Very happy "karma" nailed the principal ~ I know there are sites that present "dangers" of one kind or another to children, but I have a problem with a parent using spyware on a child ~ Sooz

Kashmir Hill, Forbes Staff
11/30/2012 @ 12:04PM
An FBI Dad's Misadventures With Spyware Exposed School Principal's Child Porn Searches

Like any dad, Joseph Auther was worried about what his son might get up to while exploring the wilds of the World Wide Web. So when his 7th grade son got a school-provided laptop from Whispering Palms School in Saipan in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, Auther decided to install a monitoring program on it. He went with a spyware program called eBlaster from SpectorSoft, a company based in Vero Beach, Florida. Unbeknownst to his son, the program captured his website visits, his keystrokes, and every email, chat, and instant message he sent and received. This was all delivered up to his dad in emails, while giving the monitored person no hint that it was doing so.

Auther has a special appreciation for the benefits of a surveillance. He’s an FBI special agent. In April, he discovered he was being transferred to the FBI office in Denver. At the end of the school year, Auther let Whispering Palms principal Thomas Weindl know that his family was moving and that they would be returning the school’s laptop. Weindl, 67, was actually a friend of the Auther family; when he got married earlier that year, Auther’s wife gave a reading at the ceremony. Auther told Weindl that he would return the laptop after he removed all of his son’s files, programs and games.

Auther first took the laptop to his FBI office and asked his colleagues how to wipe it clean. Apparently they don’t have many cyber experts in the Mariana Islands, because they were unsuccessful. So Auther had to instead take it to a computer repair shop, which cleaned out the old files and allegedly reimaged the hard drive to return it to its original settings. Auther didn’t tell the shop about eBlaster being on the computer — perhaps feeling a little Big Parent shame — but assumed that it would be wiped along with everything else. He then returned the computer to Weindl.

A week later, Auther was surprised to get an email from eBlaster which had survived the attempts to kill it. SpectorSoft claims that eBlaster is as easy to remove as any other program, such as Microsoft Word, though the company wouldn’t comment on this case or elaborate on exactly how to remove it. I consulted computer geek friends who suggested that a re-imaging should have removed it, but that the computer repair shop may not have done a good job of it.

The eBlaster report revealed that someone was using the computer again and that the person was much naughtier than Auther’s son had been. The report revealed Internet searches for child pornography and visits to sexually explicit websites, including a few that featured young Asian girls having sex with older men.

“An FBI dad getting email notifications of child porn activity [is] like a gift-wrapped present for a law enforcement official,” noted Eric Goldman, who brought the case to my attention.

While Auther wasn’t sure who was using the computer, he became suspicious of Weindl based on the type of porn involved because Weindl had “married a Korean woman, and he now had an 11-year-old Korean stepdaughter,” according to court documents. That seems like the point at which Auther should have opened an official FBI investigation, but that’s not what happened.

Auther then called Weindl, pretending he wanted to buy the laptop, to find out whose possession the computer was in. Weindl claimed the laptop had been returned to the Public School System, an agency that provides federally-funded laptops to students at public and private schools, and lets them keep them if they graduate. Auther continued his informal investigation. He stopped by the PSS office, where he showed his FBI credentials, and found out the laptop had not in fact been returned. He also contacted his Internet Service Provider to see if it could tell him, based on IP information in the eBlaster report, where the laptop was being used. They refused to disclose that to him, even though “he may have shown his FBI credentials” to them.

Despite getting all flashy with his FBI badge, Auther still considered this digging being done by a concerned parent, rather than a professional investigation. Meanwhile, Auther continued to get emails about the laptop’s activity, and they continued to involve child porn.

Auther then had another conversation with Weindl, telling him he was concerned about inappropriate content on the laptop. Weidl responded that he had “done some checking of his own” and that some “‘hanky panky’ was going on at PSS.” Since Auther had already visited PSS, he knew Weidl was lying. At that point, Auther finally shared his evidence with another agent at the FBI and contacted the Mariana Islands’ attorney general saying protective services should check on Weindl’s stepdaughter. (It’s probably worth noting here that the act of looking at child porn is not necessarily correlated with child abuse.)

