Category: Personal

Before we discuss what POS Becker did in April of 2015, we need to discuss how incompetent/corrupt the people who work in the Justice System are…

On September 18, 2015 a pre-trial harassment moron appears at my house (alone) with someone on the phone before I leave for work. He steals my Wii, PS2 and PS3 at the direction of the person on the phone. (My attempts to obtain documentation of what occurred that day have been ignored. FOIA doesn’t apply to pre-trial services). Also note that those systems had been in their locations in my house since my May of 2013 release on pre-trial.

They found nothing on the Wii or PS2, but found this picture as the background of my PS3:

That is a picture of my favorite member of Girls Generation (aka SNSD). Her name is Yoona and she was 23 years old when that picture was taken. Here is how the incompetent/corrupt moron(s) described that picture: The background on the PS3 was of an Asian female who was of the approximate age of 16 or 17, and is not a standard background photo that would come with a gaming device. That sentence tells you the kind of dishonest/corrupt people that work in the Justice System.

So POS Becker, who knows he’s in big trouble if I get a non-corrupt expert, flies to Buffalo to get a “backup” indictment against me using the same type of perjury that they used to write that sentence about the picture on my PS3. It’s important to remember that an indictment is just an accusation. Thus, if it was difficult to discover that the picture was of Yoona, it might be reasonable to describe her as a teenaged asian female. Problem is, it wasn’t (in 2015) difficult to discern that the picture was of Yoona, a 23 year old K-Pop superstar!

Therefore, it would be perjury to assert that she was a teenager because the affiant should have known that she wasn’t a teenager. This is of upmost importance because the crime(s) they accused me of have a scienter requirement. That means, the prosecutor MUST be able to prove that a charged picture is of someone 17 or younger AND they most prove that the viewer knew it. Thus, BOTH of Becker’s indictments were obtained fraudulently; because, he had no way to prove the scienter requirement: “Under Department of Justice (DOJ) policy, federal prosecutors must have admissible evidence showing that a suspect committed every element of an offense—including the required mental state, or scienter (such as acting knowingly or willfully)—before seeking an indictment”.

So now you know why I assert that both of the indictments were obtained fraudulently. The NE indictment was obtained with fabricated evidence (TB2’s fake log) and the WDNY Indictment was obtained with perjury about the images that must be carved to be viewed. Therefore, the only reason for Becker to get the WDNY indictment was for the improper purpose of intimidating me into dropping the Daubert challenge. (Remember at that time – April 2015 – no-one had examined TB2’s server. So it’s fake log(s) had not been discovered yet.)

Next post will discuss the shenanigans that occurred when the shills examined the right server on June 5, 2015.

In January of 2015 I do not trust Gross anymore, but I don’t have any solid reason(s) yet. I have a letter from Rebecca Mercuri telling me to be careful, but I didn’t have any solid proof of his sabotage until January 20, 2015.

Everything about this letter (PDF below) is wrong from an ABA perspective on its own, but it becomes egregious when you examine the previous post that exposes his ridiculously unconstitutional communications with POS Becker.

For this post I’d like to discuss the knowingly false answers they gave to me in this email. As I think you’ll agree, each answer was specifically tailored to gaslight me:

1) I specifically asked them: “Could the half of the NIT they tested be injected into an iframe at an exit node causing the browser to secretly load the two pages in question?”

They falsely answered: “It’s possible but that would be a very targeted attack. If the connection was over SSL/TLS than it would not be possible so it also depends on the connection to the site.”

The actual answer was, YES! (See page 4 figure 3 of the second pdf here) What makes this lie so egregious is the fact that you can see from the NIT report (table on About Me page) that both the connections were HTTP not HTTPS.

2) I specifically asked them: “Why is their a 39 second time gap between the first ECID on page 2 of the NIT report and Page 3 of the NIT Report and why is there a 63 second gap for the second ECID? What were the times to execute during their testing?”

They falsely answered: “Unable to answer this”

The actual answer was given (BY THEM) on page 8 of the second pdf referenced above, in sections 2.6 & 2.7. In layman’s terms, the time gaps were impossible without shenanigans (aka IP spoofing) in play. The time-gaps are far too long for any other explanation. In other words, I was clearly “framed” for visiting TB2. FYI, in their own reports the execution times are measured in milliseconds!

3 & 4) I specifically asked them “Does the Team know the NIT report is being used to support a Visit progression to the TB2 site? And that the Visit progression is “enter site, click on first url, then click on second url.” If this was true, wouldn’t the NIT Report referer for CID #1 be the sites index page and the girls.html page for ECID #2? … Therefore, Why are the request_ur and the referer the same for each ECID?”

They falsely answered: “I think those are from the logs of the site, not the NIT. NIT just sends back the session id.”

The actual answer, as I’ve documented on this blog was that the “logs of the site” (TB2) were FAKE!

