IT admin stole students' nude Facebook pics, cops say
As if we need more proof that people will post anything to social networking sites, we now have this: A former computer administrator at the University of Massachusetts is facing charges he illegally obtained nude pictures of some 16 students by breaking in to their Facebook accounts. Robert T. DeCampos Jr., 30, of Dartmouth, …
If you don't want your nude or partially nude pictures stolen. Don't put them on the internet.
So he knew there was booty to be found, and all he had to do was briefly forget his morals. Give the man a 700k pension!
Oh dear, I've joined the throng...
Coat? Thanks, there should be a phone in it with a picture of your wife's knickers on the front - yeah that's the one
If I've read this article correctly, this guy was sacked from his job simply because the police found a USB stick with some dirty pictures of students at his university on it. And it's unlikely that if he's found not guilty that he'll get his job back. Moreover, the fact that he was sacked on suspicion of "sex offences" will go on his record and nobody will ever employ him again. Nice.
Now in a real democracy with checks and balances to protect civil liberties, he would not be sacked until the allegations had been proven. He might be sent on leave pending the outcome, but not sacked on the spot. However, in the wonderfully paranoid totalitarian dictatorship our world has become, we just destroy someone's life on an unproven allegation.
How interesting. So all I have to do to destroy someone's life now is to get a USB stick, run it by some nice porn sites I know of, and quietly deliver it to the house of a politician I don't like. Great! Now - what was the address of Wakky's sister's London apartment again?
Good advice to be sure, but you're missing the point. These weren't posted publicly, they were stolen after gaining access to the the girls' accounts. Considering the girls were underage I'm surprised they're not treating this rogue admin as dangerous pedo.
Maybe that would be too embarrassing for the police since they used to employ him. Come to think of it, if he's got a taste for underage nudes, I bet he swiped some REAL interesting pics from that job.
When did we as a society decide to change the law to make guilt based on suspicion rather than an actual prosecution in court? You can now have a record of "suspicion" which is the same as being found guilty but with none of the safeguards.
How long before you are ostracised from society for not following what the fascist bastards... erm I mean the Labour party wants you to do? Isnt this how Nazism in Germany got off the ground?
Truly frightening.
"These weren't posted publicly"
They were posted on Facebook, for pity's sake. Only a halfwit would think that something posted on Facebook was in any way private.
"Considering the girls were underage I'm surprised they're not treating this rogue admin as dangerous pedo."
From the article: "A former computer administrator at the University of Massachusetts is facing charges he illegally obtained nude pictures of some 16 students..."
Student != Minor
The "University of Massachusetts" part means post-high school, and suggest that in all likelihood, the students were over the age of 18.
Underage Girls? Where did any of the articles mention that?
I don't agree with what he is alleged to have done, but you seem to want to brand him some sort of paedophile, too.
Get back to the Daily Mail.
Paris, 'cos she's easily confused, too.
You evil, evil person. Now who would ever do that?
You are exactly what's wrong with this picture, and proof that the guy above you was totally right.
It started with this guy having some pictures of a nude university girl on a USB stick which he may have snatched from monitoring her electronic activities. This became an instant firing for 'sex offence' and now the psychotic reactionists have taken it a step further and deemed him a dangerous pedophile? Do you by any chance run around waving picket signs and demanding that people 'think of the children' in your spare time?
Nowhere in this article does it say anything about underage girls, and in the US the youngest girl on a university campus MIGHT be 17 (hardly 'dangerous pedophile' material). Stop the insanity, start the civil liberties.
I doubt they were underage: isn't it 18 in the US? I'm assuming they were uni students btw.
I'm assuming btw that if these ladies put their pics in their facebook accounts, then they were sharing them with SOMEONE.
I never digitally share ANYTHING that I don't want to hit the wild. Seen too many cases of accidental forwarding.
Of course, that doesn't justify his hacking facebook accounts (no matter how easy).
Anyone hosting nudes online should pretty much expect they're going to end up in public circulation. Even putting aside the case where someone breaks into your account to steal them, one of your facebook/photobucket friends is going to send a picture to two of his or her buddies, and it won't stop with them.
Turning around, acting shocked and appalled that your nude likeness was seen by someone beyond the few hundred of your "closest" acquaintances who you've friended on facebook, that's just asinine.
Underage? Where does it say that? These are university students, 18+. That's the legal age in the UK for posing nude in a provocative manner, but i'm not sure about the US.
