Computer expert rebuts mayor's contention that images were not deliberately downloaded

Photos and documents from a gay Web site that are on Spokane, Wash., mayor James E. West's City Hall computer were put there deliberately, a computer expert said. The affidavit from Josiah P. Roloff, of Global CompuSearch LLC, rebutted West's contention that much of the material was automatically placed on his computer while he surfed Web sites such as Gay.com.

In an affidavit filed Friday in Spokane County superior court, Roloff said an index of West's computer files provided to The Spokesman-Review newspaper included a history file showing 56 visits to the Gay.com site. "The history file shows heavy usage and visits to the Gay.com site by the computer user," Roloff's affidavit said, including some visits requiring the user to enter a user name and password.
The Gay.com site requires that personal profiles be "consciously selected" by the computer user, Roloff said. "The Gay.com site will not display personal profiles and the images included on the profiles absent the computer user's affirmative choice to view a certain profile," according to the affidavit.

Roloff is working with lawyers for The Spokesman-Review newspaper, which since May 6 has been seeking access to the records on West's taxpayer-provided computer as part of its investigation into whether he abused his office by offering young gay men public appointments and jobs in exchange for sex.

Roloff's affidavit appeared to conflict with assertions by West's lawyers and a city attorney that approximately 1,800 photos and documents, many of young gay men, were inadvertently downloaded to West's computer.

West faces a December 6 recall battle over abuse of office allegations. West, a longtime Republican state senator and opponent of gay rights, has acknowledged that he was a closeted homosexual but has denied breaking any laws. In a high-profile public records battle, he is trying to keep the public from seeing some of the files on his laptop computer, saying in a sworn affidavit that they contain material that would be "highly offensive" to citizens.

After hearing oral arguments on October 12, Adams County superior court judge Richard Miller is expected to rule later this month whether West's computer files should be released.

Lawyers for West said Friday that the mayor has already admitted he visited Gay.com. "This appears to be part of an ongoing effort by The Spokesman-Review to keep the West story alive until the recall election occurs," West's lawyers said. The lawyers also wondered whether Roloff's company was the "forensic entity" the newspaper hired to identify West's activities on the gay Web site. "This raises the issue as to Mr. Roloff's disinterest and objectivity," said lawyers Bill Etter, Susan Troppmann, and Carl Oreskovich in a written statement.

Newspaper attorney Duane Swinton said Roloff was not the computer expert the newspaper hired to pose as a teenage boy during online chats that eventually snared West. Roloff based his affidavit on his familiarity from other computer forensic cases with Gay.com, the source of many of the disputed files on West's computer.

He disputed the conclusions in a September 22 letter from a city lawyer to Spokesman-Review attorney Duane Swinton about how the images got on West's city computer.

In that letter Milton Rowland said he'd discussed West's computer with the city's information systems director and that the documents "were almost certainly placed on Mayor West's computer without his knowledge, and likely without his having even visited all the Web pages represented."

That's not accurate, Roloff said in his affidavit. If images from Gay.com are contained in West's Internet cache file, this means the computer user "affirmatively viewed the images by clicking on profiles displayed by Gay.com," he said.

Troppmann told Judge Miller that West didn't deliberately download material from gay Web sites to his city computer. "These are Internet cache files—information on your computer you don't put there," Troppmann said at the October 12 hearing in Ritzville. "There are hundreds of people's identities at stake here—some of them are local." (AP)