Posted on 12/06/2005 6:06:10 PM PST by Serious Capitalist
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- A nationally known motivational speaker is facing child pornography charges. Police in Arkansas arrested Michael Fortino -- a man who lives in Pittsburgh, but travels the world. Fortino's Web site has been shut down, but a cached version of it showcases him as a motivational speaker. He was apparently in Arkansas to give one of those speeches when he was arrested.
"For every one time somebody does something wrong, it takes four rights just to break even," said Fortino on a clip on his Web site. Now, police have charged him with three counts of possessing child pornography. Police said Fortino took his computer to a Best Buy store, in Fayetteville, Ark., to be repaired. Store technicians found several pictures of children engaged in sexual acts on the computer hard drive, officials said. Former President Bill Clinton once praised Fortino, and President George W. Bush has called him a role model for future generations. Fortino and his wife live in a 9,000-square-foot home on the North Side. It's known as the "mayor's mansion" because it was built back in the 1890s for the man who was then the mayor of what was called Allegheny City -- now the North Side. Neighbors and friends said they were surprised to learn of the charges against him. "That's a big shock. You would have never known that about the guy," said neighbor Sonny Johnson. Fortino has been released on bond, and will be arraigned later this month. Channel 4 Action News tried to contact Fortino, but he did not return calls.
Yes, it is true that merely 'deleting' a file does not make it truly go away. The space is merely marked as available to be overwritten. The file is still there and completely readable, until it is actually overwritten with something else.
In fact... to be really, truly gone, those blocks on the hard drive must be overwritten multiple times.
There are good freeware programs out there that will do an NSA-quality job of fully deleting blocks. One is called "Eraser", and it is googlable. Eraser, and programs like it, will erase "free space" on the disk by writing random data and erasing it up to 27 or so times.
At that point... the stuff is gone.
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Very sad. I attended a talk he gave for the Allegheny County Bar Association some years ago and he is quite the speaker.
It would have been easier if he hadn't confessed.
I don't think it's standard in Windows. You'll have to get an Internet security software package, i.e. Norton, etc. and use the "clean sweep" or similar function. These 'wipe' funtions not only erase but write and rewrite garbage over the data so the data cannot be recovered. I learned about this technique from my crypto days in the military.
I don't know much about this stuff, but in general it's my impression that if there are not hundreds of such pictures, chances are they got on the hard drive from spam.
We all get sex oriented spam. It takes very little to click the wrong website and get cookies stuck on your machine that tells the email spammers to target you with spam of that sort.
The email is getting deceptive too, saying things like Re: Income Tax Refund. In about two months a lot of folks will be clicking that email and presto, the embedded pic gets into your cache.
Anyway, if this guy had hundreds then fine, he should have been nailed. If 10 pics were scattered in cache, then he may be entirely innocent.
>
the pervert is hardly innocent.
"Fortino met with police again Wednesday. He admitted that he viewed child pornography about twice a week and saved images of child pornography on his computer. "
>
This changes matters entirely. It also gives rise to what insanity was present in the defense attorney to allow a statement of this kind.
Yes... the confession sorta changes things a bit.
I was a juror on an arson case... for which the defense had an elaborate set of expert witnesses, and tried to muddy the water with all of the prosecution witnesses... tried to impune the career of the firefighter that investigated the case... yadda yadda yadda... none of which was all that convincing.
But the prosecutor had a confession, in writing... and it was utterly uncontested by the defense.
Made our deliberation fairly simple, really. :-)
Choosing a speaker is a very important decision.
Here are five reasons to choose Fortino...
1. Fortino is Experienced: Michael Fortino has been speaking for more than 15 years
2. Fortino is Prepared: Michael Fortino spends 150 hours on research prior to every speech
3. Fortino is Successful: Michael Fortino has built a multi-million dollar speaking/training firm
4. Fortino is Explosive: Michael Fortino receives a Standing Ovation at nearly every speech
5. Fortino is Celebrated: Michael Fortino will make you look good
.Your attendees will rave
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:-6SZdrEDM5MJ:www.fortino.com/+Michael+Fortino&hl=en
Michael Vincent Fortino, 45, of Pittsburgh faces three counts of viewing and possessing sexually explicit material involving a child.
Fortino is president and founder of The Center for Lifestyle Management, which has offices in Pittsburgh and San Francisco. He is said to be an expert in time, stress, balance and lifestyle management.
So, perhaps this is part of his 'stress, balance and lifestyle' management.
I headed up a project in the early nineties to provide an disk declassification program for the department of defense. At the time I worked for a fortune 500 company that made disk drives.
The problem we were trying to solve was that secure organizations could not get "exchange" mechanisms, because they had to send in the bad one that had classified data on it.
The software was eventually certified by the department of defense; however it was largely unsuccessful because of the time it took to declassify a mech. We were dealing with 150 MB scsi drives and it would take greater than 40 hours.
We also had access to the drive firmware, and part of the operation was doing a "write with offset". A write with offset miss positioned the heads by a quarter of a track on each side to over write residue fields that would be left over (that could still be read) during a normal write.
True, our stuff was approved for top secrete, but it's mot clear to me that any software you could buy to erase a drive today would work. At least to the standards we were held to.
In those days machs cost was over $1000, and it didn't pay to declassify a 150 MB mech. The best thing to do is to take a hammer to the machs platters.
For your reasoning, and others... my corporate policy on defunct computers is that we will not allow any computer to be disposed with a hard drive intact.
We pull the drives and collect them in a box. About annually we call in one of those shredder trucks that that handle metal objects... and we toss them in.
There is no substitute.
"Wow, someone should attempt to bottle Michael Fortino's energy" -Opray Winfrey [and her kids!]
Yeah, except for the Chinaman in the shredder company grabbing the harddrives. :)
What chinaman? We toss them in ourselves.
Motivational speaker turns out to be a total jerk. Whodda thunk?
The one I know has photos of undressed little girls over the bed he and wifey sleep in. The kids are their beautiful adopted daughters. Extremely bizarre!
The evil chinaman hiding inside the shredder!
"You can buy software that will write and re-write sectors to make it all but impossible to recover the earlier data."
I was thinking that you could just defragment the disk but the programs and other associated data wouldn't be moved.
"The one I know has photos of undressed little girls over the bed he and wifey sleep in. The kids are their beautiful adopted daughters. Extremely bizarre!"
That motivational speaker is positively rancid! Sorry, but I wouldn't want directions to a gas station from him/her. Generally speaking they all have their quirks but that....? Bleeeeeeeeech!
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