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In May 2006 in Lackawana, NY, the FBI arrested William D. Baker, 63, for possession of child pornography after getting a tip from a computer repair technician. (His case was still pending as we went to press.) Technicians finding questionable material also have led to arrests in Seattle, WA; Collier County, FL; and Odessa, TX.

It isn't just porn. Also in May 2006, an east Georgia man was arrested when he went to pick up pictures of his marijuana crop at a drugstore photo counter. And the snooping doesn't have to involve anything obviously illegal: In October 2005, a student in North Carolina got a visit from the Secret Service at his high school after the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart photo lab called the police. As a classroom civics assignment to photographically illustrate the Bill of Rights, he'd cut out a magazine photo of President George W. Bush, tacked it to a wall with a red thumbtack through the head, made a thumb's down sign next to it, and snapped a picture. Lesson learned.

Images of children, though, have the power to stir passionate forces. And the smallest photographic detail can send the shooter into a waking nightmare.

Jeffrey B. (he requested his last name not be printed to protect his daughters) was divorced and had custody of his two girls, then aged 4 and 7, until a Genovese drugstore photo lab in the New York City borough of Queens inserted a note into a packet of his prints that said several shots had been turned over to police. Seven years later -- after four weekends in jail, three years on probation, mandated therapy, losing custody of his daughters, contemplating suicide, and incurring about $300,000 in lawyer's fees and loss of income -- he's a registered sex offender and has no contact with his children.

He declined an interview, but the lawyer who handled his appeal, Joseph Klempner, who also wrote Irreparable Damage, a novel based on the case, says Jeffrey B. is "destroyed," and has not taken a single picture in seven years. "I'd stake my life on the fact that all he was doing was taking cute photos of his kids," says Klempner, who saw the offending pictures.

According to Klempner, the prosecutor said she found the silk sheets on the bed where the 7-year-old's picture was taken "very telling." The girl had mooned her father, and he snapped a picture from across the room. "It would take the Hubble Telescope" to see her unmentionables, relates Klempner.

In the other offending photo, the girls are shot from below, sans bathing suit bottoms, as they pretend to read books. A crucial fact in Jeffrey's conviction: One girl testified that Daddy posed them.

'Granny Busted'

In early 2000, Marian Rubin's granddaughters, Amy, then 8, and Kayla, then 3, were dancing naked on her bed before bath time, strutting their best Britney and Christina moves. In still photos, they must have looked posed.

Rubin is the basis of an urban legend, the 65-year-old granny taken to jail for snapping innocent bathtub pictures of her beloved grandkids. Except her case was real, and the headlines in the Trentonian screamed, "Granny Busted/Cops Think She's a Perv."

The night that she was arrested, after picking up the nude pictures of the girls at a local MotoPhoto outlet -- Rubin, an experienced and award-winning art and children's photographer, insists that she never intended to publish these photos -- Montclair, NJ, police went to the girls' home and had their parents wake them up.

"They asked totally inappropriate questions," says Rubin, who is now 72. "'Did Granny get undressed, too? Did Granny touch you? Did Granny touch herself?' They threatened my son and daughter that, if they didn't cooperate, the kids would be taken away."

Rubin wrote a book, Naked Truths (www.naked-truths.com), detailing her outrage at what she calls vigilante film processors, and she excoriates cops and prosecutors for being unable to admit they'd made a mistake.

On her lawyer's advice, she took a deal called a "Pretrial Intervention" that amounted to conditional probation but left her with no criminal record. She now regrets not taking the case to trial. Even though a federal judge later found the pictures to be "totally inoffensive," Rubin is still paying off the $30,000 debt.

"I haven't taken a nude picture since," says Rubin, who has won awards for nude bodyscape photography. "Portraiture was my thing. They took away my innocence, constricted my vision, brainwashed me into seeing things differently. They definitely changed my pictures of children."

For more see Your Photos Could Ruin Your Life (Part 2) on the PopPhoto Flash blog.

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