A Jupiter man accused of possessing child pornography was arrested after he apparently emailed some of the material – to himself.
Dr. Thomas E. Lipin is a well-known ENT with his own practice in Jupiter. His official website notes his many accomplishments over the last 30 years treating both children and adults in the community, including the Distinguished Citizen Award from Boy Scouts of America for community service in 2005 and acted as Chairman of the Board for Jupiter Medical Center for five years.
But allegations of Lipin transferring and downloading child sexual abuse material have landed him behind bars.
In a statement, Jupiter Medical told CBS12 News that Lipin no longer works with them and his privileges at their facilities have been revoked.
The fallout comes after a six-month-long investigation, where the Jupiter Police Department reportedly found more than 15 files of child pornography downloaded on multiple devices belonging to Lipin. Officers noted some of the children appeared as young as five years old.
According to the police report, the 70-year-old man told officers “When he sees an image he likes, he sends it to himself via email from one device to another.”
“It can be from his phone to his computer to get it off his phone to his computer or vice versa. But regardless, transferring illegal material between devices that you own or control doesn’t make it any better. And there’s going to be systems that are in place that are going to catch these things,” Craig Agranoff, a local tech expert, said.
The National Center of Missing and Exploited Children received a CyberTip late last year from the well-known Electronic Service Provider (EST) Apple. The company claimed one of its users had uploaded a handful of suspected child pornographic files.
The affidavit indicates the emails came from a @me.com address to a Gmail account, both of which the suspect acknowledged were his. The Gmail address was described as his email account, while the other one was created by Apple and was linked to his computer, it stated.
The affidavit noted that prior to making contact with Lipin, the investigator on the case had obtained a search warrant and had checked out both email accounts where she found further evidence of child pornography. The investigator provided detailed descriptions of some of the images on the files found. According to police, Lipin denied making any child pornography himself or sending it to anyone.
Agranoff said it’s likely that at least one of those images is already in a known database created to monitor for illegal content.
“It stores like the digital fingerprints if that makes sense,” Agranoff said. ”So, when someone sends or receives files through the platform monitored by Apple, iCloud or any other email service like Gmail, the system scans these files within a millisecond to see if those hashes match any in the database of known child abuse material.”
Once an account is flagged, the content is vetted. Only if there’s reason to believe it’s child sexual abuse material is it turned over to the authorities.
Lipin was arrested on counts of sexual performance by a child, child pornography, and transmission of pornography with an electronic device. He was taken to the Palm Beach County Jail on Tuesday with a $50,000 bond.
At his first appearance on Wednesday, the judge ordered Lipin to surrender his passport, have no access to the internet, or anyone under the age of 18 including family members.
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Source: Cbs12
