What do California Highway
Patrol (CHP) officers and nasty Internet trolls have in common?
Like the hackers who stole and released nude celebrity pics from
iCloud, these
Cali cops think they have a right to view private images off
women’s phones and the law be damned. A team of CHP officers is
now under investigation for a years-long “game” in which they stole
and traded private photos from the phones of women they
arrested.
None of the officers have been charged so far, but last week CHP
Officer Sean Harrington, 35, confessed to stealing nude photos of a
woman he arrested on DUI charges and admitted that he and other CHP
officers have been swapping such images for years. According to the
Contra Costa Times, the practice “stretches from (CHP’s)
Los Angeles office” to Harrington’s office up in Dublin,
California, near San Francisco. From the Times:
The five-year CHP veteran called it a “game” among officers,
according to an Oct. 14 search warrant affidavit. Harrington told
investigators he had done the same thing to female arrestees a
“half dozen times in the last several years,” according to the
court records, which included leering text messages between
Harrington and his Dublin CHP colleague, Officer Robert
Hazelwood.(…) In the search warrant affidavit, senior Contra Costa
district attorney inspector Darryl Holcombe wrote that he found
probable cause to show both CHP officers Harrington and Hazelwood
and others engaged in a “scheme to unlawfully access the cell phone
of female arrestees by intentionally gaining access to their cell
phone and without their knowledge, stealing and retaining nude or
partially clothed photographs of them.” That behavior constitutes
felony computer theft, the affidavit said.
Not only did the cops illegally access women’s photos, they then
proceeded to be judgmental dicks about them. Here’s a sample text
conversation between Harrington and Hazelwood:
Luckily, Officer Harrington’s intelligence is also “like a 5 or
6 at best”: the ruse was discovered when the last woman whose
photos he stole noticed that the photos had been sent to an unknown
number. Harrington had deleted evidence they had been sent from the
woman’s iPhone, but the phone was synced to her iPad as
well.
CHP is of course trying to paint the situation as an isolated
incident, but Rick Madsen, the lawyer representing the woman who
discovered the activity, balked at this. “This particular instance
was only discovered by my client by chance—and it’s a reasonable
speculation to imagine how often it has occurred undetected,”
Madsen said a statement. “Who knows how many officers have
participated in this so-called ‘game,’ or how many more women have
been victimized?”
As SearchSecurity editor Rob
Wright tweeted this morning, yet another reason for
phone encryption.
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