Michael Alan Crooker has filed a suit in the
Massachusetts Supreme Court, according to Information Week, which
claims $200,000 in damages from Microsoft because the company
failed to keep his private data secure.
Crooker said that when he bought his computer
in 2002 he was told it would keep his information secure, and he
set browser Internet Explorer to delete his browsing history after
five days.
Crooker was raided in 2004 by the US Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in an investigation into the sale of
an air gun fitted with a silencer. The court papers say that the
agents found "laboratory devices, apparent IEDs, fermenting castor
beans, chemicals and chemical equipment appropriate for the
processing of castor beans into ricin, and what appeared to be
ricin and ricin precursors in various stages of development,
indicating that Crooker was successfully manufacturing ricin".
They confiscated his computer, which was sent
for analysis to forensic computing experts at the FBI. That
analysis revealed sexually explicit videos of Crooker and his
girlfriend and cached pornographic internet pages.
Crooker's suit says that Microsoft claimed
that it would keep his data secure and did not. Its failures, he
says, have caused him great embarrassment and he is now seeking the
$200,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.
