Information Age Nightmare
Child porn raid results from good neighborly deed: Man shares Wi-Fi password,draws cops
A neighborly deed turned into an Information Age nightmare after an area man shared his Wi-Fi password with a friend . . . who promptly used the free access to download child pornography.
New Caney resident Nickolas Markeson found area law enforcement at his door Wednesday morning with authorities tracing illicit underage material to his Internet account.
In the course of interviewing the flustered original suspect, investigators established that he'd give his Wi-Fi password to a next door neighbor.
“When they woke me up, my mind is going, what’s going on right now,” Markeson told KHOU Ch. 11. “There are cops all over the place, swarming my place. I’m like, 'What did I do?' ”
Mark Seals, a captain with Montgomery County Constable's Office Precinct 4, tells CultureMap that in the course of interviewing the flustered original suspect, investigators discovered that he'd give his Wi-Fi password to a next door neighbor. The story checked out.
"We established that Markeson's connection was secure and that nobody had hacked into it," Seals says. "He actually hadn't had a laptop for several months."
Next door neighbor and (former) friend Jeremy Edwards gave written consent to allow deputies into his home. In the end, half a dozen pornographic pictures of children between the ages of four to six were found on his computer. Edwards was taken to a Conroe country jail, where he is being held on a $90,000 bond on three counts of child pornography.
"If you give out your password, you need to be cognizant of what people are doing with it," Seals says. "Otherwise, you'll never know when the police could be paying you a visit."
Watch the full KHOU report:
