VETERAN TRIAL ATTORNEY Mark Eiglarsh said his client Adil Mohammed, who was charged with ten counts of possessing child pornography images on his cell phone, did not wilfully possess the images, but they "automatically downloaded" onto his phone’s "camera roll.”
Eiglarsh made the statement days after reports were made that Mohammed was slapped with the charges.
Eiglarsh told Newsday that he was retained immediately upon Mohammed’s arrest on August 6 and handled his bond hearing, in which he was released on a US$25,000 bond.
Eiglarsh said, “The charge is possession of child pornography and the title of the statute is that he possessed the pornography where in the images involved some type of sexual performance by a child which makes the photographs very disturbing and alarming.”
In a release sent to the media on Sunday, Eiglarsh said the images automatically downloaded onto Mohammed’s phone after he visited “various lawful adult websites on Whatsapp” but in a phone conversation with Eiglarsh, he clarified, saying that it was a Whatsapp group.
“I think it is more accurate to say that he visited a Whatsapp group,” Eiglarsh said. “In my own personal experience when I visit certain things on Whatsapp – let’s say you’re in a group that is totally involving adult participants – and someone posts a photo, unless you go into your settings and change it for that group you will then automatically have every image that someone posts on that group immediately appears on your camera roll.”
Eiglarsh said Mohammed immediately disabled the feature after he learned that there were child pornography images on his cellphone.
“But it was too late,” he said. “There were still some images on one of his phones that he barely uses.”
[caption id="attachment_975788" align="alignnone" width="200"] Defence attorney Mark Eiglarsh - google[/caption]
Newsday spoke to technology columnist Mark Lyndersay, who said the iPhone camera roll can send photos to a user’s phone to Apple’s iCloud servers. He explained that any images uploaded to a user’s iCloud account are then available on all Apple devices signed in to that account.
He added that images and text viewed in a browser are downloaded to a special cache folder hidden in the operating system and that other apps do not normally have access. For an image to become part of a camera roll, it would have to be downloaded by the user from the browser as a file for future consideration.
With regard to Whatsapp, Lyndersay said, "The software has limited capacity to interpret a website. Links on WhatsApp are normally directed to a browser on the user's device.
"Images sent to a device owner from another WhatsApp user or as part of communications in a group chat are visible to image browsers and may, automatically, be added to the camera roll after they are viewed on the device.
According to Miami police reports, on August 6 officers of the Miami Dade Customs and Border Patrol contacted the police department airport district sergeant to inform him of an incident involving a pas
