The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [106]
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 Geographic 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