A Texas woman was free on bail Wednesday on charges that she offered her 3-year-old son up for adoption on Craigslist to ease her anxiety.

The woman, Stephanie Christine Redus, of Huffman, near Houston, was freed Tuesday after she posted $1,000 bond on a state charge of advertising the placement of a child, a misdemeanor. She is scheduled to be arraigned in Houston next week.

No one answered the doorbell when a reporter went to Redus' home in Huffman this week, NBC station KPRC of Houston reported.

Court records say Redus, 29, posted the ad, which has been removed from Craigslist, on May 1. It read:

Hi. I'm trying to adopt out my 3yr old son. I'm not in a good place in my life and don't feel like I can care for him properly but I don't know where to start. If you or know anyone who is interested in caring for him please let me know. I'm a single mom and can't do this. Thanks, Desperate.

Redus got several responses, some of which she replied to, the complaint says. One of them was from Deon Thomas — who turned out to be a Houston police officer.

The complaint alleges that Redus went so far as to ask one prospective parent for a picture and information about his other children. But Redus told investigators she never really intended to give up her son up, saying she was off her depression and anxiety medications at the time.

The reason she was off the medications?

She's pregnant again, according to court records.

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Thermal-imaging devices have been used to seek out pot-growing operations, map Martian geology — and now, to watch the second suspect in this week's Boston Marathon bombings as he was holed up in his last hiding place.

Authorities said a helicopter equipped with a thermal imager spotted the heat signature of a person inside a tarp-covered boat, sitting in a backyard in Watertown, Mass. Police used the sensor after an area resident reported seeing a trail of blood leading to the boat — and catching a glimpse of a blood-covered body inside. The thermal readings confirmed that there was indeed someone under the tarp, and that the person was still alive.

"Our helicopter had actually detected the subject in the boat," Col. Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police told reporters. "We have what's called a FLIR — a forward-looking infrared device — on that helicopter. It picked up the heat signature of the individual, even though he was underneath what appeared to be the 'shrink wrap' or cover on the boat itself. There was movement from that point on. The helicopter was able to direct the tactical teams over to that area."

There was an exchange of gunfire when a SWAT team approached the boat, so police had to back off. The helicopter continued to track the body's movements inside the boat. Eventually, the tactical team moved in and took the wounded bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, into custody.

How thermal imaging works
Thermal imagers can spot the signature of a heat source inside a house, a vehicle, or in this case, a vessel. Walls may stop visible-light wavelengths, but the heat can still pass through. Variations in heat emissions can be picked up by camera chips designed to be sensitive to the infrared part of the spectrum. The signature would be particularly noticeable when there's a significant difference between the background temperature and the temperature of the heat source.

Police have long used such devices to find out whether marijuana was being grown inside a house using heat lamps. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of thermal scans to monitor heat sources inside a person's home should be considered a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, and thus would require a warrant. The court said such scans could reveal private details about the homeowner, including the time of night when "the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath."

Thermal imagers have been taken to other worlds — for instance, aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, which analyzes variations in the composition of the Red Planet's surface using the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.

Immigration authorities have used thermal scanners to look for the signs of fever among arriving passengers, and researchers have been experimenting with them as a lie-detector technique.

In 2009, FBI investigators used thermal imagers to search for graves in the neighborhood where Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell lived. That may well have been the most notorious case where the technology was brought to bear. Until now.

Update for 5:43 p.m. ET April 20: The comments on this story might suggest I've shed more heat than light on the role played by thermal imaging. There's no question about it: The crucial break in the case came when the boat owner, David Henneberry, saw the blood-covered body in the boat, called police and then got out of the way. Police used thermal imagery to track the suspect's movements inside the boat, and help guide the SWAT team's response.

