Security agent gets child porn sentence

A Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM) agent has been convicted after compiling a collection of 600 films and 1750 images of hard-core child porn while on the job.

The 41-year-old man accepted his 10-month suspended sentence from Asker and Bćrum Court, but the district attorney filed an appeal - both sides have this right under Norwegian law.

The man, who did not have an Internet connection at home, used two years before his arrest in March 2006, sitting in a former NATO bunker in Kolsĺs and filling 99 CDs with child pornography, involving the abuse of minors as young as four to five years of age.

“The man realized himself that it was best for both parties that his employment ended at once,” acting NSM director Geir Salvesen told Aftenposten.no.

The NSM worker had the highest security clearance at the time, with access to top secret material when arrested.

The NSM’s own control system picked up the abnormal network traffic on their service server, and notified police.

The man told the court that his job could involve waiting for data to download, and that he “could sit bored for hours while his thoughts wandered”. His pornography watching gradually grew to be an obsession, and he became a compulsive recorder of films and images, “without having a thought about what he should do with them”.

When sentencing, the judge ruled that the 41-year-old appeared to regret his actions and took into account the over 200 newspaper articles written about the case before it came to trial, which the defense argued had been strain on the man.

Asker and Bćrum police district had a massive task examining the evidence of the man’s collection and it took 26 months before the case came to trial.

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API SOURCE AFTENPOSTENENG