A Kitchener-based computer security expert was sentenced Wednesday to 60 days in prison for accessing child pornography.
Paul Sop was charged in 2012 as part of Project Spade, a bust of an alleged international child pornography ring centred around a Toronto-based website known as Azovfilms.
Sop, who Bloomberg News once called “a pioneer of the internet, had admitted in court to purchasing eight videos and a collection of pictures from the site.
“He did not realize that purchasing those videos was a crime in Canada, but that doesn’t afford him a legal defence, so he entered a guilty plea,” defence lawyer Boris Bytensky told CTV News.
In August, Justice James Sloan threw out some of the evidence in Sop’s case, saying Waterloo Regional Police had violated the Kitchener man’s rights by seizing and searching computers beyond those they believed to contain material purchased from Azov.
“The systematic approach to search every file when they had very specific information about what they were looking for … I find to be unwarranted and somewhat egregious,” he wrote.
“I exercise the court’s discretion and exclude the evidence of child pornography, other than that downloaded from the Azov website.”
Sop will serve his sentence – which was jointly recommended by his lawyer and the Crown – on weekends only.
In total, Project Spade resulted in the arrests of 108 Canadians and 240 more people worldwide.