In most cases, thermal imagers can detect only the heat signature emanating from a wall or a vehicle. For example, you could tell whether there were heat lamps (or a lady taking a bath) in a particular room by noticing the high level of heat emitted by the room's walls. But you generally wouldn't see the outline of the heat lamps themselves (or the lady, for that matter). In the Cleveland serial-killer case, thermal imaging was used to look for the signs of freshly turned soil rather than for the cold, dead bodies themselves.

The Watertown case is special: The tarp was so thin that police could indeed see Tsarnaev's outline, as graphically illustrated by these pictures.

More about thermal imaging:

• PhotoBlog: More thermal images of suspect
• Infrared holography identifies fire victims
• Like Pinocchio, your nose shows when you lie
• New tech gives soldiers Predator-style vision

Slideshow: Search for suspects in Boston Marathon bombings

Jared Wickerham / Getty Images

Cheers filled the streets after a Boston Marathon bombing suspect was captured alive but wounded Friday night — following a daylong manhunt that shut down the city.

Launch slideshow

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Fri Apr 19, 2013 9:14 PM EDT

Michael Francis Mcelroy / Zuma Press

Aaron Swartz, a noted Internet freedom ''hacktivist,'' died Friday at his apartment. He was 26. He was due to begin a federal trial next month on charges he downloaded millions of academic papers and meant to distribute them for free.

In the 24 hours since Aaron Swartz, a prodigy programmer turned Internet folk hero, hanged himself in his New York apartment, his family and a close friend and mentor have not only expressed devastation – they have been angry.

“Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family wrote in a statement. “It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

Swartz, who helped to create RSS at age 14, was indicted in 2011 on charges alleging he improperly downloaded more than four million articles from JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals. Swartz argued for transparency -- JSTOR costs more than $50,000 for an annual university subscription -- but court records show that the federal government believed he had, among other felonies, committed wire fraud and computer fraud and unlawfully obtained information from a protected computer.

JSTOR ultimately backed Swartz. But his family’s statement was unflinchingly critical of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Cambridge, Mass., university where Swartz had allegedly registered a ghost computer to download the records:

Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.

JSTOR paid tribute to Swartz in a statement on its front page, saying it regretted being drawn into the case because the organization's "mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge."

"At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content," the statement said. "To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."  

Swartz’s family described him as entirely committed to social justice. He helped to defeat an Internet censorship bill and “he used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place.”

Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his New York apartment on Friday, his family confirmed. 

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who described himself as a mentor and close friend to Swartz, took to Tumblr to express his own raw emotions. He wrote that Swartz's actions may not have been ethical, but the government's response was overly aggressive:

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office told Reuters that officials wanted to respect the family's privacy and did "not feel it is appropriate to comment on the case at this time." Reuters and The Associated Press reported that they could not reach MIT for comment.

Lessig described Swartz as brilliant, funny, “a soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think?”

He concluded his piece: “We need to get beyond the ‘I’m right so I’m right to nuke you’ ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.”

Related: NYT: Aaron Swartz, precocious programmer and Internet activist, dies at 26

Updated: 3 pm ET 

An Apple store employee refused to sell an iPad to an Iranian American customer, citing company policy that aims to comply with U.S. sanctions on trade with Iran, WSBTV in Atlanta reported this week. The customer left empty-handed, in tears, and complained of discrimination to the reporter.

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The case is more complicated than that, legal experts say. The incident and others like it highlight a dilemma created by the U.S. trade embargo against Iran — and other sanctioned countries, including Cuba, Syria and North Korea — which makes even the humblest sales associate responsible for enforcing the embargo’s provisions. 

Those employees — as well as the store and the company — could be hit with civil and criminal penalties if they sell products to customers who they have reason to believe will export them to Iran in violation of the embargo, legal experts say. But if the same clerk refuses service on the basis of the customer’s language or ethnic background, they may run afoul of civil rights laws.

"If I walked in and told them I want to buy this and send it to a friend in Iran or Cuba, they can’t sell it to me," said Clif Burns, an export control attorney at Bryan Cave, a law firm in Washington, D.C. "If they had that information, they were absolutely within their rights" to refuse the sale.

