This was a case of mistaken identity where police raided a home to seize child pornography. The police had identified the farm family’s house as having child porn from the IP address provided by the local internet provider.
The only problem is that the IP address was dynamic and the house in question was not using that particular IP address when the police had identified that IP address as the source of the child porn. The internet provider had given the police the wrong physical address of who was using the IP address at the time in question.
With dynamic IP addresses versus static IP addresses, the internet provider owns a block of IP addresses, but issues the IP addresses dynamically to its internet subscribers. Dynamic IP addressing is done to minimize the number of actual IP addresses as IP addresses are only used or re-allocated as required.
Days later the police determined that they had raided the wrong house. This is unsettling as any of us could have been the victim of this police raid and had the stigma of being a distributor of child porn.