ISU police arrest man on child porn charges

Iowa State University police have arrested a man from the state of Washington for possession of child porn, after tracing images to a computer he used this week. Gene Deisinger, commander of the special operations unit of ISU police, says the 19-year-old was in Ames attending a national conference.On July 29 campus police became aware there was a computer at ISU that was sharing files for anyone on the University computer network, files reported to contain images of child pornography. Deisinger says investigators requested and got a search warrant. They were able to locate the computer, look through it, interview the owner — and after that, arrested the owner on two charges of sexual exploitation of a minor. The computer was not one that belonged to Iowa State. This was a conference participant using his own computer and a wireless connection, linked into the ISU computer network. The campus cops say they traced the traffic in the illegal images to a connection in the memorial union, and the to computer of 19-year-old Timothy Rand Wallace. Deisinger says ISU police have a “very sophisticated computer forensics team” he says is quite able to trace computer usage paths. He says it wasn’t necessary to do much since the suspect was putting things on a computer bulletin board, the equivalent of a “chalk board,” Deisinger says, that anyone passing by could view them, nothing that took hacking, just putting up things that could be viewed by anyone who knew how. Police say Wallace was on campus as part of a scouting event, the Order of the Arrow conference. Around 6500 people are in Ames for the conference, which organizers refer to as scouting’s national honor society.