"The tricky question is if you hear someone speaking Farsi (also called Persian) … then the issue is: Should you be more alert to the possibility that they might export the item to Iran? And by being more alert in that situation are you in violation of civil rights statutes? It’s not any easy question."

Under U.S. sanctions against Iran — dating to 1987 and expanded several times since — exports to the Islamic republic are illegal, with exceptions for items in a few limited categories, such as books, movies, agricultural goods, medicine and medical supplies. These sanctions are enforced by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control and the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. Sanctions are not intended to affect the sale of goods used in the United States.

"There is absolutely no U.S. policy or law that would prohibit Apple or any other company from selling its products in the United States to anyone intending to use the product in the United States, including Iranians and Persian-speakers," said Pooja Jhunjhunwala, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department.

Click here for an overview of the sanctions from the Treasury Department

But the government does not spell out how an individual working in a retail store should judge whether a customer intends to send or carry a product to a country under sanctions, and technically the onus could fall on store clerks. And Burns says anyone in the chain who touches a transaction that violates of the sanctions can be held liable if they knew or should have known that the item was being shipped to a sanctioned country.

"The standard applies to the retail clerk, shipping manager, corporate headquarters," said Burns.

Individuals can be fined up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison for export sanctions violations. Corporations can be hit with a $1 million criminal penalty, he said. "In theory there’s no intent (to commit a crime) requirement. They will look at whether you knew or should have known."

In reality, there are only a few reported cases of retailers denying individual sales on this basis, all involving Iranian Americans and Apple stores.

Apple: Silence
Apple did not initially respond to requests for comment.

After this report published, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling contacted msnbc.com with the following statement:

"Our retail stores are proud to serve customers from around the world, of every ethnicity. Our store teams are multilingual and diversity is an important part of our culture. We don't discriminate against anyone."

In the case of Sahar Sabet, from the WSBTV report, who was refused purchase of an iPad at an Apple store in Alpharetta, Ga., some of the facts are unclear. She said the clerk refused to sell her an iPad after hearing her speak Farsi with her uncle. The iPad was intended as a gift for her cousin in Iran, according to the report, but it was unclear how or if the clerk was aware of that.

Calls to Sabet were not returned. A call to the Apple store at North Pointe Mall in Alpharetta was referred to corporate headquarters.

A second Iranian American interviewed in the report also said he was barred from purchasing something at an Apple store in the Atlanta area when he was helping an Iranian student buy an iPhone. Zack Jafarzadeh said he and the friend were speaking Farsi when the sales rep denied their purchase. "We never talked about him going back to Iran or anything like that," Jafarzadeh said, according to the report.

The Council on American Islamic Relations, a non-profit rights group, says it was in discussions with Apple to revise its policy even before this week's news story, because of a complaint from an Iranian American who was refused a purchase in an Apple store in northern California in March.

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In that case, a sales associate refused to sell him anything — even things he was buying for his own use — after he mentioned that he intended to send an iPod Nano to Iran as a gift for a relative, Rachel Roberts, civil rights coordinator for CAIR, told msnbc.com.

"He claims that when he asked the associate how he could get the items he needed, she told him to go to a different Apple store if he wanted service and to not reveal that he is Iranian," Roberts said — adding that he found that answer to be degrading and inconsistent. Ultimately the store made an informal apology and sold him items for his personal use, Roberts said.

"The concern … is how store employees balance their obligations under embargo law and civil rights laws," said Zahra Billoo, an attorney for CAIR in San Francisco, adding that the U.S. government should clarify how retail stores should comply. The other concern, she said, is "how employees are being trained to implement this."

Apple's policy regarding sanctions, published on its website, is closely tailored to the language of the U.S. trade law itself.

The National Iranian American Council, a nonprofit organization, said the Apple stores were "overzealously enforcing the sanctions." "In singling out Persian-speakers for interrogation about how they intend to use Apple products, these Apple employees are clearly engaging in racial profiling," the group said in a statement.

