NASA headquarters office raided in child porn probe
April 03, 2006
Federal investigators seized a laptop computer, a hard drive, CDs, and other material from the office of James R. Robinson, 42, a program executive with NASA's In-Space Propulsion, Mission and Systems Management Division.
The NASA inspector general's office served a search warrant on the agency headquarters office of Robinson on Wednesday.
The search warrant said Robinson's computer had been used to send movies of child pornography and used a Yahoo! mail account to correspond about pictures.
Using the alias "Jim Saron," Robinson allegedly responded to six undercover agents' inquiries about trading digital child pornography files, according to the search warrant affidavit by Special Agent Paul R. Danley.
Robinson was snared last year in an online operation run by postal inspectors. In correspondence with the undercover agents, he described his preferences as, "probably priority right now would be boy-on-boy or boy-with-Man, and girl-on-girl. But really, anything is of interest.," reports The Smoking Gun Web site.
Robinson, who has not been arrested, wrote that he was "Not a cop," and explained that he amassed his child porn collection via downloads "via Kazaa and usegroups."
In his management job, Robinson runs programs on robotic probes sent around the solar system.
To locate Robinson through his alias, agents contacted Yahoo, but it is unclear whether the company gave information that led to Robinson.
In December, after being contacted by postal agents, NASA's inspector general opened its own investigation. An internal NASA search located the IP address from which nude photos of children had been viewed. It pointed Robinson, court documents show.
The probe included a review of reports from the space agency's Web activity monitoring application. The NASA system, dubbed Web ContExt, used a "skin tone filtering system" to determine that Robinson was viewing child porn from his office computer.
The software picked up 189 images of child sexual activity on Robinson's work computer. This was enough probable cause for a search warrant to be issued.
Although the investigation reportedly began last year, Robinson looked at the illegal electronic images as recently as January, the court records show.
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