As for being fired, he should take the university to court. He's not been found guilty of any crime, and charging somebody is, afaik, common practice in situations like this. Garden leave is the worst he should have received.
First of all we do not know if the pictures actually were stolen. It is an accusation which does not yet appear to be proven. For all we know the pictures could have been obtained without "breaking into their accounts". Perhaps the girls had misjudged their webpresence in the first place and the result was more embarassing then they wish to admit? I agree with the point that until proven guilty this guy should not have been sacked. If he is found guilty then yes by all means get rid of him and sack him without remorse - but until then it is inappropriate.
"University of Massachusetts", implies of age - is there more than being reported?
Perhaps not now. Perhaps not when the pictures were uploaded. Perhaps not even when the pictures were taken. But these poor girls were underage once - surely that's enough proof for any self-respecting Daily mail reader?
Why didn't he just browse the proxy cache for interesting photos, It's much easier
Or so I've heard....
It's quite legitimate for the university to sack someone whom has been accused of computer misuse [b]if they have investigated and believe it to be true[/b]. People can be sacked without criminal convictions being required first.
If an underage girl were to post nude pictures of herself (or even possess them) would she be guilty of child porn crimes, and tainted ever after as a paedophile?
When you've stopped laughing - why not? What's so different about this special case?
There may soon come a time when perfectly ordinary parents are jailed for "possession of a naked child". Isn't that far, far worse than just having pictures of a naked child?
"Isnt (sic) this how Nazism in Germany got off the ground?"
Actually one of the first things the Nazis did was to outlaw the private possession of firearms. We are well past that point in the UK, although it took our pols decades to achieve it by a step by step process.
"Truly frightening."
And the Nazis were voted in by a frightened population looking for a daddy to protect them. Those who give up their freedoms for the promise of safety will get (and deserve) neither.
UMass discovered that one of their techies was hacking into students' email accounts. The hacks were discovered by his supervisor and then verified by an outside consulting firm. That sounds like more than enough grounds for firing him. The whole business of nudie Facebook pics has nothing to do with it. Hacking into user email accounts is grounds for immediate dismissal.
Yeah, I'm sure the attempted upskirt shots just jumped onto his USB drive as well.
I'm not too sure how you would go about getting naked pictures onto Facebook. I mean unless you actually put them in your photo albums then how would you get them on there?
"They were posted on Facebook, for pity's sake. Only a halfwit would think that something posted on Facebook was in any way private."
Only a halfwit would equate privacy with complete security. Putting something on Facebook with the correct privacy control to limit access could (and should) be seen as private, at the same time putting something on Facebook that you don't really want to be seen is naive.
The definition of Private has to be put somewhere, and if people abusing their job to access your Facebook doesn't infringe privacy, the same would be true of them doing it to email and argueably true if they illicitly gained access to your computer.
Pics or it Didnt happen !!!!
Interesting. Why doesn't the story mention this?
Bad form, Reg.
Has anyone considered that "nude" and "partially nude" photos might simply be beach/bikini/sunbathing pictures?
I think the bigger crime here is the hacking into the accounts.
> Best Buy, where DeCampos worked part time.
If he worked part time at Best Buy, surely they must have been paying peanuts.
Tom,
Do a quick search, there are a few Stateside cases where exactly that has happened and they have been charged with the equivalent of making and forwarding child porn.
Just think, if they had been pictures of breastfeeding, Facebook would have been all in a tizz and removed them.
That thinks it is the perfect way to refer to upskirt shots having been "snatched"?
Sorry, mine's the the rather obvious one, but it still makes me snigger. Sounds a bit like "bum"....
Maybe it's different in the UK, but here in the States, your employment history is not kept by the police. If you don't want someone to know why you lost a previous job, you simply don't tell them about it. Also, if he's found innocent and does put down UMass as a prior job, and they tell potential employers he was guilty of something he wasn't, he can happily turn around and sue them for large sums of money. Is it unfair that, due to the publicity, future employers will know about this regardless of the outcome. Sure - but that's the fault of the media. (Oh wait - The Reg belongs to that grouping - I can't go around bashing them - I blame society instead ;)
Also, I'm fairly certain that government oversight on who you can and cannot fire is antithetical to a "real" democracy. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that most democracies today aren't "real" democracies, but some hybrid governance.
You have a good point.
Reg - Can we have the pics so we can judge for ourselves?
Can we get a extension to Godwin's Law for calling Pedophile?
