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AN IT EXPERT who began to trawl the Darknet for child pornography websites has avoided a jail term after he downloaded over 300 images.
Richard Coghlan (37) had recently lost his job and was sleeping all day and accessing these websites at night. He later told gardaí he went “into a hollow”.
Detective Garda Kieran Murphy told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that the Garda Computer Crime Investigation Unit had such a backlog of cases in 2010 that he didn’t receive any results until November 2015.
Murphy told Dara Hayes BL, prosecuting, that in August 2010 Interpol provided gardaí with an IP address that officers suspected had downloaded child pornography.
The address was traced back to Coghlan and when gardaí arrived at his Dublin home to search it a month later, he immediately handed over two laptops.
It took five years for the two machines to be forensically analysed but in the meantime Coghlan came voluntarily to the station and admitted that images of child pornography would be found.
Coghlan of Glenbrea Court, Shankill, Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of 325 images on his computers on September 21, 2010. He has no previous convictions.
Murphy said of the 325 images found, 52 fell into the lowest category of seriousness, 175 were in the second lowest category and 98 fell into the second highest category.
There were also a number of movie files that fell into those categories.
Murphy said Coghlan had also visited a number of known child pornographic websites after doing a search on the Darknet for “girls of a young age, 5 yo to 12 yo – penetration”.
Suspended sentence
Judge Martin Nolan sentenced Coghlan to two and half years in prison which he suspended in full on strict conditions.
He said he had based his sentencing on previous child pornographic case law which concluded that in incidences of a low number of images and when an accused had no previous convictions, a suspended sentence should be handed down.
Judge Nolan said that just over 300 images was not a high number in comparison to cases that had previously come before him when people have been caught with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of images.
“It’s an odious crime to have committed and he should be ashamed of himself. I’ve no doubt that people who know him, think less of him now,” the judge commented before he added that Coghlan was an intelligent man and a man of ability.
He also accepted that in the seven years since Coghlan was caught he had not re-offended.
Detective Garda Murphy agreed with James McCullough BL, defending, that his client “never sought to take advantage of the delay” in analysing his computers and made admissions before the results came back.
He accepted that Coghlan “doesn’t seem to be a person at risk of future offending”.
McCullough said that Coghlan had come to realise himself “in a real way that this is not a victimless crime and that young children are hurt”.
“He carries the shame of these activities,” counsel continued before he submitted that Coghlan would benefit from psychotherapy.
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I don’t get from the article what the benefits of being a data hosting hub country are? Other than perhaps prestige and increased regulatory role.
Benefits of pharma and software tech multinationals are proven, with large numbers of high paying jobs.
Data centers aren’t big scale employers, additionally they are energy hungry industries that will not help our push to meet energy reduction targets.
The associated data science careers referred to in the article, arent typically located at the data centres, we could strive to excell in these disciplins without the data centres.
As a country we need to be discerning about the type of industry that we court. If it is to be huge banks of servers, we need to insist on zero emission environmentaly friendly facilities.
To be a global data hub we need data centers! Was it 2yrs later Apple finally gave up on planning for a 1billion investment in a data center in Galway a few years ago ? In the mean time a similar project started In Denmark was complete and operational. They are now proposing to build another in Denmark where they propose to provide unwanted heat to the local community.
Is this just a backup plan ?
The real challenge is hiring academics only, the US have a growing pool of criminals to cut deals with, good hackers either go to jail or work for the state. We don’t have criminals at that level here. Couple of good professionals in Cork but I am unsure where we can get the talent to really enforce the team behind these new task forces. We need people who can reverse engineer malware, are constantly updated on backdoors in circulation, along with 0day flaws and dissect packets, that’s before we even look at the problems with hardware from certain regions.
@Padraig Carey: *”enforce the team” = “harden the team”
It’s almost embarrassing to think the best in Irish tech management and government believe the data management companies like Amazon etc are here for anything other than cold weather cheap power and tax breaks
Perfect place for Data Hubs. Not to extreme weather patterns so cosy of electricity is not so high with cooling units and not really a chance of a earthquake or some other natural disaster.
Downside not great for climate change targets and don’t really employ many.
have your say