More Drama In the OC

Dave G. | February 22nd, 2007 | Filed Under: Slashdot Rounddown

From the OC Register:

Police caught onto Kline after a Canadian computer whiz hacked into the judge’s Irvine home computer and discovered sexually explicit images of young boys and a diary that revealed Kline’s fantasies involving young boys. A subsequent search of his court computer revealed more images and more Web sites.

While this guy was clearly guilty and deserves to be arrested, I think it’s pretty crazy that the authorities will listen to someone who claims to have broken into someone’s computer, and gives them evidence. How can the possibly validate that this evidence is real? The computer is already known to be compromised by someone who is breaking the law.

BTW, this is what the computer whiz kid actually did:

“I was just playing around with this program I wrote. I wanted to see how it worked. Then I got way more curious about what these people were doing. It’s exciting to see something you build actually work. It means I have actually helped out. It challenges me and makes me work,” said Mr. Willman, now 21.

The program, disguised as an image, allowed him to retrieve anything — undetected — once downloaded. He posted the image on several usenet groups used by pedophiles. In reality, the downloaded image was simply one retrieved from the user’s own hard drive.

Some 3,000 users around the world downloaded the Trojan Horse program— giving him full control of targeted computers.

3 Comments so far

  • one.miguel

    February 22nd, 2007 7:09 pm

    June-October 2003: A federal judge rules that … found on Kline’s computers cannot be used in the federal child-pornography case, contending that the Canadian hacker was serving as an agent of authorities and therefore his “search” of Kline’s computer was illegal.

    The bolded part is simply amazing. Must’ve been the 9th…

  • jf

    February 23rd, 2007 1:13 am

    If you look at the timeline he reported it to them and it was something like a month or two before they arrested him, which says to me they did their own investigation.

    Also, to one.miguel, that doesn’t mean he was working for them, but rather he was *acting* as an agent, which probably means they asked him for data and he complied. I used to work in a facility that was .gov and had the FBI/et cetera in the building and we had to be real careful in helping them specifically because we didn’t want to be considered law enforcement or agents of LEO because the laws get complicated when doing so (i.e. your employer can sniff the network without a problem but LEO needs a warrant)

  • Jon Robinson

    February 27th, 2007 1:39 am

    @jf: according to Information week the Assistant US Attorney Greg Staples said that they wouldn’t have known about the problem without the hacker and that the information they got from the hacker kicked off the investigation.

    I think this does amount to an illegal seizure and don’t understand why the 9th wouldn’t agree.

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