More on the case of Riccardo Calixte

Yesterday I wrote about the case of Riccardo Calixte whose computer was seized by Boston College Police. I still think that the best that they could probably do is to draw on the line of thought in the Lori Drew case, and that the argument for going after Calixte was weak. That said, if you read the warrant, they have Calixte dead to rights on the charge that he was responsible for faking a profile of his roommate on a gay dating website and sending out a mass email about it. The officer involved did his homework, and has plenty of network information connecting Calixte to the incident. The officer also had noted that the roommate had been a "trusted source of information" in the past, and that the college's Director of Security for IT is backing up the claim that Calixte signed up his roommate on the site.

That said, there is a credibility gab that the roommate has created for himself. A lot of the accusations seem to be baseless so far, not the least of which is the allegation that he changed grades. Most well-funded universities use systems like PeopleSoft products to manage that process, and the police should have been able to get audit logs showing when grades were changed and then compare those times with the activity of the professors whose classes were affected. The "probable cause" in the warrant comes down to the following allegations:

1. Changing grades
2. Making his roomate look gay
3. Appear with strange laptops that the roommate could not identify
4. Crashing his roommate's PC
5. Jailbreaking phones
6. Copyright infringement

So far, there is no reported evidence that I have come across that proves point #1. Point #2 may be a crime, but based on the warrant, the necessity of seizing Calixte's property was minimal since the police had a mountain of evidence from the university network logs, and they were getting access to Calixte's webmail accounts from Google and Yahoo. The roommate has no proof that anything illegal was ahppening with point #3, as there are many good reasons why Calixte would have laptops that the roommate had never seen, given Calixte's job and reputation. Point #4 is simply reaching, as there was no evidence presented in the warrant other than the paranoia of the roommate (which, while understandable, was still just paranoia if the warrant was any indication). Point #5 is not illegal either unless the jailbreaking is done specifically to enable copyright infringement. Jailbreaking phones normally implies that the goal is to run 3rd party software, not copyright infringement. Point #6 would, at the most, be a federal issue, and the US Attorney's office for Calixte's district has far too many fish to fry to deal with a student whose whopping federal offense is the bootlegging of 200 movies for private enjoyment.

The seizure of all of his devices, disks, etc. was, on balance, still overkill, especially in light of how much information they had from the university's network logs. It still looks like it was little more than a fishing expedition on the part of the campus police.