Then the case became something else entirely—because the phone had child sex abuse material (CSAM) on it.
From bad to worse
Thompson’s iPhone, iPad, and a pair of laptops showed evidence that Thompson had used them to connect to MIRA9120, but the CSAM was actually a bigger deal. Upon finding it, agents halted their searches and obtained further warrants allowing them to search all of Thompson’s seized devices specifically for CSAM.
They found plenty of it. Court documents show that Thompson’s iPad also had CSAM on it; in fact, the government said, he had been using the iPad to search “the dark web for CSAM at the time the FBI knocked on his door with the search warrant.” CSAM also showed up on a hard drive in Thompson’s home and on a computer seized from a storage unit.
“Thousands of images and hundreds of videos on Thompson’s personal devices depicting CSAM were found,” the government said. And Thompson was not just a consumer of CSAM; tragically, he had produced a series of videos with several 7- to 10-year-old children in June 2019, just a month before the warrant was served. Some had been made right in Thompson’s living room.
On July 27, 2019, Thompson left the US for the Philippines without noting his international travel as required by the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). The US then revoked his passport, and the Philippines deported him in January 2020. He was arrested upon his return to the US.
The case took several years to wind its way through the courts, partly because Thompson began representing himself.
Thompson filed long motions accusing the FBI of, among other things, improperly calling his attack on the Jaguars a “denial of service” attack.
He claimed that the FBI had actually exonerated him due to a typo in one agent’s lengthy filing; a single line said that Thompson “did have authority” to access the MIRA9120 server, though the rest of the document made clear that he did not have such authority. (In a footnote, the government said that the FBI agent in question “has amended his report to correct this typo.”)