It was all downhill from there for Weindl. Auther and another FBI agent confronted him at his office at the school, where he admitted to viewing child porn and claimed that he had since “destroyed the [laptop] and threw the pieces in the jungle.” Weindl was then arrested and charged with receiving child porn and with accessing child porn with an intent to view it. “When asked why he performed Google searches on 11-year-old girls, Weindl stated it was his own ‘morbid curiosity’ or ‘inappropriate curiosity,’” reports the Saipan Tribune.

Whispering Palms got itself a new principal. Weindl meanwhile is trying to fight his child porn charges. He called foul on an FBI agent putting spyware on his computer without any kind of legal authorization. A judge in the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands was unsympathetic.

“Auther’s installation of eBlaster on the laptop in June 2011 was unrelated to the performance of his duties as an FBI special agent,” writes Judge Ramona Manglona. “Auther was acting as a devoted father, not a law enforcement officer.”

Because Auther’s leaving the spyware on the computer when he returned the laptop to Weindl was “inadvertent,” and not “a sting [operation],” it was kosher, and it was okay for Auther to look at the first eBlaster report that he received, ruled Manglona.

“The intrusive conduct — the installation of eBlaster — was not by the government but by Auther the private citizen,” writes Manglona, and thus Weindl can’t claim that his right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure was violated (though he might want to consider a civil invasion of privacy suit against his FBI frenemy). At least with the first eBlaster report that Auther looked at. After that first report turned up child porn activity though, Auther’s investigation took on professional color and should have been handed over to his colleagues at the FBI, writes Manglona. While those subsequent reports should be subject to Fourth Amendment scrutiny, Manglona says Weindl’s rights still weren’t violated because of the fact that he was doing his child porn searches on a computer he didn’t own. It was a computer owned by PSS that was intended to be used by students not by principals or administrators, and so Weindl had no right to expect what he did on it to remain private, according to Manglona’s reasoning.

“Sometimes, people delude themselves into thinking that they have a right to things that don’t belong to them,” writes Manglona. “A person cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a computer he stole or obtained by fraud.”

She does say that he would have a higher expectation of privacy had the computer actually been assigned to him.

This principal is going to be getting into serious trouble. Two lessons to be learned here:
•Don’t do your porn searches on other people’s computers.
•Be wary of used computers given the sensitivity around what we do on our computers; the fact that both FBI agents and a computer repair shop failed to wipe eBlaster from this computer is troubling. Who knows what a computer’s previous owner has in mind for you?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/11/30/an-fbi-dads-misadventures-with-spyware-expose-high-school-principals-child-porn-searches/

I consulted computer geek friends who suggested that a re-imaging should have removed it, but that the computer repair shop may not have done a good job of it.

Or it simply cannot be removed, as claimed, and is being used for data mining.

Add his name to the "too stupid to keep your job" category. Why would he be dumb enough to search for porn on a computer owned by the school board?

As for the dad...I have exactly NO PROBLEM with using spyware against children, if you're in a caregiving position. I have told my kids that when and if I allow them on facebook, I will have full access to everything they post. They have NO expectation of privacy, and no so up front. Kids need to be protected from their own impulsive selves in cyberspace. As far as I'm concerned, that goes for teachers and school owned computers as well.

This is so much why I insist on building, formatting and installing my own computer. I don't trust ANY of the stuff that comes prebuilt and preloaded. There's no way to know what is running in the background and sending log files out so quickly you won't even notice. In this instance - yeah... OK... the bad guy got caught - but - it comes down to living in a world where "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". As for parents using this sort of technology on their kids, well, they already do it with GPS enabled cell phones or ithinkPadpodtablet thingamajiggers and I think that would fall under parental discretion. I have to wonder how much of this was really just an "oops" and how much of it was this cop's instincts kicking in and then investigating how it could be done and justified.

IOW - I smell a rat.

I smell a rat.

They let Harper out on Sundays, Sid.

Oh gawd... his best friend, Doug Finley lives down the road from me and he's dying... Harper could be in my neighborhood.

Greeny, I have no problem with telling a child I'm watching ... and then doing so ~ and I have no problem with disciplining a child for knowingly breaking a "rule" ~ but, for me, installing spyware is a step too far ~ it shows a marked lack of trust in the child and the child's attitude morphs into "well, you think I'm doing it anyway so I may as well do it" ~ I'm comfortable talking issues thru with a child [which is virtually always my first choice] because that's how I was brought up ~

Sooz

Ditto, sooz.