59°
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
7 Day Forecast
Follow our weather team on social media

State investigators say former parish attorney illegally accessed emails

Related Story

BATON ROUGE - State Police released more information about the issuance of a misdemeanor summons to former parish attorney Mary Roper Wednesday.

State Police said cyber-analysts assigned to the Louisiana State Police Fusion Center investigated a complaint about suspicious email activity originating from the East Baton Rouge Parish Attorney's Office in October 2014.  In a news release late Wednesday, troopers said the complaint suggested  unauthorized emails were sent between illegally-accessed email accounts belonging to several parish attorneys.  The email accounts were accessed more than 40 times and investigators determined the illegal access originated from a home IP address belonging to Roper, State Police said.

"Evidence obtained further indicated Roper's use of her personally owned computer to illegally access the EBR Parish Attorney's email system through a proxy service designed to mask the user's actions and location," a spokesperson for the department added.

A misdemeanor summons is an order to appear in court but does not require being booked into jail.

Roper was removed as the East Baton Rouge Parish Attorney in a vote by the Metro Council in September 2014.  Council members believed Roper improperly shared information about a parish computer program with her husband. They claimed the proprietary information in the program should not have been shared with him, because he could have profited off the parish-developed program. Roper maintained no wrongdoing, and said she was getting his help to file a copyright application.

The summons was issued for intellectual property, computer tampering and online impersonation charges.

No one answered the door at Roper's home Thursday and phone calls went unreturned.

Also read: Hacking allegations stall lawsuit involving Roper

**************

Follow the publisher of this post on Twitter: @treyschmaltz

News

Desktop News

Click to open Continuous News in a sidebar that updates in real-time.
Radar
7 Days