14 DAY TRIAL // A former TV news anchor admitted to having hacked the email account of one of his coworkers. Lawrence Mendte, who used to be a TV presenter for KYW-TV, a television station in Philadelphia, has been accused of "intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization and obtaining information," a felony that can send him behind bars for five years.
By using keystroke logging, Mendte managed to intercept all the personal emails of his former colleague, co-anchor Alycia Lane. For approximately two years (March 2006 - May 2008), the man, who was fired from the TV station shortly after being accused of the felony, was able to find out basically anything about Lane, a situation of which his co-presenter was completely unwary. In 2008 alone, Mendte is suspected to have accessed at least 537 personal messages, for which illegal action he used both his home and work computer, as well as a computer at his vacation home.
Besides private correspondence between Lane and her friends and family, the former TV presenter also got a hold of that between her and her lawyer. Details about Lane's involvement in two litigations - one civil and one criminal - were then disclosed to a reporter from a newspaper in Philadelphia. It is claimed that one of the trials Lane is involved in, which is related to an assault on a police officer who tried to stop her from taking pictures at the place of an accident, was the only cause for her dismissal.
The newspaper that first reported on Lane's assault charges and on the fact that she had been fired because of the subsequent lawsuit was, in fact, the one with to which Mendte took the information. Although he has already pleaded guilty, the former TV anchor accused of computer crime is currently being prosecuted. If found guilty, the maximum penalty for accessing private and, in some cases, attorney-client confidential information, is of five years in prison.