But the group provided a fact sheet on sanctions and conceded that "it also appears to be the case that many Iranian Americans do not understand the implications of how U.S. sanctions on Iran affect them."

The very notion that sales clerks could have to make decisions on purchases under the sanctions raised red flags for some observers.

"The responsibility for enforcement should fall on border patrol, law enforcement, the U.S. post office, customs -- government agencies," said Nahal Iravani-Sani, president of the Iranian American Bar Association. As it is, the law "promotes dishonesty and invites profiling. When you come down to it, it's absurd."

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Sarah Butrymowicz

At the Edison School in Yoder, Colo., administrators hope to provide a technological base for students to compete in college and the workplace.

YODER, Colo.—Surrounded by farmland and ranches, Colorado’s Edison School sits off an unpaved road, with tumbleweeds blowing across its dirt parking lot. As recently as a few years ago, many families relied on solar or wind power instead of electricity; today, many still haul home their water from wells. Principal Rachel Paul estimates that 25 to 30 percent of her students don’t have Internet access at home.

Yet at Edison — where about three-quarters of the 120 K-12 students are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch — there are as many computers as there are students. On one recent day, Paul Frank’s fourth- and fifth-graders started off by learning about latitude and longitude on Google Maps and ended sprawled around the classroom on laptops, putting together presentations about the Midwest. While one student searched for photos of famous people born in Minnesota and Wisconsin, another used Google to find out Nebraska’s annual rainfall.

Frank and administrators in the two-school district, located an hour east of Colorado Springs in Yoder, Colo., have big technological ambitions. They want to infuse technology into every bit of the curriculum, from using iPods to help elementary students practice reading to mandating that high-school seniors take a computer-science course to graduate.

It’s not about improving test scores — last year, every single one of Edison’s elementary students was deemed proficient on the state’s math exam. Instead, the goal is to expand the students’ horizons and prepare them for college and the workplace, where technological literacy will be assumed.

“Kids don’t have access to that kind of stuff at home,” Frank said. “It’s the future. They need to know how to do this.”

Rural schools have long been leaders in distance-learning and online education — to offer a full slate of courses to their students, they’ve had to be. In fact, Edison has a fully online school that enrolls about 100 other students in the district. But when it comes to technology inside traditional classrooms, the small sizes — and budgets — of rural schools present unique hurdles.

More from the Hechinger report:

• The teacher you've never met: Inside the world of online learning
• Promise of the flipped classroom eludes poorer school districts
• Teaching software flooding into New Jersey classrooms

Some states, fearing a divide between rural and urban communities, have developed statewide initiatives to provide technology to rural schools. Maine, for instance, gives every student a laptop, and Alabama requires all school districts to offer Advanced Placement courses through distance-learning technology, where students video-conference with teachers.

But in many places, the onus is on the already-strained staff of the schools to acquire and then use things like computers and iPads, leading to pockets of innovation, like that in Edison. Although it leaves a line in its budget for technology upkeep, Edison has supplemented its tech experimentation with a $10,000 grant from the Denver-based Morgridge Family Foundation.

In districts facing shrinking budgets and consolidation, technology could be rural schools’ saving grace, said Bob Wise, a former governor of West Virginia who now serves as president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., that has studied the challenges facing rural schools. “We’re encouraging every district to develop a systematic strategy for employing technology,” he said. “My guess is you will see a number of rural schools actually saved and renewed as learning centers.”

Rural America lags behind the rest of the country in Internet usage, making rural schools an important center of connectivity in the communities. In 2010, for instance, 57 percent of rural households had broadband Internet access, compared to 72 percent in urban areas, according to a November 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Expanding horizons
In Yoder, Frank tries an experiment with his students every few months. He gives them a homework assignment that must be submitted by email. When he started doing this a few years ago, he’d be lucky to get five responses. Most recently, all but three of his 21 students emailed him something. In part, he said, the improvement is a result of work the phone company has done in the area, making it easier for homes to get broadband Internet access.

