Joanna Eberts

For the second time in two years, an RIT student has been charged in federal court with possession of child pornography.

Christian L. Barroso once pursued a computer engineering degree and expected to graduate in 2011, but on May 13 federal prosecutors accused him of possessing, receiving and distributing child porn. If convicted, he could face between five and 30 years in jail. Bob Finnerty, chief communications officer at RIT, stated that Barroso is “currently not at RIT.”

Stephen M. Reber, a graphic design graduate student, pleaded guilty to possessing child porn last year.

The cases are part of an explosion of child porn suspects, who are increasingly introduced to child porn by the internet and then introduced to police the same way. RIT is no stranger to this trend; according to Mark Allen Miles, director of Clinical Services, the Student Health Center has treated students unnerved by their own favorable reaction to child porn.

Frostwire Download Triggered Perkins Raid

Barroso, who entered RIT in 2006, was a prolific Facebook user. He “liked” 306 pages about a range of topics: Filipino identity and food; the Muppets and George Lopez; the RIT Society of Women Engineers and breast cancer awareness; N64 and Starcraft.

Barroso tried to involve himself in his RIT housing community on Facebook by joining pages for students living in the RIT Inn, Perkins Green apartments and James E. Gleason Hall, but sometimes met only frustration.

“Yes! Maybe this place can get a little more social with the doors open,” he wrote, responding to a question about the use of door stops on the RIT Inn page in September 2008. Six days later, he asked, “So are we going to do anything?” No reply was apparent.

Requests for more information about Barroso met with few results: RIT cited the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law protecting student information; a woman who answered his listed phone number said he was “not available;” his lawyer and one of his former co-workers did not return messages seeking comment.

What is known is largely from court documents.

Those documents allege that a New York State police investigator used peer-to-peer software to download a video containing child pornography from an RIT-owned IP address. The address was allegedly assigned to Barroso at the time.

Police raided Barroso’s Perkins Green apartment with a warrant and seized a computer found there.

The documents allege Barroso then confessed to investigators that he downloaded child porn files using Frostwire peer-to-peer software and stored hundreds of images and videos in a “Sharing” folder.

Investigators found approximately 350 videos and 938 images of child porn on his hard drive. A media report said he was 21 years old at the time.

On July 1, Barroso was arrested at his Hewlett, N.Y. home in Nassau County, Long Island and was subsequently released on bail. The terms of release prohibit him from using a computer, except for work, and from going near children, except when the child’s parent is present.

He has since appeared in a Rochester federal court, but his trial date has yet to be scheduled.

The Case of Stephen Reber

The case closely parallels the case of Reber, another student charged with possessing child porn.

Reber was identified by his IP address and e-mail as a customer of a child porn website.

Court documents allege that Reber voluntarily allowed investigators to take his computer, and confessed to possessing approximately 100 child porn files on his computer. He allegedly told investigators that he had been trying to document child porn sellers so he could notify police. Investigators questioned that story, partly because he hadn’t contacted any police officials.

Reber, who was 38 years old at the time, pleaded guilty to possessing child porn in October 2009 as part of a plea bargain he made to spare his family large fines, according to a media report. He was sentenced to a little over five years in jail, was ordered to pay $500, and was required to register as a sex offender. He is now a prisoner in a Massachusetts federal medical center with an estimated release date of 2014.

A Growing Problem

The number of suspects prosecuted in federal child porn cases shot up from just 76 in 1994 to 1,390 in 2006, said a Justice Department report. Cases have continued to rise at a rapid clip since then.

The increase is due in part to the ease with which child porn can be obtained on the Internet, experts say. Police have also adapted to the Internet with increasing success.

Miles, the Clinical Services director, said viewing child porn is a legal problem and, to many, a moral issue, but that it isn’t necessarily a psychiatric problem. Still, it does result in an increased risk of child abuse.

“The risks seem to be high enough that, as a society, we’ve said, ‘Let’s legislate against it,’” Miles said.

Reporter will continue to follow the Barroso case as it progresses through the court system.