Cops gave a malware-laden drive to a lawyer for whistleblowers
Arkansas' Fort Smith Police Department may be responsible for some particularly sinister digital tricks, if you ask one lawyer. An attorney representing whistleblowers in a police corruption scandal says that the Department sent him a hard drive laden with trojans when he requested documents. Given that the rogue files were found in a folder specific to the court order (that is, they were added after the court order was issued), it looks as if someone in the FSPD wanted to hijack the lawyer's computer and sabotage his case. And that's not the only suspicious behavior, either -- the city reportedly deleted email accounts and messages that it knew it was supposed to keep.
The Department hasn't commented on the findings so far. We've reached out for answers, and we'll let you know if there's more to share. However, it's safe to say that any culpable officers will have more problems than they bargained for. The lawyer wants the city held in contempt, and he's planning to sue over the attempted infection. If there's any meat to the claims, law enforcement would have had a much easier time of things if it had settled the original case.
[Image credit: Alamy]
