“It all started with a broken laptop,” according to an FBI forensics
expert who helped expose an online kidnapping and people-eating conspiracy that
involved a New York City police officer.
The investigator was Stephen Flatley, senior forensic
examiner with the Computer Analysis Response Team in the FBI’s New York City
office. He spoke on the second day of the 2013 International Conference on
Cyber Security (ICCS), hosted by Fordham and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation from Aug. 5 to Aug. 8.
He discussed the technical challenges in building the case
against Gilberto Valle, the so-called “cannibal cop” convicted in March of
taking part in the plot to kidnap, torture, kill, and cannibalize several
women, including his wife. The intended victims included friends he had known
since high school or college, Flatley said.
The broken laptop that prompted the investigation belonged
to Valle. His wife lent him hers, but when she happened to glimpse what she
thought were online dating sites on the screen, she installed spyware that took
screen shots and e-mailed them to her.
When she realized what her husband was really up to, she fled
the family’s home with their one-year-old daughter and took the computer to the
FBI, Flatley said. With her help, investigators copied data from his laptop
while he was at work, discovering dozens of folders labeled with women’s names.
“Jaws hit the floor” when agents saw the number of folders,
since they had thought that approximately 20 women were targeted, Flatley said.
They set about making sure that none of the women had been reported missing.
His team gathered e-mail addresses from the laptop, sent
subpoenas to internet service providers to obtain the messages, and saw their investigation
spread to multiple computers, cameras, SD cards, floppy discs, game consoles,
and CDs and DVDs. Six alleged conspirators were arrested: four in the United
States, three of whom are awaiting trial, and two others in Canada and the
United Kingdom.
“We found this really ugly thread and started pulling it and
all kinds of weird stuff started coming out,” said Flatley, who also teaches in
Fordham’s Department of Computer and Information Science.
The trial brought out various Internet-related questions,
such as whether images in Valle’s web cache could be used to show his state of
mind (not if there’s no way to prove he saw the pages, the judge ruled). At one
point, the defense showed parts of a deposition conducted via Skype, because a
subject—the proprietor of a website Valle visited, a hobbyist living in his
mother’s basement—was in Russia. As Flatley described it, the video showed a
man sipping a drink and answering questions with a terse, Russian-inflected
“yes.”
“It was quite the deposition,” he said.
Flatley referred to online communities of people interested
in cannibalism. “It was one of these things that we never knew existed until we
bumped into this case,” he said.
During the question-and-answer period, an audience member
asked how corporations should respond if an employee is found to be frequenting
a disturbing site. While visiting the site may be against corporate policy, Flatley
said, a lawyer should be consulted about whether to call the police.
“There’s no easy answer to that,” he said. “It’s going to
have to be a judgment call every time.”
--Chris Gosier
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