Trout appears in court in council spyware case

Tony Trout, a Republican council official in Greenville County, South Carolina, has been arrested by FBI agents investigating spyware found on the council chairman’s PC, and made his first court appearance.

According to media reports, councilman Trout contends that he was acting within his rights when he installed the spyware on county administrator Joe Kernell’s computer because the Kernell was his employee. He denies accessing county-owned computers belonging to County Council Chairman Butch Kirven.

“I was able to access what is going on because he (Kernell) is an employee of mine,” Trout was reported as saying after his house was raided by the FBI in June and computer equipment was seized. “As a county councilman, I have the right to ascertain what he is doing…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.