United States v. Charles Borowy

I. Background

On May 3, 2007, Special Agent Byron Mitchell logged onto LimeWire, a publically available peer-to-peer file- sharing computer program, to monitor trafficking in child por- nography. Agent Mitchell conducted a keyword search in LimeWire using the term “Lolitaguy,” a term known to be associated with child pornography. From the list of results UNITED STATES v. BOROWY 2521 returned by this search, Agent Mitchell identified known images of child pornography using a software program that verifies the “hash marks” of files and displays a red flag next to known images of child pornography. At least one of these files was shared through what was later determined to be Borowy’s IP address. Using the “browse host” feature of LimeWire, Agent Mitchell viewed a list of the names of all of the approximately 240 files being shared from Borowy’s IP address, several of which were explicitly suggestive of child pornography and two of which were red-flagged. Agent Mitchell downloaded and viewed seven files from Borowy’s IP address, four of which were child pornography. Prior to downloading the files, Agent Mitchell did not have access to the files’ contents.…