Concord
An “acknowledgment and waiver of rights” filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Concord and signed by the 49-year-old Favor indicates that he intends to plead guilty to one felony count of possession of child pornography at a hearing on Thursday.
Though she declined to comment on the specifics of the plea hearing, Dena Blanco, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said that Favor’s new plea — he pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in the fall — wouldn’t be registered until that hearing. The documents also say that Favor isn’t obligated to plead guilty, and if he declined to do so, the case still could go to trial. “It’s not set in stone,” Blanco said.
The felony charge carries a maximum prison term of 10 years, a maximum fine of $250,000 and a term of supervised release, although it’s also possible under federal statute that Favor would receive no prison time at sentencing.
Meanwhile, a recently unsealed affidavit sheds light on how authorities built their case, using technology that, coincidentally, another Dartmouth professor helped develop.
Investigators tied Favor to child pornography through an account on the website Tumblr that was connected to an IP address corresponding to his home in Plainfield, according to the Aug. 24 affidavit in support of a search warrant.
In May 2015, authorities say, the Tumblr handle “lustyjourney” uploaded to the website three images and a video that triggered an alert in Tumblr’s computer system, which maintains a database of files previously determined to constitute child porn.
According to the affidavit, a representative from Tumblr reviewed the files before sending a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC, which forwarded the information to law enforcement.
In September, police arrested Favor and charged him in New Hampshire District Court, alleging that they found in his home five videos depicting sexual abuse of children. In November, federal authorities took over the case and obtained permission to seize his passport, a computer and other electronics.
The system that alerted authorities relies, in part, on the work of another Dartmouth faculty member: Hany Farid, chairman of Dartmouth’s computer science department, whose expertise lies in digital forensics and image analysis.
Farid helped refine a technology created by Microsoft called PhotoDNA so that it matches files to known examples of child pornography, according to a 2009 news release from the company.
The Microsoft news release said the technology “calculates the particular characteristics of a given digital image — its digital fingerprint or ‘hash value’ — to match it to other copies of that same image.”
The release announced that Microsoft was donating PhotoDNA to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — which runs the program that Tumblr used to tip off police in Favor’s case.
Investigators in Favor’s case compared hash values associated with the images linked to his IP address to the values for known images of child pornography, according to the affidavit.
Reached by phone on Thursday, Farid declined to discuss the matter, citing the sensitivity of commenting on legal proceedings involving a colleague.
Favor’s attorney, Norwich’s George Ostler, also declined to comment before the hearing.
Soon after Favor was charged, Dartmouth removed his publicly accessible faculty web page, placed him on paid administrative leave and banned him from campus. A college spokeswoman confirmed Thursday that Favor, a former chairman of the African and African-American Studies program, remained on paid leave.
The change-of-plea hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. on March 31 in U.S. District Court in Concord.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.
Clarification
J. Martin Favor, a Plainfield resident accused of possession of child pornography, is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College and former chairman of the African and African-American Studies program. An earlier version of this story was unclear on his principal affiliation at the college.