5) In January of 2015, I do not understand why my NIT report shows the current page as the previous page, which indicated reloads. (What actually causes them to be the same was that Edman’s code – figures 3 & 4 of the shill’s academic report – falsifies the data in the “request_uri” column.) Thus, I asked them specifically: “Could the reloads have occurred in hidden frames and the user of the browser never even saw the two pages?”

They answered with this banal nonsense: “Lots of things could have occurred, but we would doubt it was a hidden Frame. Servers don’t save logs of the content of the files they send, only the files that are requested so it would be hard to determine. If we know the pages he purportedly visited we could inspect the source on the web servers and look for anything out of the ordinary.”

The actual answer, as proven by their own report, was that the request_uri was a forgery! That forgery causes the referring page to be the same as the current page because the browser is reporting the page that the iframe was located on. Thus Edman’s code was scraping the actual referring page, which could have been anywhere on the internet. As the shills explain in section 2.7 of their 2016 report.

6) Finally, I asked them about the blank fields (knowing for an absolute FACT Flash Player could not fill them): “How could gallery.swf fill out the blank fields on Page 3? Specifically, Updated TBB (Tor Browser Bundle)?”

They again answered with government shill nonsense: “I think these were in the apache logs, not the gallery.swf. We are not sure what he is asking. Since we don’t know which version of TBB he used, or anything about the client, we can say that it necessarily came from him, only that the flash app is able of producing output as the FBI reported. If we had an unencrypted view of his system would could tell more about this.”

Thus, after I read this email, I determined that my experts were clearly government shills hired to gaslight me and to give my counsel cover for thinking that the government’s case was legitimate when they knew (or should have known) that it was totally fraudulent.

Next post I’ll discuss how POS Becker responded to the removal of Gross.

After the Court allowed me to go back to work in May of 2013, nothing happened in my specific case until September 4, 2014. (May 2013 until October 2014 was spent arguing about the government’s Rule 41(f) violation for all defendants, the court ruled against “us” in October.)

While waiting for the Court’s ruling, my attorney (and a few others) were pressing Becker for details about the NIT. On September 4, 2014 Becker presented the nonsense indicated at the bottom of page 2 of the PDF. Basically Becker began his disinformation campaign to convince defense counsel (and the Court) that the NIT was just a flash application, which in my case was complete and obvious bullshit!

So, I immediately told Gross that Becker was lying. That prompted Gross to send Becker the first email in the PDF below. Note Gross is loyally advocating for me and demanding the NIT’s source code in October. Sadly his loyalty wouldn’t last…

After that first awesome email, Becker was able to convince Gross that I was guilty of “something” by introducing a red herring (discussed in my April 9, 2013 post). As I explain on my About Me page – I knew that my NIT report was a fraud, I just didn’t know why in October of 2014.

I didn’t know the specifics at the end of 2014, but I knew something had changed with Gross as he stopped communicating with me in November and December of 2014. I didn’t know exactly why until I got these FOIA emails in 2025. As you can read on the last page of the PDF, Gross is all in on Becker’s alternative narrative (one totally negated by the information presented in my April, 9, 2013 post). The betrayals in this email are egregious and extensive, but none more so than telling Becker: “Basically I found numerous [images] in the thumbnail format located in the thumbnailcache … Further it seems to me that because Cottom’s hard drives are encrypted it is entirely possible that the “original” image was downloaded and stored encrypted as evidenced by the thumbnails.” Becker knew that Gross did not understand ANY of the digital evidence BUT since this thumbnail red herring was turning attention away from the NIT fraud, Becker played along.

As Gerry Spence (an attorney who never lost a criminal case) said “The operational word in every competent defense is attack. If you’re explaining and defending, you’re losing.” Gross was doing more than explaining and losing, he was selling me out wholesale. What Gross basically said in that email was that he agreed with Becker, I was guilty so let’s work together to railroad him into a conviction.

In the next installment, we’ll explore how my railroading began in January of 2015. BTW, if you think any of this was okay, just ask Google AI (IMO, it’s actually the best now): “Hypothetically, is it okay for a defense lawyer to go behind his client’s back and admit to the prosecutor that he agrees that his client is guilty?” You’ll learn that there was absolutely nothing OK about that December 4, 2014 email.

The attached FD-302 is a sanitized version of the events that transpired on April 9, 2013. It should be read as a cautionary tale about thinking law enforcement are the “good guys”. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t. In other words, every encounter is 50/50 (See the movie Crash.)

Shortly after I get home from work, there is a knock on my door as I’m fixing myself dinner on an idle Tuesday as the advice song warns: “The real troubles in your life … Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind … The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday”.

I go to the window that overlooks my front door and see two average looking white guys, I say “whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it” and one of the guys flashes an FBI badge and I go to open the door. That was a mistake, I should have immediately asked them – from the window – “Do you have a warrant?” This would have forced the bastards to reveal the warrant immediately; because I wouldn’t have opened the door without an affirmation.