Still, teachers can’t count on students being able to go online to complete assignments and have to be flexible about staying after school so students can work on the computers. “Getting the Internet into the homes is going to become our number one issue,” said Deirdre Binkley-Jones, Edison’s high school math and computer-science teacher. “We’re still dependent on traditional methods.”

While technology doesn’t necessarily lead to better student performance, it can expand students’ horizons beyond just preparing them for college or the workforce.

Related: One district's near-perfect record on state exams

“The Internet can give them library resources that they might otherwise not have,” said Aimee Howley, senior associate dean in the College of Education at Ohio University who studies technology integration in rural schools. Technology can also be used for simulations of things “you just can’t do on site. You can’t create a chemistry lab, dissect a whole bunch of animals.”

Edison has used distance-learning equipment to take elementary students on a field trip to NASA and to teach them about the Civil War. Frank’s classroom frequently practices writing and communication skills by “blogging” on class discussion boards about stories they’ve read. High-school students might use Rosetta Stone to learn Spanish or watch free videos from the Khan Academy to master math concepts. Before receiving their diplomas, all students learn the basic coding behind computer games.

Howley has found that rural teachers are open to using technology in their classrooms, but she cautioned that doing so in rural schools typically requires innovative faculty to take on extra responsibilities. Even then, schools often don’t have the money to buy computers or tablets and offer teachers corresponding training.

Teachers not only need to know how to use new gadgets, but also must be prepared to use the tools in ways that improve student learning, Howley said. Although Edison’s grant money has paid for some teacher training, it’s not enough to cover everything.

Frank, the self-proclaimed technology “guinea pig,” has learned by doing. When he first got an interactive Smartboard, for instance, he and his students learned together how do to things like upload textbooks and record attendance. Now, he’s got the other elementary teachers using Smartboards and even iPod  Touches to monitor reading fluency, but the laptops rarely leave his classroom.

“I use [the Smartboard] for a year and figure out all the bugs,” Frank said. “It’s been really exciting to see the other elementary teachers buying in to using the technology.”

Tech comes with IT problems
But enthusiastic as he is about the potential of digital learning, Frank isn’t an IT expert — and it’s rare for rural schools to have one. “You get this much technology and you need a lot of tech support, and we don’t have it,” said Paul, the principal. “Then we’re just frustrated.”

Edison  joins with other schools in the area to share an IT person, who comes once a week and mainly tends to the school’s servers. Without extra help, though, Edison may have reached its limits. “At this point, getting more technology would be a disaster,” Binkley-Jones said.

Although many staff members say students are enthusiastic and take to technology easily, Binkley-Jones finds herself teaching basic computer skills — how to open or save Word documents, for example — to high-school students.

As the school moves forward with its five-year technology plan, which will include expanding distance-learning and more training for teachers, the elementary staff will need to address that.

“Even five years ago, we would have been happy with kids graduating knowing how to write a Word doc,” she said. “The focus in technology is moving away from [just] being able to use a computer.”

This story, “Bridging the digital divide in America’s rural schools,” was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Viewing child pornography online isn't a crime, the New York Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work computer was found to have stored more than a hundred illegal images in its Web cache.

M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The court dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and one of the dozens of counts of possession of child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Kent — who said at his sentencing that he "abhorred" child pornography and argued that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer — was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009.

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The decision rests on whether accessing and viewing something on the Internet is the same as possessing it, and whether possessing it means you had to procure it. In essence, the court said no to the first question and yes to the second.

"Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote for a majority of four of the six judges. 

"Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Ciparick wrote. "To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."

Read the full appeals court ruling (.pdf)

In other words, "the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York," Judge Victoria A. Graffeo wrote in one of two concurring opinions that agreed with the result but not with the majority's reasoning.

