Fuzzy Thoughts

Detective Lounsbury is the Norwich Police Department’s computer crimes officer, and was the person responsible for obtaining evidence off of the computer in questions. An 18 year veteran, he has spent the last seven years investigating computer crimes.

Since being seized back in 2004, the computer had been sitting in NPD’s evidence room, and the only thing that had been done prior to being examined was having the floppy drive being replaced due to it being faulty, and the hard drive was duplicated so the defense could have a copy of it.

There was a bit of testimony that bothered me though. It appears that Det. Lounsbury only told Computer Cop Pro, the software that he used to conduct his investigation, to only look for things that are used on web pages.

Also, I instructed it to search for certain types of words, and again, in the internet there is not your words as we know them there, it’s HTML, which is a language. HTML, rich text format, TXT’s, and again, I told it to search specifically for them, and then there were specific words that are utilized that give you the most information with that group of words looking for pornographic-type stuff.

What’s the problem with this? It just shows that pornography had been accessed, something we already knew. What he never told was if the pornography had been accessed on purpose, or in a barrage of popups.

According to Faith and the City, Computer Cop Pro is designed for routine monitoring, and is unable to definitively tell between when a user clicks on a link, or the effects of malware (or even a popup for that fact). It goes on to further say that Det. Lounsbury has very little formal training; he has completed a two week FBI computer security seminar and is a certified Computer Cop Pro user. Unfortunately, to be certified only requires an hour of training (that can be done over the phone, nonetheless) and a test.

Over at AlterNet, Lounsbury said in an interview that

he is satisfied that Amero intentionally viewed porn in class because the logs show that her computer accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer.
“I take that at face value,” Lounsbury told Alternet. “It’s evidence. It speaks for itself. The pop-up defense is a Twinkie defense.”
Lounsbury said that Amero must have navigated to pornographic sites in order to have infected her computer with obscene popups. “You’ve got to get that ball rolling,” he said.

Again, we already knew that the computer had accessed inappropriate sites, what we don’t know is how. And yes, for popups to happen, the ball does need to get rolling. How it gets rolling can take several forms. A serial key/crack site can infect the computer, or it could have been a dating site. It could have been due to an advertisement viewed on an innocent page, or it could have been from an infinite number of other things, we just don’t know. I’ll take it at face value that they had been accessed. But I wouldn’t call it evidence to help the state, not until I knew, with 100% uncertainty, how they had been accessed. And that is where Detective Lounsbury went wrong.

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