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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Ind. Decisions - "Coach was 'just flirting,' defense says"

The verdict is in in the trial of "Matthew Hensley, the former coach charged with trolling the Web for sex with young girls," according to a description in the NWI Times quoted in this July 11th ILB entry. Yesterday Joe Carlson of the Times reported:

HAMMOND | Former girls basketball coach Matthew Hensley was found guilty Friday afternoon of attempting to solicit sex from minors using the Internet. * * *

Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Benson said Hensley's case stood out among the two-dozen similar cases that came out of a sex predator sting operation last August run by 26 federal, state, county and local police agencies.

Hensley's former jobs coaching girls basketball at Andrean High School in Merrillville and St. Paul Elementary School in Valparaiso gave him a dangerous position of trust over young girls, Benson said.

Also, Hensley used a complex system of four online identities that each had different personalities, including one female persona. Using that female person, he urged an undercover agent posing as a 13-year-old girl to have sex with older men, as "she (Hensley)" did.

"I can't think of a situation more predatory. He's pretending to be one of her peers and telling her how good (sex) is," Benson said. "It's a unique form of peer pressure exerted by the predator."

Andy Grimm's story in the Gary Post-Tribune adds:
Defense attorney Alex Woloshansky said Hensley would appeal the decision.

Throughout the trial, during which Hensley did not testify, Woloshansky attempted to convince jurors that multiple people had access to Hensley's computer, and that in the pages of online chats, the author never indicated he believed the person behind the screen identity "jen_indy13" was really a 13-year-old middle-schooler.

The Times' Joe Carlson also has an interesting story today that begins:
It's not surprising young men typing messages on their bedroom computers and posting the messages on an Internet with millions of users could believe they're anonymous, observers say.

The message-senders rarely register under real names, and some even take steps to disguise their computer's digital address while posting offensive or illegal messages.

But as the recent cases of Internet felons Vikram Buddhi and Matthew Hensley illustrate, prosecutors intend to hold people as accountable for on-line postings as they would for illegal activity on a street corner.

"(Internet users) need to understand that they're not invisible as much as they might think they're invisible," said Joseph Van Bokkelen, U.S. Attorney for Northern Indiana. "It's an illusion. Buddhi thought he was anonymous, and now he's a convicted felon."

The Vikram Buddhi federal jury trial, reported by Carlson the end of June, resulted in the conviction of Vikram Buddhi, who had been a grad student at Purdue, of using the Internet to threaten American leaders and the nation's infrastructure. See this June 29th ILB entry and its link for background. Today's story continues:
How does the government connect an Internet user posting messages under a pseudonym to a real-world person with a name and face? * * *

[P]rosecutors often rely on Internet Protocol addresses. An IP address is a string of numbers up to 12 digits long and separated by three periods that identifies a computer on the Internet, similar to how a street address identifies a home.

Prosecutors issue hundreds of summonses or subpoenas every year to companies such as Yahoo to find out what IP addresses were used to create on-line identities suspected of posting illegal messages.

With the IP addresses in hand, investigators can then ask phone companies about people registered at those addresses. The addresses have to be accompanied by dates because computers are routinely assigned new numbers.

Using that process, prosecutors tied together at least four on-line identities that Hensley used simultaneously to proposition an undercover agent posing as a minor on-line.

In the Buddhi case, he stole other students' IP addresses in exhorting the assassination of the president and other illegal activities.

Budhi's tactic initially led authorities to question the wrong person. Authorities used a second digital identifier called a MAC number, which is unique to each computer similar to the VIN number on a car.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 15, 2007 09:31 AM
Posted to Ind Fed D.Ct. Decisions