That night after Ree went to bed, I booted up the family computer and went to work. I opened the security window in AOL and busily “permissioned” away. Of course, after I went to bed, it occurred to me that Jason might not use AOL to surf the web. Maybe he used Internet Explorer or another browser.
I returned to Ethan the next day.
“Is there any way to see exactly which websites have been visited by each computer? You know, that way I can check and see if each student is going where he or she is supposed to be going and that our network security protocols are working.”
Ethan explained to me that each time a user clicks on a website, a cookie is created by that website and temporary copies of the web pages are saved in the computer’s cache file. The computer also stores a browser history, so that by glancing at the right files, I could tell exactly where that computer had been on the World Wide Web.
I had to wait five more nights, until Ree was asleep and Jason was at work. Ethan had showed me how I could click on the pull-down menu of the Internet search bar, and it would show me the websites most recently visited by the computer. I selected the search bar, got the pull-down menu, and saw three options, www.drudgereport.com, www.usatoday.com, and www.nytimes.com.
Right away, this struck me as not enough options, because when Ethan had done it in the computer lab, we’d easily gotten twelve to fifteen sites. So I booted up Internet Explorer, and tried its browser history, which gave me the exact same results.
I was stumped.
I monitored the browser history for a bit after that. Every few days, random times, when I thought I could quickly call it up without Jason noticing. Always I found the same three sites, which didn’t make any sense to me. Jason spent hours at a time hunched over the computer. No way he was simply reading the news.
Three weeks later, inspiration hit. I constructed a civics question to research for my social studies class regarding the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment. Then I merrily Google-searched away. I found history sites, I found government sites, Wikipedia, all sorts of good stuff. I hit them all, and by the time I was done that evening, the pull-down menu showed a nice robust list of recently visited websites.
I went to school the next day and gave my class an impromptu lecture on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully assemble, and freedom to petition.
Then I raced home, barely able to contain myself until Ree went to bed and I could check the browser history of Internet Explorer once more.
You know what I found? Three websites: Drudge Report, USA Today, New York Times. Every site I had visited just twenty-four hours before was gone. Wiped out.
Somehow, some way, my husband was covering his online tracks.
The following day, I hit Ethan with my question the second he walked into the computer lab.
“I was talking to another teacher after school yesterday, and she implied that checking the computer’s browser history isn’t enough. That there are ways of tampering with the browser history, or something like that?”
I shrugged helplessly and Ethan immediately sat down at the nearest computer and fired it to life.
“Oh sure, Mrs. Jones. You can purge the cache file after going online. That will make it appear like that web visit never happened. Here, I’ll show you.”
Ethan logged on to the National Geo graphic website, then exited and showed me the options for clearing the cache on the computer. I was crestfallen.
“So I can’t really track what the kids are doing at all, can I? I mean, if any of them figure out how to clear the cache-which is just a click away-then they can visit all sorts of places when I’m not looking and I’ll never figure it out.”
“Well you have the basic security functions,” Ethan tried to assure me.
“But they’re not foolproof either. You demonstrated that the first time we set them up. It seems to me I can’t really control where the students go or what they do. Maybe a teaching module on Internet navigation isn’t such a good idea.”
Ethan was thoughtful for a bit. He is a bright kid. Earnest, but lonely. I had the feeling his parents loved him but had no idea what to do with him. He is too smart, intimidating even for adults. The kind of kid who is meant to suffer for the first twenty years or so, but then would take his software company public at age twenty-one and wind up married to a supermodel and driving a Ferrari.
He wasn’t there yet, however, and I felt bad for his painful shyness, the way he regarded the whole world through this highly analytical lens the rest of us could never see.
“You understand that when you delete something on a computer, it never actually goes away?” he said presently.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t understand that at all.”
He brightened. “Oh, absolutely. See, computers are inherently lazy.”
“They are?”
“Sure. A computer’s primary function is to store data. If you think about it, the hard drive is nothing but a giant library lined with empty shelves. Then you, the user, come along and start inputting documents, or downloading information, or surfing the Internet, whatever. You’re creating ‘books’ of data, which the computer then stashes on the shelves.”
“Okay.”
“Like any library, the computer needs to be able to retrieve the books at a moment’s notice. So it creates a directory, its own version of a card catalogue system, which it can use to find each particular piece of data on the bookshelves. Got it?”
“Got it,” I assured him.
Ethan beamed at me. Apparently, in addition to being a good teacher, I was an excellent student. He continued his lecture: “Now this is where the computer gets lazy: When you delete a document, the computer doesn’t take the time to track down the actual data on the bookshelf and trash it. That would be too much work. Instead, it simply deletes the reference to the document in the directory. The book’s still there; the card catalogue, however, no longer shows its location.”
I stared at my red-headed partner for a bit. “You mean to tell me, even if the cache is cleared, those particular Internet files are still on the computer somewhere?”
I got a second smile for that one. “Great job!”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled back. This made Ethan blush, and reminded me I had to be careful. Just because I was using Ethan Hastings didn’t mean I wanted to hurt him.
“So, if the card catalogue has been cleared,” I asked, “how do I find the data?”
“If you really want to know what’s in the computer’s browser history, I recommend Pasco.”
“Pasco?”
“It’s a computer forensic software you can download from online. Here’s the deal When someone ‘clears the cache,’ the computer rarely clears all the cache. At least a few index.dat files get left behind. So you open the history files, run Pasco, and it’ll spit out a CSV-”