Officer Charged With Illegal Computer Use

MADISON - Town police on Tuesday arrested one of their own, charging him with illegally using police computers to track down information on various women, including his ex-wife and current and former girlfriends.

Officer Bernard Durgin Jr., a seven-year veteran of the Madison Police Department, was also suspended without pay on Tuesday by Chief Paul Jakubson for neglect of duty, conduct unbecoming an officer and other violations of department policy related to a separate incident.
Durgin already had been suspended with pay since early August, after a confrontation between New Haven police and a member of the Poor Boyz motorcycle club outside a bar. Durgin, according to police, was wearing the East Haven motorcycle club's colors and represented himself as an on-duty Madison police officer. Jakubson said Durgin had called in sick that day.




Officer Bernard Durgin Jr.





As a result of the investigation into the New Haven incident, Jakubson placed him on unpaid leave. Both the internal and criminal investigations into that incident are ongoing.

Durgin, a resident of East Haven, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

In the computer-use case, Durgin was released Tuesday on $75,000 bail for an appearance in Superior Court in New Haven Oct. 16, police said.

That charge involves Durgin's alleged efforts to obtain private and personal information about women he met while working part-time as a security guard at Yale-New Haven Hospital. According to the arrest affidavit, Durgin made 34 separate inquiries about 17 people between Feb. 17, 2006, and July 14, 2007, using the computer in his cruiser to access the networks police use to obtain information about suspects.

In most cases the people were women with whom he had no more than a passing acquaintance. He also used the system to find out about his current and past girlfriends, his ex-wife and her family, a former fiancée and her partners and family, police said.

Police spoke to the human resources department and the head of protective services at Yale-New Haven and interviewed several of the women.

Durgin's arrest on a felony charge of computer crime, which covers a wide range of possible activities, came about as the result of the investigation into the August incident. Durgin had called a fellow officer, investigators said, and asked if he would look up information on someone using his cruiser's computer.

The officer pretended his computer was not working. A week earlier, he said, "Durgin had told me that his fiancée left him for another guy and that [Durgin] was going to try and find out who that guy was," according to the arrest affidavit. Police began looking into other inquiries Durgin had made.

Police use various information systems, including the Connecticut On-Line Law Enforcement Communications Teleprocessing system, the National Crime Information Center and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. It is a clear violation of policy - and illegal - for police to use those systems for personal reasons.

On Aug. 5 about 12:30 a.m., on a night when he had called in sick for the midnight to 8 a.m. shift, Durgin showed up outside a Temple Street bar in New Haven after an altercation between a suspect and New Haven police, according to Jakubson, who referred to the incident in a suspension letter given to Durgin Tuesday. Durgin reportedly showed his badge and told officers at the scene he was on the job with Madison police. Instead of assisting the other officers, Durgin interceded "on behalf of a convicted felon who had been violently resisting arrest," the chief wrote.

Durgin's actions "caused the investigating officer in the incident to relate deep concern about the display of motorcycle gang `colors'" by Madison police, Jakubson wrote.

Needy schools a priority in computer rollout

ALL secondary schools will be able to apply for commonwealth grants from March next year to boost their computer resources, but the most needy schools will be given priority.

Federal cabinet yesterday signed off on Labor's ambitious $1billion computer initiative, the first election pledge to be approved by the Rudd cabinet.

Deputy Prime Minister and federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said that under the program every secondary student in Years 9 to 12 would have access to computers and other information technology resources.

Ms Gillard said a million Australian students would benefit from the technology fund, the first step in the Rudd Government's education revolution.

"World-class ICT in schools will make a real and sustainable change in the way teaching and learning are delivered in classrooms across Australia," she said in a statement.

The fund will allow each school to apply for up to $1 million, depending on enrolments and existing technology. Funding can be used to buy computers, digital projectors, interactive whiteboards and other equipment.

"The Rudd Government will work with the school systems in every state and territory to identify schools that have the highest priority in terms of need, and assist them in making applications to the fund. Over four years, all secondary schools will have access to the fund," she said.

Ms Gillard said visits to secondary schools by Labor MPs since the election had revealed a desperate need for an increase in computer and internet access.

"Unfortunately, they found too many Australian schools don't have adequate internet access, some don't have internet access at all," Ms Gillard said after the cabinet meeting in Brisbane yesterday.

"Too many schools don't have enough computers for senior secondary students."

Ms Gillard said she was concerned that technology aids such as interactive whiteboards and digital projectors were missing from many schools.

"Today, cabinet has agreed that we will implement our $1billion fund to bring computers to Years 9 to 12 students in each Australian secondary school," she said.

An audit will be launched to establish existing resources in schools, and the Government will begin discussions with state and territory governments and independent and Catholic schools to ensure the rollout of funding.

"In the course of this financial year, there will be expenditure of $100 million in grants to schools to assist them with getting computers, internet access and other information technology aids," Ms Gillard said.

Computer security systems vulnerable to new attacks

New York: A new category of computer attacks may compromise memory systems touted as foolproof, particularly in laptops, a recent study has found.

The study, by researchers at Princeton, found these attacks overcome "disc encryption," a broad set of security measures meant to protect information stored in a computer's permanent memory.

The researchers cracked widely-used technologies like Microsoft's BitLocker, Apple's FileVault and Linux's dm-crypt.

They described the attacks in a paper and video published on the web.

The team said these attacks are likely to break through other disc encryption systems because these technologies have similar structural features.

The attack is particularly effective against computers that are turned on but are locked, such as laptops in "sleep" or hibernation mode.

One effective countermeasure is to turn a computer off entirely, though in some cases even this does not guarantee protection.

"We've broken disc encryption products exactly when they seem to be most important these days: laptops that contain sensitive corporate data or personal information about business customers," said Alex Halderman of Princeton's computer science department.

Halderman's Princeton collaborators included graduate students Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, Joseph Calandrino, Ariel Feldman and Professor Edward Felten of the Centre for Information Technology Policy.

The findings demonstrate risks associated with recent high-profile thefts, including a Veterans Administration computer containing information on 26 million veterans and a University of California, Berkeley laptop that contained information on more than 1,00,000 graduate students and others, said Felten.

The team wrote programmes that gained access to essential encryption information automatically after cutting power to machines and rebooting them.

"This method is extremely resistant to countermeasures that defensive programmes on the original computer might try to take," Halderman said.