FBI dad’s spyware experiment accidentally exposes pedophile principal
Source: Raw Story
When Joseph Auther installed a spyware program on his 12-year-old son’s school laptop, he was hoping to keep tabs on his son’s Internet use and head off any potential trouble. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes magazine, that decision set in motion a chain of events that cost his son’s school its principal; that principal his reputation, career and marriage; and the Auther family a long-time friend.
Auther, an FBI special agent stationed in the Northern Marianas Islands, installed the spyware program eBlaster on the laptop provided to his son by Whispering Palms School in Saipan in the U.S. territory of the Marianas. eBlaster sends the installer updates via email every time the person using the computer sends or receives and email or chat message and records every keystroke and every website visited as well as every search the user performs.
Months later, Auther was transfered to the FBI’s Denver office. Before turning his son’s laptop back over to the school, the agent took it to two different service centers to have the memory wiped and the spyware disabled. Nonetheless, before Auther and his family left for Colorado, he began to get notifications again.
Spyware programs are, by design, difficult to detect and disable. eBlaster had survived both wipe attempts and had awakened, sending Auther word that the user currently operating the laptop was using it to search for child pornography, including images of underage Asian girls engaged in sex with much older men. Auther didn’t know who was using the computer, but his son’s principal at Whispering Palms was a family friend, 67-year-old Thomas Weindl.
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Weindl was arrested and charged shortly thereafter with “receiving child porn and with accessing child porn with an intent to view it.” He lost his job at Whispering Palms and has since then been trying to fight the charges against him.
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