different mindset, I guess, where people and their
rights count for nothing before the almighty State.

Everywhere else, what I said is quite accurate. The rest of
don't live in a surveillance society where tips are enough to
get things like that to happen, not even if a cop claims to
believe the tipster. In the real world, a police officer has to
swear that he can corroborate his suspicions with probable
cause before any judge will grant a warrant to arrest or
search. That, by definition, means he has seen a crime in
progress or gathered evidence, not that he believed the
word of someone else. If Germany suffers from having a
much lower standard, that's too bad for you, but I suggest
you ask an experienced officer about it before you continue
to paint such a backward picture of law enforcement in your
country. Remember, even in Germany or any other EU
nation, the police and courts know the difference between
reasonable suspicion and probable cause. It's time you
learned it too.

It still doesn't matter if downloading is illegal or not in
Germany. Accessing or possessing such files is illegal
virtually everywhere but those who accidentally downloaded
and deleted such files are still in no greater danger because
of it, since there is still no possibility of prosecution if
they do not share the file and simply delete it, proving their
innocence by action, and having never actually created any
evidence against themselves.

The download mesh is not enough to call probable cause.
That's still just another uncorroborated tip or lead which
they would have to follow up on to get a shared file list.
Since an accidental downloader is not actively sharing the
file, any browse host will not have the suspect file in it and
more importantly will not show the usual suspect pattern of
many more such files, therefore that lead will always be
discarded in favour of real suspects with real collections of
such files.

In addition, even if they had an IP address to look at, any
broad search for such files will never include them as a
source, even if the police managed to connect to them as a
peer. In fact, the lack of response to the files they were
looking for would be proof of innocence as far as an
investigator is concerned, and he or she will move on to the
many suspects for which they actually do have large
quantities of evidence.

Please be more careful what you tell unsuspecting users,
especially since you won't be the one running into problems
from your info, but others might pay for your carelessness.
You are so intent on scaring people unnecessarily over a
theoretical danger which you hold dear but in fact has never
actually occurred, or if it has was so rare and so quickly
dismissed that it may as well have never happened at all.
What you are saying is, in effect, that people's lives can be
totally ruined by random chance simply because they used
Phex, LimeWire or any other P2P to download anything at
all. Do you really want to scare people away from P2P so
much?

As for the rest of you ( and sageecl ), you should always
be in control of what you share.

Some P2P applications share the downloads folder by
default, but you can easily change that. It has been a
longstanding problem that some junk files and worms
spread easily simply because so many people are sharing
their downloads without first checking what they actually
have.

Also, don't forget to check the advanced settings for sharing
of partial files, which enables your software to share bits
and pieces of your downloads even before they are
complete files on your own disk. Most software comes with
this enabled by default too.

If you take care of these two details there's no way you can
ever be sued or charged for sharing anything you didn't
intend to share.

It is good to see that there is at least one other person around here who is trying to tell people about these two fundamental errors commited by most developers. The two default settings mentioned are one of the biggest problems affecting all users and the Gnutella Network.

Allowing the sharing of downloads and partial files, by default, is a disaster for all of us and should be considered as the definition of irresponsible file-sharing.