SAPD cyber-sleuthing led to stalking charge against ex-union leader

For years, Christopher Steele was a commanding force in city politics, unafraid to use hardball tactics to pursue his vision of what was best for the San Antonio firefighters' union. A week ago, the former union president was arrested and charged with stalking, a felony. He is accused of sending threatening emails and text messages to member of the San Antonio Fire Department command staff to discourage them from applying for the vacant fire chief's position.

Portrait of Christopher Steele, 'an enigmatic and disruptive political force' Behind the public drama of the arrest lies a story of sophisticated cyber-sleuthing by the San Antonio Police Department. The alleged harassment campaign, conducted from early to late March, involved aliases, fake phone numbers and bogus email accounts. To find out who was behind it, an

detective subpoenaed and sifted through highly technical information from Google, T-Mobile, AT&T and other internet and telecommunications companies. Det. David Snow used the data to trace the emails and texts to Steele, records show. Snow's affidavit of probable cause, which prompted a Bexar County magistrate to sign a warrant for Steele's arrest, reads in places like an engineering manual. Steele, 57, was arrested May 31 and released a day later on $3,000 bond.

tapped Snow to investigate. He's assigned to the Southwest Texas Fusion Center, a local-state-federal intelligence hub managed by . It tracks terrorist threats and sophisticated criminal activity. Snow determined that one of the phone numbers used to send the harassing messages was assigned to Bandwidth Inc., a North Carolina company that provides software interfaces for voice over internet communication. From Bandwidth, Snow learned that Google was the current customer for the phone number in question.

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