Kent's attorney, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, told msnbc.com that he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to his client, so he couldn't discuss what they would do next. But he agreed with Graffeo that the ruling means that "in New York, there is no crime" in simply viewing child pornography. 

All of the judges agreed that child pornography is an abomination, but they disagreed whether it was necessary to "criminalize all use of child pornography to the maximum extent possible," as Ciparick wrote in the majority opinion. The majority said that was up to the Legislature, not the courts, to decide. 

Judge throws out child porn charge against Washington man

The technical details revolve around copies of deleted files that remained in the cache of Kent's Web browser, which were the basis of the two counts that were dismissed. They were discovered, along with other materials, during a virus scan that Kent had requested because his computer was running slowly.

To demonstrate possession of the images in the cache, "the defendant's conduct must exceed mere viewing," Ciparick wrote, adding that "the mere existence of an image automatically stored in a cache" isn't enough.

Furthermore, the prosecution failed to prove that Kent even knew his Web browser had a cache in the first place, writing, "A defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists."

Dershowitz said the "real problem here is that legislation is not keeping up with technology," arguing that federal courts also haven't fully addressed the legal standing of images stored only in a browser cache.

The federal statute outlawing possession of child pornography — 18 USC 2252A — doesn't mention browser caches. The few cases that have examined the issue at the federal level — notably a 2002 federal appeals case involving a Utah man and a 2006 federal appeals case involving a visitor to Las Vegas — generally conclude that cached images alone can establish possession if the defendant knows about the browser's caching function.

Both courts noted that it was hypothetically possible for the defendants to be innocent if they were ignorant of the cache function. 

"Those statutes are probably not quite as incomprehensible, but they are anything but clear," Dershowitz said.

Kent's convictions on the other counts rested on other evidence, including a folder on his machine that stored about 13,000 saved images of girls whom investigators estimated to be 8 or 9 years old and four messages to an unidentified third party discussing a research project into the regulation of child pornography.

"I don't even think I can mail the disk to you, or anyone else, without committing a separate crime. So I'll probably just go ahead and wipe them," one of the messages said.

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iPhones, Nintendos and Kindles — devices synonymous with "fun" — are taking a new role in the classroom, thanks to a new trend in education called Bring Your Own Technology – or BYOT.

BYOT programs — like the one at Georgia’s Coal Mountain Elementary School — encourage students to bring in their own personal mobile technology — including iPads, Kindle Fires, netbooks — even gaming devices — to use during class.

“It’s really a simple thing,” says Tim Clark, District Technology Specialist for Forsyth County School District. “Kids have technology in their pockets and [are] taking them to school, but trying to hide them from teachers and from their parents. What we’re trying to do is have the kids take them out of their pockets and use [them] for instruction.”

Technology can be incorporated into lessons in various ways — serving as a research tool, providing access to educational games and allowing students to create multimedia presentations. Clark says students who don’t have their own devices, or opt not to bring them, can use district-owned laptops and electronic resources.

He says the program encourages participation and interaction because “it’s not a solitary type of activity where every child is buried in their device … it increases collaboration. It increases communication with the teacher. The teacher sees immediate feedback from the student’s work and the students are able to overcome other difficulties.”

Tracey Abercrombie, a fifth grade teacher at Coal Mountain, has been impressed with the program in general and praises the difference it has made with her special education students. “I’ve got one [student] who has trouble getting [information],” Abercrombie says. “He can get the ideas formed but there’s a bit of difficulty getting them out verbally. There’s something about typing it, having it come up on that screen. All of a sudden the barrier is gone.”

Clark says incorporating students’ personal devices in the classroom not only enhances learning, but teaches responsibility. “All of this is putting the responsibility on the shoulders of the students and [we’re] also trying to teach them and guide them to use their devices more effectively…not only taking care of their device and being careful not to drop it, but also wanting to make sure they know where it is at all times so it’s not stolen. [Using] it appropriately so they don’t post inappropriate pictures, so they don’t text inappropriate message to each other.”

