A couple of years ago I was shopping at my local mall when I stole some tracksuit trousers - for about eight seconds.
I had been shopping with my toddler and already had two bags of clothes from a retail chain when I cruised into another clothes store. I had just picked up the tracksuit trousers off a rack when my daughter announced that she really had to go to the toilet. I grabbed the bags of clothes from the floor and headed for the door mentally mapping out where the nearest toilets were.
That’s when I ‘stole' the trousers. They were still in my hand, though covered by the other shopping bags as I left the store. When I realised, I spun on my heels ignored the startled cry of my daughter as I abandoned her and raced the few steps back to the store and thrust the trousers into the hands of a shop assistant.
It was a close, close, close call. I was a distracted father saved from being charged as a shoplifter by inattentive staff. And charged I most certainly would have been.
The clothes already purchased where from a head-to-head competitor of the store I had just ‘stolen' the trousers from. I think the management of the store would have taken a dim view of a ‘shoplifter' who buys from the competition and then ‘steals' from them. Charged and quite likely convicted as a thief because of a moment’s inattention; scary stuff.
This came to mind with recent case of Michael Fiola, a Massachusetts US state employee whom recently had child pornography charges dropped after it was determined his government-supplied laptop was poorly configured and riddled with malicious software.
Defence computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs said that malware surreptitiously served up pre-teen pornographic images onto the machine without the awareness of its user. Loehrs described the case as "one of the most horrific" she'd ever dealt with. In her report to the court, she said "the laptop was compromised by numerous viruses and trojans, and may have been hacked by outside sources".
There is no evidence to support the claim that Michael Fiola was responsible for any of the pornographic activity, Loehrs stated. All the offending images were loaded into locations reserved for cached web pages. Crucially there was no sign that any user had viewed or attempted to access this content. Two computer forensic experts hired by the prosecution came back with the same conclusion.
It’s been crucifying for Fiola; having been charged with possessing child pornography his friends and family deserted him.
Fiola, along with the even more ludicrous prosecutions of high school teacher Julie Ameo and that of Matt Bandy, have been hurled into the public spotlight because of Information Technology Ignorance (ITI). An infected laptop or PC loaded with pornography leads to an automatic assumption of guilt directed towards the user/owner of the machine. ‘Innocent, how can that be, it was his/her computer,' an ill-informed general public all too readily assume.
That the public routinely suffer from ITI is understandable. What’s stunning is that Fiola’s employer, the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA), could be so manifestly struck down by ITI during the initial investigation of the situation. The so-called ‘experts' who incorrectly verified Michael Fiola’s guilt as the downloader of the child porn, and then so casually hung him out to dry, were clearly out of their depth.
Too bad for Michael Fiola the DIA was not prepared to acknowledge the lack of expertise in computer forensics in its IT department and call in a specialist, as opposed to letting incompetence and ITI send an innocent man to purgatory.
