Tag Archive for: Counts

Florida Man Faces 75 Child-Porn Counts in Hacking Probe After Computer Seizure

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Brandon Diaz Florida Man Child Porn
Florida registered nurse Brandon Diaz faces 75 child-pornography counts.
Polk County Sheriff’s Office
Florida Man Brandon Diaz Child Porn Charges
Brandon Diaz was charged with over 85 counts in a hacking bust that also led to child-pornography charges, police said. Above, an unidentified man is pictured in handcuffs in this undated file photo.
ronstik/Getty

A Florida man is facing 86 criminal charges, accused of possessing child pornography while being investigated for hacking the computers of his former workplace, police said.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said during a Thursday press conference that 38-year-old Brandon James Diaz, a registered nurse who worked at Polk State College as an emergency medical services program coordinator, was found to possess 75 “very graphic” images of children and infants being sexually assaulted after detectives seized his computer as part of their hacking investigation.

“While we’re doing our due diligence, looking through his computer pursuant to a search warrant, voila! We find child porn,” Judd said.

“If he hadn’t messed up by hacking the computers, we at least at this moment in time wouldn’t have known he was accessing child porn,” he added.

The sheriff said that although Diaz was a married father of four, an investigation did not uncover any evidence that his own children had been abused. A $386,000 bond was set for Diaz during his initial court appearance on Monday.

Public records indicate that Diaz was booked into Polk County Jail on Friday. He was charged with 75 felony counts of enhanced possession of child pornography, using a two-way device to commit a felony and 10 counts of accessing a computer without authorization.

After Diaz’s employer Lakeland Regional Health fired him earlier this year for failing a drug test, he turned his anger toward Polk State College under the belief that two instructors at the college were responsible for the loss of his job, police said.

“… He hacked into computers at Polk State College, and specifically he hacked at least two instructors’ computers for which he blames all of his problems,” Judd said.

The college notified the sheriff’s office after discovering that its network had been hacked. Judd said an instructor noticed that Diaz had changed a…

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Violence breaks out as Congress counts electoral votes: live updates

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A joint session of Congress to oversee the counting of electoral votes in the 2020 general election descended into chaos when throngs of violent Trump-supporting insurrectionists breached the US Capitol building.

The rioters, who had attended a “March for Trump” rally to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential race, stormed the building, forcing the House and Senate to abruptly go into recess and for lawmakers, Hill staffers, and reporters to shelter in their offices before being evacuated.

Pence, lawmakers, and members of the press were evacuated into an undisclosed location after the rioters entered the House and Senate chambers. It triggering a dramatic armed standoff at the doors of the House chamber. 

In response to the violence, Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser ordered a 6 p.m. curfew in the District of Columbia. The D.C. National Guard and Virginia National Guard are being deployed to the scene. 

The event in most years is simply a procedural formality. Biden won 306 Electoral College votes compared to 232 for Trump. But outgoing President Donald Trump and his allies spent the prior two months attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. 

Today, that effort erupted into violence never before seen in modern US history. 

Dozens of House lawmakers and 13 Republican Senators, as of Wednesday, had planned on raising objections to at least one and possibly multiple slates of electors under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which permits lawmakers to raise objections to specific states’ electors.

Outside, meanwhile, several thousand Trump supporters gathered and then stormed the building.

Scroll down for live coverage.

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Twitter “bot” purge causes outcry from trollerati as follower counts fall

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A number of “alt-right,” pro-Trump, and self-described conservative social media personalities awoke this morning to find that they had a lot fewer followers on Twitter than they had the night before. The apparent cause was the latest culling by Twitter of accounts that in some way violated the company’s terms of service, a Twitter spokesperson told Ars, including “behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse.” The sweep has some on the right accusing Twitter of politically motivated censorship.

“Twitter’s tools are apolitical, and we enforce our rules without political bias,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Ars. The accounts were targeted as part of “our ongoing work in safety,” the spokesperson said. “We also take action on any accounts we find that violate our terms of service, including asking account owners to confirm a phone number so we can confirm a human is behind it. That’s why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks. This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone.”

In response to the sudden culling of accounts, starting at around 1am Eastern Time today, some aligned with “alt-right” figures such as white supremacist Richard Spencer started the #TwitterLockOut and #TwitterPurge hashtags, and some resurfaced Project Veritas’ accusations that Twitter employees were deliberately censoring “right-leaning” accounts. Spencer himself claimed to have lost over 1,000 followers over a few hours overnight; Janna “Deplorable” Wilkinson, who had her own account suspended in October, claimed to have lost 3,500 followers.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Americans value online privacy but voters do not care when it counts

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The rush by Republicans in Congress to kill still-pending Obama-era rules that would put curbs on the ability of ISPs to collect and sell our personal Internet usage data has been met with howls of protest from privacy advocates and citizens.

And the outrage is no wonder, as the idea of our browsing habits and histories being hawked to the highest bidder is an affront to any understanding of personal privacy rights.

It’s also an affront to public opinion, as a Pew Research Center Survey last year shows:

  • 93% of adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is important; 74% feel this is “very important,” while 19% say it is “somewhat important.”
  • 90% say that controlling what information is collected about them is important—65% think it is “very important” and 25% say it is “somewhat important.”

Despite such overwhelming public sentiment, Republican majorities in both the House and Senate have voted in recent days to scuttle the privacy protections authorized last October by the Federal Communications Commission, protections that were scheduled to take effect later this year. That FCC measure passed on a 3-2 party-line vote, with then-Chairman Tom Wheeler and two fellow Democratic appointees in the majority, and current Chairman Ajit Pai and fellow Republican Michael O’Reilly opposed.

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Network World Paul McNamara