Those involved with the program say students aren’t the only ones with something to gain from BYOT. For example, Clark says teachers “can learn alongside their students instead of having to determine all of the ways that their students should learn … they get to ask questions and discover all these new uses of the devices themselves."

Abercrombie agrees and has seen her teaching style change since the program began.

“I thought my role was give them all the knowledge that I’ve got about something and use that textbook and my knowledge together," Abercrombie said. "Now I realize that’s not my job at all. My job is to facilitate them. My job is to point them in the right direction, give them the tools they need and — wow — they can do so much more.”

Before launching BYOT in Forsyth County Schools, teachers and administrators explained the program’s structure and ground rules to parents and students. At first, Kara Laurie, who has two children at Coal Mountain Elementary, was apprehensive about allowing her kids to bring their devices to school. She says her initial reaction was that it “was a horrible idea … I had the normal parent concerns, you know, are things going to get broken? Are they going to get lost or stolen? And what about those kids that don’t have technology that they could take to school?”

But as the program got underway, she saw “how much the kids were able to do with it in the classroom. I found that it was a phenomenal idea.”

“We had to sit down as a class, as a team, and really define our rules because [the students are] used to using it any way at home,” Abercrombie says. “They’re used to … putting everything on Facebook, so we had to have a little talk about … different ways to use these devices in school.”

Amy Anderson, another parent of two, was comforted by the district’s approach to the program. Her fourth grader uses a netbook in class, while her first grader has a Nintendo 3DS. “The administration "set some very clear ground rules at the beginning and we had to sign an agreement as parents and they had to sign an agreement as students that they would only stay on,” Anderson recalls. The students "have to be on the school network which has all of the filters. If they don’t abide by those, if they use them when they are not supposed to, if they use them incorrectly, then they lose that privilege of being able to bring it in.”

In 2010, seven schools in Forsyth County School District began BYOT programs. This year, all 35 of the district’s schools are participating. While it is a relatively new idea, BYOT already exists in schools across the country, in states like Texas, Minnesota and Ohio.

Clark says the district has received positive feedback, along with interest in the program.

“I’m receiving messages from other districts that would like to come and see the implementation of bring your own technology in their schools … we recently held a tour of BYOT in our district … we had over 100 visitors on that tour. They were not only other districts, but also vendors wanting to understand how it’s impacting [the students].”

As far as student reaction, Clark says “the students love it…[they] have their devices, they’re learning how to use them in a more responsible way, and they’re being critical thinkers and very creative with their devices in ways that they never would have used them on their own.”

The lawyer for George Zimmerman, the Florida man charged in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has launched an all-out social media blitz seeking to tell Zimmerman's side of the story, msnbc.com's Suzanne Choney reports.

The Mark O'Mara Law Group confirmed that the website at the heart of the effort, titled George Zimmerman Legal Case, is its production, NBC station WESH-TV of Orlando reported. There are also Twitter and Facebook accounts.

"We understand that it is unusual for a legal defense to maintain a social media presence on behalf of a defendant, but we also acknowledge that this is a very unusual case," O'Mara says on the website.

But Stephen A. Saltzburg, former chairman of the American Bar Association's criminal justice section, told msnbc.com that "generally speaking, lawyers are not supposed to be making public statements that could compromise a fair trial." 

Read the full story on Technolog

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Rock Center

It was a crime of staggering sophistication by computer hackers who figured out a new way to get rich. 

In a case that became known as Trident Breach, the hackers stole $70 million from the payroll accounts of some 400 American companies and organizations – all from the safety of their homes in Eastern Europe.

“I think it’s the perfect definition of organized crime,” said FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry.  “It’s very well organized.  It’s very well-structured.  It requires many people operating in unison, in a collaborative way.”

At the beginning of 2008, the group of hackers compromised hundreds of thousands of Americans computers using a malicious computer “Trojan” bug called ZeuS. When computer users clicked on certain attachments and e-mail links, ZeuS infected their computers.

