Laptop security firm charged for spying on sex chats

A laptop-tracking company faces charges for recording the sexually explicit chats from the stolen computer of one of its clients. US District judge Walter Rice ruled last week against Absolute Software, which provides software and services for tracking stolen computers, according to a report on Wired.com. The case centers on a laptop that substitute teacher Susan Clements-Jeffrey, a 52-year-old widow, bought from one of her students in 2008. Clements-Jeffrey recently renewed a romance with her high school sweetheart Carlton Smith, who lived in Boston. During their courtship, she exchanged sexually explicit email and instant messages with him, using the computer she had just purchased. Going too far Rice said there were grounds to believe Absolute had gone too far, and that a jury might reasonably decide that it had violated the plaintiffs’ privacy. “It is one thing to cause a stolen computer to report its IP address or its geographical location in an effort to track it down. It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting the electronic communications of the person using the stolen laptop," Wired.com quoted the judge as saying. However, Absolute sought a summary judgment, insisting that one of its theft recovery agents acted properly when he captured sexually explicit images of Clements-Jeffrey communicating via webcam with her boyfriend. It had passed the images to police in its efforts to recover the stolen computer. Tracking down the laptop Court records showed the laptop belonged to Clark County School District in Ohio, and had been stolen from one of its students in April 2008. Another student at Kiefer Alternative School bought the laptop at a bus station for $40, even if he suspected it was stolen, and turned around and offered it to Clements-Jeffrey for $60. Clements-Jeffrey, a long-term substitute teacher at Kiefer, said the student told her his aunt and uncle had given him the laptop, but that he no longer needed it after getting a new one. She maintained she had no idea the computer was stolen. Clark County School District, which legally owned the laptop, had purchased Absolute’s theft recovery service, which includes remote-recovery software LoJack. LoJack gave Absolute employees remote access to a stolen computer and allows them to record and intercept any data from the machine. When the school district reported the laptop stolen, Absolute began collecting the IP address from Clements-Jeffrey’s laptop when it connected to the Internet. While Absolute’s next step would have been to provide a suspect’s IP address to law enforcement agents, Absolute’s theft officer Kyle Magnus went further and remotely intercepted e-mail and other electronic communications going to and from Clements-Jeffrey’s machine in real time. Constitutional rights Magnus also captured three screenshots from her laptop monitor, which showed Clements-Jeffrey naked in the webcam images. In one picture, her legs were spread apart. Clements-Jeffrey and her boyfriend, Smith, sued Absolute Software, Kyle Magnus, the city of Springfield, Ohio, and two police officers. They claimed the police violated their Fourth Amendment rights, and that Absolute violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act and intentionally invaded their privacy. Legitimate expectations of privacy But the defendants moved for summary judgment on grounds that courts have ruled in the past that there is no legitimate expectation of privacy in cases involving known stolen property. They asserted that Clements-Jeffrey should have known the laptop was stolen based in part on the $60 price the seller was asking for it and on the fact that the serial number had been scraped off the bottom of the machine. Clements-Jeffrey, however, asserted she never noticed the missing serial number and had no reason to doubt the asking price for the two-year-old machine, since the computer had been wiped clean of software before she bought it. She said Absolute had a right to collect her IP address in an effort to track the laptop, but that it broke the law when it intercepted her communications to track her and then passed those images to police. Absolute also insisted it was acting on behalf of its customer, the school district, and therefore was covered under “color of law" and “safe harbor" statutes. The company cited its agreement with the school district, which gives Absolute’s staff “the ability to view and recover any files that are present" on the school’s computers. But the school district has asserted that it never knew this meant that Absolute would intercept communications that a suspected thief might have with third parties. The judge ultimately ruled that although Absolute might have had a noble purpose in assisting the school district in recovering its laptop, “a reasonable jury could find that they crossed an impermissible boundary." — TJD, GMA News