Last week, New York State Police searched the Albany-area home of a high-ranking officer with New York State Police. Investigators seized electronic devices from Lt. Colonel Jared Duffy’s house, including a laptop computer. The FBI has now taken over the investigation as Duffy remains suspended without pay.
The Times Union reported the search, and an investigation came after a tip from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. But, as the Times Union’s Brendan Lyons tells WAMC’s Lucas Willard, Duffy’s brother has raised questions about the case and the seized laptop at the center of the probe.
Read the full transcript below:
Brendan Lyons: We have since spoken to Jared Duffy's brother about this case, and he contends that it wasn't hidden; it was just in a junk drawer. There's been some back and forth on that, and the origin of this investigation was a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and it had to do with sexually explicit images involving minors. So, Jared Duffy has not been arrested. He was questioned and underwent a polygraph examination last week. He was initially questioned at the Schodack Barracks, which is in Rensselaer County. They brought him there to apparently try to keep this thing under wraps. That backfired on them when they cleared out the barracks. Told people they needed to leave unless they were part of that case. And it immediately drew attention and got information. You know, we were tipped off about what was going on.
Lucas Willard: Now, your latest article has some information provided by Jared Duffy's brother, who claims that the X account, former Twitter account, at the center of this investigation, was actually the subject of a hack.
Brendan Lyons: That's correct. He did some research on his own. He's an attorney in Buffalo. He's not a criminal attorney, he's a civil attorney who works on property tax cases and those sorts of things, but he had shared with us this information, and he also knew, of course, the identity of the Twitter or X account that Jared Duffy used to have, which he created in 2009. That account was shut down. You can't find it anymore online. And it had been set up in 2009 with a Yahoo email address. That sometime in September, according to the brother, Jared Duffy lost control of that email account, apparently due to an alleged hack, and then subsequently lost control of that unused or long unused Twitter account, which carried his name, and that's what the brother's point was: that account was alleged to have circulated links or information that could lead to sexually explicit images of children, and when those posts went up, they were subsequently retweeted by other accounts that appeared to be either made-up accounts or were hacked accounts themselves, and those all were subsequently shut down by Twitter. And the brother's point was: why would a lieutenant colonel in the State Police tweet information like this on an account that carries his own name and his hometown? And it's a fair point, but the question now is: of the electronic devices that they took from his house back on October 20th, what was on those devices, if anything? And that's now apparently the subject, or you know…the FBI is going through those devices it seems, to do a forensic analysis of them.
Lucas Willard: Right. So, just because an account, and we don't know the outcome of this, but if the account was hacked and did retweet something after the lieutenant colonel lost control of it, that information or links or content may not actually be archived on this old laptop that's in a drunk drawer somewhere.
Brendan Lyons: Right, yeah, if anything. And initially, my understanding is, they found nothing on the devices through an initial scan of them because if they had, of course, there probably would have been an arrest by now.
Lucas Willard: And I think this just raises a lot of questions about internet security and personal data and sharing. What's going through your head as you're working on this story, when we see information like this and updates like this come across?
Brendan Lyons: What's going through my head is: why did the state police not involve the FBI from the beginning? Or a prosecutor? It doesn't appear that they consulted with the U.S. attorney or the Albany County District Attorney prior to executing or obtaining that search warrant. And the FBI, including the Albany field office, is said to have some of the foremost experts on tracking IP addresses and penetrating allegations. Oftentimes with people accused of these types of activities, their defense becomes, "Oh, my account must have been hacked. That wasn't me." And the FBI is an expert at breaking down those defenses, and showing that no, this actually was your device, and it was traced to an IP address that is unique to you. I'm not saying that that's happened here. But for the State Police, it seems that they arguably mishandled this investigation by not involving some of those other agencies because normally with the feds, especially the FBI and their Internet Crimes Task Force, when they get to someone's house to execute a search warrant, they already have the evidence they need to also charge that person.
Lucas Willard: So, I guess, what are you expecting to happen next here? If you had a crystal ball, what would it tell you?
Brendan Lyons: I think, well…two things: either, one - they do find evidence that results in a criminal charge, or two - if they don't, because of the public statements made by the FBI and the state police in this case, and because of the publicly executed search warrant, and I say publicly executed because neighbors were watching them go in and out of Jared Duffy's residence off Osborne Road when it happened, I think they would owe it to this lieutenant colonel to clear his name if in fact this turns out to be that he had a hacked social media account, and no other evidence of any sexually explicit images of children were found on any devices or on any accounts that he used. It does seem that they would owe him sort of a public apology, or at least to say that we found no evidence of wrongdoing here.
