Microsoft discovers an ‘upskirt’ peeping tom on campus

On July 24, 2013, a Microsoft vendor employee working at the company’s RedWest campus in Redmond, Washington had a piece of good fortune—he found a Muvi USB video camera just lying in the footpath between buildings. He picked up the camera, only later taking a look at the footage on the device, which revealed that his good fortune was actually evidence of a crime. The Muvi camera contained “upskirt” video footage of women climbing stairs or escalators—or sometimes just standing in checkout lines—and some of it had been shot on Microsoft’s campus.

The vendor employee reported the incident to Microsoft Global Security, who took possession of the camera on July 26. To find the camera’s owner, two Global Security investigators pulled up Microsoft’s internal security camera footage covering the RedWest footpath. They began by locating the moment when the vendor employee walked into the frame, paused, and bent down to retrieve the camera off the ground. Investigators then rewound the footage to see who had dropped it.

At the 11:24am mark, they saw a man in a collared shirt and reddish pants walk out of a RedWest building and walk along the footpath. Then, at 11:25am, the vendor employee appeared and picked up the camera. At 11:26am, the man in the reddish pants suddenly returned to the picture. According to a later report from the Redmond Police Department, he was “rushing” back to the RedWest building he had just left and appeared “nervous, frantically looking around.” He eventually used a keycard to re-enter the RedWest building.

More at Ars Technica…