The underlying story is one of those that makes your head explode from its sheer stupidity.   Radley Balko sums it up.

Family with an unsecured wireless connection gets an early-morning FBI raid, lives under a cloud of suspicion for two years.

Note that though the FBI arrested the guy they were after in November, it took them until May to get around to notifying the family they were no longer under investigation—and even then only after the media got wind of the story.

It was a simple mistake, simple in the sense that anyone with the slightest clue of how wifi and the internet works would have understood that there was a  huge factual gap in what appeared superficially and reality.

“There were FBI and police at the door. They came up into our bedroom flashing lights in our faces,” said Tracy. “I ran to my daughter’s room. She was sitting on the side of the bed crying. She was terrified,” she said.

Investigating a child porn case, the family was interrogated for 3 hours. With search warrant in hand, agents took seven computers and a router from the home.

“They kept asking us about the screen name ‘babytodd’ which we knew nothing about. The whole manner of interrogation was degrading, demeaning and cruel,” said Tracy.

Somebody horned in on the family’s wifi.  Somebody, using the name “babytodd,” downloaded kiddie porn.  It was pure kismet that they didn’t shoot and kill anyone in the misbegotten raid.  Smart bunch of guys working for the FBI, right?  Keeping America safe, one mistake at a time.

So the FBI made a mistake.  Hard to imagine, at least if you’re in law enforcement.  Even after it was all over, the FBI couldn’t quite grasp that they were the ones at fault.

In a statement the FBI told NewsCenter 5: “We understand it must be very upsetting for innocent people to have their home searched by the FBI. They were victimized by a wireless trespasser.”

Of course, the “wireless trespasser” didn’t raid their home in the wee hours of the morning, seize them, interrogate them.  But they were just doing their job.

Two years after the raid, and six months after they arrested a neighbor who happened to use the screen name “babytodd,” Denise Tacey and her family remained, as far as they know, the unarrested suspects of distributing child porn, under the cloud of this horrific charge. 

For two years the Tracys didn’t hear a word from the FBI. They sent letters to government officials demanding resolution.

“The worry and stress and sleepless nights have aged us,” said Tracy.

The feeling of being an innocent person involved in some Kafkaesque nightmare is hard to explain.  There is no comfort to be found in knowing that you’re innocent, as the taint of accusation and fear of prosecution hangs over your head every day.  The threat of another morning raid, the door smashed in as armed men seize your children is omnipresent. 

Yet there’s this naive hope that a day will come, a phone call or maybe a letter, from the FBI, saying in official language that they realize they made a mistake, that they realize they broke down the wrong door, that you are officially declared innocent.

That’s not how it happens.

They may be lightning fast in leveling falsely accusing, but there is no interest whatsoever, none, in conceding a mistake.  The Tracey’s sent letters. They heard nothing back.  They caught the the man they were looking for, and still nothing.  The allegations still hung over the family.  And they would have forever but for the intervention of media.

After NewsCenter 5 made inquiries to the FBI, the Tracys were finally called and offered an apology and promised to return their computers.

That’s right, not only were they forced to live under the accusation of being child pornographers, but the FBI naturally had to seize all their computers, since they contained all the evidence.  Like nice pictures of their cat Fluffy.  Shouldn’t that have had some impact on the FBI’s allegations? 

One would think, but the lack of evidence of guilt doesn’t mean you’re innocent.  Quite the contrary, it makes you an especially devious criminal mastermind, capable of concealing your guilt, even from the brilliant minds at the FBI.  Aw, you clever criminal.

So the Tracey family will be given it’s two year old computers (any new programs for that Wang?) back.  And a begrudging apology, of sorts.

The FBI tells NewsCenter 5 the incident should remind people to secure their wireless networks.

Only in law enforcement can the party that screwed up the worst, the dopiest guy in the room, give advice to others.  But despite everything, this is a rare success story.  The Traceys were not prosecuted and imprisoned.  The Traceys learned, albeit two years too late, that they were no longer upon the cloud of suspicion.  The Traceys got their outdated and useless property back.

This is a success story, because most of the time, the targets of an investigation never achieve closure.  The fingers point, the home raided, all the bad things that aren’t supposed to happen to nice, law-abiding folks, and then . . . nothing.  Silence.  No charged, but no letter saying they’re cleared.  Perpetual silence, and the fears continue day after day, night after night, without end.

The official response to demands that they end the nightmare is “it’s under investigation.”  This is a lie. There’s no investigation, just a refusal to admit they blew it. There will be no further investigation, and there will be no letter or phone call informing the targets that they are no longer under suspicion.  The story will never end.

To the extent an explanation exists, it might be found in the inability to concede that law enforcement is wrong.  The FBI has great difficulty with this concept, adhering to the certainty of their knee-jerk, half-baked, often ignorant conclusions.  They aren’t wrong, just haven’t gotten the goods yet.  They can’t be wrong.

Once law enforcement officers have pegged someone as a criminal, that’s where they remain.  They are not due an apology, or notification that they are no longer under suspicion.  They are not due the courtesy that one would expect from a slightly normal human being.  They are criminals, once and forever, and they deserve nothing. 

And so people, families, like the Traceys, live the rest of their lives under a cloud of suspicion for some heinous crime that they never committed.  And no FBI agent loses a minute of sleep feeling badly that their nightmare never ends.