Yellowknife man convicted of possessing child sexual abuse material

An NWT Supreme Court justice has found a man in Yellowknife guilty of possessing child sexual abuse material after police found thousands of photos on his devices.

Russ Jones, then 53, was arrested in 2020 and charged with two offences related to what RCMP termed child pornography.

Jones ultimately went to trial facing one count of possessing child pornography. In Supreme Court on Thursday, Justice Shannon Smallwood convicted him.

Many of the facts in the case were not in dispute.

According to evidence presented at trial, the NWT RCMP’s Internet Child Exploitation Unit was notified by Microsoft in March 2019 that someone had uploaded eight images of suspected child sexual abuse to Bing in February that year.

Investigators obtained subscriber information for the user’s IP address from Northwestel and discovered it was connected to Jones. They obtained a warrant to search his home in June 2019, seizing devices that included a hard drive and computer tower.

Analysis of the devices uncovered more than 5,000 images of child sexual abuse.

Testifying in his own defence, Jones admitted he owned the devices and knew they contained child sexual abuse. He said he had accidentally come across nude photographs of children when searching on Bing in 2016 or 2017 for a beach photo. He said he “freaked out” and saved the photos to his computer as he believed that was the only way to prove he had not searched for child sexual abuse.

Jones testified that on multiple other occasions, photos of child sexual abuse would come up when he searched on Bing for unrelated innocent photos or adult pornography. In some cases, he said, the search engine suggested search terms that would “produce massive amounts of child pornography.”

Jones said he continued to save the photos to his devices to save the date and time stamps and to “prove Microsoft is running a child pornography site.”

Jones said he never directly searched for child sexual abuse online. However, data retrieved from his devices uncovered many search terms that investigators said were related to child sexual abuse.

Jones denied making many of those searches or knowing the meaning of the terms. He said they could have been search terms Bing suggested to him.

A computer forensics expert testified that he could not differentiate between search terms Jones may have typed out and suggested terms that he clicked on.

Justice Smallwood said she had concerns about Jones’s evidence, adding that some of it did not make sense.

She noted that Jones had not taken steps to permanently delete all of the images of child sexual abuse on his electronic devices.

While Smallwood said she could accept that Jones may have initially come across images of child sexual abuse accidentally, she said that did not explain why he continued to use Bing to search for photos and click on the search terms it suggested.

She said Jones had saved the photos to multiple different folders on his computer and there was evidence he had accessed at least three of the images after they were downloaded.

“This was not accidental or innocent possession,” she concluded.

Lawyers are set to meet with the court on January 29 to discuss a date for sentencing.

Correction: December 15, 2023 – 10:02 MT. This report initially stated an analysis of Jones’s devices uncovered more than 10,000 images of child sexual abuse. The figure given in court was actually a little over 5,000.