Instead, I opened the door and let them inside, for what is legally called a “knock and talk”. They immediately began by asking me if I was a terrorist then quickly pivoted to asking if I was a member of the criminal images community. Again, I made the mistake of trying to defend myself and trying to be cooperative. In hindsight I should have 1) Not let them inside until they produced the warrant and 2) Said “I invoke my 5th Amendment right to remain silent”. As that would have put them in a bind, because their search warrant was based on fraudulent information.

In the PDF, you’ll see that the lead agent memorialized these events in the first four paragraphs of his FD-302. He based those paragraphs totally on the chicken scratch of first two pages of the PDF and his imagination. As you can see, the FD-302 is mostly a sanitized re-arrangement of what actually occurred, but thanks to no-one recording the “interview” (even though POS Becker ordered them to – See Nebraska Case No. 8:13CR106 Doc# 247 “Although Agent Koontz recorded the interview, due to an oversight she did not record the advisement of Miranda rights … Agent Koontz explained the oversight occurred because FBI policy did not permit her to record interviews; however, she recorded the interview with the defendant at the Department of Justice’s request”), it’s just my word against their’s; but I have receipts.

The key sanitization occurs in paragraph 5 where the agent (SA Couch) states “Cottom was then told that the FBI had a search warrant for his residence”. That is not what happened. In sum, the two Agents performed what is known as a “knock and talk” when they should have performed a “knock and announce”. But Courts often think this is just fine, so YOU need to be vigilant to protect your rights.

What actually occurred during those first 5 paragraphs was that the two Agents (who didn’t have clue of what computer they were looking for) got me to discuss Tor and what computer I used to access it. (At the time these idiots thought that using Tor was a key admission – Courts later rejected that belief.) That made them focus on my Linux computer for the triage, that was turned off in my office/bedroom. The lead agent then asked if I’d consent to a digital exam of that computer and I said “No, you’ll need a warrant for that.” Note how the lead agent left that FACT out of his 302. Odd no? Well, things just got odder from there.

Notice paragraph 6 states that “…a hard drive from Cottom’s desktop computer was looked at from behind a write blocker using X-Ways…” and that they located “multiple images…under the home/adama directory”. The lead agent then reports in paragraph 7 that “Cottom denied knowing how [images] had gotten onto his computer”. That’s not what happened, When SA Couch confronted me in the kitchen (were I was made to stay] about the images, I actually said “Bullshit, all the home directories are encrypted!” Couch being technically ignorant offers to show me. BIG Mistake!

SA Couch reports that after he showed me the images I just said “whatever” and walked away. Again, this is an egregious sanitization. First, I told the tech (SA Romus) – after looking at his laptop screen – “those are thumbnails genius and you wrote over an encrypted home directory to plant them, be sure to save the X-Ways log.” That caused the tech to immediately get angry and he shut down the triage. I told the lead agent “he planted the thumbnails in a decoy account”. SA Couch then responded with some nonsense and I said “whatever” and walked away from my office. The triage I saw (which they didn’t photograph, even though they took 74 pictures during the raid) consisted of the desktop’s 500GB drive on a TV table next to a laptop running X-ways. That’s right, he took a cold hard drive (off) out of my desktop computer and connected it to his laptop with a standard USB to SATA adapter (It was slim, thus not thick like a write blocker would have to be). When you look at exam chicken scratch you can see it just says “write blocker with an arrow to X-ways” no name or make was noted.

Here is what I observed from my kitchen table during the triage. The tech examined the hard drive for about an hour finding nothing but MP3 files (I had about a half a million). SA Couch stated “You have a lot of MP3s” And I replied “Yes”. I also knew that the home directories were encrypted, so I knew they couldn’t examine them. After that first hour, I saw an agent pick up my locked laptop and open its screen. I knew it would present him with my picture associated with the user name Adama. Unknown to them, the Adama account on my linux box was a decoy, it was there for hackers to make the mistake that the admin account on my windows computer was the same on my linux computer. So my decoy trapped these clowns, a few minutes later they claimed to have found images in Adama’s account. I knew they were lying because 1) I didn’t use that account (no-one could, it was locked in the shadow file) and 2) all home directories were encrypted – thus my response was “bullshit”. (Note: I am asserting that the tech had a script (likely python) that generated the fake thumbnails in seconds. He overwrote/modified the home directory fast because I had told them the linux os drive wasn’t encrypted (which it wasn’t). The tech just falsely assume the home directories weren’t encrypted either. Thus his fatal mistake.)

As you can see from the indecipherable notes the tech took, there is no way to contradict my story. So I had my attorney ask for the X-ways logs from the triage or a picture of it (because I knew they didn’t use a write blocker). The AUSA said neither was available. 100% Suspicious, you betcha! So that’s when they came to the agreement that my case would just be about the NIT. Since I was a legal novice at this time, I trusted my CJA Attorneys. As I’ve documented on this blog, that trust was misplaced