Subj : Magic Lantern and Sexual Predators
To   : All
From : warmfuzzy
Date : Thu Nov 02 2017 01:50:03

Patrick Naughton was a dot-com wunderkind.  In 1988, he started work at Sun
Microsystems and was part of the team that developed Java.  Catching the
start of the Internet craze, he worked for Starwave, a web development
company, serving as president and Chief Technology Officer.  He then joined
infoseek, which was subsequently acquired by Disney, and he was riding high
during the dot-com gold rush as an executive vice president responsible for
Disney's Go Network at 34 years old.

Naughton's world came crashing down in September 1999 when FBI agents
arrested him on federal charges of crossing state lines to solicit sex from a
minor.  Naughton had been chatting online with what he thought was a
13-year-old girl for several months and had made arrangements to meet her at
the Santa Monica Pier.  Instead of ending up in the nearby hotel room he had
reserved, he ended up behind bars as part of an FBI sting.  During the
investigation agents also discovered a handful of child porn images on one of
Naughton's computers.

Patrick Naughton pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years of probation
and nine months of home detention, and he had to register as a sex-offender
where he lived or worked.  The story would have ended there, but a document
released by a Los Angeles federal court in August 2000 contained some
interesting revelations.

As part of a reduced-sentence deal, Naughton was to provide the government
with five software applications. He ended up spending more than 1,000 hours
working for the FBI in exchange for no jail time.

Although the details of the work that Naughton performed for the FBI were
sealed, a request by the San Jose Mercury News did shed light on the five
applications he was tasked with developing for the government.  They included
a utility for matching images, a tool for tracing a server used to send
e-mail or host a Web page, a utility for logging chat session, and another
tool for detecting the use of steganography.

All these tools would be useful in child pronography and sexual predator
investigations, but the fifth one was most intriguing.  Naughton created a
"framework" for an application that would allow the FBI to remotely access
and search a computer.

Whether this had anything to do with the Magic Lantern project isn't
publically known.   A Department of Justice spokesperson stated the following
to a Mercury News reporter: "The details of the software are under seal,
therefor, secret.  And second, the disclosure of details about the use of
these applications may compromize law enforcement's use of these programs."

Secrets of Computer Espionage: Tactics and Countermeasures
By Joel McNamara
ISBN-13:978-0764537103
Tactics: Magic Lantern and Sexual Predators

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