>> Has anyone considered that "nude" and "partially nude" photos might simply be beach/bikini/sunbathing pictures?
Good point I suppose, many in the States seem to topless to be 'nude'. Partially nude could well reference someone wearing a bikini - or perhaps jeans and a bra.
>> I think the bigger crime here is the hacking into the accounts.
Except that he didn't 'hack' any accounts really. He already had access to the email, access which he mis-used. I suppose you could describe mis-using the Facebook's password reset as 'hacking', but it is a bit of a stretch IMHO. Computer mis-use certainly, but not really hacking.
I wonder what constitutes and attempted upskirt photo? Did he miss and set the zoom to far so that he ended up with up with up nostril shots? perhaps he got the angle wrong and just had photos of Women wearing skirts? perhaps the lack of flash (using a flash would kind of give the game away) or floor level lighting and non-translucent skirts means that all he got were mostly black images with a couple of knees visible? Just maybe he managed to get a few good shots, but later realised they weren't actually 'upskirt' but up-kilt?
is that they recently implemented stricter email password rules. Minimum of 8 characters, must contain characters from at least three of the groups: uppercase, lowercase, numeral, symbol. Passwords expire after 180 days and can never be re-used.
The Reg article links to a couple of local news articles for more information. For some reason, the police were concerned that DeCampos might attempt to make contact with the women whose photos he had stolen. They found that he had looked up directions to at least one of the women's residences. This is just a guess on my part, but the fact that DeCampos possessed a web cam in his apartment suggests that he might have it used it while making contact with women through social networking sites and/or online messenger services. Only one of the women interviewed by police recognized DeCampos (she had seen him at BestBuy and she said his facial expression had "freaked her out"), so apparently he never made contact with any of them, but the campus police advised all the women who were living on campus to get new rooms. They seemed to be concerned that DeCampos might retaliate against them, which I admit does not make sense to me. I don't know whether DeCampos would ever try to make contact with those women, but the police had reason to believe he would.
To any that think that enabling settings on facebook for privacy therefore implies there should be privacy, stop and double-check - unless those pictures were uploaded over a secured encrypted connection private is one thing that they certainly ain't.
In the El Reg tradition of analogies - uploading a nude picture of yourself over a normal http connection is like sending a nude postcard by royal mail.
He isn't welcome here either.
Any 'tard can see that these soppy tarts posting on Facebook are inviting trouble. All that has happened here is that they got it.
Pedo? How did anyone make that leap? Whats up? Missing the Dark Ages? Tell you what, why don't we all go round and have us a burnin, just in case. It don't have to be him, it could be anyone at all really. How about that bloke down the road with the shifty eyes or the one with the dodgy shirts? FFS, I've just had to double check the calendar to make sure this really is 2009!!
Upskirt pics in Best Buy? Well there in itself lies a parable.
Go and read the comments made by Daily Mail readers on their website. The odd one is a typical Daily Mail reader comment but the majority are Reg Reader type of comments.
This either means
1. they have a lot of Trolls.
2. the readers actually are like this
3. that people on the Internet who comment are not like typical Daily Mail readers.
Just talking to ordinary people it seems that not many of them are like Daily Mail readers either. I actually think there has been a shift of opinion in the UK. People are more prepared to defend freedom and bash the government.
My eldest started college at 17, and her next younger sister will be 17 in the fall when she starts. Thankfully, none of them are dumb enough to use facebook or any other idiot web site like that.
@Scott Swarthout - Godwins Law Redeux
"Can we get a extension to Godwin's Law for calling Pedophile?"
Yes, we'll call it codpiece's law
And yes, I consider snooping through someone's email account without a warrant "hacking"; even if he was a sysadmin there. Throw the book at him.
This guy may not only be a dangerous peodo, but is also likely to indulge in weed,, and heavens forbid, sell the stuff to school kids!! Who do we say that? 'cause we know the type, don't we? He will also not be paying his taxes, or vote republican, and will park in the handicap zone. And the biggest indictment of them all, he will not be a member of the NRA. He will not own an assault rifle.. As a decent law abiding god fearing minority hating Fox News believing US citizen would.
Kill the bastard.
Mine's the one with 1984 in one pocket and Mein Kampf in the other.
"Pedo? How did anyone make that leap? Whats up? Missing the Dark Ages?"
Given the average age of marriage back then i think you'd need to get turned on by infants to have been a paedophile back in the Dark Ages! :-)
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