Friday, January 26, 2001

Mike Lafferty
Dispatch Staff Reporter

Chris Russell / Dispatch John Lateulere, director of information technology at Otterbein College, says the most common problem among campus computer users is the gobbling up of storage space. He is seated among the hard drives of the students' computer lab.

With every e-mail, downloaded research paper and online library addition, a college computer system evolves. Every second, new information is stored, accessed and altered.

Its sheer volume and ever-changing content keep officials on any given campus from knowing exactly what's on a computer system.

So when a cache of hundreds of thousands of pornographic images was found on the Marietta College computer system in December, Dan Temple wasn't surprised.

Temple worked for the University of Pittsburgh in 1996 when someone was found to have used the university computers as a porn site.

"A guy was using the university system to store pictures,'' said Temple, now vice president of library and information sciences at Kenyon College in Gambier. "He set it up so only he could see those files.''

But Temple said the man had left some images on a public site.

"Somebody saw them and turned it in, and the next thing we knew the FBI was all over the place,'' Temple said.

Police, FBI and state investigators now are investigating whether a Marietta College official, who had access to a private server on the campus, might have maintained a collection of more than 300,000 child pornography images.

The official resigned his post Wednesday, college officials said.

Although he has not been charged, the case is expected to be presented to the Washington County grand jury.

The official has denied any wrongdoing.

Temple and officials at other colleges -- virtually all of which have policies regarding computer use -- said hiding such material on a campus computer system isn't difficult.

"It's very easy,'' said Joe Deck, director of computing services at Wittenberg University in Springfield. "If the individual storing information is the one who has access to those directories and disks, no one else can find out about it.''

Other college officials said it's nearly impossible to keep tabs on computer systems that change so often.

"There's no question that those in charge of providing computer service have access and they're expected to work at the highest level of integrity,'' said Capital University Provost Ronald Volpe.

"It's very difficult to ensure that some technical personnel will not always use the system properly.''

Temple said there is no Big Brother watching over these employees.

"If you want to give people the freedom to explore and learn, you can't be looking over their shoulders every couple of minutes,'' he said.

Marietta College has hired a computer consultant to look at security in the wake of the discovery. But officials say the college has no plans to begin monitoring computer use.

The cache of images found on the college's system is the largest collection of Internet child pornography discovered, authorities say.

It dwarfs anything the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has looked into since its computer crimes unit was established in 1997, said Bret Crow, a spokesman for the Ohio attorney general's office.

Police said the Marietta official and a friend at Ohio University were the only people with access to a secret Marietta College server, known as Caleb.

Limiting access to a server isn't that uncommon, said Andy Abbott, assistant vice president for information technology at Capital. At the same time, that kind of privacy and computer savvy can cause problems.

"The better they are, the more likely they won't be found,'' Abbott said.

For example, only two people have access to Capital's mail server.

"If the two people who have access wanted to take over half of that machine and store other things on it, there would be no way of learning about that unless some technical glitch occurred,'' he said.

Officials said the larger the university is, the harder it is to keep tabs on the system.

At Ohio State University, 1.5 million e- mails zip through cyberspace daily and 35,000 computers are used by more than 65,000 students, faculty members and staff members.

"We have many thousands of servers,'' said Mike Veres, deputy chief information officer and executive director of the university's office of information technology. "It would be difficult to look at each of those.''

In addition to the university's central system, each college has its own computer system, Veres said.

Marietta is not unique.

Earlier this month, the FBI accused a computer programmer at the University of California at Davis of sending child pornography to a 13-year-old boy.

The same day, a Northwestern Michigan College student pleaded not guilty to charges that he downloaded pictures of naked boys from the Internet.

A former professor and a student at the University of Louisiana at Monroe were convicted in November of transmitting child pornography over the Internet. They face possible five-year prison sentences and $250,000 fines.

Most colleges have policies concerning computer use.

"In an educational environment, it is a little hard to say sometimes what is educational or not,'' said John Lateulere, director of information technology at Otterbein College in Westerville.

Downloading music from the Internet, he said, is not educational.

Lateulere said the most common problem is that users exceed their personal storage limit.

Officials say snooping into computer files runs against principles of academic freedom.

Lateulere said that when he has poked around, he hasn't found anything that interesting.

"I find old pictures of girlfriends, pictures of cars, families. If it's a male student, I find some nude girls.

"It's an educational institution, and our mission is education. You need to do what's appropriate, not to come down with a 5-pound sledgehammer.''

mlaffert@dispatch.com

---