Shaq Helped on Botched Bust
This is an embarrassing mistake for the Blue Ridge Thunder. No, the Blue Ridge Thunder is not a minor league hockey team in Virginia. It is the monicker of the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office Task Force against Online Child Predators.
Shaquille Oneal of the Miami Heat moonlights as a Bedford County Deputy during the off season. He tagged along during a September 23rd bust of a country farmer’s home for a kiddie porn raid. Turned out that they had the wrong house.
From the AP here:
Deputy Shaq’ part of botched Va. raid
ORLANDO, Fla. – Shaquille O’Neal was present during a botched child pornography raid last month while working in Virginia as a reserve sheriff’s deputy, a Bedford County Sheriff’s officer said.
The Miami Heat center, who pursues his interest in law enforcement during the offseason, denied Tuesday taking part in serving the search warrant at the wrong house Sept. 23. However, Bedford County Sheriff’s Lt. Michael Harmony confirmed to The Associated Press that O’Neal was there.
The 13-time All-Star has expressed an interest in becoming a Bedford deputy or sheriff somewhere else after his NBA career ends. He also works as a firearms-certified reserve police officer in Miami Beach.
A.J. Nuckols, who said his family has filed formal complaints, wrote in a letter published in the Chatham Star-Tribune that the raid at his Gretna, Va., home scared him and his family “beyond description.”
Authorities later realized they had been given the wrong IP address, which Internet service providers can use to identify users, leading them to the wrong physical address, Harmony said. It was the Internet company’s mistake, he said.
He said the sheriff’s office conducted a successful search on the correct home Friday, finding child pornography and securing a statement from a man saying he knowingly distributed it.
The Bedford Sheriff’s Office enlisted O’Neal to be the spokesman and public face of its anti-child pornography and child predator campaign, making him a deputy last year.
Harmony said O’Neal had been on previous search warrant executions.
The farmer was none too pleased at having his door kicked in and his family frightened because of this mistake. From the Bedford Bulletin here:
According to a letter which appears in this week’s opinion section, Aubrey J. Nuckols, a Pittsylvania County farmer, is extremely upset that sheriff’s deputies searched his home looking for child pornography on Sept. 23.
The search was based on incorrect information provided to investigators by the Internet service provider involved with the case, Harmony said. “I regret they gave us wrong information,” he said. “But I’m not going to say I’m sorry for doing my job.”
“I am a local farmer, my wife teaches elementary school, our three children are well-adjusted, ‘A’ students,” Nuckols said at the beginning of his letter. “We go to church, work hard and pay our bills and taxes. We are law-abiding, responsible members of society, we have never had reason to fear the law.”
“Men ran at me, dropped into shooting position, double-handed semi-automatic pistols at me, and made me put my hands against my truck. I was held at gunpoint, searched, taunted and led into the house. I had no idea what this was about. I was scared beyond description. I feared there had been a murder and I was a suspect,” he wrote.
“My wife and I were interrogated about Internet crime. We are not avid computer users, we do not even e-mail. We knew nothing of what they were speaking,” Nuckols added in his letter.
This story garnered national attention because of Shaq. But what piqued my attention is the simple mistake of getting the wrong IP address, and the astonishing fact that only an IP address is needed as probable cause to enter someone’s premises to conduct a search.
And Blue Ridge Thunder claims to be a big deal too. Their website is here. On it, they claim:
You may have seen the national headlines: the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office was one of only 10 law enforcement agencies in America to receive a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Dept. of Justice to continue its high-tech war against the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. The other nine agencies awarded this grant are some of the largest in the country, (e.g. Dallas, Sacramento, Broward County, FL, etc.), whereas the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office is among the smallest. US Dept. of Justice official Ron Laney said of the BCSO, “It’s very unusual for a department that small to be as aggressive as they are and to do what they’ve done.”
If there is a middle of nowhere in Virginia, Bedford is it. Now, I’m not advocating that they should lose any federal funding. Far from it. Any organization that fights internet crime is okay with me, especially if they are successful. But they made a huge rookie mistake that the other organizations would not likely do- They got the wrong IP.
Now, they are blaming it on the ISP, but the bust is ultimately theirs, and they needed to ensure that they were working with the correct IP address. When I first started in information security, I quickly learned to rarely trust any IP address that was quoted to me either verbally or written down on scrap paper. It is way too easy to transpose numbers or get them wrong. I prefer all of my investigations to take place using IP addresses that have been faithfully copied and pasted from log files. Blue Ridge Thunder has now learned that lesson well, at the expense of the sanctity of an innocent family’s home.
Rather than being defiant and saying “I’m not going to say I’m sorry for doing my job,” BRT needs to show more tact, contrition, and prove that such simple mistakes will not recur. Otherwise, they will face a loss of funding.
