from http://www.foxnews.com/national/081600/pedophile_riley.sml
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>
Feds Enlist Cyber Pervert
To Write Snooping Software
Wednesday, August 16, 2000 By Patrick Riley
Federal investigators were so eager to beef up their Big Brother presence online that they had a convicted cybersex offender develop spy software for them in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Patrick Naughton, a former InfoSeek executive netted last year in a federal sting for arranging sex with a minor, last week received nine months of home detention six months after a plea bargain set him to work crafting original surveillance programs.
One of the five programs enables a computer to be searched from a remote location. The other tools help investigators engage in so-called "chat logging," "Internet Protocol number capturing," "image matching," and "steganography detection," according to a court document obtained by FOXNews.com. The document was first released in response to a request by the San Jose Mercury News.
Further details of the espionage programs remained under court seal. Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles, refused to elaborate except to say the software will provide "substantial assistance" to investigators.
"Patrick Naughton provided technical expertise for the government which we hope will be very helpful in our continuing efforts to protect children from pedophiles and other aggressors on the Internet," Mrozek told FOXNews.com.
Naughton, known as a Web pioneer since leading the development of the programming language Java, made online contact with an undercover officer posing as a 13-year-old girl and agreed to meet "her" last September on a pier in Santa Monica, California.
When Naughton showed up he was arrested and indicted on three charges: interstate travel for the purpose of having sex with a minor, use of the Internet to entice a minor, and possession of child pornography.
Enlisting criminals to help catch their own kind in exchange for lighter punishment is commonplace, Mrozek said. But he admits asking a convict to design programs that do the same thing is something new.
"It's the first time to my knowledge," Mrozek said. He wouldn't rule out doing it again.
News of these criminally master-minded snoop tools comes amid the continuing controversy over the FBI's revelation that it has a program called "Carnivore" to sort through all e-mail traveling through a specific Internet service provider in order to target a criminal suspect's mail.
Still steaming over Carnivore's potential for abuse, both privacy rights activists and members of the Internet underground are concerned about the new tools not because they're being used to catch potential pedophiles, but because they're secret and might also be used to snoop on non-criminals, said Stanton McCandlish of the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
"Until we actually see the software, we can't be sure what it's doing," he said.
Among Naughton's mysterious new programs, none is causing more speculation than what the court document referred to as "image matching," McCandlish said. "I've heard eight different theories about what that could refer to, but one of the common ones is face-recognition technology."
He said while some of what Naughton apparently has devised sounds like already existing technology, the applications may have new twists. The remote-searching software, for instance, might entail "a non-detectable version of [the already available snoopers] Satan or Back Orifice."
He also guesses that the chat monitoring and IP number tracing programs every computer has a unique Internet Protocol number could be to help investigators get a lock on a suspect's location. And software that detects "steganography" would ostensibly break the cryptographic technique of hiding data within other data or images.
Naughton declined to talk about his work, but said unlike Carnivore, his programs target individual suspects without first sifting through the mail of non-suspects.
"This is more targeted," he told the Mercury News. "They'll catch more people breaking the law. I don't think anyone who is remotely innocent will be swept up in this."
[/quote]
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>
Feds Enlist Cyber Pervert
To Write Snooping Software
Wednesday, August 16, 2000 By Patrick Riley
Federal investigators were so eager to beef up their Big Brother presence online that they had a convicted cybersex offender develop spy software for them in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Patrick Naughton, a former InfoSeek executive netted last year in a federal sting for arranging sex with a minor, last week received nine months of home detention six months after a plea bargain set him to work crafting original surveillance programs.
One of the five programs enables a computer to be searched from a remote location. The other tools help investigators engage in so-called "chat logging," "Internet Protocol number capturing," "image matching," and "steganography detection," according to a court document obtained by FOXNews.com. The document was first released in response to a request by the San Jose Mercury News.
Further details of the espionage programs remained under court seal. Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles, refused to elaborate except to say the software will provide "substantial assistance" to investigators.
"Patrick Naughton provided technical expertise for the government which we hope will be very helpful in our continuing efforts to protect children from pedophiles and other aggressors on the Internet," Mrozek told FOXNews.com.
Naughton, known as a Web pioneer since leading the development of the programming language Java, made online contact with an undercover officer posing as a 13-year-old girl and agreed to meet "her" last September on a pier in Santa Monica, California.
When Naughton showed up he was arrested and indicted on three charges: interstate travel for the purpose of having sex with a minor, use of the Internet to entice a minor, and possession of child pornography.
Enlisting criminals to help catch their own kind in exchange for lighter punishment is commonplace, Mrozek said. But he admits asking a convict to design programs that do the same thing is something new.
"It's the first time to my knowledge," Mrozek said. He wouldn't rule out doing it again.
News of these criminally master-minded snoop tools comes amid the continuing controversy over the FBI's revelation that it has a program called "Carnivore" to sort through all e-mail traveling through a specific Internet service provider in order to target a criminal suspect's mail.
Still steaming over Carnivore's potential for abuse, both privacy rights activists and members of the Internet underground are concerned about the new tools not because they're being used to catch potential pedophiles, but because they're secret and might also be used to snoop on non-criminals, said Stanton McCandlish of the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
"Until we actually see the software, we can't be sure what it's doing," he said.
Among Naughton's mysterious new programs, none is causing more speculation than what the court document referred to as "image matching," McCandlish said. "I've heard eight different theories about what that could refer to, but one of the common ones is face-recognition technology."
He said while some of what Naughton apparently has devised sounds like already existing technology, the applications may have new twists. The remote-searching software, for instance, might entail "a non-detectable version of [the already available snoopers] Satan or Back Orifice."
He also guesses that the chat monitoring and IP number tracing programs every computer has a unique Internet Protocol number could be to help investigators get a lock on a suspect's location. And software that detects "steganography" would ostensibly break the cryptographic technique of hiding data within other data or images.
Naughton declined to talk about his work, but said unlike Carnivore, his programs target individual suspects without first sifting through the mail of non-suspects.
"This is more targeted," he told the Mercury News. "They'll catch more people breaking the law. I don't think anyone who is remotely innocent will be swept up in this."
[/quote]