Cyber trainer arrested on child porn charge - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Cyber trainer arrested on child porn charge

He is a top trainer for Army cyber warriors, and he went online to break the law, according to investigators.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Richard Andrew Mitchell, the technical director at the Army School of Information Technology at Fort Gordon, Ga., shared child pornography on the Internet, according to law enforcement officials.

Mitchell, 47, of Grovetown, Ga., had “multiple” videos depicting child pornography on his laptop computer, according to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation news release dated Aug. 13.

Charged with one count of sexual exploitation of children, he was arrested in Georgia and released Aug. 12 on $15,000 bail.

From his position at the School of Information Technology, Mitchell had a wide influence in the Army’s signals community. As the primary adviser for the school’s curriculum for signal regiment warrant officers, Mitchell was responsible for incorporating the latest operationally relevant technologies into training.

A spokesman for Fort Gordon declined to comment on Mitchell’s case, and attempts to reach Mitchell were not successful.

Col. Robert Hoelscher, the former commandant for the Leader College for Information Technology at Fort Gordon and now the U.S. Army War College chief information officer/G-6, said he was shocked by the allegations against a former colleague and considered “trustworthy.”

Hoelscher called Mitchell a great leader who had “made sure 21st-century cyber skills were in the schoolhouse,” and said if the accusations against Mitchell are true, it was a “horrible, stupid, idiotic mistake.”

On July 15, law enforcement agents executed a search warrant at Mitchell’s home and seized an external hard drive and laptop computer which allegedly contained the illicit video files, said John Bankhead, spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Mitchell possessed a video, more than 10 minutes long, involving boys, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.

Investigators had traced child pornography files shared on a peer-to-peer file sharing network to IP addresses linked to Mitchell at hotels, motels and his home, Bankhead said. IP addresses, numerical labels assigned to devices in a network, allegedly tying Mitchell to the peer-to-peer network, were in Grovetown, Fort Gordon and Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.

Mitchell apparently spent 10 weeks in Florida recently. In June, he was the first joint service member to graduate from the Air Force’s undergraduate network warfare course, hosted at Hurlburt Field, Fla.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command at Eglin, and the Fort Walton Police Department, near Hurlburt Field, participated in the investigation.