A computer technician convicted of stealing more than 1,000 sex photos of celebrities from a computer he was servicing was sentenced to 8 1/2 months in jail yesterday.
Sze Ho-chun, 24, was found guilty of three counts of obtaining access to a computer between January and June 2006 with a view to dishonest gain. In sentencing him, Chief Magistrate Tong Man said he had breached the trust of his employer and intruded on the privacy of singer-actor Edison Chen Koon-hei and the female stars shown in the photos.
Mr Tong said while there was no evidence that Sze had intended to disseminate the photos widely or use them for blackmail, a custodial sentence was necessary.
'It was a serious offence ... as the defendant put the [nude photos] at an extreme risk of being distributed as he copied them onto a compact disc,' he said.
Kevin Tang, Sze's lawyer, told the court Sze had been depressed after he was arrested and for over a year had been afraid to leave his home for fear of being identified or harmed.
Mr Tong, who denied the lawyer's request for a suspended sentence, told Sze: 'For all the painful days you have experienced after you lost your privacy ... have you ever thought that what you did has similarly caused pain to the victims?'
Sze's application for bail was also denied. He plans to appeal against the sentence.
Sze's mother, who left court wearing a mask and sunglasses, said she was 'very upset' and implored the reporters gathered outside to leave her family alone.
Sze discovered about 1,300 sexually explicit photos of Chen and a string of female stars - including Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi, Bobo Chan Man-woon and Gillian Chung Yan-tung - while he was servicing a laptop computer belonging to Chan in 2006, after he unlocked the encrypted files.
He showed the photos to two colleagues and copied them onto a CD, which he gave to one of the women.
The photos later surfaced on the internet and became widely circulated, triggering a massive scandal last year. The person who distributed the photos has yet to be found.
Mr Tang said in mitigation that Sze regretted his offence, which he committed out of ignorance because of his youth. The lawyer asked for leniency, to allow Sze to make a fresh start.
In a mitigation letter, Sir David Tang Wing-cheung, the founder of Shanghai Tang and a client of the computer company that Sze worked for, praised the computer technician for being helpful and said he was willing to entrust Sze with the job of fixing his computers in future.
Kenny Wong Tak-cheung, chief inspector of the police technology crime division, said the judgment showed the court viewed obtaining computer information with dishonest intent as a serious offence. He said the police were determined to combat such crimes.
Yesterday, both the spokeswoman for Chen's agent and Ng Yu, the chief executive of Emperor Entertainment Group, the record company to which Chung belongs, declined to comment on the sentence.
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