November 22, 2010 The Ottawa Sun
Defence: Child porn was for ‘scientific purposes’
by Megan Gillis
Ottawa Sun
A prosecutor compared a New Hampshire engineer to the Wizard of Oz Friday, arguing he’s hiding behind a curtain of “technobabble” that the child pornography he brought into Canada was research for a computer program to find and block it.
But John Bird’s lawyer said mocking his goal of ridding the Internet of child pornography is like discounting the effort to put a man on Mars just because it hasn’t happened yet. A judge will make the final call Jan. 25.
The Crown alleges that Bird had child pornography – 213 images and 24 stories – on a USB device when he arrived at the Ottawa Airport in Oct. 2008.
He was charged with possessing and importing child pornography – the latter carrying a minimum one-year sentence.
Lawyer Bob Carew argued Bird didn’t know he had the device in his briefcase, didn’t know there was child pornography on it and only had any illegal material for scientific purposes – a defence set out in law. Two-thirds of the images are computer-generated, legal in the U.S., Carew said.
Bird, an engineer who holds multiple patents, testified he was motivated by the sex assault of a young relative to begin work on software that would be installed on Internet servers and treated the judge to demonstration.
“All he’s done is create this simplistic web site to dupe us all,” prosecutor John Ramsay argued, contending Bird has come up with nothing existing blockers don’t already do and only did it after he got caught.