ASU police are no longer investigating 16 child-porn cases reported last month and will not hand the cases over to federal officials, an ASU detective said Thursday.
"There's [nothing] to follow-up on," said Det. Terry Lewis after a computer-crime panel discussion held Thursday morning in the Computing Commons.
The e-mails received by athletic-department staff members at the Intercollegiate Athletics building Oct. 17-19 contained four thumbnail-sized images of child pornography, Lewis said.
Lewis, who investigates computer crimes for the ASU Department of Public Safety, said he discovered the e-mails were a type of spam that has been seen before by police across the country.
Lewis said the e-mails have all been traced back to a number of other countries, many of which do not have computer-crime laws or extradition agreements with the United States.
Thursday's panel discussion covered how law-enforcement agencies would respond to a variety of technology-related crimes, as well as how ASU's system administrators should handle potential tech crimes.
Panelists told the audience to report possible child-porn cases directly to police.
Lewis said employees who receive e-mails containing what may be child pornography should not forward them to supervisors because possession of the images is illegal.
"Even if you have child porn in [temporary] files, that is considered to be illegal," he said. "Child pornography is just like drugs -- we're not going to let you keep it."
Lewis said all the images in the recent child-porn cases had been deleted from e-mail servers.
Reach the reporter at brian.indrelunas@asu.edu.
