Police say no evidence city computers used for dating website

Published 10:32 pm Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Dalton Police Department officials say they were able to determine that department computers and city work time were not used to access a dating website.

In August, hackers released a list of some 36 million email addresses used to sign up for AshleyMadison.com, a dating website for, among other things, married people who are looking to cheat on their spouses. A Dalton Police Department email address was on that list.

Police department officials say they closed their investigation after finding that no work resources were used to access the site.

“We were able to determine that not only did the person in question not use city computers or city Internet to access that website, but also that nobody had ever used the city’s Internet to access that website,” said department spokesman Bruce Frazier in an email. “The city’s email or Internet servers were never in contact with that site. Because the city’s servers, equipment, nor city time were used, the issue was closed. We will not be releasing information about the identity of the person in question as it’s a personnel matter.”

Police Chief Jason Parker said they were not able to determine whether the employee the email address belonged to had used it to sign up for the account or whether the email address had been stolen.

According to press reports at the time of the leak, the website did not verify email addresses, and security experts warned that an email address did not necessarily indicate the genuine user of an account.

Parker said the employee told investigators he “did not believe he had ever used a city email in association with that website or anything like that.”

“As best we can tell, even if it was an employee of the department, they were doing this on their own time and using their own resources, so we are talking about something that is a private issue,” Parker said.

Mayor Dennis Mock said he was satisfied with the results of the investigation.

“I’m happy to find that no city time, nor city computers, were used,” he said.

While Mock said he’s glad to know that city resources were not misused, he is also happy that recent upgrades to the city’s information technology should reduce any employee’s incentive to misuse it.

“We can track what websites they go to, how much bandwidth they use, and our IT department has sent out a memo alerting everyone to those capabilities,” he said.