An Illinois watchdog group is asking for a criminal investigation into allegations that someone has attempted to delete computer files that show pornography on fire department computers in the city of Country Club Hills.
On its website, the Edgar County Watchdogs (ECW) group says a forensic expert was called upon to image the hard drives after the firefighters were accused of viewing pornography on city computers. The expert said he had found "thousands" of such searches, but also something perhaps more disconcerting, the Edgar County Watchdogs said.
"I also let [the judge in the case] know that it appears that they’ve wiped the hard drives, reloaded them, and I gave her three dates in which that was completely done, and that’s a complete wipe, but the problem was, once the computers were hooked back up, the server pushed down profiles that had information of the previous Web history and the searching of pornography," the watchdog group quotes the forensic expert as saying in a statement.
Edgar County Watchdogs cites the expert as saying the attempt to delete the files began less than two weeks after the court ordered the imaging, on August 31.
At the time of the original discovery last summer, the watchdog organization expressed outrage at the complexity of accountability in the case, pointing out that local taxpayers unknowingly had been forced to be on the hook for the time, energy and money spent on correcting inappropriate behavior of public officials.
Alerts Sign-up