ZeuS is designed to zero in on users’ bank information. For example, when a user visits a bank website, ZeuS knows; and since it is a key logger program, it records the user's keystrokes as he or she enters usernames and passwords. It then sends that information by instant text message to waiting hackers, who then have access to the compromised accounts. 

Henry is one of the country’s top cybercrime fighters. He says Americans are increasingly prone to “virtual gangs” prying on people’s personal data stored on their computers.

“We have organized groups that have developed internationally where groups of people have come together, each with a very specific capability and skill, who have never met each other in the physical world, but they meet online in a collaborative way,” he said. 

Henry says that the security breaches have the potential to be more than just criminal acts. They could pose a national security risk.

“There are foreign intelligence services that are aggressively pursuing American technology.  They’re aggressively pursuing American strategy.  They’re looking at the American military, the American consumer, the American corporations, research and development organizations, laboratories, educational facilities,” Henry said.  “The amount and value of data that is on the network is at an unprecedented level.  Our adversaries know that that data is there.  It’s information and information is valuable."

Money Mules Help Hackers Get $70 Million

In the Trident Breach case, the hackers were able to get their hands on the cash by turning people into money mules.  

Beginning in late 2008, they created some 3000 money mules, many of them unwitting Americans, by luring them into work-at-home jobs requiring "employees" to open bank accounts. 

“The first money mule activity we started seeing was people who would receive an email saying, ‘You can get a work-at-home job’ and the work-at-home job would be something like transaction manager for an international company,” said Prof. Gary Warner of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who teaches a program that combines computer forensics and justice studies. 

Warner is also a member of the little-known FBI-affiliated group called InfraGard, comprising some 50,000 members across the United States who keep an eagle eye on U.S . critical infrastructure: power plants, water supply, security and financial services…and the internet. Warner said the hackers transferred cash from business payroll-type "ACH" (Automated Clearing House) accounts to the mule accounts and the mules sent the cash by Western Union or MoneyGram to Eastern Europe, taking eight or 10 percent commission.

Warner said that when the banks started to get wise to the hackers’ work-at-home schemes, and set up roadblocks, the hackers then recruited dozens of students, mainly from southern Russia, to be a new breed of money mule. 

“It’s still a little gray whether the students who were recruited knew that they were being recruited for crime,” Warner said.

The hackers obtained fake passports for the students, U.S. J1 work/study visas, and packed their new mules off to the United States. The students opened multiple bank accounts, mainly in the New York area, where they received stolen cash. Then, just as the mules before them had, they wired the cash back to their bosses. 

University Professor Helps FBI Crack Cybercrime Case

So stealthy was their ZeuS operation, neither the hackers nor the mules had counted on getting caught. But, using complex data mining techniques, Prof. Warner established links between ZeuS-infected computers and traced the origins of the mass infection to Ukraine; and many of the hackers and their mules were caught.

But 18 mules remained at large in the United States. And after the FBI published a wanted poster of the students, Warner’s students began using what they’d learned in class to track the criminals.

“So the students used the techniques we had taught them during investigating online crime [class] and began crawling Facebook pages and VKontakte, which is a Russian version similar to Facebook and were able to quickly identify profile pages of almost all of them, at-large mules,” Warner said.

Warner’s students discovered one of the students-turned-mules had brazenly posted pictures of herself with a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Another had posted a picture of himself dressed in an “I ❤ New York” top, arms aloft, celebrating in a bar with his friends – some of whom turned out to be other money mules. And another was pictured standing next to the new car he has presumably just bought.  

Though all the mules – except one – were arrested, that does not necessarily mean the end of the money mules, says Gary Warner.

“ZeuS infections are rampant still today.  There are probably millions of computers in the United States that have active Zeus on their machines right now,” Warner said.

Editor’s Note: Click here to watch Richard Engel’s full report, 'Easy Money,' from NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.